00:00:00.000Hey everybody, and ask me anything with yours truly, Andrew Colvet, producer of the Charlie Kirk Show, and Blake Neth, another producer of the Charlie Kirk Show, and Ivy League Greg, but don't hold that against him.
00:00:12.000We talk about three things in this discussion.
00:00:15.000All three are extremely controversial.
00:00:17.000One, is it right to be kicking out people that say from the river to the sea and into FADA at Harvard, Penn, and MIT?
00:01:07.000Starts on December 16th, just days away.
00:01:09.000And also consider becoming a member of Charlie Kirk Exclusive, where we put members-only content just for you there.
00:01:17.000And by the way, if you are a member and you show proof of it and you're going to Amfest, you get to watch Charlie record his interviews with people like Tucker Carlson live and in person.
00:01:26.000We're only letting members into those settings.
00:01:49.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:57.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:38.000I mean, Charlie had a couple viral tweets about this, about the Harvard, MIT, Penn, congressional testimony.
00:02:46.000Very explosive, probably, if not the biggest story, top three stories of the week.
00:02:50.000We've talked about Bill Ackman, but one of the things we haven't really talked about is this question of are we going too far?
00:02:57.000Are we sort of saying, well, all of a sudden now free speech is outlawed, right?
00:03:02.000So is that what we are demanding of these university presidents by saying, hey, you have to condemn this speech by saying from the river to the sea or into FADA?
00:03:13.000You have to condemn that so much to the extent that you have to kick these students out and you have to remove from the student organizations, you know, their official register of organizations, any groups that endorse or repeated these statements.
00:03:27.000I think you have an interesting perspective on this because you've been, I've been noticing in our conversations, you've been hitting the brakes a little bit saying, is this the right way to go?
00:03:37.000Yeah, so there's really like two major outcomes we can have here.
00:03:41.000We can have the outcome of, and you kind of see both paths even in the statements we're getting from like Bill Ackman.
00:03:48.000You have the outcome of, okay, we've realized that universities have become toxic places and we're seeing, yeah, there's a lot of anti-Semitism on campus and that is a manifestation of a bunch of other antis they also have on campus, you know, anti-white, anti-everything else.
00:04:05.000And what we should do is we should try to get away from that and we should make it so campuses aren't places that are indulging a lot of like, you know, racial hate or, you know, anti-male hate or whatever else have you.
00:04:19.000Or we can go the other way and sort of make it so we'll just carve it out where we'll be, okay, you can't say bad, like you can't say bad things about Israel.
00:04:28.000You can't say bad things about Jewish people.
00:04:30.000And we'll kind of just slot this aside as its own thing.
00:04:34.000And then we'll just go back to the way things were before.
00:04:36.000And what we want is we want this to give us momentum for things to get better across the board.
00:04:40.000And I think one of the ways that universities are terrible is they'll claim that they support free speech, but they really don't.
00:04:46.000You have absolute freedom to say whatever you want as long as it's bashing white people or something.
00:04:52.000But you can't say something that essentially offends liberal sensibilities, whether it's on racial stuff or LGBT stuff, any of that.
00:04:59.000And the good outcome of this would be we use this to get momentum for total free speech, like the kind that would be advocated by fire.
00:05:10.000And the bad outcome is, yeah, we just use this and we increase speech restrictions.
00:05:14.000And I'm a little worried that's what we might get.
00:05:16.000Like the other day, we had the presidents of Harvard and Penn and I think MIT were on Capitol Hill testifying about this.
00:05:24.000And one of the things that happened was Elise Stefanik was browbeating, I think, the Harvard president, about whether they would revoke admissions offers from students based on what they said.
00:05:34.000And I think my position and the position of a lot of people would be we shouldn't revoke admission offers from people based on what they say unless it's really genuinely criminal.
00:05:45.000And that means literally advocating specific violence.
00:05:55.000Will admissions offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say, from the river to the sea or into FADA, advocating for the murder of Jews?
00:06:08.000As I've said, that type of hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me.
00:06:16.000Today that no action will be taken, what action will be taken when speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies, including policies against bullying, harassment, or intimidation, we take action.
00:06:30.000All right, so this is the crux here is, is the statement from the river to the sea or into FADA inherently calling for the death of Jews, right?
00:06:43.000I think it's very clear that it can be meant that way.
00:06:46.000But in popular sort of jargon of this protest movement on the left, is that what they're calling for?
00:06:52.000I think we're parsing words a little bit here.
00:06:53.000If we were saying, you know, death to all black people, I'm pretty sure the admission would be rescinded from that Harvard person if somebody said that.
00:07:02.000Your take, like, on the flip side, you know, we have things like kill the boar, and we'll get New York Times articles that will explain how kill the boar is actually part of this rich protest history.
00:07:28.000And you will get, you know, you can get really deranged rhetoric against white people on campus.
00:07:34.000If you've been on campus in the last decade, you've definitely seen it or you're not paying attention.
00:07:39.000And, you know, I think my overall position is it is better for campuses to have absolute free speech rules.
00:07:47.000I kind of go back to, you know, like maybe the Chesterton principle.
00:07:51.000He had a line where he says like rules are generally better than just sort of informal drift.
00:07:57.000And if you have an absolute rule of everyone gets free speech, that will sometimes allow bad things, but it'll allow a lot of good things that might otherwise get suppressed.
00:08:06.000And when you instead have this norm of we'll kind of ad hoc figure it out and sometimes you just don't have free speech, then what will happen is powerful people and powerful groups will use that to deny speech for things that are totally legitimate.
00:08:21.000And so, you know, things like intifada.
00:08:36.000And I think you could say that if you were going to ban that, you are giving a lot of ammunition to people who would say, well, any number of conservative things are actually calling for violence.
00:08:47.000The people who say Trump, when he says, we need to fight, that's calling for violence.
00:08:52.000I agree with 50% of what you're saying.
00:08:54.000I agree with the fact that we have to acknowledge that for the foreseeable future, conservatives will have less power institutionally in the university systems that we are now sort of clamping down on, right?
00:09:08.000So these will be any rules we create right now will be used against us, so help you, God, right?
00:09:14.000You bring up Amy Wax, who's been on this show, prominent, very controversial at UPenn, that is a conservative, one of the few, and they are trying to remove her tenure, right?
00:09:25.000For really basic stuff that we say on this show all the time.
00:09:29.000But I do believe that when you say intifada or from the river to the sea, you are inherently calling for the genocide of Jews.
00:09:37.000So I do believe in the destruction of the state of Israel, which is inherently, you got to kill Jews if you're going to destroy Israel, right?
00:09:44.000They would say, of course, to devil's advocate here, what they would say is they're essentially calling for Israel to become like America, not a sectarian state, not a racially premised state.
00:09:56.000And so they say like, you know, for Palestine to be free, it would mean that Palestinians have the right of return.
00:10:19.000But nevertheless, like, the tradition in the United States is you literally can go out and say Hitler was right.
00:10:25.000You can say that, and that is freedom of speech.
00:10:27.000And, you know, actual violence, actual calls for violence have been narrowly defined as you have to kind of have two out of three of specific person, specific time, specific place.
00:10:38.000If you have two out of three things, that's kind of enough, and you're calling for violence.
00:10:41.000That is enough to say that this quality has a real violent threat.
00:10:45.000Specific person, Jews, specific place, Israel.
00:12:07.000The program rids your body of the inflammation that is causing so many health problems.
00:12:13.000If you look around today, America is the fattest it has ever been.
00:12:16.000Our families, friends, and neighbors are dying of diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer's, now called T3 diabetes.
00:12:25.000PhD has helped so many people who want to have a good active life, play with their grandkids, travel, hike to a waterfall, go for a bike ride, but their weight was holding them hostage.
00:12:35.000They don't want any of you on experimental drugs for your brain degeneration from Alzheimer's or homebound with an oxygen tank for heart failure.
00:12:42.000My PhD weight loss knows that losing weight is the best thing for overall health.
00:14:27.000I was not focused on, but I should have been the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate.
00:14:43.000A call for genocide of Jewish people is threatening, deeply so.
00:14:49.000It is intentionally meant to terrify a people who have been subjected to pogroms and hatred for centuries and were the victims of mass genocide in the Holocaust.
00:15:02.000In my view, it would be harassment or intimidation.
00:15:15.000So, and I want to give some credence to what you're saying here, Blake.
00:15:19.000I definitely believe that many of these people are calling for genocide.
00:15:22.000I think, you know, you're a two out of three standard that's been used for, you know, violent speech or sort of where you have a, what was it, a specific person, a specific location, a specific time.
00:15:35.000I don't see how any of that applies to genocide because genocide is by its very nature not a specific person.
00:15:50.000Well, and I do want to give some credence because there are other levers we can pull.
00:15:54.000And I think Charlie has been one of the loudest voices on the internet saying, defund, defund, defund, pull your donations, pull your donations.
00:16:03.000I think this was yesterday that we had a $100 million donation to UPenn withdrawn by Ross Stevens, founder and CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management Group.
00:16:15.000He's now written a letter saying that UPenn is in violation of his December 2017 gift.
00:16:21.000It was actually limited partnership units in Stone Ridge.
00:16:25.000And he's saying you're in breach of our contract.
00:16:42.000They have too much influence in American life.
00:16:44.000They promote countless toxic things, including the loss of free speech over time.
00:16:49.000But you do want to look at what we are demanding.
00:16:51.000And I think a thing with free speech that it's very easy to fall into, and the left did this all the time when they were justifying censorship with big tech or through deplatforming, is they're like, well, the First Amendment only governs the government and it doesn't govern anything else.
00:17:05.000So any company can fire you for your speech.
00:17:08.000Anyone can de-platform you over speech.
00:17:09.000Your bank can de-bank you if they don't like your speech.
00:17:11.000And that's all okay because it's not the government.
00:17:14.000And I would say, why do we have the First Amendment?
00:17:16.000We have the First Amendment because we think speech is a good thing.
00:17:19.000We think freedom of speech is valuable.
00:17:21.000That it is tyrannical to say people cannot say what they really believe, that they have to lie about their beliefs because they fear retribution for it.
00:17:29.000That when you have a more free exchange of ideas, you generally get better ideas, just like the same way that by having free markets, you get better access to goods than you do under something that's rigidly controlled.
00:17:42.000And again, I think it would be a tragedy if what we get from this is that UPenn comes out and says, okay, our bad.
00:17:49.000We have a new speech standard that says that a very broad definition of harassment is no longer allowed.
00:18:16.000And as long as they have rules that say, actually, our school follows the First Amendment standard of speech, then the rules are on her side.
00:18:23.000And she has a very strong case that they're trying to fire her for bad reason.
00:18:26.000But if they have a restrictive rule that says, well, if you say something that offends a lot of people or we decide is harmful to them and that's not allowed, we're going to classify that as harassment, then they'll be able to fire Amy Wax.
00:18:38.000And they will use this on conservatives.
00:18:41.000They already do this to conservatives with the more liberal speech rules that they nominally have.
00:18:46.000And if they end up adopting more anti-speech rules because we're calling for it, I think that would be a big mistake.
00:18:55.000I go back to the saying is that any rules that we have to see this clear-eyed.
00:19:00.000Any rules that are created now will be used against us in the future.
00:19:04.000And mark my words, the university systems are not turning over overnight.
00:19:08.000They're still going to have the power.
00:19:10.000What we really need is more reforms, more ideological diversity.
00:19:15.000I don't know how you get there unless you start mass defunding these people and you start basically saying you lose your protections at the, you know, we're going to start taxing your endowments.
00:19:25.000Instead of taking out speech, you say this was caused by DEI.
00:19:28.000This is caused by whackadoodle stuff getting money from the school.
00:19:31.000And you say, okay, no more DEI, no more anti-white discrimination, no more anti-anyone discrimination.
00:19:49.000I think a lot of our audience is probably like, yeah, like calls for genocide, like these kids should be kicked out of school.
00:19:54.000This is Glenn Greenwald, and then we can move on to Trump 2.0, as I like to say.
00:19:59.000So, Glenn's tweeting about this right now.
00:20:01.000He says, There are, by all appearances, millions of people who now believe that there's an epidemic of students marching around chanting gas the Jews and kill all Jews.
00:20:09.000I've asked around 100 people in the last week for examples.
00:20:11.000Nobody can give one, let alone show an epidemic.
00:20:14.000It's scary how easily the public can be convinced that there's a new crisis that requires massive speech restrictions.
00:20:21.000What's really being done is that Israel supporters have taken longtime pro-Palestinian slogans and declared them genocidal and demanded censorship of them.
00:20:30.000And I think that is the crux here: if you're saying from the river to the sea and into FADA, is that inherently calling for the death and destruction of millions of Jews living in Israel?
00:20:44.000And then what do you do about it if they are saying that?
00:20:47.000It's a fascinating debate, nevertheless, and it's one that I think is branching out more widely.
00:20:51.000If you want to add anything to that, Blake, if not, we can.
00:20:54.000You know, I would advise people, we have seen this happen in our own world.
00:20:58.000They'll say, you know, Trump runs on America first.
00:21:00.000And they're like, well, America First was also a slogan that was anti-Semitic in the 30s, and so you can't say that.
00:21:04.000Or, you know, Reagan runs on states' rights.
00:21:06.000And they're like, states' rights is code for segregation and bring back slavery.
00:21:10.000And they've done this in our own politics to slogans that we ourselves have used.
00:21:16.000So you should always be careful when they're using that towards anyone else.
00:21:20.000But yeah, we spent a lot of time on this.
00:21:22.000So let's go into this Axios article that came out in the middle of the week, and we've both been talking about it a ton.
00:21:29.000It's Behind the Curtain, How Trump Would Build His Loyalty First Cabinet.
00:21:35.000And it's kind of just great, like wish casting.
00:22:03.000This says that Melania Trump wants Tucker to be the vice president, which, and for the same reason we've said on this show, which is he really is like a force multiplier for Trump.
00:22:14.000He's not, he doesn't outshine Trump, which is what a lot of people would say.
00:22:47.000It could be that literally none of these people have a job in a future Trump administration.
00:22:51.000Well, I think the more interesting question is, and we've debated this privately, Blake, is Trump so set in his ways that, in a sense, that was Trump 1.0 basically what you're going to get with Trump 2.0, or can he fundamentally adapt, change, and actually surround himself with better people so that he can achieve his policy goals?
00:23:54.000Yeah, well, so it's just, you can see the ways it can go both ways right from the start.
00:23:59.000You know, the fact that he's considering Stephen Miller for either attorney general, despite not having a law degree, attorney general, or at some sort of immigration deportations art, that's really promising as long as he's able to stick around.
00:24:11.000But on the other hand, it also says he's considering a Democrat, Jamie Dimon, at J.P. Morgan, for a Treasury pick.
00:24:18.000And I think a lot of people will consider that pretty frustrating if he just literally picks a Democrat to be Secretary of the Treasury.
00:24:28.000So I think the best argument for Trump 2.0 would be better is Trump is extremely, he's still extremely angry about 2020.
00:24:37.000And it sort of says in this article that sort of the basic qualification for any appointees going to make is they have to affirm that 2020 was stolen.
00:24:47.000And, you know, a natural caveat I can imagine is if he wins in 2024, he won't be nearly as angry about 2020 anymore because he's sort of, he's undone it.
00:25:04.000The other good argument is, you know, a lot of the people who he was, you know, he might just start as a default with the people who are with him in 2020.
00:25:14.000And I think we'd both agree the people he had in position by late 2020 were better than who he started with.
00:25:20.000So if he brings back John McIntye to run personnel again, they were making a lot of great appointees with McIntyre in 2020.
00:25:26.000If they're doing that right away in 2025, we're going to be way better positioned for the next four years.
00:25:34.000So I see both elements even in the list of this Axios article.
00:25:38.000Yeah, maybe the right way to think about it is almost like Trump 1.5.
00:25:41.000Like aspects of this are certainly going to be better because I think, you know, Heritage has his Project 2025, Turning Point Action has contributed to that.
00:26:06.000You've got another thing that's been floated, Schedule F, right, Blake, which is essentially how do you get rid of this bureaucratic monstrosity that has formed over decades and centuries inside of Washington?
00:26:19.000I mean, the fact that our seat of government is in a place geographically that has basically a 90-95% Democrat voters, I mean, it is, it makes San Francisco look like a conservative voting block.
00:26:38.000This is how bad the nation's capital has become and how partisan and how just entrenched.
00:26:44.000This is why we see these juries and anything that's brought against Trump in D.C., you're just like, it doesn't even matter if they're claiming, you know, that he picked up a quarter, but he said it was a dime.
00:26:56.000Like, the grand jury will convict him.
00:27:03.000I mean, Fulton County is like 80-20 now.
00:27:05.000I will say, so maybe a good way of thinking of it is maybe it's not Trump 2.0 versus 1.0, but maybe Trump World 2.0, which is you have people who are in Trump's orbit, who have been in his orbit the whole time, but now they understand, okay, if we come in, you know, the Office of Personnel, these different groups are going to be obstacles.
00:27:27.000And we figured out in 2020 how to solve these obstacles, but we couldn't implement them in time before we had to leave office.
00:27:42.000They're really hyped up, you know, this idea of Trump as the retribution presidency.
00:27:48.000And even if that's very fun to say, I do think it is harmful to frame it this way, both in terms of, I don't think it's electorally useful.
00:27:56.000I don't think most Americans like the idea of this guy running when he's like, I'm running to get revenge on all of my personal enemies.
00:28:06.000So I would step away from it for that reason.
00:28:08.000But also, again, we have to think in practical terms.
00:28:11.000If you're going to have to do these things, you are going to have to get them past judges.
00:28:14.000And a kind of conventional thing is it is difficult for you to judges and the Supreme Court have thrown out measures before by basically saying this law you passed or this policy you did is not actually a normal product of lawmaking, but you just intended to single somebody out.
00:28:32.000And, you know, we can't pass bills of attainder.
00:28:34.000You can't have Congress pass a bill that is just like punishing somebody, one specific name.
00:28:39.000You could also, judges have also referenced statements made on the campaign trail to then overturn because they looked into the integrity of the people.
00:28:50.000They would do this with Trump's immigration thing.
00:28:52.000They would say like, well, Trump's statements on immigration prove that this bill to close our border, this measure to close our border is driven by hate.
00:29:40.000You know, we were just talking about the polling in Arizona, how like older voters are less associated less with Trump and more with the Republican Party.
00:29:48.000They want a return to sort of some of that more genteel political tone.
00:29:57.000You're exciting news to share about saving babies by providing ultrasounds.
00:30:00.000Right now, there is a dollar-for-dollar match, doubling the number of babies you'll save with pre-born.
00:30:04.000There are babies alive today about to celebrate their first Christmas because of what we did together a year ago at this time providing ultrasounds.
00:30:11.000And right now, you could save twice as many babies.
00:30:14.000Maybe you're already wondering about end of the year giving and want to give every dollar, get the most results.
00:30:19.000Or maybe you just want to know that a girl making this decision deserves the truth.
00:30:22.000So that next year at this time, she's picking out a Christmas stocking for her baby's first Christmas.
00:31:33.000Which I think was a tactical mistake because she is left of center.
00:31:37.000I don't think she's nearly as political as some.
00:31:39.000But that being said, you know, she feels like such an easy target because she's just, I don't know, she's obviously not that sophisticated when it comes to politics.
00:31:49.000And she's, of course, going to side with the liberal Democrats, even though they're destroying our country.
00:31:55.000You are a little muted on this as well.
00:32:43.000You know, in the 1960s, they didn't give it to the Beatles.
00:32:47.000And to give it to Taylor Swift, because she's just a really popular celebrity who's made a lot of money is weird to me, especially because celebrities overall are less important than they've been in a long time.
00:33:01.000Like, we have more sources of entertainment with more options.
00:33:05.000So, even if she's the most popular singer, songwriter in the world, she's not nearly as big a deal as the biggest singer-songwriter in the world would have been 50 years ago, 40 years ago, even 20 years ago, I'd say.
00:33:19.000And especially when you already have just sitting there being enormous, like the most obvious pick for some sort of person of the year.
00:33:28.000It's what's the biggest story of the year?
00:35:15.000Well, but this shows that we will now get the full George Santos.
00:35:19.000We're getting the full, America is now forced to get the full George Santos, like completely unleashed, unfettered, and we are all going to be dumber and worse off for it.
00:35:28.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:35:30.000If you have not gotten your tickets to Amfest yet, go to Amfest.com.