In this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, we have a special guest on the show this week, former Marine and current member of the Joint Improving Military Readiness Project (JRP) and former member of Congress, Tyler Smith, joins us to talk about his experience as a whistleblower and what he's doing to fight for the fight against waste, fraud and abuse within the Department of Defense.
00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:02:28.000And in my documented case, reporting it, me and other whistleblowers, led to retaliation and what looks like a compromise DODIG process.
00:02:40.000What's the best way to get verified whistleblower evidence in front of the right oversight, House Oversight, Armed Forces Service Committee?
00:02:49.000And would TPUSA be willing to help route and spite cases that involve military waste, fraud, and abuse and IG failures?
00:03:07.000I haven't talked to him about this, but I just, I can tell you, on its face, the guys, especially the political appointees that are now in charge of the Department of War, are absolutely devoted to rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse, all of this stuff.
00:03:21.000And there is a huge, and it sounds like you're very well aware of this, a huge behemoth of a procurement process that was in place and it's been in place for years and years and years that favors the incumbents, that favors the bloated companies, that favors the old school companies.
00:03:36.000What they're trying to do is they're trying to revamp a lot of this.
00:03:39.000You know, you hear about Palmer Lucky with Andorill and kind of what they're doing, this new age of defense contractors that are lighter, more nimble.
00:03:50.000They're thinking about war in new and creative ways.
00:03:54.000There's a bunch of companies like that, actually, startups all across the country, huge entrepreneurial neural class.
00:04:02.000Maybe they were fighting wars 10 years ago, and now they're trying to build the machines and the technologies that will help us win wars in the future.
00:04:10.000There's a huge group of these guys all over the country.
00:04:13.000And so they're trying to break into this procurement process because they know exactly what you said.
00:04:17.000But the old dogs, they're full of bloat.
00:04:26.000I can tell you, Secretary Hegseth is aware that this is happening.
00:04:30.000There's a whole team that's dedicated to doing just what you're doing.
00:04:34.000So, yes, if you guys get us stuff that you want us to pass along, obviously, this is you know, Department of War is not our specialty, but we know a lot of those guys, and we'd be happy to pass it on.
00:04:45.000And I believe they've also got whistleblower protections at the federal level within the Department of War.
00:04:50.000There should be already routes that you can take.
00:04:53.000There's an armed services committee, and you got to look up and down that list and see who the good guys are because a lot of those guys are, it's kind of like the Intel committee.
00:05:01.000You know, you don't really want to go directly to some of those guys.
00:05:05.000So, I hate to be that blunt, but you got to find the right voices there.
00:05:09.000Also, by the way, we just had Eli Crane.
00:05:12.000This is a former special services guy.
00:05:36.000There's only a handful of congressmen who take these types of things seriously, or they won't just kind of balk and blank you on some of this stuff.
00:05:44.000And so I would go directly to his office and sit down with him.
00:06:11.000So the problem as I see it is the Department of Defense IG is actively part of the problem.
00:06:17.000So when I did report it multiple times and other people report it multiple times, they just seem to proceed to help cover up or whitewash the report.
00:06:26.000And what happened in this case, they apparently lost a lot of equipment.
00:06:31.000They broke into dozens of U.S. contractors' bedrooms in foreign soil.
00:06:35.000And so that shows just how the state of our inventory, which obviously means how many times has this happened?
00:06:44.000How many, you know, is that equipment compromised?
00:06:46.000Were people trying to, you know, you only take SIP or computers for, you know, there's not very many reasons you would do something like that.
00:06:56.000I don't want to get, you know, because it's a long story.
00:06:59.000Yeah, the route then is to go around the IG.
00:07:02.000I mean, I can't vouch for what you're saying, but I don't know the IG at the Department of War, but then go through an Eli Crane, go through a congressional committee or get stuff directly to Pete Hegseth's office.
00:07:28.000If you can tell us, kind of, are you former military?
00:07:31.000Yes, I'm a former, I'm a former military officer, and I've been working as a defense contractor for about 12 years after I completed my service.
00:08:02.000There's a lot of money sloshing around.
00:08:04.000It's like that and HHS are the two, the two agencies where so much of this goes on, where it's this revolving door of you're appointed, you're in the admin, and then you go out into the private sector.
00:08:16.000You spend a lot of money, and then we're like, well, we must have the strongest military in the world because we spend the most money, right?
00:08:34.000Maybe it's maybe 60, 40, 70, 30, but it could be 50.
00:08:37.000We're also, this is not really direct military spending, but we're actually on a trajectory where our VA spending might exceed military spending eventually, which is remarkable because the number of veterans is going down.
00:08:47.000We don't have the World War II generations.
00:09:25.000You know, you always hear on like X, everything is so divided, but it really wasn't that bad.
00:09:29.000Like, I would talk to some of my friends that I met that were all around my age of 18, and they were just like, you know, I disagree with you, but that's a good point.
00:09:36.000And we weren't like, you know, mad at each other.
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00:11:34.000Josh was telling us about all the fun he had at Amfest in the members podcast room, which is, I think, one of the best things that we do, actually.
00:11:48.000And I'm sorry that we couldn't get more people in for the Don Jr. Interview, but again, complicated business with the Secret Service.
00:11:54.000But yeah, we had Megan Kelly, we had Ali Beth Stuckey, we had Tom Homan, we had the Korean, the Korean guys that forget the sons, the sons of Sun, Pastor Sun's sons.
00:12:07.000We had so many, we had a lot of great conversations, and we'll keep those going for sure.
00:12:15.000So I'm from Minnesota, and I was wondering with all the stuff going on, getting all the people out of here and deported and all that stuff.
00:12:21.000Is there any hope for our races getting rid of Waltz and then Ilhan Omar, especially?
00:12:40.000There's some speculation around that based off of some of the interesting findings that are being, you know, the threads that are being pulled.
00:12:47.000And this goes to show, again, when good things start happening, there can be a domino effect that causes a lot of chaos for the Dems.
00:12:54.000And so that's a great, that's a great story.
00:12:57.000You have a governor's race right now, as you know, that has a ton of candidates that are running it.
00:13:02.000Our friend Mike Lindell is running in it.
00:13:05.000Right now, he's not polling at the top.
00:13:08.000There were two people who kind of duked it out in 2022 last time.
00:13:13.000Jensen, who is who was the nominee last time, Scott Jensen, who's a decent guy, pretty strong.
00:13:22.000He had a decent showing, but lost last time to Waltz.
00:13:27.000And then another guy named Kendall Qualls, who is a healthcare technology executive.
00:13:32.000It's also running that has been polling towards the top.
00:13:37.000Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest with you.
00:13:39.000The Minnesota Republican situation is a little bit of a disaster because it's not well funded.
00:13:46.000It's always been one of the most dysfunctional Republican parties.
00:13:49.000It's pretty dysfunctional just in general.
00:13:52.000And I'm not saying that as pointed at any particular person, but you have a strong amount of good conservatives in the state of Minnesota.
00:14:02.000And then you have a really weak establishment that tries to control everything.
00:14:07.000And then they end up just buckling and bending the knee of the Democrats, which has led to a fairly deep blue state that is probably winnable, but at this point.
00:14:16.000So I'll just simplify this and say this is that if you don't consolidate around one candidate and push forward, it's really hard because you can't attract the people to drive the votes, like the body.
00:14:27.000So you need a turning point action style chase the vote operation in order to win Minnesota.
00:14:46.000There's just not enough votes to topple the amount of votes that the Democrats can chase.
00:14:51.000So basically what this comes down to is when you look at the map, if the Democrats have far more low propensity votes to chase than we do, if they fund the systems to chase those votes, then you're going to lose.
00:15:02.000The second piece, though, is that if you don't consolidate around, and I'll hand it off to you here, Blake, if you don't consolidate around one candidate, then the establishment doesn't do their job in buying the TV, the ads to increase the name ID so that, again, more people who are just your mid to high propensity voters will vote for that guy.
00:15:21.000Yeah, no, he also asked about Ilhan Omar.
00:15:23.000I'll be frank, we're not getting rid of Ilhan Omar unless we deport her, basically.
00:16:24.000She's just kind of a reasonable, normal person is the electable in Minnesota.
00:16:28.000She might be able to attract the number, the amount of money that's needed to stave a serious Senate challenge that could increase the voter turnout for that day.
00:16:42.000And again, you have a lot of voters in a state like Minnesota who potentially might split, right?
00:16:50.000They could vote for a new governor candidate.
00:16:53.000I'm saying like a center-left person that's not happy with the way that the state's been run and the Waltz stuff and the findings, where they could vote all Democrats, but then vote for a Republican governor, for example.
00:17:04.000We see that happen in a lot of places.
00:17:07.000And we see that conversely happen in a lot of places for us.
00:17:10.000Like, again, like your Kentucky's, your Kansases, other places.
00:17:13.000I mean, I think if we're going to win Minnesota, we just actually have to maximize the fact that Minnesota is horribly messed up.
00:17:19.000Waltz dropped out because the Somali fraud scandal, other fraud scandals have actually bubbled up to the point of being something they can't ignore.
00:17:28.000Even the New York Times had to come in and admit that it's really real.
00:17:31.000So it really is, you could say, a generational opportunity of how badly the state is run while not being so blue that it's effectively unwinnable the way California is.
00:17:42.000And so I definitely don't think it's really a shame that we don't have a better Republican Party there because this should be an eminently winnable race.
00:17:52.000Every other state near, you know, in that kind of chain of states that resemble Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, all of those states generally moved right in the presidential level.
00:18:04.000They were pretty winnable at the state level.
00:18:06.000And Minnesota's just been bluer than them.
00:18:09.000And it really shouldn't be insofar as there's a lot of really messed up things that their state Democrat Party has done that a lot of people really don't like.
00:18:19.000Yet it's been a challenge over and over.
00:18:22.000Well, and I would just say you said it, the generational opportunity.
00:18:31.000A whistleblower out of Minnesota is throwing allegations at Keith Ellison and Tim Waltz, 451.
00:18:36.000Whistleblowers told a congressional committee, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison there ignored warnings for years as millions of dollars and millions were stolen on their watch.
00:18:48.000Congress is investigating a long list of massive fraud schemes in the state.
00:18:52.000Prosecutors say it's led to at least $9 billion in fraud dana and counting.
00:18:57.000Congress also asking why the attorney general there would meet with a group of Somali fraudsters, which were under FBI investigation in 2021.
00:19:06.000The group can be heard in an audio clip given to us by Bach's lawyer offering to donate to his campaign if he can help them get their funding flowing again.
00:19:17.000He slammed Bach in a statement to Fox, calling her a liar and manipulator, adding, now she's on a media tour to deflect her guild onto others instead of finally taking responsibility for this fraud scheme that she ran.
00:19:29.000Yeah, so she, that was the Feed Our Futures fraud scheme.
00:19:32.000She's in prison, and she's basically saying there's no way they couldn't have known while Keith Ellison was meeting with people that were under FBI investigation at the time.
00:19:42.000So we've gone through the Minnesota question.
00:19:45.000I believe it's a generational opportunity.
00:19:48.000Not sure if we're going to catch fire and catch momentum there or not, but they're under FBI investigation.
00:20:17.000What are signs that you met someone worth marrying?
00:20:20.000Is finding someone that shares conservative and Christian values so rare these days that we should overvalue that with the level of oversaturation, of promiscuity, and perversion that has tarred the dating pool?
00:20:32.000How did you know your spouse was right for you?
00:20:35.000I know marriage wasn't made to make you happy, but to make us holy.
00:20:38.000Also, how have we not found Blake a wife yet?
00:21:03.000I would say, you know, all you can do is talk from your personal experience.
00:21:08.000And when I met my wife, I will tell you that it was like everything that had been hard in every other relationship was easy all of a sudden.
00:21:16.000We wanted to do the same things at the same time.
00:21:49.000But for us, it was just all of the things that you kind of assumed were going to be the case with dating and relationships, it just wasn't the case anymore.
00:22:01.000And when you share values, I mean, here's one thing that I completely agree with with Charlie.
00:22:07.000Charlie would say, don't date a Democrat or a progressive if you're a conservative.
00:22:11.000You're inviting a ton of conflict into your life, into your relationship that you don't need to have there.
00:22:17.000And if you're a Christian, a serious Christian, you should be dating a serious Christian and you should be dating intentionally to get married.
00:22:23.000It doesn't mean it can't be fun and exciting and all those good things.
00:22:27.000And by the way, it doesn't mean that there aren't exceptions to that rule.
00:22:30.000But as a general rule of thumb, date Christians if you're a Christian.
00:22:33.000Date a conservative if you're a conservative, especially the way the culture's gone and everything's so much more political these days.
00:22:39.000Everything gets brought up in a relationship.
00:22:41.000It's going to determine which school you send your kids to, what religion you raise them under.
00:22:46.000It's going to determine what kind of shows you watch, what kind of movies you go to as a family.
00:22:50.000All of those little mundane things become controversial.
00:22:54.000They become rife with conflict if you do not marry people that are on the same page as you.
00:22:58.000So when you know, you kind of know, honestly.
00:23:01.000And, you know, there's a pastor friend of mine.
00:23:03.000It was, it was basically like, find a woman you're attracted to and it'll put up with you.
00:23:45.000I think you, it's, it's, it's one of those things where you have to put yourself in the batter's box and you have to take swings and the right thing happens.
00:23:53.000Not all the time, but, you know, some of the time it happens and then it just kind of works its way out.
00:24:00.000Like you just got to dating, I think, is just like anything that we deal with on the social scale with political is like when you show up, things start happening.
00:24:12.000And I think that's just what life's all about is all those things.
00:24:15.000I think most people, and this has no commentary on you, because I don't know your personal dating life, but others of my friends that sometimes they feel like, oh, I'm not finding the right person or whatever.
00:24:27.000It's like, well, are you investing enough of the time to be around the people that you want to be around and that you want to try to be around?
00:24:34.000And the good news is with Turning Point, there's a lot of those people who show up around our stuff.
00:24:39.000And so this is a great place where people meet each other.
00:24:42.000We have a lot of turning point babies and a lot of turning point weddings.
00:24:45.000And in fact, going to mini this year, I have like a wedding like every other week for the next like three months.
00:24:51.000You've kind of aged out of the time where you're supposed to be going to a wedding every month, but at turning point, it's like at turning point, you never get out of it.
00:24:58.000Yeah, you never get out of it because everyone's like in their 20s and 30s.
00:25:06.000So if you desire to be married and have kids, you got to move forward because then you can sort of, to Tyler's point, you can put yourself in the batter's box.
00:26:35.000She had a great disposition, great personality, all of this.
00:26:38.000I didn't realize how important that would be when you actually are in the mundane life of just running a household day in, day out, and making sure your kids get to school, making sure they have their lunch boxes full, making sure that they get to their lessons.
00:26:53.000Having a wife that you would trust to raise your children, it's a huge, a huge, huge issue.
00:28:41.000I have to chastise conservatives a bit because I'll still, I will run into conservatives to this day who will, one, they'll gloat that the NFL's ratings are in the toilet due to boycotts while admitting they themselves still watch the NFL and all its games.
00:32:08.000My question for you guys: obviously, today is the March for Life.
00:32:12.000We heard from Vice President Vance earlier today.
00:32:15.000And specifically for you, Tyler, have we had any updates on legislation in some of the red states you guys have been working in on pro-life issues?
00:32:24.000Yeah, so this has actually been one, I think, one of the biggest victories in the Trump era is that the pro-life movement has become stronger.
00:32:35.000We're in a stronger position because of the president.
00:32:37.000There's pressure that people don't see that's actually happening from the Trump administration with executive orders because remember, a lot of governors and a lot of presidents operate on pro-life issues based off executive orders.
00:32:52.000So they can ignore laws that have been passed in some cases.
00:32:57.000We've seen that with governors and AGs who have done that.
00:33:00.000And then we've seen enacting specific executive orders that actually really trounce on some of the pro-life increases that have happened in some of these states.
00:33:13.000It's without question, every poll that we've seen has shown that young people are more pro-life than even the millennial generation.
00:33:21.000Yeah, Gen Z is definitely more pro-life.
00:33:25.000So the question that you have, which is how do we pass more laws?
00:33:29.000Well, unfortunately, there's a couple of different things that are happening.
00:33:32.000The left is trying to pass constitution changing laws in a lot of places to, you know, after the Roe v. Wade overturn.
00:33:43.000Not to get too deeply into this because we only have a few minutes here, but they're trying to pass laws that write into the Constitution of the states to basically put back into place Roe v. Wade.
00:33:56.000Those have passed in some states that you would consider maybe lean right overwhelmingly.
00:34:07.000So the question now at this point is: are there different types of pieces of legislation that can limit the amount of abortion that is completed within your state?
00:34:22.000While giving access up until whatever the constitutional number of weeks that gets passed into those states, I would just say this is that there's been laws that have been passed, like in Florida, and I've been pushed by Texas, Governor DeSantis, Texas, the heartbeat bills that are, I think, the most common sense, best way forward that shift the conversation to the right, where most anyone that you poll talks about when the heartbeat is detectable,
00:34:50.000that's when you got to, you have to say there's absolutely no more.
00:34:54.000That is far better than a 20-week or six weeks.
00:34:58.000It's usually right in the ballpark of four to six weeks.
00:35:01.000And so, again, without getting to, because no matter what I say, it will be attacked or it'll go back to spawn.
00:35:10.000But I think a great step in the right direction is our heartbeat bills.
00:35:14.000We are seeing those get passed in many states, and those have to be in the states that a heartbeat bill has not yet been passed.
00:36:35.000The left had just said, oh, it's actually unconstitutional to really debate abortion seriously.
00:36:40.000And once you overturned that, it wasn't abortion suddenly illegal.
00:36:43.000It was we're allowed to make the case.
00:36:46.000And what we've seen, frankly, is it's sad to say, there's a lot of young women who might go to church and they might say that they said they were pro-life when it wasn't, the stakes were not there.
00:36:56.000But once it really was an up or down vote on that right, they turned the other way.
00:37:01.000And we've seen that in the polls, that young women have become sharply more pro-abortion in the last three years.
00:37:07.000Yeah, and I would say, you know, this question is putting me back, Mick, into that 2024 headspace when, if you'll remember, we were all arguing about whether or not there was this hidden woman vote and Trump was going to get, you know, crushed because of the abortion issue.
00:37:21.000The Democrats were trying to make it a huge issue.
00:37:22.000They were trying to sneak that like they did in Arizona onto the ballot because they thought, well, if people are going to come out to the polls to vote in favor of abortion, that Trump's going to lose.
00:37:32.000The good news is that obviously Trump won.
00:37:35.000The abortion topic did not end up sinking his candidacy, and we have Trump 47 now.
00:37:40.000So I would say the news is good and bad.
00:37:43.000The news is that you can overcome this politically and conservatives need to get a backbone.
00:37:47.000I am 100% pro-life in every single conceivable possible way.
00:37:51.000So, and it sounds like I join you with that.
00:37:54.000And there have been restrictions, whether it's South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri.
00:38:02.000Utah's even appropriated money to their pro-life Utah.
00:38:05.000So there's broader efforts that are happening.
00:38:07.000But to Blake's point, in Kansas, you saw a rejection.
00:38:11.000Kansas, you saw a rejection of a pro-life measure.
00:38:14.000Kentucky, you saw the, it was 59-41 it lost.
00:38:22.000These are reliably red states that are declining to pass pro-life ballot measures.
00:38:28.000So when you have that kind of dynamic, I think it scared off a lot of conservatives and it's conservative legislature.
00:38:32.000If you want to make a gain at this point, one of the most important things you could do is the states that should be going our way and they didn't because they have bad courts.
00:38:40.000So we had Wyoming, I think one week ago, Wyoming, their Supreme Court went and said, actually, you have a right to abortion because of this Obamacare law that we passed.
00:38:52.000Utah also, I believe their Supreme Court is what upheld more liberal abortion regimes.
00:38:57.000So if you want, our two best states to pick up are those two by making their state courts actually aligned with what conservative voters believe.
00:39:05.000And I think that's our best chance to make some gains.
00:39:19.000That's where we have our best options.
00:39:20.000And we hate to give you the incremental answer, Mick, but like to Tyler's earlier point, things like heartbeat laws actually have a good PR spin.