The Charlie Kirk Show - Brutal Honesty With CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 Today in the Charlie Kirk show, Matt Schlapp, who's the head of CPAC, with some pretty incredible revelations about President Trump's legal team.

00:00:08.000 Were they prepared?

00:00:10.000 Matt Schlapp shares some information that I think is so important.

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00:00:28.000 Email us your questions.

00:00:29.000 As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

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00:00:36.000 Matt Schlapp is here.

00:00:37.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:38.000 Here we go.

00:00:40.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

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00:02:26.000 Hey, everybody.

00:02:26.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:28.000 With us today is the chairman of CPAC, or is it the American Conservative Union?

00:02:32.000 It's one of those things, but I just call him the head of CPAC.

00:02:34.000 Matt, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:37.000 Yeah, man, chief cook and bottle washer, whatever it is.

00:02:40.000 There you go.

00:02:40.000 I encourage all of our viewers to go to CPAC this year.

00:02:44.000 It's in Orlando, and I encourage everyone in the surrounding area around the country to come in.

00:02:49.000 Matt, what made you guys go to Orlando?

00:02:52.000 I could venture a guess, but what brings you to the Sunshine State?

00:02:56.000 Governor Hogan shut us down.

00:02:58.000 Maybe a combination of Governor Hogan and Dr. Fauci.

00:03:01.000 And I think they expected us just to take the year off.

00:03:05.000 As Dr. Fauci has been saying, you know, no Super Bowl parties, no church, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas.

00:03:12.000 And I just couldn't look myself in the mirror.

00:03:15.000 And the same for my team and say we would be the first team to not have a CPAC in half a century.

00:03:20.000 So we thought, well, we should go to either Tennessee or Texas or Florida.

00:03:24.000 And Florida was very inviting, as was Governor DeSantis.

00:03:27.000 So we did it.

00:03:28.000 And I'm sure you're going to be bringing work for thousands of people, you know, people that set up the venue.

00:03:34.000 And so you're delivering a massive stimulus to the Florida economy, which is awesome.

00:03:39.000 Is CPAC going to look any different this year?

00:03:40.000 And for people that don't know, CPAC is an awesome event.

00:03:43.000 I'll be speaking there.

00:03:44.000 I'm really super excited about it.

00:03:46.000 We want to get a lot of young people there.

00:03:48.000 It's the premier event, and there might be some other guest speakers.

00:03:51.000 I'm hearing through the grapevine.

00:03:52.000 We don't have to go into that.

00:03:54.000 But is CPAC going to look any different this year?

00:03:57.000 Yeah, look, it's different.

00:03:59.000 You know, we're normally in this venue, this huge hotel that's just south of the Reagan airport.

00:04:04.000 So it's a new venue for us.

00:04:05.000 But the Hyatt down there in Orlando has been very accommodating.

00:04:08.000 They really wanted our business.

00:04:11.000 And, you know, it'll be a little bit of a more humble stage than the stage normally is at CPAC.

00:04:17.000 The chairs will be a little further apart.

00:04:19.000 Governor DeSantis has Florida open for business, but there are health regulations which we will follow.

00:04:26.000 And so, you know, it'll be sold out here, I think, in just a number of days.

00:04:30.000 We're selling overflow tickets and we have a few premium tickets left.

00:04:34.000 And we apologize for those folks who are used to, you know, getting the regular ticket or the senior ticket.

00:04:39.000 It's just it sold out fast.

00:04:41.000 And I think the reason is, and you know this, Charlie, because you just had a really great event down in South Florida, which you sold out on, is people, our people, people who love America, who love our founding, who love cops, who go to church, who have faith, who thinks George Washington's a good guy, not a bad guy, maybe not a perfect guy, but close to perfect.

00:05:02.000 You know, those types of people, they are hungry to get out of their basements.

00:05:06.000 They're tired of being told that they're going to get sick and die if they do anything at all.

00:05:10.000 And they are also watching this onslaught of socialism that they hoped that Joe Biden would be more moderate in approach to.

00:05:18.000 But as you and I knew, he never had any intention of being moderate.

00:05:21.000 He's reading the papers that are given to him.

00:05:24.000 And the agenda is pretty radical.

00:05:25.000 It's going to be pretty harmful because socialism has never worked for anybody but the people in power.

00:05:30.000 And so I think there's a lot of Americans who are just really worried.

00:05:33.000 That's why it's sold out.

00:05:34.000 That's why you sold out.

00:05:35.000 That's why what we do this year is so important.

00:05:38.000 I agree.

00:05:39.000 And so CPAC is probably the most covered political event of the entire year, minus this show trial in Congress or, you know, some other stuff.

00:05:49.000 But in the traditional calendar, it's really important.

00:05:52.000 It always is.

00:05:53.000 And it's going to be super important this year.

00:05:54.000 I know a lot of press are going to be watching very carefully.

00:05:57.000 Matt, you have a lot of input on who speaks, on the type of panels that are done, and kind of the direction you want the conservative movement to go.

00:06:09.000 You've done a really good job when you run CPAC.

00:06:11.000 You allow different voices of the conservative movement to be heard.

00:06:14.000 Libertarians, traditional conservatives, establishment Republicans.

00:06:18.000 However, there is sometimes a philosophical direction that you want to see the event go or the movement go.

00:06:25.000 What is that for CPAC this year?

00:06:27.000 Are you taking a stance that we need more of the Trump movement, less of the Trump movement, or to be determined or undecided?

00:06:34.000 What are just some of the more philosophical underpinnings in the direction you're taking CPAC, which with it will be characterized as the direction of the conservative movement?

00:06:44.000 I've tried over the last couple of years to really get the RNC and Republican Party entities to understand that they ought to partner a lot better with conservative groups like yours or ours.

00:06:57.000 And, you know, this year, I actually don't feel it's the best time for that.

00:07:02.000 I actually think this is the time where we need to understand that the Republican Party and the elephant is awfully important, but it's not the most important part of our coalition.

00:07:12.000 The most important part of our coalition are the great forgotten men and women all over this country who came out and said, you know, I might not have been that involved in politics, but I really like what Donald Trump is saying.

00:07:24.000 I like what his policies are.

00:07:26.000 And that added millions of new voters to our coalition.

00:07:29.000 Think about it.

00:07:30.000 Since like the last four, five, six presidential elections, Donald Trump was able to do better with non-traditional Republican voters than all these other guys who said that Donald Trump would do worse with these voters.

00:07:41.000 They actually did better.

00:07:42.000 So I actually want more of this.

00:07:44.000 I want more people who wouldn't consider themselves a conservative or Republican, but feel like they believe with these foundational principles of our country.

00:07:53.000 I want them to feel welcome.

00:07:54.000 So we're going to spend a lot of time.

00:07:56.000 And that's kind of where my language is going, which is it's not so much about one party versus another party.

00:08:01.000 And of course, we're a nonpartisan event and we're not a Republican entity.

00:08:05.000 You know, we're a C4 and a C3.

00:08:07.000 So it's about getting those voices, including small business people who've been shut down over this excess of the virus, giving them a voice.

00:08:16.000 And we're going to do a lot more of that.

00:08:19.000 So can you give us some insight into some of the speaker selection for this year?

00:08:24.000 I'm guessing Mitt Romney was not invited.

00:08:28.000 And so I know that was a controversy last year where you just said Mitt Romney is not welcome.

00:08:34.000 Can you give us some preview of some of the people that you're planning to have?

00:08:38.000 I don't think this is the year for those who believe that the president should be impeached once, twice, three times.

00:08:46.000 I feel like the Republicans who fell for that trap aren't really able to understand what the Democrats and the socialists are doing politically, which is everything possible they can do to demonize Trump and demonize anybody who might like his policies or support Trump.

00:09:04.000 And I really feel like this has nothing to do with morality or ethics or the law.

00:09:09.000 It has everything to do with trying to destroy our political movement.

00:09:13.000 And if Republicans don't get that, I just don't think this year they need to be given that microphone.

00:09:18.000 I also think that we looked more carefully at a member's voting record.

00:09:23.000 And we always have this 80% rule that Ronald Reagan said, you know, I view you as my 80% friend, not my 20% enemy.

00:09:31.000 At 80% in schools, a C. I think a member should be able to get to that 80% if they call themselves a Republican, unless they're just truly just a liberal and or, you know, a moderate to liberal.

00:09:43.000 So we were a little more careful with that.

00:09:45.000 So, you know, we have the Devin Nunes was announced today.

00:09:48.000 We have Jim Jordan coming.

00:09:50.000 We have Mike Lee coming, which I don't think is announced yet.

00:09:52.000 We have Ted Cruz coming.

00:09:53.000 We have Josh Hawley coming.

00:09:55.000 We don't believe Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley are insurrectionists that were calling for violence in simply questioning the election results.

00:10:03.000 Charlie, you and I were together election night going back and forth on our Intel on your now home state of Arizona and these other important states.

00:10:11.000 We're not shying away from the idea that what Stacey Abrams and Mark Elias and these people are trying to do is to make unregistered voting legal and to have illegal votes now be accepted in elections.

00:10:27.000 That breaks 250 years of our history.

00:10:30.000 That goes back to the days of Lyndon Johnson stealing elections in Texas.

00:10:33.000 And we can't have that.

00:10:35.000 So we're going to talk about that significantly at the conference.

00:10:38.000 And the other thing I think you'd appreciate is we're going to talk about each of the Bill of Rights and why this socialist Democratic Party wants to dilute it, undermine it, eliminate it.

00:10:48.000 They don't believe in these foundational documents or values in our society.

00:10:54.000 And we have the proof both on the illegal voting and on the fact that they want to undermine the Bill of Rights.

00:10:59.000 And we're going to soberly and carefully walk through it and you're going to help us do that.

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00:11:51.000 I always love the energy at CPAC.

00:11:53.000 And I also love how for the media, this is kind of their safari trip.

00:11:59.000 What do I mean for that?

00:12:00.000 This is their one time to kind of go on the African safari to go see the animals of the wild, aka conservatives.

00:12:07.000 So it's a great chance for them to kind of say, this is the one time we get to go here conservatives, hear what they're about.

00:12:13.000 And then we don't have to listen to them for the rest of the year and just call them awful names.

00:12:16.000 But I think that that's the time where they kind of just check the box.

00:12:19.000 I get the B-roll.

00:12:20.000 You know, they're able to do that.

00:12:22.000 And I think it's critically important.

00:12:24.000 And so, Matt, I want to talk about your time in Nevada because you just talked about unregistered voting.

00:12:30.000 There's a lot of frustration amongst our listeners.

00:12:32.000 When I mean a lot, I mean more than 80% of our listeners.

00:12:37.000 And I mean top to bottom, regardless of income level, wealth level, age, that they believe that their vote was interfered with.

00:12:45.000 And so interference can come in a variety of different ways.

00:12:48.000 Social media interference, media interference.

00:12:51.000 That stuff is not even, you know, that's 100% rock solid.

00:12:55.000 And also the signature verification, the voter registration interference.

00:12:59.000 What did you see in Nevada?

00:13:01.000 And at CPAC, will you guys be taking that issue head on?

00:13:05.000 The election integrity issue.

00:13:08.000 Yeah, we're not backing down.

00:13:09.000 I will say I don't use the word that the presidential election was stolen.

00:13:13.000 I know other people like to use that term.

00:13:15.000 I don't use that because that implies one person kind of picked our pocket when we weren't looking or broke into our house and stole our goods when we weren't there.

00:13:24.000 This was a much publicized multi-year effort by Mark Elias and Perkins Cooey, top-notch lawyers, $1,000 an hour lawyers that came up with the fake Russian dossier and are basically operatives of the Democratic Party and their allies to change and to normalize illegal voting by making it about race, which just has nothing to do with race.

00:13:47.000 If it had something to do with race, why did Donald Trump have historic levels of support from African-American voters and Hispanic voters?

00:13:54.000 I'm obviously married to a Hispanic woman.

00:13:58.000 Her family was overwhelmingly enthusiastic about President Trump.

00:14:01.000 This election question has nothing at all to do with race.

00:14:04.000 That's an old-fashioned notion.

00:14:06.000 And by the way, as a Republican, I'm proud of what Republicans have done on the question of race and voting and the fact that we were the historic pusher of civil rights for everyone.

00:14:16.000 So we got to get out of the defense of being on the defensive on these questions of civil rights.

00:14:21.000 It's the Democratic Party that is associated with Jim Crow and stopping people from voting.

00:14:26.000 But this is not about empowering black people to vote or people of color to vote.

00:14:32.000 This is about woke, white, powerful liberals using race to divide us and to put illegal ballots, probably filled in illegally by white people, not people of color, in our nation's biggest cities, not allowing us to observe it and not allowing these roles to be properly updated and cleaned.

00:14:54.000 In Nevada alone, Charlie, there was about 95,000 names that everyone knew that those people had died or moved.

00:15:02.000 The election officials were under legal mandate to scrub those 95,000 names.

00:15:08.000 They waited one day after the statutory deadline to request the state to clean the rolls, knowing that the state would say, you've already passed the deadline, so you can't clean those rolls.

00:15:19.000 Do you know what?

00:15:20.000 About 10% of those people got into the count.

00:15:22.000 Now, they didn't come back from life.

00:15:24.000 They didn't all of a sudden build a house in Nevada.

00:15:27.000 But this is what happens when you have unsolicited mail in balloting, right?

00:15:34.000 For people who didn't request the ballot.

00:15:37.000 That means that anybody who gets that ballot can fill in that ballot.

00:15:41.000 They can fill in multiple ballots.

00:15:43.000 And there's no way to check it.

00:15:44.000 There's no way in America to check if somebody voted in California and Nevada.

00:15:48.000 And that happened to the tune of thousands and thousands.

00:15:52.000 So we just have to get wise with what they're doing.

00:15:54.000 We've been on our heels because they say no judge verified any fraud.

00:15:59.000 Do you know no judge even looked at any of the evidence in Nevada?

00:16:03.000 They didn't look at the evidence.

00:16:05.000 One reason because the RNC and the Trump campaign, their legal teams, and I'll criticize them, they weren't ready for this fight.

00:16:11.000 They told us they were.

00:16:13.000 They were not ready.

00:16:14.000 They were asleep at the switch.

00:16:17.000 And so we scrambled to put legal teams together.

00:16:20.000 And by that point, the judges took a dim view of the legal teams we had pulled together.

00:16:25.000 The Democrats had the most expensive, most renowned lawyers in the country.

00:16:29.000 And we had kind of a ragtag group of lawyers who were wonderfully patriotic, good people, but they weren't election law experts.

00:16:36.000 And that meant the judges never really looked at the evidence.

00:16:39.000 All of this went down in courtrooms all over the country.

00:16:42.000 And I don't think it actually got the scrutiny it deserved.

00:16:46.000 And for that reason, half this country believes that their vote was watered down, deluded, that the elect, there were a lot of questions around the election.

00:16:55.000 And as an American, I know that we're not going to survive as a country if half the country questions the results of the last election.

00:17:02.000 By the way, it was the Democrats who questioned the legitimacy of Donald Trump.

00:17:06.000 Nancy Pelosi has tweets out there saying that we can't accept the election results of 2016.

00:17:12.000 Nobody took her to task or said she was un-American for doing it.

00:17:15.000 She had her free speech rights to do it.

00:17:17.000 Thankfully, Bob Mueller, in a perverse way, proved that her Russian collusion fantasies weren't true.

00:17:24.000 And so they should have accepted the results.

00:17:27.000 But we're not un-American when we said there shouldn't be illegal ballots in the count.

00:17:32.000 There were so many illegal ballots in the count.

00:17:34.000 I know that in Nevada and Georgia, those results would have been flipped.

00:17:38.000 By the way, David Perdue would have won before a runoff.

00:17:42.000 We never would have lost the Senate.

00:17:44.000 The results of this illegal voting and the effort by Stacey Abrams and Mark Elias to undermine our democratic norms has essentially turned the country's power over to this Democrat socialist movement.

00:17:58.000 Now is the time for Americans, not even Republicans and conservatives, just Americans who think cops aren't evil and the military isn't evil and it's okay to have a statue of Jesus without desecrating it.

00:18:09.000 Those types of people, it's time for them to wake up because I believe that our coalition could take back in the House and the Senate in less than two years and change the dynamics of this country forever.

00:18:20.000 I agree with you, Matt.

00:18:22.000 I want to zero in on something you just said to ask for some more detail on that.

00:18:26.000 We were told from the Trump campaign, and they told many donors, and I mean massive donors that I know and that you know, that they were ready for the legal fight of the century.

00:18:35.000 They raised hundreds of millions of dollars in July, August, September, and October just for this purpose.

00:18:40.000 This is a multi-billion dollar campaign.

00:18:43.000 There's $240 million left over.

00:18:45.000 Are you trying to tell me that the best lawyers were not prepared for this, that there were not law firms engaged, ready to contest this the night of the election?

00:18:53.000 The problem in Philadelphia is they could barely even get representation because they were trying to hire lawyers after the election.

00:19:01.000 Charlie, here's the problem.

00:19:02.000 How is that possible?

00:19:03.000 If you try to hire the best lawyers after you're already behind in a presidential election or a senate election, they are going to be less willing to take that client on because they will get cross-pressured.

00:19:17.000 So in Pennsylvania, every time they hired a law firm, they were cross-pressured by corporate and other interests.

00:19:22.000 Yes.

00:19:22.000 And they were dropped.

00:19:23.000 And then in Nevada, like I said, these lawyers, I love these lawyers.

00:19:27.000 I consider them lifelong friends.

00:19:29.000 You need the $1,400 an hour guys that went to Harvard that obsessed.

00:19:35.000 Not because they're better, but because it's their specialty.

00:19:38.000 And the judges, more importantly, the judges and the justices will respect those pleadings and those filings more.

00:19:46.000 Totally right.

00:19:46.000 It's the lawyers they went to law school or play golf with or feel like are at their lawyers.

00:19:51.000 Or they were former prosecutors or whatever.

00:19:53.000 Yeah.

00:19:54.000 I'm going to say this, and I know it's going to earn me.

00:19:56.000 I'm going to lose some more friends, which I seem to do about every three months in my life.

00:20:00.000 But the RNC and the Trump campaign were not ready for this moment.

00:20:05.000 It's pretty clear to me they weren't ready for this moment.

00:20:08.000 And the president himself had to try to pull together an effort just to try to make sure that illegal votes were taken out of the count.

00:20:18.000 And I feel like we were scrambling too little too late.

00:20:21.000 Look, I was a veteran of 2000.

00:20:23.000 We scrambled a lot in 2000 as well.

00:20:26.000 But eventually a team was pulled together and there was a comms strategy that was pulled together and we barely pulled it out.

00:20:35.000 We lost in court over and over again until we won in the most important court.

00:20:39.000 And what happened in this case is we really never got a chance to properly explain all this information.

00:20:45.000 So at CPAC, we're going to take the opportunity to explain to people the type of evidence that's out there, not because we think that we're going to, you know, change the election results of 2020.

00:20:58.000 That ship has sailed.

00:20:59.000 Joe Biden is our president.

00:21:00.000 The question is this.

00:21:02.000 Are we ever going to win tough seats in states like Arizona ever again?

00:21:07.000 Although Arizona had fewer problems than other states, much fewer.

00:21:10.000 Are we ever going to win tough races in these purple states if we allow for thousands and thousands and thousands of illegal ballots to get in the count? 0.83

00:21:18.000 Because Republican officials are too chicken to stand up to Stacey Abrams and her lawyers and say, you know what? 0.78

00:21:26.000 We're all going to follow the laws and we're going to make sure everybody who wants to vote has a chance to vote once and legally.

00:21:35.000 Every new year, all you hear is new year, new me.

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00:22:55.000 Matt, what you're saying is stunning for me to hear.

00:22:58.000 And I've been hearing different stories because I have friends that are in those positions of leadership.

00:23:04.000 And they say, oh, we were prepared.

00:23:05.000 We had everyone ready.

00:23:06.000 I have found that hard to believe.

00:23:10.000 I find it hard to believe just based on what I've seen.

00:23:12.000 But just going back in time, Matt, which I think the bigger lesson is, though, we were promised they were ready.

00:23:17.000 We were promised they had lawyers on retainer.

00:23:19.000 We were promised they had law firms briefed.

00:23:22.000 We were promised that they were mail and balloting experts.

00:23:24.000 And it just seems that that was just either an exaggeration, a falsehood, or a misrepresentation of what was happening.

00:23:31.000 I'm zeroing in on this for a reason, Matt, because it wasn't a lack of resources.

00:23:35.000 There was plenty of money.

00:23:36.000 It wasn't a lack of notice.

00:23:38.000 The president was warning about mail and balloting problems for nine months.

00:23:43.000 It wasn't a matter of public consensus.

00:23:46.000 His base was demanding action on this.

00:23:48.000 It wasn't a matter of donors.

00:23:50.000 I know you and I both know a ton of donors that were saying, Hey, why are we ready?

00:23:54.000 Do we have lawyers here?

00:23:56.000 And so I'm really disappointed to hear that because if you have wonderful patriotic lawyers, God bless them.

00:24:02.000 Thank you for standing up.

00:24:04.000 But the way the system works, especially in hotly contested, high-threshold, high-stakes games, if you don't have the guys that have the right credibility, then you're going to get tossed out, especially if they're not working on these cases for weeks ahead of time.

00:24:18.000 Let me give you a couple of examples.

00:24:19.000 So, in 2000, obviously, you have a governor of Texas who's trying to become the president.

00:24:25.000 His brother is the governor of Florida.

00:24:27.000 That was a strange dynamic, but we were on the ground with thousands of people immediately.

00:24:33.000 I actually flew out with Ben Ginsburg.

00:24:35.000 Joel Kaplan from Facebook was on the plane with us.

00:24:39.000 He and I were partners together on the ground in Volusha County, in Florida.

00:24:44.000 We had people on the ground immediately.

00:24:46.000 I tried to explain this to the campaign and to the RC: you need thousands of people.

00:24:49.000 You don't need four people.

00:24:50.000 You need thousands of people to start to take down the evidence, take the sworn statements.

00:24:55.000 You need thousands of lawyers.

00:24:57.000 And it fell on deaf ears.

00:24:58.000 In 2002, I was the deputy political director of the White House.

00:25:02.000 It was my job to be prepared for all these Senate potential recounts.

00:25:07.000 We had planes ready.

00:25:09.000 We had lawyers who had signed up to get on those planes.

00:25:12.000 We put teams out there before Election Day.

00:25:15.000 In 2004, in George W. Bush's reelection, I have Dan Schneider here, one of my colleagues at ACU, who you know well.

00:25:22.000 He was put in the state of Ohio a month early as a volunteer lawyer to prepare for all the shenanigans that will happen in our nation's biggest cities.

00:25:32.000 When I landed in the ground in Nevada, I had very prominent lawyers tell me that in 2020, they had just showed up literally right around the election, whereas in 2016, they were there three and four weeks early to prepare.

00:25:45.000 So we just, I think the feeling was that we had the president really hit his stride at the end of the campaign, and he did.

00:25:53.000 And all of us were out there really pushing as hard as we could.

00:25:56.000 I was doing events through ACU and Battleground States.

00:25:59.000 You were doing the same thing.

00:26:00.000 And we thought we'd overcome them with all these millions of new voters.

00:26:04.000 And I have to give the campaign great credit for that.

00:26:06.000 They pulled in millions of new voters and they deserve great credit for it.

00:26:11.000 But the legal piece is the basic blocking and tackling, and we blew it.

00:26:16.000 And I'm not saying that because I want someone to get in trouble.

00:26:18.000 I'm saying that because let's stop kind of like making ourselves feel better that we left it all in the field and we did all we could.

00:26:25.000 No, it's not true.

00:26:26.000 If we had spent the money that it took to have a legal strategy four years earlier, we could have prevented thousands and thousands and thousands of these ballots from getting into the count.

00:26:36.000 And in a state like Nevada, where it's a 32,000 vote difference, it'll swing the outcome just by preventing these illegal packets of ballots.

00:26:44.000 Philadelphia, there's a long tradition that they go through shenanigans for weeks and weeks and weeks around the election to try to do their big city politics.

00:26:52.000 So the lesson out of this is we all have to hold our Republican entities to account for making sure that this type of thing never happens again.

00:27:03.000 Or I'll make a promise to you: we will never put another conservative or constitutionalist on the Supreme Court because we can never win again if these are the new rules.

00:27:12.000 Yeah, what you're saying is one of the most important things that I've heard.

00:27:14.000 And you are going to add a lot of information right now to our base that's listening to this because they've been looking for answers.

00:27:24.000 And this is an answer, no doubt.

00:27:26.000 This is an uncomfortable answer, but I just believe with my experience, it's the only thing we can conclude, which is if we don't beat Mark Elias with our best lawyers against their best lawyers, all we want to do is have legal voters.

00:27:41.000 Remember, they're the ones who are trying to break the norms of having.

00:27:44.000 They have a harder threshold to defend.

00:27:46.000 That's right.

00:27:48.000 Ours is easier.

00:27:49.000 We just have to say state passes these laws.

00:27:52.000 We must follow these laws.

00:27:54.000 But let's face it, they afflict us in each and every one of these states.

00:27:57.000 So, and just to complete the point here, Joe Biden had lawyers as far as the eye can see.

00:28:02.000 He was prepared for this.

00:28:05.000 You know, whether it's the Biden campaign or the DNC or one of their soft money groups.

00:28:10.000 Right.

00:28:10.000 They're much better.

00:28:11.000 They're much better than us of all this kind of, this is real collusion, real coordination of making sure that this happens.

00:28:18.000 But they raised tremendous amounts of money.

00:28:20.000 As you know, we're at a big money disadvantage when it comes to these outside groups.

00:28:25.000 And they had a plan over four years.

00:28:28.000 My guess is if you added up all the money they spent trying to make it easier to vote illegally in this country, my guess is it's tens of millions of dollars just with lawyers.

00:28:38.000 And I think if you looked at our spend, I would be surprised to be a tenth of that.

00:28:41.000 And we've got to change that.

00:28:43.000 I'm not a big pro-lawyer guy.

00:28:45.000 I'm fine with the way the president negotiates with lawyers.

00:28:47.000 I'm fine with getting lawyers at a discounted rate.

00:28:49.000 I'm fine with all that.

00:28:50.000 Matter of fact, I think we have a lot of great volunteer lawyers, but we've got to have a better plan.

00:28:55.000 And we have to listen.

00:28:56.000 Look, I'm old.

00:28:57.000 I got white hair. 1.00

00:28:58.000 Listen to the people who have been through the trenches on this stuff instead of assuming that everybody who's done something before is an idiot. 0.94

00:29:06.000 And what we have to do as a movement is embrace all of these people with this experience, including a lot of lawyers in courtrooms, and put our best team on the field.

00:29:15.000 If we do that, I'm telling you, we're going to win back the House and the Senate.

00:29:19.000 I agree.

00:29:19.000 The only way that doesn't happen is if this Stacey Abrams-Mark Elias strategy overturns these individual races.

00:29:26.000 And that would be another horrible tragedy.

00:29:30.000 And I'll say, Matt, you know, I have been a critic of a lot of the policies of George W. Bush, but I will compliment him.

00:29:36.000 He was phenomenal at building political machinery.

00:29:39.000 And you were part of that.

00:29:41.000 When there was, if there was a state party chair that stepped out of line, their kids wouldn't get into boarding school.

00:29:46.000 Their parking pass was revoked.

00:29:48.000 And for whatever reason, they got an angry call from their boss.

00:29:51.000 It was, and I'm joking, half joking, he had control over the party through and through.

00:29:57.000 And also, and he learned it from his father and Lee Atwater, you know, names that you're very familiar with that helped build the party and the movement.

00:30:05.000 But that kind of infrastructure just always seemed to be lacking the last couple years of the Trump campaign and the Trump movement.

00:30:12.000 And I think that they prided themselves on not having bureaucracy.

00:30:15.000 I don't like bureaucracy, but there's a difference between having bureaucracy and infrastructure.

00:30:21.000 If you're just a free-flowing movement of people, then when a real tough fight comes, you say, well, who's in charge of crisis comms and who's going to this state?

00:30:28.000 And you're just deploying people all over the planet.

00:30:31.000 And I'm glad they sent you to Nevada, but they should have had three Nevada law firms.

00:30:36.000 They are like, I actually were ready for this.

00:30:38.000 You know what I mean?

00:30:39.000 In all candor, I tried very through many channels to tell folks that I was willing to go anywhere they wanted me to go.

00:30:45.000 It was Rick Grinnell who called me and said, hey, would you help me by coming out to Nevada?

00:30:50.000 Because I think he realized, you know, he wanted to have some help.

00:30:54.000 And Kurt Schlichter and a lot of great people flew out there.

00:30:58.000 And I think we made a real difference.

00:31:00.000 But unfortunately, we lost the argument and we lost in court.

00:31:04.000 And I hate to lose.

00:31:06.000 And it's not about us.

00:31:07.000 It's about our country.

00:31:08.000 And we kind of let everyone down because we didn't put our best foot forward.

00:31:13.000 Now, I'm not criticizing any individuals.

00:31:15.000 I think everyone tried to do the best they can.

00:31:17.000 This was a very strange presidential election.

00:31:19.000 Let's just learn from our mistakes.

00:31:21.000 Let's never repeat our mistakes again.

00:31:24.000 And when it comes to this question of not having your bureaucracy and not doing it the old ways, I'm good with all that.

00:31:30.000 I can't tell you how many times I told President Trump he shouldn't do something.

00:31:34.000 He did it anyway.

00:31:35.000 And he was right.

00:31:36.000 And I was wrong.

00:31:37.000 And I can admit it.

00:31:38.000 It happened a lot of times.

00:31:40.000 The man has a really good instinct.

00:31:42.000 I just feel like too many people in positions of power told him that it was all taken care of.

00:31:48.000 That's exactly right.

00:31:48.000 What I saw from what I saw, and not only on before election day and on election day, but after throughout that whole process, what I saw was contrary to that.

00:31:58.000 Yeah, I totally agree.

00:32:00.000 So, in closing, here, Matt, you guys are ramping up for CPAC, and it really is going to be one of the most important events to people who are going to be looking for the future of the party.

00:32:09.000 And, you know, we've gone into that.

00:32:12.000 Can you just help us chart the course from now to the midterms?

00:32:16.000 And also, I meant to ask you earlier: what is the theme of CPAC this year?

00:32:19.000 I know last year it was stop socialism.

00:32:21.000 What is the theme of this?

00:32:23.000 America versus socialism.

00:32:25.000 This year, it's America uncanceled.

00:32:28.000 Tell us why you chose that.

00:32:30.000 Well, it's really personal.

00:32:31.000 First of all, I tried to cancel CPAC, right?

00:32:33.000 We're going through this whole idea where literally they're trying to make it so Donald Trump can't speak.

00:32:39.000 And they're trying to make it now so that his allies can't speak.

00:32:42.000 Now they're going to call us all domestic terrorists.

00:32:44.000 So the next step will be we can't speak.

00:32:46.000 And this is a critical time.

00:32:48.000 People feel desperation over the fact that, okay, sometimes you win races, sometimes you lose races.

00:32:54.000 But in America, we don't take those we beat and put and try to put them in jail and take all their followers and try to get them not to have jobs. 0.66

00:33:02.000 My wife's on an execution list, Charlie.

00:33:04.000 That's un-American.

00:33:05.000 Matter of fact, it's pretty unsafe for her and my children.

00:33:08.000 Whose list is that?

00:33:09.000 People are trying to.

00:33:10.000 What'd you say?

00:33:10.000 Whose list is that?

00:33:12.000 Oh, there's all these lists floating around.

00:33:14.000 You're probably on some of people who supported the president, and somehow we have to be driven from civil society.

00:33:22.000 This is not what you and I do.

00:33:23.000 This is not what decent people do.

00:33:26.000 This needs to be called out, and this needs to stop.

00:33:29.000 So, like I said, we're going to spend a significant portion of our agenda talking about why voting is the fundamental right we have in a republic.

00:33:39.000 If we can't vote and take confidence in that election, it undermines everything.

00:33:44.000 But the other part of that is, as we know, God gives us rights.

00:33:48.000 Government doesn't give us rights.

00:33:49.000 You know that.

00:33:50.000 Your listeners know that.

00:33:51.000 But we need to walk through why we have this Bill of Rights, how it is operational today, and what's the evidence that actually the socialists and the conservatives have at least a basic understanding of what it means.

00:34:05.000 I think that's been disrupted.

00:34:07.000 And we have to go back and remind people: quit being canceled, cowed, quit having your voice taken away, and quit being scared.

00:34:16.000 If we quiver in the corner, like so many are doing, and I've done it too, they will take all of these rights away, not through constitutional amendments.

00:34:24.000 They don't believe in doing that.

00:34:26.000 They just have judges do it.

00:34:27.000 And now they increasingly have corporations who do it. 0.80

00:34:29.000 Now they increasingly have foundations and these tech oligarchs.

00:34:33.000 There's just real, this is the real collusion that's going on in society.

00:34:36.000 We have to be reminded of our rights.

00:34:39.000 We have to jealously guard them and defend them.

00:34:42.000 And it's time for us all to speak.

00:34:44.000 Some of us have bigger megaphones than others of us, but all of us must speak, else we will lose this country.

00:34:50.000 And we could lose it much faster than I ever feared previously.

00:34:54.000 I agree with you completely.

00:34:55.000 And so, CPAC, Orlando, Florida, it's coming up in just a couple of days.

00:34:59.000 Anything you wanted to touch on, Matt, that we didn't get a chance to cover?

00:35:02.000 No, I'm just going to say it's going to be sold out.

00:35:04.000 We're going to have a great crowd.

00:35:06.000 Governor DeSantis is now truly America's governor.

00:35:10.000 I totally agree.

00:35:11.000 He's open for business.

00:35:12.000 He's smart and courageous.

00:35:14.000 And we really are glad that he's welcomed us and he welcomed you with open arms.

00:35:19.000 And I'm sure we're going to have a lot of great new announcements of the speakers who are going to be there.

00:35:23.000 But the best part of CPAC, and you know this with your events, are these great kids and these great people who come from all over the country and they love their country.

00:35:31.000 Some of them are rich, some of them are poor, some of them are powerful, some of them aren't.

00:35:35.000 And this is America, and I love it.

00:35:37.000 And I'm going to feel pumped.

00:35:39.000 And I know that everyone who's going to tune in to watch it is going to feel pumped too because we haven't given up and I'm not giving up.

00:35:45.000 I'm never giving up.

00:35:46.000 I'm never, sometimes I get discouraged.

00:35:48.000 When I really get discouraged, I have a martini.

00:35:51.000 And then the next day I'm ready to fight again.

00:35:53.000 So two extraordinarily quick questions.

00:35:55.000 How could people go to CPAC if they want to?

00:35:56.000 What's the website?

00:35:57.000 And then is there going to be a certain former president who resides in Florida that might show up?

00:36:04.000 You know, I would love to see the president show up.

00:36:06.000 As I've told people, if he doesn't want to, I think we'd all understand.

00:36:11.000 Or if he wants to take a pass this year, I think we'd all understand.

00:36:15.000 But he is welcome to be there.

00:36:17.000 And I think it's important.

00:36:19.000 You know, some people got a little frustrated with the president at the end of his, at the end of all this.

00:36:24.000 It was kind of ended cruddy. 0.88

00:36:26.000 And I think now with they're watching the show trial, as you call it, I think everyone's kind of been reminded that it took a certain kind of person to endure this crap for four years, all the lies, all the prosecutions, all this attempt to destroy and minimize him.

00:36:43.000 And it takes that kind of fortitude to push back on this radicalized socialist agenda that we're seeing.

00:36:50.000 And I think people would feel, I think it would give them a real boost to hear from their president.

00:36:55.000 And I know Joe Biden is the current president, but from their former president, and I'd love to have him there.

00:37:00.000 But I also will respect him.

00:37:02.000 I mean, it's hard to leave the presidency and it's hard when they're trying to do everything they can to destroy you.

00:37:07.000 They won't end with impeachment twice, Charlie, as you know.

00:37:10.000 They're going to do everything they can to destroy him.

00:37:12.000 And as they try to destroy him, I think they're going to build him back up even bigger than he's ever been.

00:37:17.000 And look, I think CPAC is going to be MAGA friendly as it always has been, as it always should be.

00:37:25.000 These are good, decent people.

00:37:27.000 And a couple of knuckleheads went into the Capitol and did terrible things.

00:37:30.000 And I think we ought to throw the book at them.

00:37:33.000 But we shouldn't allow them to make the rest of us get on defense, including President Trump, who had nothing to do with this, or Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz.

00:37:41.000 They shouldn't be on defense for the fact they simply wanted to raise questions of illegal voting.

00:37:46.000 They should be proud of that.

00:37:47.000 And we're all going to have to do that, Charlie, as we're never going to win again.

00:37:51.000 I like it.

00:37:52.000 This is going to be a time for conservatives to go on offense.

00:37:54.000 And that's why CPAC is so important.

00:37:56.000 Matt, thank you so much for joining us.

00:37:58.000 I learned a lot and I know our listeners did too.

00:38:00.000 Thanks so much.

00:38:01.000 Thanks, Charlie.

00:38:05.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:38:06.000 Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:38:09.000 And if you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.

00:38:13.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:38:15.000 God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - February 13, 2021

Brutal Honesty With CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp

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