The Charlie Kirk Show - A Political Extinction Moment for the Woke Left—LIVE from CPAC

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, I had a PAC Day at CPAC.

00:00:01.000 First, I spoke directly to the audience.

00:00:03.000 You'll hear that first.

00:00:04.000 And then my panel, Remembering the Great Andrew Breitbart, with Alex Marla and Matt Boyle, Larry O'Connor, and James O'Keefe as we remember the great Andrew Breitbart.

00:00:16.000 Subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast by hitting subscribe in the upper right-hand corner.

00:00:21.000 And if you want to email me, it's freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:23.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:24.000 Here we go.

00:00:26.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:27.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:30.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:33.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:36.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:37.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:38.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:00:40.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

00:00:45.000 Turning point USA. 0.65

00:00:47.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:00:55.000 That's why we are here.

00:00:58.000 Hello, CPAC.

00:01:00.000 Great to see you guys.

00:01:03.000 It's great to be in a free state.

00:01:05.000 Ron DeSantis is doing such a great job, isn't he?

00:01:07.000 I mean, he's been probably the greatest governor.

00:01:09.000 He's been unbelievable.

00:01:11.000 I want to thank CPAC for having us.

00:01:13.000 It's so great to see so many grassroots activists from all across the country.

00:01:16.000 There's something special happening in America right now.

00:01:20.000 And a year ago when we met, things looked pretty bad.

00:01:24.000 Now, I understand things don't look great.

00:01:26.000 Double-digit inflation, border-wide open, all these crime going up.

00:01:31.000 But there's something that's happened in the last 12 months that is very significant.

00:01:36.000 And every single one of you have played a role in that.

00:01:39.000 You could have gave up.

00:01:41.000 This election, the last election, the 2020 election, was the most interfered with corrupt election in our lifetime.

00:01:47.000 And we need to say that over and over again.

00:01:50.000 $400 million from Mark Zuckerberg, the inability to talk about these issues on Facebook or Google.

00:01:56.000 And it would have been very easy for all of you to give up.

00:02:00.000 Instead, the opposite happened.

00:02:03.000 And the people in charge of our government, Hollywood, the media, they couldn't really understand why all of a sudden my dads kept on showing up to school board meetings across the country.

00:02:15.000 They couldn't understand why all of a sudden people started to run for precinct committee positions.

00:02:19.000 They couldn't understand why the energy of the conservative movement only increased when they controlled everything.

00:02:27.000 And what we saw over the last year is the regime controlling every aspect of our life.

00:02:32.000 Literally, whether or not and how you can breathe.

00:02:35.000 Vaccination status.

00:02:37.000 Let me just say one thing.

00:02:38.000 No one should ever be forced to get a vaccine against their will.

00:02:41.000 Period.

00:02:42.000 End of story.

00:02:44.000 Hard stop.

00:02:46.000 And instead, we have seen an unprecedented rise of the citizen in the last 12 months.

00:02:52.000 And the regime doesn't know where this is coming from.

00:02:56.000 CNN's ratings are collapsing.

00:02:58.000 Their top cable news hosts are taking time off.

00:03:02.000 They're already getting ready.

00:03:04.000 They're bracing for impact for something completely and totally historic.

00:03:09.000 But I don't know about you, but I don't just want to win.

00:03:12.000 I want to look at what's happening right now.

00:03:15.000 And I want to be part of an extinction event for the political woke left to put them into complete and total irrelevancy for the next 20 or 30 years.

00:03:28.000 Now, in order to do that, though, we as conservatives must get our priorities right.

00:03:34.000 We must be very honest with each other and our leaders must be honest with you about what really matters.

00:03:42.000 You see, we're a nation in multiple crises right now.

00:03:45.000 We are $30 trillion in debt.

00:03:49.000 We have the most suicidal, alcohol-addicted, drug-addicted generation in history.

00:03:54.000 We got a lot of problems.

00:03:56.000 So we have to demand from our leaders not just solutions, but direct addressing of what actually matters.

00:04:05.000 For example, the U.S.-southern border matters a lot more than the Ukrainian border.

00:04:14.000 In fact, I want every Republican leader that comes up on stage the next couple days to call what's happening on the southern border an invasion because 2 million people waltzed into our country this last year. 0.70

00:04:29.000 I'm more worried about how the cartels are deliberately trying to infiltrate our country than a dispute 5,000 miles away, cities we can't pronounce, places that most Americans can't find on a map.

00:04:43.000 Now, I'm not defending the actions of dictators halfway across the world.

00:04:47.000 What I'm saying, though, is when your own country is falling apart, I don't want to hear lectures about why we need to send our troops halfway across the world when we are being invaded.

00:05:04.000 Priorities.

00:05:07.000 The left wants to talk about how men can become pregnant.

00:05:10.000 They can't.

00:05:12.000 Men are men, women are women. 0.99

00:05:14.000 There's only two genders. 1.00

00:05:15.000 End of story.

00:05:16.000 Thanks for shopping.

00:05:20.000 These are smokescreen tactics to try to distract us from the fact that we lost over 100,000 people to drug overdoses in this last year.

00:05:29.000 They don't want you to talk about how the generation that I speak to, college and high school kids, they are being priced out of the housing market.

00:05:38.000 They're being told to go to college to study things that don't matter to find jobs that don't exist, to borrow money they don't have.

00:05:44.000 Everything costs twice as much in most of the metropolitan areas of Phoenix and Dallas and Orlando, Miami, Tampa.

00:05:51.000 No, instead, our leaders want to talk about systemic racism or climate change.

00:05:57.000 The conservative movement must be very clear that we're going to talk about things that matter to our voters, matter to American families.

00:06:05.000 And one of the things that we must be very clear about is how the lockdowns, the vaccine mandates, and the mask mandates was generational theft.

00:06:13.000 Now, this might, now some people in this audience don't want to hear this, but it's immoral and it was wrong when we decided to deliberately hurt the younger generation to try to protect the older generation.

00:06:27.000 It was a moral tragedy on this country.

00:06:31.000 And our leaders need to talk about a national recovery program.

00:06:35.000 We need to talk about how we can elevate young people who do the three things that create conservatives.

00:06:40.000 You want to create conservatives, we all do.

00:06:43.000 Make it easier to buy a home, make it easier to get married, and make it easier to have children.

00:06:48.000 You have a lot more conservatives.

00:06:50.000 Instead, we have a generation of renters, a generation of people that are the least married generation in history, having the least children in history. 0.67

00:07:00.000 And we wonder why they find purpose in Leonardo DiCaprio, Greta Thunberg, climate change type movements.

00:07:06.000 We wonder why they want to confiscate the wealth from business owners.

00:07:10.000 They don't own anything.

00:07:11.000 People that pay mortgages don't burn Wendy's at night.

00:07:14.000 Just good rule of life.

00:07:17.000 So we must demand from our leaders clear priorities of what actually matters.

00:07:23.000 So we have a choice.

00:07:25.000 We could do the Republican Party of old, where we do nothing but talk about corporate tax cuts for the richest people.

00:07:31.000 We just talk about stopping socialism and the conversation ends there.

00:07:34.000 We talk about how we need to go send our beautiful and amazing armed service members to countries that have no relevancy to our immediate future.

00:07:42.000 Or, here's the amazing thing, though.

00:07:45.000 If our conservative leaders learn something from our wonderful 45th president of the United States and actually decide to not just talk about but deliver some very common sense things, such as representing the muscular class, such as how about this?

00:08:01.000 The Republicans should say what happened in Canada and what Justin Trudeau did against those Canadian truckers is a moral outrage and a human rights abuse.

00:08:09.000 Where's the Republican Party been on that?

00:08:11.000 So I'll say this in closing.

00:08:14.000 I want to win.

00:08:16.000 I don't want to win elections.

00:08:17.000 That's fine.

00:08:18.000 That's a small thing.

00:08:18.000 Elections come and go.

00:08:20.000 I want to win the civilization.

00:08:22.000 I want to live in a country that is free.

00:08:25.000 I want to live in a country I recognize.

00:08:28.000 I want our leaders to care more about you and our fellow countrymen and our fellow citizens than some sort of abstract idea or some sort of undefined GDP number.

00:08:38.000 The conservative movement is trending towards a movement that will represent 60, 70, 80% of voters of all backgrounds and all colors.

00:08:46.000 It's going to require our leaders and you to make sure they do it.

00:08:50.000 The citizen is rising, everybody, and the regime has fallen.

00:08:53.000 We're going to win.

00:08:54.000 Thank you so much.

00:08:54.000 God bless you guys.

00:08:58.000 Please welcome from Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk from Project Veritas, James O'Keefe, from Breitbart News Network, Matt Boyle, and your host, Larry O'Connor.

00:09:28.000 Hey guys.

00:09:30.000 Let's hear for Andrew Breitbart.

00:09:34.000 Oh, he's more than just a name on a website, especially here at CPAC.

00:09:40.000 It was, guys, it was 10 years ago this week that Andrew Breitbart gave his last major public speech.

00:09:48.000 We lost him on March 1st, 10 years ago next week.

00:09:52.000 But that speech, like all of his speeches at CPAC, instantly became legendary.

00:09:57.000 I just watched it last week.

00:09:59.000 I literally just watched it as well.

00:10:00.000 It was weirdly prophetic, wasn't it?

00:10:02.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:10:03.000 All the major issues that he's talking about, the critical race theory.

00:10:06.000 Oh, yeah.

00:10:07.000 I mean, literally, the major story that he was ready to break right after CPAC, leading into the 2012 election, was how Barack Obama had been infected with critical race theory in Harvard.

00:10:18.000 Critical race theory.

00:10:19.000 Remember when critical race theory became a big story this last election and people went on MSNBC saying, they don't even know where critical race theory is.

00:10:26.000 They just, you know, found out about it.

00:10:27.000 There's no Andrew Breitbart, as usual, ahead of his time, talking about it 10 years ago.

00:10:33.000 We each represent a very different relationship directly with Andrew Breitbart in our own way.

00:10:41.000 Andrew plucked me out of the world of commercial theater.

00:10:44.000 I literally worked on Broadway, not as an actor, but in management of theater management.

00:10:50.000 I managed a theater in Los Angeles.

00:10:52.000 He took me out of that world and put me into the world of political commentary with my first column at his first site, Big Hollywood, that then eventually morphed into Breitbart News Network.

00:11:04.000 So I got to work with him for three glorious years and have a whole new career.

00:11:09.000 Matt, you ended up working with Andrew, well, for his company right after his passing, right?

00:11:16.000 Yeah, so I was a reporter at Daily Caller, got to know him really well.

00:11:21.000 Tucker Carlson introduced me to Andrew, and then Andrew passed away in early 2012.

00:11:25.000 After the 2012 election, I came over to work at Breitbart and build out our DC Bureau.

00:11:30.000 Great.

00:11:31.000 But yeah, it totally changed my life.

00:11:33.000 I could have gone to go anywhere in the established media.

00:11:35.000 I was breaking all sorts of big stories and whatever.

00:11:38.000 Andrew changed my life.

00:11:39.000 Like, I literally chose this path to build out a new conservative media outlet.

00:11:44.000 And guess what? 0.99

00:11:44.000 We're kicking their butts all the time right now. 0.99

00:11:48.000 I think it's fair to say Andrew changed all our lives. 0.98

00:11:50.000 James, I mean, I mentioned Big Hollywood.

00:11:52.000 That launched January of 2009.

00:11:56.000 I believe it was September.

00:11:58.000 Along came this brand new site, Big Government, and it launched with a little expose about an organization that no longer exists called Acorn.

00:12:07.000 Remember that?

00:12:08.000 James? 0.98

00:12:10.000 Well, I had gotten a message from Hannah Giles, and she said she wanted to go into Acorn as a prostitute. 0.99

00:12:19.000 So I said, Do you often get messages from Hannah like this?

00:12:23.000 I get a lot of messages from a lot of people.

00:12:25.000 And I said, well, why don't we go in there? 0.87

00:12:26.000 I'll go in there as a pimp. 0.51

00:12:27.000 Sure. 0.98

00:12:28.000 Sure.

00:12:28.000 A logical response.

00:12:30.000 Do a sting investigation into Acorn.

00:12:33.000 And this is right before Project Veritas even existed.

00:12:35.000 So we did the video, did the whole story.

00:12:37.000 For those of you who remember it, 10 years ago, actually 12 years ago.

00:12:40.000 12 years ago.

00:12:41.000 And I didn't know who to go to with the tapes.

00:12:45.000 And everyone sort of said, well, there's this guy named Andrew Breitbart.

00:12:48.000 I didn't know him.

00:12:50.000 And I called him up, or he called me, and he said, I don't believe you have this information.

00:12:55.000 So I said, well, can I come to Los Angeles and show you?

00:12:57.000 He's like, sure.

00:12:58.000 So I went to his house.

00:13:00.000 I opened up my laptop.

00:13:01.000 I played the first Acorn video of me with a hidden camera in my tie recording these workers.

00:13:07.000 And he instantly said, this is going to change everything.

00:13:10.000 This is going to embarrass the New York Times.

00:13:12.000 And he came up with this strategy to release the tapes one at a time.

00:13:18.000 Because you had investigated multiple Acorn offices on the East Coast.

00:13:22.000 So he predicted rightfully that these organizations, CNN and everyone would say it's isolated.

00:13:27.000 And then the next day, the second tape.

00:13:28.000 And the third day, the third tape.

00:13:30.000 And by the end of the first week, Congress, Democratically controlled Senate, defunded Acorn.

00:13:35.000 Defunded Acorn.

00:13:36.000 82 to 6 vote, if I remember right, or maybe 89 to 2 votes.

00:13:40.000 It was 83 to 7.

00:13:41.000 South Park covered it.

00:13:42.000 The Daily Show covered it favorably.

00:13:44.000 Yeah.

00:13:45.000 And then Charlie, and I, frankly, I think your representation here is most meaningful because you didn't meet Andrew personally.

00:13:52.000 But you represent so many people out there, so many people in this room who were inspired by Andrew Breitbart, who have started a movement on their own because of the inspiration Andrew gave you.

00:14:04.000 Yeah, not just inspired.

00:14:05.000 My first piece I ever wrote was for Breitbart.com.

00:14:08.000 And it wasn't, you know, kind of unpacking an interstate government-funded prostitution ring.

00:14:15.000 By the way, it's a great idea.

00:14:16.000 Well, raise the bar, Charlie.

00:14:17.000 Come on.

00:14:18.000 Oh, yeah, exactly.

00:14:19.000 I just want to say, isn't James O'Keefe doing great work in Project Veritas?

00:14:22.000 They're doing unbelievable work.

00:14:24.000 I want to make sure I say that.

00:14:24.000 They really are.

00:14:26.000 James, you're continuing the legacy of Andrew amazingly.

00:14:30.000 But I was in high school, and I found a textbook that said kind of really incendiary things, at least what would have been considered that 10 years ago.

00:14:38.000 And I emailed Joe Pollack.

00:14:40.000 I just saw his email on Breitbart.com as a tip, and he's like, why don't you just write the piece?

00:14:46.000 And it got on Drudge Report and kind of all of that.

00:14:48.000 And without Breitbart.com, I don't know if I ever would have been involved in this at all.

00:14:52.000 And I got to know the whole team at Breitbart really well.

00:14:54.000 Matt, you and I have been working together for quite some time.

00:14:57.000 Got to know Alex and got to know Larry.

00:15:00.000 And the legacy of Andrew was always believing in younger aspirational entrepreneurial talent.

00:15:06.000 He's the best at that.

00:15:08.000 And there are a lot of names we could go through.

00:15:10.000 But if you look at the kind of roster of people that are now in conservative politics and media, so many of them were kind of nurtured and also kind of given a platform by Andrew.

00:15:22.000 He was a movement guy.

00:15:23.000 He was not an empire guy.

00:15:25.000 And I never had an opportunity to meet him.

00:15:26.000 In fact, my piece was written a month after he passed away.

00:15:30.000 So almost exactly a month after.

00:15:33.000 I want to say one other thing about Breitbart and Andrew, which is we take for granted this kind of idea of making things go viral, right?

00:15:42.000 And so, for some of the younger people here, if you're in high school or college, you might not know how good Andrew was at this.

00:15:50.000 He was the pioneer.

00:15:51.000 He invented this.

00:15:53.000 He was the one that was able to get Anthony Weiner completely resigned in disgrace, right?

00:15:58.000 Amongst many other things.

00:16:00.000 But he.

00:16:01.000 But in perfect Andrew Breitbart fashion, where he actually ended up at the podium at Anthony Weiner's own press conference.

00:16:08.000 That's right.

00:16:09.000 Taking questions across all the cable channels.

00:16:11.000 It wasn't enough that Anthony Weiner had to resign in disgrace.

00:16:14.000 Andrew had to be there to emcee the entire event.

00:16:18.000 It was a total surprise, too, by the way.

00:16:20.000 I remember on his way in there, he called me and I was like, We're waiting.

00:16:24.000 We're all sitting there waiting to watch to see Anthony Weiner come out.

00:16:27.000 And he's like, I'm like, where are you?

00:16:29.000 He's like, I'm about to walk into the Anthony Weiner press conference.

00:16:32.000 I'm like, what?

00:16:33.000 I was shocked.

00:16:35.000 And then next thing you know, there's Andrew.

00:16:37.000 I wish I would have gave a group text message to us because a couple of us were like, Andrew, are you sure you want to go into the Anthony Wiener press conference?

00:16:44.000 And of course, we always second-guessed him, and he was always right.

00:16:47.000 I wish I'd have saved this.

00:16:49.000 The text message was, don't worry, I'll keep a low profile.

00:16:54.000 Next thing.

00:16:56.000 Sorry, but you were saying, and it's exactly right.

00:17:00.000 And so the movement we have at Turning Point USA, Project Veritas, they're all offshoots from the energy of Andrew.

00:17:06.000 And it lives on in more ways than one.

00:17:08.000 He was the first person that mastered the viral medium of getting a video in front of millions of people.

00:17:17.000 And, you know, we take that for granted now.

00:17:20.000 He really was the architect.

00:17:21.000 Oh, an incredible pioneer.

00:17:22.000 Yeah, please absolutely applaud anytime you want, because it's for Andrew.

00:17:27.000 He was a pioneer, not just for the media, but certainly for the intersection of media and politics and culture and everything.

00:17:32.000 I want to say something real fast, though, because the name of this panel is War.

00:17:35.000 And you've all seen the video of Andrew saying war, right?

00:17:38.000 And that was the trailer for the film Hating Breitbart.

00:17:42.000 And there were a lot of hashtags about Andrew Breitbart, war and Breitbart's army.

00:17:46.000 And there are all these viral videos, you talk about viral videos of Andrew Breitbart.

00:17:49.000 He's always in the trenches fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting.

00:17:51.000 And it was great to see somebody fighting for us for a change.

00:17:54.000 This was 10 years ago when we were used to the blue jacket, khaki pants, penny loafer, country club kind of conservative.

00:18:04.000 No offense, James.

00:18:09.000 And Andrew would show up in his, you know, beat-up converse and Hawaiian shirt and his hair everywhere.

00:18:15.000 But he was fighting for us.

00:18:16.000 He would go toward the crowd, and he was a fighter.

00:18:18.000 But I don't want us to forget something.

00:18:21.000 The term happy warrior is thrown around a lot.

00:18:25.000 He was the quintessential happy warrior.

00:18:27.000 Andrew Breitbart was hilarious.

00:18:29.000 The funnest time I've ever had in my entire professional life was the three years I worked for.

00:18:35.000 I never stopped laughing.

00:18:36.000 He was so much fun hanging out with all the time.

00:18:39.000 I mean, that's the okay.

00:18:40.000 So first off, I highly recommend that everybody go out there and watch some of the old speeches because he is pretty funny and you see the sense of humor come through.

00:18:48.000 Like that 2012 CPAC speech is probably the best one.

00:18:52.000 In it, he talks about going to dinner with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn.

00:18:56.000 This was a thing that Tucker, so they, these two lefty Bill Ayers.

00:19:02.000 These are the terrorists from the Weather Underground who inspired Barack Obama's political career.

00:19:06.000 Right, exactly.

00:19:07.000 And so they put out a thing during the beginning of the Obama administration, an auction for a dinner with them.

00:19:13.000 And I remember when it came out, again, I was a reporter at Daily Caller.

00:19:18.000 I encouraged Tucker Carlson to go buy it.

00:19:20.000 So he did.

00:19:21.000 He actually, he got it.

00:19:22.000 And then he invited Andrew as his guest to go with him.

00:19:25.000 And then Andrew's talking about.

00:19:26.000 Tucker wins this dinner with them.

00:19:27.000 And the first thing, we got to get Andrew at the table.

00:19:30.000 Right.

00:19:30.000 And so now in this speech at CPAC in 2012, Andrew's talking about how excellent a cook Bill Ayers is, right?

00:19:37.000 Like, you know, he made very excellent ribs and succulent squash and everything.

00:19:42.000 But then he's like, you know, they were very charming people, but, you know, then he goes, but so was Ted Bundy, right?

00:19:49.000 So, yeah, so again, Andrew, very funny guy, and that personality and that fun mentality, that happy warrior mentality, I think, carries through.

00:19:59.000 Yeah, and I'm afraid we don't often see that part of it.

00:20:02.000 We need to see it.

00:20:02.000 It's out there.

00:20:03.000 But I mean, James, the audacious way you presented the Acorn videos and then the just flat-out fun Andrew had with it.

00:20:11.000 Yeah, what I remember about Andrew is a couple things.

00:20:15.000 He simultaneously was able to hold the media accountable, yet speak with them and work with them.

00:20:20.000 That's a very fine line.

00:20:22.000 And now, I mean, people in this room, I mean, people hate the mainstream media, but Andrew was able to sort of hack the mainstream media and get them to cover things.

00:20:32.000 And right before he died, a few days before he died, he died 10 years ago on, I believe, March 1st, Tuesday.

00:20:37.000 March 1st, the evening of the 28th.

00:20:38.000 It was a leap year, it was the 29th evening to the first.

00:20:40.000 A few days before that, you know, we were going through a lot of the time.

00:20:43.000 You and I were working together, and I was doing videos, and he said, James, and I'm paraphrasing him, he said, they want us on a leash.

00:20:51.000 They want us to dance with them, but we're not going to dance with them.

00:20:54.000 He had this very profound, intense way of speaking.

00:20:58.000 And he said, and there was a quote that he said, where if you keep running towards the fire, if you keep going, you send a message to other people that are rooting for you, that they in fact can do it too, if you keep going.

00:21:10.000 But he was a force of nature.

00:21:11.000 I mean, I have so many stories.

00:21:14.000 But there was one story about the alpaca, right?

00:21:17.000 The alpaca, retracto, the correction alpaca.

00:21:20.000 All right, so we started getting these newspapers and websites to retract fake stories.

00:21:25.000 Fake news.

00:21:26.000 Andrew knew about fake news well before it became a catchphrase.

00:21:29.000 And this actually was the brilliance of Alex Marlowe, who's now the editor-in-chief of the Breitbart sites.

00:21:34.000 At the time, he was the first person Andrew ever hired.

00:21:37.000 He met him giving a speech to young conservatives at Berkeley, by the way.

00:21:42.000 No, but this is a lesson.

00:21:43.000 When you're Andrew Breitbart or any conservative, there are conservatives even at Berkeley.

00:21:47.000 And Alex Marlow was one of them.

00:21:49.000 And he gave a Young Americas for Freedom spare Young Americans Foundation speech at Berkeley.

00:21:55.000 Alex went up and said, I love you.

00:21:56.000 And he hired him.

00:21:56.000 I want to work for you.

00:21:57.000 I think his first day on the job, he helped him move his desk out of his.

00:22:00.000 That was the retraction.

00:22:01.000 The alpaca was Alex's.

00:22:02.000 So Alex came up and says, We got all these retractions on this, on these fake stories.

00:22:07.000 And so, and Andrew said, well, you got to brand the retraction somehow, brand it.

00:22:10.000 It's like, how do you brand a retraction?

00:22:12.000 They created a byline at the big journalism site called Retracto the Correction Alpaca.

00:22:20.000 And he lives on to this day.

00:22:21.000 Obviously, that's a logical thing to do.

00:22:23.000 This does come up on our internet.

00:22:25.000 Andrew called me because I was arrested in New Orleans and everyone's lying about what happened to me.

00:22:29.000 And then at like midnight, Andrew calls me and he goes, James, the mascot for the Retracto theme song is an alpaca.

00:22:37.000 And we laughed until we cried.

00:22:39.000 I don't know why, but it was just so random.

00:22:41.000 And he just goofy and funny.

00:22:43.000 I mean, we laughed until we cried on midnight in February 2010.

00:22:47.000 Oh, man.

00:22:48.000 That was a pretty amazing moment.

00:22:50.000 Yeah.

00:22:51.000 And actually, Charlie, this is important because his humor and his love of life and how the vivacious way he approached all of this stuff as a happy warrior, this attracted young people to him.

00:23:02.000 How old were you at the time?

00:23:03.000 I was in high school, I was 18.

00:23:04.000 18.

00:23:05.000 And for God's sake, how many times have we gone to these conferences and we hear somebody who's 90 years old saying, how do we attract young people to the movement?

00:23:12.000 How did Andrew attract you to the movement?

00:23:14.000 Yeah, I mean, he was authentic and he was willing to push the boundaries.

00:23:18.000 It was the videos of him going up to protesters asking them, What does your sign say?

00:23:23.000 And they didn't know.

00:23:25.000 They were like, I don't know.

00:23:27.000 He was the first one to do that, right?

00:23:29.000 He was the first one to actually go straight into the fire.

00:23:33.000 And every enemy Andrew Breitbart had, it was a good list.

00:23:36.000 That list still is pretty good to this day, I can tell you.

00:23:40.000 He would go to all their conferences and just show up in the lobby.

00:23:43.000 And look, we're kind of used to that now.

00:23:46.000 Not used to it, but there's a lot of different people that kind of do that sort of work.

00:23:49.000 This was unheard of in like 2010 conservatism, right?

00:23:53.000 It was like, hey, you know, we don't control the White House.

00:23:53.000 Yeah.

00:23:55.000 Obama's president.

00:23:56.000 Like, just wait your turn.

00:23:57.000 Keep your head down.

00:23:58.000 Yeah, keep your head down.

00:23:58.000 Layla.

00:24:00.000 And Andrew was going around talking about how Barack Obama is destroying the country from within and he's doing it intentionally.

00:24:10.000 And I mean, Breitbart changed Breitbart.com and Andrew completely changed the way that conservatives fight the left.

00:24:17.000 This is one of his great legacies.

00:24:20.000 And Andrew fought to win.

00:24:22.000 Is that he didn't just fought to win?

00:24:25.000 Thank you.

00:24:26.000 And it wasn't just to be in the fight.

00:24:28.000 It was like, wait, we're doing something.

00:24:29.000 No, it was like, okay, you know, the other side decided to end kind of the coffee shop dialogue a long time ago, right?

00:24:35.000 It's like we're in a street fight.

00:24:37.000 And Andrew's like, okay, if we're in a street fight, then we're going to win because the country's at stake.

00:24:41.000 And I think that's inspired millions of people in a very profound way.

00:24:45.000 But I don't want to overlook the fact, again, I mean, I remember going with him and Brandon Darby, who still runs Breitbart.

00:24:51.000 He runs our lawyer team.

00:24:53.000 Brandon Darby and I accompanied Andrew to a protest of America's for prosperity.

00:24:58.000 I think it was America for Prosperity out in Palm Desert, California.

00:25:02.000 And Andrew says, all right, we're going to go to the protesters, we're going to confront them, we're going to start challenging them, we're going to ask him questions.

00:25:07.000 And Larry, you're going to be the cameraman.

00:25:09.000 Brandon, you're going to do tactical.

00:25:11.000 We're going to make sure that we got to watch our back and everything.

00:25:13.000 So we're getting all set.

00:25:14.000 So we park, we get out, he goes to the back of his Range Rover and he starts putting on rollerblades.

00:25:21.000 It's like, wait, Andrew, we didn't talk through the rollerblade part of this.

00:25:24.000 What are you talking about?

00:25:25.000 He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, no, the whole time I'm taunting them and challenging them, and I'm going to be on rollerblades.

00:25:32.000 Which was, of course, brilliant in its insanity, but that went viral, right?

00:25:36.000 You said, and so it was always with a smile.

00:25:40.000 In fact, at the end, he said to all the protesters, all right, come on, we're all going to Applebee's.

00:25:45.000 And I kid you not, we were tracking them on Twitter and on social media.

00:25:50.000 They all went to Applebee's.

00:25:52.000 We almost went.

00:25:53.000 Hilarious.

00:25:54.000 We should have gone to Applebee's as well.

00:25:56.000 Can I say one quick thing?

00:25:57.000 Everyone here has heard the expression multiple times: politics flows downstream from culture.

00:26:02.000 Oh, yeah.

00:26:02.000 That was him.

00:26:04.000 He identified this early.

00:26:06.000 He made conservatives reorient what mattered as well.

00:26:10.000 And he wrote about it in his book extensively.

00:26:12.000 He said, Look, the arts, the culture, Hollywood matters a lot more than whether or not ours versus he also had this understanding of the institutional flaws of the establishment media.

00:26:23.000 So if you listen to people that work at the New York Times or CNN or any of these other places, they claim to be objective.

00:26:30.000 They claim that they, here's the problem with that.

00:26:33.000 We're human beings.

00:26:34.000 Any decision we make has the opportunity for the insertion of bias, intended or not.

00:26:39.000 In some cases, a lot of the establishment media, it's unintended.

00:26:42.000 But what we see is what stories they cover, what stories they don't cover.

00:26:48.000 That's the most important thing.

00:26:49.000 They ignore important stories.

00:26:52.000 And what's happened in the timeframe since Andrew passed away is: I mean, look, we've built out Breitbart.com and these other institutions, what Charlie's doing at Turning Point, what James is doing, what Larry's doing, what everybody else is doing out here throughout the conservative media.

00:27:09.000 I mean, we've literally built these things into a strong institution that didn't exist before.

00:27:15.000 And so, I mean, frankly, I mean, just Breitbart in the last three months alone, we beat the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Hill, and Politico combined.

00:27:28.000 And I think we're seeing similar stuff from a lot of these other places as well.

00:27:33.000 And I think that that, Again, these institutions wouldn't have existed had Andrew not paved the way for all of us beforehand.

00:27:41.000 James Charlie just mentioned something very important, too, about the tactics.

00:27:45.000 I remember you rolled out a lot of the videos utilizing Sololinsky's Rules for Radicals, remember?

00:27:51.000 Like the headline of each new video took one of Sololinsky's rules.

00:27:54.000 Because let's be clear, I mean, Sololinsky was a terrible, horrible anti-American communist.

00:27:59.000 But that doesn't mean his rules weren't correct.

00:28:02.000 I mean, the rules actually are effective.

00:28:04.000 The difference was he used their rules against them.

00:28:07.000 Yeah, Linsky, Andrew and I, when I met him in his basement with Larry Soloff, Alinsky rule number four, make them live up to their own book of rules.

00:28:18.000 And Linsky says in his book, Rules for Radicals, you can destroy them with that because they can't live up to your book of rules, but they have to live up to their own. 0.94

00:28:26.000 So, I mean, it was, he was a, another story was he was a leader, but he was also very tactical.

00:28:32.000 So he would tweet, I don't know how many times a day.

00:28:34.000 Oh, my God.

00:28:35.000 He's like a machine.

00:28:35.000 I mean, he would tweet hundreds of times.

00:28:37.000 And he would get into every little fight, no matter how big or small, he would fight the person.

00:28:41.000 The rule is you only punch up.

00:28:43.000 Well, he'd punch down.

00:28:44.000 I mean, he'd tweet, reply to every single person.

00:28:47.000 And there was one video we did, Teachers Gone Wild in New Jersey in 2010.

00:28:53.000 And we did this video, and I had just got off the set with the IFB in doing a local media hit.

00:28:59.000 And he already transcribed Chris Christie's entire speech about it.

00:29:04.000 He transcribed the speech.

00:29:05.000 So he wasn't just this leader.

00:29:07.000 He was fighting in every little trench.

00:29:10.000 And it was all about narrative.

00:29:12.000 And again, I don't know of anyone else who's really filled his shoes.

00:29:18.000 Oh, everybody said after he died, who will replace Andrew Breitbart?

00:29:21.000 No one.

00:29:22.000 No one did what he did.

00:29:23.000 No, but let's talk this through for a minute.

00:29:27.000 Couple names you might recognize, couple memes you might not, because they do vital work behind the scenes as well.

00:29:34.000 But we mentioned Alex Marlowe, the new editor-in-chief, or not new, but he's the editor-in-chief of Breitbart and hosts the serious Exxon radio show for Breitbart, Joel Pollock, a vital voice at Breitbart right now, right?

00:29:46.000 The four of us up here, right?

00:29:48.000 How about a Dana Lash, right?

00:29:51.000 How about Ben Shapiro?

00:29:54.000 Right?

00:29:56.000 Where was Ben Shapiro for?

00:29:57.000 I mean, it was at the Breitbart sites.

00:30:00.000 John Nolte, who is still a vital voice at Big Hollywood, right?

00:30:04.000 Christian Toto, who does incredible work on Hollywood and the culture.

00:30:08.000 I'm leaving so many people out of this conversation.

00:30:10.000 There's literally hundreds.

00:30:11.000 I mean, Andrew Clavin, Stephen Crowder.

00:30:15.000 Right?

00:30:17.000 And oh, and by the way, a guy who had a really obscure four-in-the-morning show on Fox, thanks to Andrew Breitbart's suggestion, who started writing at the Breitbart sites.

00:30:28.000 His name is Greg Gutfell.

00:30:34.000 Kurt Schlichter, Chris de Gaulle.

00:30:37.000 I mean, I can get Tony Katz and all of my colleagues in talk radio right now.

00:30:41.000 We owe all of this to Andrew.

00:30:44.000 He's a great baseball fan, Andrew was, sadly for the Dodgers.

00:30:48.000 But he used to say he didn't want to be the cleanup hitter.

00:30:51.000 He didn't want to be the leadoff hitter.

00:30:53.000 He didn't even want to play on the team.

00:30:54.000 He didn't even want to be the manager.

00:30:56.000 He wanted to be the talent scout.

00:30:58.000 He would say that all the time.

00:30:59.000 He thought his special skill was finding the right people and putting them in the right place.

00:31:03.000 I mean, look.

00:31:04.000 Well, and by the way, I mean, speaking of which, I mean, we've literally hired over the course of the last 10 years that I've been working here dozens and dozens of new up-and-coming reporters.

00:31:15.000 I mean, the names that you just rattle off there are a lot of those people are really well-known names, but we've got new and yeah, the next generation.

00:31:24.000 By the way, speaking of which, anybody out there that knows anybody that wants to be a reporter, reach out to me.

00:31:28.000 We are hiring.

00:31:29.000 So, and I know James is a big hire that he announced there a few minutes ago, but we are definitely hiring.

00:31:36.000 So, we are always looking for talented young people.

00:31:40.000 But it's exciting to see these young folks come through.

00:31:43.000 That's one of the coolest parts of the job.

00:31:47.000 In 2010, I want to say, White House Correspondents Association dinner, Andrew goes, reported, James does rock.

00:31:56.000 You just do whatever you let it flow, buddy.

00:32:00.000 He's feeling the Andrew energy.

00:32:02.000 Andrew crashes the MSNBC party at the White House Correspondents Association.

00:32:07.000 Rachel Maddow is tending bar.

00:32:11.000 Andrew goes right up to her and starts talking to her.

00:32:15.000 And she makes him a drink.

00:32:17.000 And he says, well, make yourself one.

00:32:18.000 And she does.

00:32:19.000 And they start drinking and laughing together.

00:32:21.000 And there's a picture.

00:32:22.000 It's a very famous picture of Andrew at the bar with Rachel Maddow.

00:32:26.000 And they're like toasting each other because everyone loved Andrew, even the people who pretended to hate him.

00:32:33.000 And I think that we can take something from that.

00:32:36.000 One of the things that reminds me of the story with the New Yorker reporter.

00:32:39.000 I don't know if you were there or someone was there, but it was a New York reporter.

00:32:42.000 And everywhere I'd go, Andrew would have reporters following him, like an entourage, magazine writers.

00:32:47.000 And in the beginning, I was a little skittish.

00:32:48.000 I was like, you sure you want to be interviewed by these people?

00:32:51.000 I don't trust them.

00:32:52.000 And Andrew had a totally unique approach.

00:32:54.000 He would say, no, no, no, be yourself in front of them.

00:32:57.000 Just be yourself.

00:32:57.000 Just say who you are.

00:32:59.000 Identify yourself.

00:33:00.000 And I think a lot of people in this room would be very scared about being interviewed by a reporter for New Yorker magazine.

00:33:05.000 Andrew had a radical approach, which was be yourself, be open.

00:33:10.000 And I've become more that way.

00:33:14.000 Kept less secrets, if you will.

00:33:15.000 No bad secrets, but just be yourself.

00:33:18.000 And everywhere I'd go, he'd have a slate reporter, a New York reporter, a wired reporter following him around.

00:33:24.000 And he said, just be open about who you are.

00:33:27.000 And that's the way he was.

00:33:29.000 And you got to really know him, and he was who he said he was.

00:33:32.000 He did Bill Maher's show, and they treated him horribly.

00:33:34.000 I got to hang out with him backstage and in the green room, and they were all just awful to him.

00:33:38.000 And when he was on stage, all the writers were making snide comments.

00:33:41.000 And Marlowe and I were in the green room with them.

00:33:44.000 We were like, oh, we're here with Andrew.

00:33:46.000 And afterwards, they do a party, an after-show party.

00:33:49.000 And Bill couldn't stop.

00:33:51.000 It was just Bill and Andrew in the center of the room talking to each other and having a great time.

00:33:56.000 And Bill respected Andrew, and Andrew enjoyed being on the show.

00:34:00.000 And they were worlds apart politically, right?

00:34:04.000 But he understood how to utilize that platform and get it.

00:34:07.000 Oh, and boy, all the writers just hated the fact that Bill Maher was spending time with Andrew.

00:34:11.000 But here's the thing: when he connected just a little bit and convinced Bill Maher just a little bit.

00:34:16.000 And by the way, look, look at where Bill Maher is now.

00:34:19.000 I mean, he's out there questioning some of the stuff on the pandemic and all these other things.

00:34:23.000 So if you connect with these people just a little bit, isn't it worth it?

00:34:27.000 Last thoughts, guys?

00:34:28.000 Because they made the mistake of telling us before we came out that they were running early.

00:34:33.000 And so.

00:34:34.000 Screw it.

00:34:36.000 I mean, look, I'll say one.

00:34:38.000 I have this kind of story that is about Andrew, not anything I experienced, but that we can all thank Andrew for, which is, so the Clintons hated Andrew because he was really good at what he did, right?

00:34:51.000 So Andrew passed away in the spring of 2012, but his work and his legacy lived on for years after.

00:34:58.000 So he was able to expose Anthony Weiner for all of his, let's say, illegal activities, let's put it nicely.

00:35:07.000 And because of that, there were several federal investigations that were triggered in the years that followed, including seizures of laptops and personal information.

00:35:16.000 So allegedly, Anthony Weiner had a relationship with Huma Abedin as his wife or whatever.

00:35:24.000 And the FBI came and seized Anthony Weiner's laptop.

00:35:30.000 Now, you might remember in the fall, this is all thanks to Andrew Breitbart, by the way.

00:35:35.000 In the fall of 2016, boy, October of 16, like a couple days before the election, James Comey issues that famous memo saying that there's still an investigation ongoing into Hillary Clinton's emails.

00:35:49.000 Now, what was he talking about?

00:35:50.000 He was talking about material that was sourced directly from Huma Abedin, who is friends with Hillary Clinton, and triggered James Comey to write that letter that some people say made Donald Trump win that following Tuesday and Hillary Clinton lose.

00:36:08.000 So even after Andrew Breitbart passed, he was still defeating leftists and he helped get Donald Trump right up in 2006.

00:36:19.000 Back to the Acorn story, we had broken the story, released the tapes one at a time.

00:36:24.000 Of course, the media, it's an isolated incident.

00:36:26.000 You know, they got thrown out of the other offices.

00:36:28.000 And of course, my phone rang on that whatever day it was in September 2009, some 70 times.

00:36:34.000 The media would not stop.

00:36:35.000 They were going to personalize the story, make it about me.

00:36:37.000 At the time, no one knew who I was.

00:36:40.000 And Andrew said, Do not pick up that phone.

00:36:42.000 Do not answer that phone from the Washington Post or CNN.

00:36:44.000 They were trying to personalize the story, make it about you, so I didn't.

00:36:47.000 And then he went on Rush Limbaugh Show.

00:36:49.000 Andrew Breitbart wrote a column, Why James O'Keefe does not take phone calls from an intrepid CNN producer.

00:36:56.000 And he read it live on the air.

00:36:58.000 And I mean, my phone would not stop ringing because these journalists did not want to cover the story.

00:37:02.000 They wanted to make it about who is this guy.

00:37:04.000 So I never picked up the phone.

00:37:06.000 For the first three days, no one had any idea who I was.

00:37:09.000 Andrew Breitbart knew how to play the media, how to force them to do their jobs.

00:37:15.000 I just hired a producer from CNN, and he got up here and said, Do your jobs.

00:37:19.000 Andrew made them do their jobs.

00:37:22.000 And I would just say, thinking back on this whole idea of, you know, again, looking back at some of those old speeches, again, the 2012 CPAC speech, other ones out there where Andrew was weirdly prophetic and ahead of his time significantly, we're at a point now where, I mean, I remember back then when Republicans wouldn't fight the culture wars and they wouldn't get, you know, it felt like there were only a handful of us out here willing to ask tougher questions.

00:37:47.000 I think that you're seeing more and more people across the movement, across the party, et cetera, really getting engaged on all of these things.

00:37:56.000 I mean, it's a central part of the Republican Party now to challenge the defund the police, to challenge critical race theory.

00:38:03.000 Before, they wouldn't touch it with a 50-foot pole, never mind a 10-foot poll.

00:38:07.000 So I think that if anything, Andrew Breitbart is still winning the war.

00:38:14.000 It's an ongoing war.

00:38:15.000 Don't get me wrong.

00:38:15.000 We've got a lot of work to do.

00:38:17.000 But his vision is winning the war for the hearts and soul of the movement and the party and more broadly the country.

00:38:25.000 And I think that there is an end in sight, and I think we can't beat the left.

00:38:29.000 I, yeah, amen.

00:38:32.000 I loved Andrew Breitbart.

00:38:35.000 The greatest three years of my life were the three years I worked with him.

00:38:39.000 And I'll never forget that time.

00:38:41.000 And my life has changed because of him.

00:38:46.000 And he'll always be with us.

00:38:48.000 Charlie said that one of Andrew's favorite things to say was: politics was downstream from culture.

00:38:53.000 He would give a speech to young people, and he would say, You want to change this country?

00:38:56.000 You're a young conservative with a fire in your heart.

00:38:58.000 You want to make a difference?

00:38:59.000 Don't move to Washington, D.C. They'll ruin you there.

00:39:03.000 Move to Hollywood.

00:39:05.000 You really want to make a difference?

00:39:06.000 You move to Hollywood.

00:39:07.000 Let me tell you something.

00:39:09.000 This week, Jen Saki went on Roblo's podcast, because of course Roblo has a podcast, and revealed that what convinced her to get back into politics. 0.97

00:39:19.000 Did you see the story?

00:39:21.000 What convinced her to get back into politics was binging every season of the West Wing. 0.98

00:39:29.000 No, no, no, don't underestimate this.

00:39:32.000 We have legions of Chardonnay-sipping, Peloton-riding leftists in our American government right now that were inspired by Aaron Sorkin and the West Wing because they think it's real life.

00:39:47.000 And they think that this is what our country is about.

00:39:49.000 And guess what?

00:39:50.000 They're remaking it right now before our very eyes in the model of Aaron Sorkin's Little Pipe Dream.

00:39:56.000 You want to change the country?

00:39:58.000 You change it through Netflix.

00:40:01.000 You change it through Amazon Prime.

00:40:02.000 You change it through creating content that has nothing to do with news and politics and theology, but has everything to do with news and politics and theology.

00:40:13.000 And there's a lot of moms and dads in this room right now.

00:40:17.000 And their kids, when they're 12, 13, maybe getting into high school, they'll go to you and they'll say, Mom, Dad, I want to be an actor.

00:40:23.000 I want to be a writer.

00:40:24.000 I want to be a director.

00:40:25.000 I want to be in the arts.

00:40:26.000 And you're going to say, nope, nope, nope.

00:40:28.000 My kid's going to be a lawyer.

00:40:30.000 My kid's going to be a politician.

00:40:31.000 My tid's going to go into investment banking.

00:40:34.000 Because, yeah, we need more bankers and politicians and lawyers in our world.

00:40:40.000 You wonder why all of the drech you see from Hollywood is liberal and progressive and leftist and Marxist and undermines this country?

00:40:48.000 Because all the people who were making that content, they had parents who supported their kids and said, yeah, go into the arts.

00:40:56.000 So you want to follow Andrew Breitbart's legacy and really pick up what he had to say?

00:41:01.000 Inspire your kids and don't say no to them because that is truly how we'll change this country.

00:41:07.000 Thank you so much for your time today.

00:41:08.000 Thank you, gentlemen.

00:41:10.000 Thank you.

00:41:13.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:41:14.000 Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and support us at charliekirk.com slash support.

00:41:20.000 Thank you so much for listening.

00:41:21.000 God bless.

00:41:25.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - February 27, 2022

A Political Extinction Moment for the Woke Left—LIVE from CPAC

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