00:00:00.000Today at the Charlie Kirk Show, Lee Fong joins us to talk about Radicals vs. Atlanta, the global left's violent rage over a police academy, that and so much more.
00:00:10.000Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast and get involved with Turning Point USA Today at tpusa.com.
00:00:39.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:46.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:11.000Really excited for our guests this hour.
00:01:13.000Lee Fong joins us, who has been doing some great reporting and honestly has a super interesting story.
00:01:19.000I'm going to get into his background later, though.
00:01:21.000I want to first lead with his excellent story here that is Radicals versus Atlanta, the global left's violent rage over a police academy meant to prevent killings.
00:01:46.000You know, this piece looks at a couple of different issues.
00:01:49.000You know, in America, we have a crisis of police training.
00:01:53.000Police are not very, they don't have a very large training requirement, especially compared to other wealthy industrialized countries.
00:02:02.000You know, it takes a minimum of about three months to four months of training to become a police officer in many jurisdictions in the United States.
00:02:10.000Compare that to Finland, Germany, Denmark, and other countries where it takes at least three years.
00:02:16.000Stressed out cops, cops without proper training are more likely to injure civilians and themselves, more likely to escalate violent situations.
00:02:26.000There's just so much social science, criminology, and other research that shows better trained police are better at preventing crime, are better at de-escalating and dealing with mental health emergencies, better at policing in general.
00:02:41.000Yet, despite this kind of clear fact of the matter, the new cause du jour on the far left, the radical left, is going after police training.
00:02:52.000There's a view that any type of training, any type of investment in preparing police is some kind of violation of defund the police, abolish the police principles, that it's somehow dangerous for society.
00:03:06.000And we're seeing protests all over the country of various police training centers.
00:03:10.000But the biggest kind of rallying cry is a proposed police training center in Atlanta that will be primarily for Atlanta police, but for Georgia police overall.
00:03:21.000Police in Atlanta are, you know, they're forced to train in a very decrepit building where the roof is literally caving in.
00:03:29.000Firefighters will also use the same training center.
00:03:32.000They're using an ancient abandoned elementary school.
00:03:35.000And this is something that the unions, that community leaders, that the entire city council, that community leaders have demanded for decades, and now it's finally happening.
00:03:45.000And the global left, I mean, people are flying in from France, from the UK, from Canada to protest this center, to engage in violence, to attempt to burn it down and attack it.
00:03:55.000It's kind of the rallying cry for protesters around the world in San Francisco and Brooklyn and Paris and other places.
00:04:02.000They've kind of branded it as a supposed cop city and made it their rallying cry.
00:04:09.000And it's kind of led to these escalating violent tensions in Atlanta that is very unusual for the city.
00:04:16.000This is a city with a long history of nonviolent civil rights protests, very kind of gradual, moderate reform.
00:04:23.000It's not known as a hotbed of radicalism, yet anti-faw and anarchists from around the country are swarming to the city and encamping and attacking construction workers and police officers as they attempt to build this training center.
00:04:38.000I think you've pinpointed the first perfectly, which is for years, as I do these campus events, I'm told by anti-police BLM activists, the key is training, that we need to train police better, that we need to make sure they're better equipped, that they're not overwhelmed, that when they get in a situation, for example, they don't mistake their taser for their firearm, right?
00:05:00.000Which is a situation we saw recently that ended tragically.
00:05:04.000Now, that seems to just be an excuse, right?
00:05:10.000But this activist base is going after the actual training centers themselves.
00:05:15.000Now, our audience probably remembers, and Lee, I want you to correct me if I'm in error here, but this felt like a coordinated attack.
00:05:23.000It felt like as if there was communication channels, time, date, place, and manner to go after this construction site of well over, it seemed to be between 50 to 100 people is my estimation.
00:05:34.000Walk us through that day that went viral, where these Antifa folks gathered with, I guess you could say, weapons, or I don't know if it was Molotov cocktails.
00:05:43.000Tell us the details of when they decided to actually try to damage the training center in Georgia.
00:05:52.000Well, you know, to your first point, there's been a great division within the criminal justice reform movement.
00:05:58.000There are many well-meaning people, well-intentioned people who see police abuses, who see issues between police and civilians as an opportunity for reform, for greater investments in body cameras and civilian oversight and better training and working closer with police and violence interrupters to deal with all the kind of issues that we have in this country when it comes to crime and policing.
00:06:22.000But there's another side that's overwhelmingly kind of dominated by upper class activists, by foundation-funded activists, by kind of highly educated left-wing anarchists, for lack of a better term, who see this opportunity, see these kind of moments of police misconduct or viral moments you see in the news around policing as an opportunity to burn it all down, to kind of confront police, to engage in rioting and violence.
00:06:48.000And that's what we've really seen with this public safety training center in Atlanta.
00:06:53.000Back in December, you had a number of activists, almost all of whom who were at least arrested, were from out of state.
00:07:02.000And once you look at the arrest records, in one of these confrontations where protesters brought weapons, knives, small-top cocktails, even firearms, in one case, 27, I believe, were arrested.
00:07:36.000I mean, these violent protesters who are bringing weapons into Georgia and at this training center, the arrest records show that they don't live from the state.
00:07:45.000I mean, it's become a global rallying cry.
00:07:49.000And you listen to the last city council member hearing on this training center from earlier this summer, and people at least identify themselves.
00:07:56.000They said, look, I flew in from Los Angeles.
00:07:59.000I flew in from New York, and I'm just so opposed to police training that I use my own resources and my time to come protest.
00:08:09.000It's the mimetic power of the internet.
00:08:12.000When people see these kind of very emotional causes, they get so invested.
00:08:16.000And if they have the time and resources, they will literally fly to a place like Atlanta and engage in these protests.
00:08:22.000And it hasn't been a meaningful back and forth.
00:08:24.000You know, there are, you know, there are claims that this is a militarization center, that this is going to be used for training alongside Israeli special forces to terrorize minorities.
00:08:37.000But you can understand if you did believe that, that might be kind of a galvanizing reason to go and protest.
00:08:43.000But there's just been such a big separation between those who are very eager to jump on a bandwagon and those who are actually dealing with the facts of the matter for this training center.
00:08:52.000How much damage did they do to the construction site?
00:08:55.000And do you think this training center will actually get to completion?
00:08:59.000Well, they've destroyed multiple bulldozers and construction materials.
00:09:03.000They went to the Alabama home of one of the construction executives and attempted to intimidate him.
00:09:09.000They just destroyed and burned several police motorcycles at the center.
00:09:13.000They've attacked ATT workers who are setting up some of the telecom equipment.
00:09:17.000I don't think there's been a full kind of exhaustive list of all the damage they've done, but they keep attacking the workers, the police, and destroying all the equipment as they come and develop the center.
00:09:29.000There's lots of kind of far-left money flowing into the city to put the issue to referendum.
00:09:34.000So there will be a yes or no vote in Atlanta that has not qualified yet.
00:09:39.000They're still gathering signatures, but it's still CBD.
00:09:42.000You know, there's a lot of money coming in, and this is an off-year election.
00:09:46.000So, you know, for an off-year election, if it qualifies for this November, it's really, you know, for those types of elections, the most eager and enthusiastic voters can have a lot of sway.
00:09:56.000I just want everyone to just take a second here.
00:10:25.000Listen, as students begin heading back to school, do you think they'll be learning about the founding principles that made America the freest, most prosperous nation in history?
00:10:32.000Will they learn that our unalienable rights are God-given and not granted by government?
00:10:36.000Will they be given a full and honest account of our nation's history?
00:10:39.000The answer to all these questions is yes for students at Hillsdale College.
00:10:43.000And these days, in addition to teaching college students, Hillsdale has extended its teaching to K-12 students and lifelong learners like you and me.
00:10:51.000If you're not doing so already, one of the best ways to start learning from my friends at Hillsdale is through In Primus, Hillsdale's Free Digest of Liberty.
00:11:00.000My listeners can sign up for free at this special website, which is available for a limited time.
00:11:39.000You know, I've been doing a little bit of writing on this one kind of billionaire-backed foundation called Solidaire.
00:11:47.000They're funded by many different kinds of wealthy heirs and tech executives.
00:11:51.000Even Mark Zuckerberg, you know, co-founder of Facebook, he's given quite a bit of money to Solidaire.
00:11:57.000This is a group that's a main funder of several of the activist groups in the kind of Atlanta area that are engaged in this public safety training center, including one of the groups, this movement builders, that's kind of spearheading the push to stop this project.
00:12:15.000This foundation is one of several different kinds of Silicon Valley-based groups, backgroups.
00:12:23.000Another one is the Schmidt Foundation, the former CEO of Google.
00:12:27.000They've provided a significant amount of money.
00:12:30.000And there's an heir to a billionaire fortune, the Cox Media Enterprises, James Fergie Chambers.
00:12:36.000He's promised $600,000 to this effort to stop the police training center.
00:12:41.000So it's a lot of billionaire money, a lot of tech money, a lot of California money flowing to this effort.
00:12:46.000Well, so Lee, just for the kind of everyday listener in our audience, help them understand why a plutocrat oligarch like Mark Zuckerberg, who factually does spend $3 to $4 million on private security a year.
00:13:05.000Every time he goes jogging in Rome or London, he has buff veterans jogging alongside of him.
00:13:13.000So what is the motivation, if you were to speculate a little bit, Lee, why someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who does not have a moment without armed security to fund the destruction and or the challenging, let's just be fair, challenging of a police training center?
00:13:31.000I think there are a couple of explanations.
00:13:33.000One is that some billionaires, I've done some reporting on this, like Piero Midiart, founder of eBay, he's a big funder of abolish and defund the police groups.
00:13:43.000He is also an investor in private security startups, including a company that's like an Uber.
00:14:16.000Some of these workplaces in Silicon Valley are very left-wing.
00:14:21.000It's about kind of showing, for lack of a better term, virtue signaling and showing that they have all the right bona fides in terms of being in the good graces of progressives.
00:14:32.000But it's deeply ironic and cynical in another way, because look at Mark Zuckerberg's foundation.
00:14:38.000He's providing money to the group that sponsors defundpolice.org.
00:14:42.000He's providing money to Solidaire, which is providing training for activists to fight to abolish police and fight this police training center.
00:14:50.000But look at another donation from the Zuckerberg Foundation.
00:14:54.000He's providing money to the Redwood City Police Foundation.
00:14:59.000So he's defunding police all over the country, except for the police department near the Facebook headquarters.
00:15:05.000So it's for me, but not for thee, that type of thing.
00:15:08.000Yeah, and I just, that's an unbelievably accurate yet simple talking point I hear so often.
00:15:14.000And it's also, I think, unbelievably evil to say that I'm okay with protecting myself, but I have to be lectured by Zuckerberg types about marginalized communities where violent crime is going up.
00:15:27.000I mean, it's going up in D.C., it's going up in most urban areas, at least over the last couple of years.
00:15:32.000And I mean, I'm just visiting this website, Lee, right now.
00:15:46.000So, defundthepolice.org, a one-stop shop for organizers and advocates looking for tools, resources, and trainings to divest from policing and to build safer communities.
00:15:58.000And it has legislative resources, budgeting tools, organizing resources, trainings, and events.
00:16:03.000And so, you're telling me Mark Zuckerberg is funding this organization.
00:16:07.000Yeah, he funds the sponsor of that organization.
00:16:09.000And look, even though this is draped in egalitarian language about helping all of society, the actual net effect is the Brazilification of America, more inequality, that the rich will have private security, gated communities, the poor won't have anyone to call when there's crime.
00:16:24.000Yeah, and if you want to be extremely cynical, then politically you're able to control the masses permanently because the middle class is in disarray and criminality is widespread.
00:16:34.000That's only if you're super cynical, which I reject wholeheartedly.
00:16:40.000Do you know that the average American spends about 20 years in retirement?
00:16:44.000That's a long time to live without a steady income.
00:16:46.000And we want to make sure you enjoy every moment of it and don't outlive your money.
00:16:50.000Retirement is about more than just investments.
00:17:39.000You know, I'm a millennial growing up in the DC area.
00:17:43.000I grew up kind of east in the suburbs east of D.C.
00:17:47.000And I was very motivated and shaped and influenced by the war on terror, the war in Iraq.
00:17:53.000You know, I watched as smoke billowed out of the Pentagon just to kind of see the rush to war, the rush to kind of separate everyone between the Manichaean worldview between good and evil.
00:18:07.000I was kind of alarmed by efforts to privatize Social Security, and I saw tax cuts that seemed very unfair, that seemed weighted towards the upper income side of the equation.
00:18:19.000You know, we live in a winner-take-all system.
00:18:21.000So we basically have a two-party system.
00:18:23.000And it pushed me towards the Democrats early in life.
00:18:26.000Did a lot of activism in college on the war, joined college Democrats and like engaged in a lot of primary stuff, getting out, you know, who I perceived as conservative, pro-corporate Democrats out of the party, engaging in a lot of those primary fights.
00:18:42.000Joined a think tank tied to Obama and the Obama White House, the Center for American Progress, did a lot of investigative reporting and journalism that was, you know, I'm proud of most of that work, but having a little bit of a partisan edge, kind of supporting certainly more Democrats.
00:19:02.000You know, I saw a lot of the corrupt deals in the Obama administration that were very pro-corporate, the kind of dirty deal with Google to like, you know, refuse to enforce any of the antitrust or privacy regulations on this company because it became so close to the Obama administration.
00:19:18.000You know, the refusal to get out of Afghanistan, you know, instead Obama surged the number of troops there and breaking his promise.
00:19:26.000You know, just kind of as I grew older, maturing and seeing the realities of politics, you know, you can't be wedded to one partisan side or even one ideology.
00:19:36.000You know, if you want to be an independent journalist, if you want to understand the way the world works, you can't be connected to any team.
00:19:43.000You know, you got to view everyone with skepticism.
00:19:46.000You got to view everyone with some degree of scrutiny.
00:19:50.000And as I've moved a little bit to the more progressive left, you know, I worked for a number of different magazines.
00:19:59.000Eventually, I worked at The Intercept, this billionaire-funded left-wing investigative site.
00:20:05.000You know, I did a lot of journalism there that I'm incredibly proud of.
00:20:09.000And there are still some good reporters there.
00:20:11.000But, you know, it has some of the different trappings of ideology and partisanship that when it comes to just seeing the world as it is on policing, on identity, and being bare-minded around these issues, it's impossible for the kind of radical left.
00:20:28.000They see these issues in their own kind of manichean, good versus evil, just as the Bush administration saw the war on terror in a similar way.
00:20:36.000You're either with us or you're against us.
00:20:38.000And if you do anything that's perceived as against us, we're going to destroy you personally.
00:20:43.000I come from a more old school view on identity.
00:20:46.000I want to view people on their, judge people on their character, on what's in their heart, not their skin color or their race.
00:20:54.000And that's not popular anymore on the radical left.
00:20:57.000In fact, if you view the world through that lens, you're seen as a racist.
00:21:02.000And, you know, that's a fundamental disconnect I have with sites like The Intercept and other kind of progressive movements and protests and media kind of academic.
00:21:13.000There's a whole kind of sphere of the radical left where identity politics reigns supreme over every other issue.
00:21:22.000How have your relationships been since you've, let's just say, dissented from the party line as you say, hey, maybe it's not a good thing that we riot or maybe we shouldn't have black-only dormitories?
00:21:43.000It's certainly harmed several personal and professional relationships.
00:21:47.000That being said, it's also opened the door to exponentially more relationships.
00:21:52.000When you tie yourself too deeply to an extremist ideology, which really at the end of the day, it is, even though it's the dominant ideology, this kind of far left identity politics is dominant in certain spheres of the media and academia, regular people are not down for it.
00:22:08.000People who work nine to five regular jobs, whether that's in tech or in the service sector, if they're driving a bus or driving Uber or working in a hospital, they don't share these views around violence.
00:22:25.000They don't say, hey, we've got to segregate people by their skin color and put them in different HR trainings and say you're inherently an oppressor or inherently a victim based on the pigment of your skin.
00:22:36.000Once you reject that ideology, you realize that, look, you can actually have more common cause with ordinary Americans.
00:22:43.000Yes, it will harm some of your relationships in the elite with these billionaire foundations, with a lot of journalists and activists.
00:22:52.000But look, those people don't speak for most Americans.
00:22:55.000So it certainly has kind of disconnecting from that world has harmed a few relationships, but it's also opened me to many new relationships.
00:23:03.000I think that's beautiful the way you put that.
00:23:06.000And the divide in America is both ideological and class.
00:23:10.000And so it tends to be that the wealthiest of the wealthy have these they're subsidizing, but also they might not believe it, but that's why I want to ask you some of this stuff.
00:23:22.000I mean, I'm looking at Pierre Omadar's example, right?
00:23:25.000French-born Iranian-American billionaire, technology entrepreneur, helped start, you know, obviously he started eBay and some people call him the next George Soros and Sergey Brin or Larry Page and Lorene Powell Jobs and Mackenzie Bezos.
00:23:39.000There's a community of plutocrats that are wealthier than anything that we could comprehend, right?
00:23:44.000Multiples of multiples wealthier than the ordinary person.
00:23:49.000And Lee, what I find fascinating about what we are living through is we think of, let's just say, radical revolutions usually as being bottom-up, as being the workers revolting against the capital class, right?
00:24:18.000Radical movements are often elites galvanizing the working class for their own interests.
00:24:24.000You know, the communists were elites, you know, who galvanized the working class.
00:24:28.000Fascists were elites who galvanized the working class.
00:24:31.000And we see that kind of similar dynamic happening in America, where we have a very elite class of people at major corporations who have inherited incredible amounts of wealth who are hoping to galvanize the working class for their own pet ideology.
00:24:44.000And in many cases, this is essentially class war, but not in the sense, not in the kind of like standard left-wing way of viewing the world.
00:24:54.000In many cases, it's creating an ideology, a value system that gives the perception of doing good for society, but really entrenches a very rigid class system.
00:25:07.000And we see that certainly with public safety issues, where, as we just discussed, the only people who benefit from a completely divided system where only the people with private security and gated communities can live safely are the very, very wealthy.
00:25:24.000And the people who are suffering from these policies are the working class, the middle class, who can't afford this type of security, who can't just flee their community because they're grounded in something real.
00:25:35.000They work at a place where they can't just go on their laptop and hide in their house all day.
00:25:39.000If you have to commute to work, if you actually have to go into the streets, you aren't afforded the luxury of an abolish the police ideology.
00:25:47.000Yet we see where does the money come from from this movement?
00:25:50.000It comes from the very upper echelons of society.
00:25:53.000I have no idea how you're going to answer this question, but I'm genuinely curious.
00:25:56.000As a free thinker and someone that probably hears one side is extreme, other side is extreme.
00:26:02.000What do you think currently in today is a greater threat to American liberty, like the MAGA base, or let's just say the prevailing dogma of the American Democrat Party?
00:26:15.000That's a really hard question to respond to because it's, I think, just this general dynamic where we have these two warring tribes that can't see each other and understand their commonality.
00:26:27.000I think essentially, if you just wipe away the labels, the social media hate, people basically want the same thing.
00:26:49.000We might have different ideas of paths to get there, but there's not that much that separates us in terms of what we want at the end of the day.
00:26:58.000And I think it's dangerous that the prevailing norm now in the Democratic Party is valorizing everything the FBI does and cracking down on having the government crack down on public debate and speech.
00:27:15.000I think it's also dangerous that we're such a weaponized country that everyone's getting guns and arming themselves for some potential conflict down the road.
00:27:24.000I could see a very negative consequence of that as well.
00:27:27.000And I think we all just need to kind of tone down the temperature and understand and respect each other.
00:27:34.000So, Lee, the issue of war, just riff a little bit.
00:27:38.000There's mass kind of political confusion.
00:27:41.000Some people on the right, I mean, the majority of the people on the right are against what's happening in Ukraine, but prior it was the other way around.
00:27:47.000Republicans were the biggest neocons and cheerleaders.
00:27:51.000Just add your thoughts or some clarity to, are we seeing a realignment when it comes to foreign policy?
00:28:01.000You know, every two years, the budget for the Pentagon has to be reauthorized.
00:28:07.000That's an opportunity for Congress to kind of tinker with some of the provisions and shape foreign policy kind of from the sidelines.
00:28:14.000You know, the president has incredible power, but this is the one check that Congress has really on shaping military foreign policy.
00:28:22.000Look at the last few votes when they were happening in July.
00:28:26.000It was actually the far left, a lot of the squad members, and the Freedom Caucus coming together to say, hey, we've got to actually have a special inspector general to oversee the $117 billion Congress has allocated to Ukraine.
00:28:41.000You know, we have no special inspector general, a special inspector general for TARIP, for the bank bailouts, for Afghanistan, for Iraq, but no one, kind of, no special IG for Ukraine.
00:28:54.000A check on cluster bombs, on better oversight on how casualties are reported.
00:29:01.000These were interesting votes where it didn't cut between Democrats and Republicans.
00:29:07.000It was establishment versus populace, where you saw Freedom Caucus and squad members coming together, even members who I think truly hate each other.
00:29:17.000Marjorie Taylor Greene and Corey Bush famously kind of yelling at each other, hating each other.
00:29:22.000They were voting for each other's bills, which I give both of them credit for.
00:29:26.000Reflecting on our earlier conversation, this is one of my kind of mea culpas, but maybe Black Pill moment.
00:29:34.000Growing up in the shadow of the Iraq war, I obsessively hated the mainstream media.
00:29:39.000I thought this was an institution that worked with the Pentagon, worked with political leaders to manufacture consent for the war.
00:29:49.000They got us into war without asking the right questions about weapons of mass destruction and other claims that the Bush administration was making.
00:29:56.000And that we needed independent and especially social media.
00:30:45.000You know, these are platforms that have drained the ad revenue from quality media outlets.
00:30:51.000So you have less reporters doing their job.
00:30:54.000You know, Baltimore Sun, you know, I grew up in Maryland, the Baltimore Sun used to have foreign correspondents all over the world.
00:31:00.000Now they barely have enough reporters to cover what's going on in Baltimore.
00:31:04.000So you have less of these, less legacy talent.
00:31:07.000You have more social control centralized at these social media platforms that are working with the government to curtail speech.
00:31:16.000These disinformation debates, the government is very clearly working with the big platforms to shape the type of content we see, what discussions are allowed, what's shadow banned, what's banned.
00:31:27.000And at the end of the day, because of these factors and others, there's less scrutiny.
00:31:32.000There's less of a public debate about the war in Ukraine.
00:31:35.000fact, there are these propaganda accounts that are constantly cheering on NATO and exaggerating.
00:31:40.000I mean, look at what all of these pro-NATO accounts were saying earlier this year that Ukraine had this huge opportunity to seize Crimea and make gigantic gains in the war.
00:31:51.000You know, this has not been the case, but we have this very powerful war propaganda that's actually amplified through social media and the internet.
00:32:00.000And, you know, again, like I'm wrong, I'd hope for a completely different dynamic with the rise of the internet back in 2004.
00:32:09.000Yeah, and it also makes you wonder, this is a topic for a different time, how talented the intel agencies are at actually manipulating our algorithms and puppeteering our tech companies because they are actively involved in the propaganda networks.