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.
00:01:09.000All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show, March 27, 2026.
00:01:13.000It was great having Molly Hemingway, Sean Davis, and Megan Basham all in studio yesterday.
00:01:48.000In the dead of night, with only five senators present on the floor and no one there to object, the Senate rushed through a DHS funding bill that deliberately left ICE and CBP unfunded.
00:03:36.000The filibuster, the primary beneficiary of the filibuster are people like Mitch McConnell, people like John Thune, who want a ready-made excuse for why they haven't delivered on anything their party has run on and promised in 20 years.
00:03:50.000Because we've been getting promises of serious immigration reform for 20 years.
00:03:54.000We've been getting promises on all manner of things, election reforms, all of that.
00:04:01.000And then they just go, oh, well, you know, unfortunately, we just can't pass this until you give us, really, we're going to probably need like 64 votes because, you know, you lose a Republican here and there.
00:04:08.000Well, we're never going to get 64 senators.
00:04:36.000You've got an Iran situation where you've got reports now from Axios that we're preparing potentially up to 10,000 more troops to send into the Middle East.
00:04:46.000If you are not going to deliver on domestic policy promises that you ran on, that people voted for you on, you are going to lose those voters.
00:05:12.000If we're going to do all the work to send you to Washington to get simple things done, common sense legislation done, and you cannot find a way, and all you do is raise excuse after excuse, then don't be surprised when people don't show up for you.
00:05:26.000Don't be surprised when the people online that used to cheer you on and get out the vote for you get so frustrated that they don't want to do it anymore.
00:05:34.000We are at that point where it's going to be impossible to make the case for you if you don't get certain basic things done.
00:05:43.000And you're leaving people like us on this show completely holding the bag.
00:05:48.000So I encourage House Republicans, deny, reject this awful deal, get back to work, do whatever it takes.
00:05:56.000I don't care if you can't sleep for a month and a half.
00:06:07.000Because not only are the Republicans the last bastion of anything sensible and good potentially in America, the conservative movement in the United States is the last bastion of hope and freedom for the entire Western civilization.
00:06:22.000The stakes could literally not be higher.
00:06:28.000Can you make the case to send these guys back when they can't even get away from the people?
00:06:31.000Well, I mean, in general, a frustrating thing with politics is you think of, I like to make the comparison to professional sports because it's something Americans actually care about.
00:06:41.000And when you have a NFL team and it's during the season, like how hard is your team expected to work?
00:06:48.000They're expected to practice pretty intensely.
00:06:50.000They're expected to take it for Alan Iverson.
00:06:54.000Yeah, and if you don't, you tend to like wash out on your team.
00:06:58.000And I just feel like the stakes for the country are pretty high.
00:07:02.000And it would make a lot of sense to have lawmakers be pretty committed to being there all the time and getting things done.
00:07:08.000And if you don't want to do it, we can replace you with a lawmaker who will do that.
00:07:12.000And instead, we just have these barnacles on the American body politic.
00:07:16.000They have basically allowed Congress to become this inert entity that never passes anything useful and repeatedly disappoints.
00:07:24.000I think the question I'm asking and everyone asking is, wait, I thought the entire justification for the one big beautiful bill last summer was, oh, it has this unprecedented funding for ICE and border security.
00:07:34.000And then actually six months later, Democrats in the minority can just kind of make you reverse tack on that.
00:07:42.000And also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that a lot of the guys who are stampeding towards giving the Democrats everything they want on this are also the same ones who are the source of so much of our other political difficulties.
00:07:56.000They're the ones who are the most avid that, oh, we need boots on the ground in Iran.
00:08:00.000We need to have maximal intervention there.
00:08:02.000Well, whether that's a good idea or not, it's pretty clear that's going to be a politically difficult sell in the midterms.
00:08:08.000And so you're stacking all these things on top of each other.
00:08:12.000Basically, just that Democrats are evil and bad, which they are.
00:08:16.000But people are going to vote for them if you are not offering a good alternative.
00:08:21.000If you want to depress turnout in the midterms, keep doing the same thing.
00:08:26.000Keep doing the exact same thing that you're doing right now.
00:08:30.000Because right now, I'm looking at a situation where we have chapter presidents and they're tabling all over the country and they can't defend these actions.
00:08:38.000They're getting approached by liberals that are calling out the hypocrisy of this garbage.
00:10:10.000Yeah, well, it's just, it's all, again, this is one of the toughest conflicts to cover because President Trump has an unusual negotiating style.
00:10:19.000So he's constantly signaling he might escalate.
00:10:46.000So there's all sorts of maneuvers going on.
00:10:48.000And the truth is, we don't know exactly what the plan is.
00:10:51.000But it does seem like, to be frank, we are taking steps towards a course of action that we warned about the very day that the first strike started in Bombay.
00:11:02.000It was a Saturday and we talked about it here, which is at that time, it was a purely aerial campaign.
00:11:09.000And we said we have to worry about whether you start getting into this pattern of steady step-by-step escalation where they say if you send in a few of these troops and take a few of these places, that's going to resolve it.
00:11:23.000So now we're, it's almost everyone's talking, oh, they might take Carg Island, they might take these other islands.
00:11:28.000But see, this is exactly how this happens.
00:12:37.000And it actually worked better in Iraq because it at least had a much more clear objective.
00:12:41.000And, you know, it's a more urban society.
00:12:43.000But in Afghanistan, they just kind of threw money at the problem, threw troops at the problem, but they didn't fix the fundamental issue of how do we define what's our objective?
00:12:55.000It was just sort of have troops there, get in fights with the Taliban, and hope it works out.
00:13:01.000And what we have to worry about is there certainly are factions within our own government that would just love to see an Iraq-style conflict with Iran.
00:13:11.000They won't say that, but they'd love to see it.
00:13:13.000And what they'll sell to people is this line of, oh, you know, yeah, if you send a few troops here, that's going to make the regime collapse.
00:13:22.000And when it doesn't, they'll, you know, it's like a heroin dealer.
00:13:26.000And they'll say, one you're already populated, so you might as well see it all the way through.
00:15:21.000That's going to be one of the driving factors here.
00:15:23.000A year ago, if you wanted to lay out a situation for electoral disaster for the Republican Party, it would include open-ended, expensive war in the Middle East.
00:15:42.000There's a lot of good that has been done, but we're not talking about it enough because we've got a war in Iran, and now we might be sending ground troops.
00:15:50.000The exact thing that we sort of promised the country was not going to happen under President Trump.
00:15:55.000What's so sad is we actually genuinely have a lot to be proud of, domestic.
00:16:37.000Through Hillsdale College's free online courses, he studied the great works of the classics, the principles of the American founding, and the life-changing truths of the Bible.
00:16:45.000Those ideas didn't just inform him, they shaped his character, strengthened his convictions, and prepared him for the challenges ahead.
00:16:52.000One of the courses he took was the Genesis story, taught by Hillsdale professor Dr. Justin Jackson.
00:16:58.000This free online course explores the relationship between God and man, what happens when that relationship is broken, and the path toward reconciliation.
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00:18:08.000Yeah, well, this has now been going on for two weeks.
00:18:11.000It's a joint investigation with multiple independent journalists, including James O'Keefe, our own Savannah Hernandez, Brandon Dre, as well as muckrackers Anthony Rubin and Cam Higbee, as you mentioned.
00:18:24.000And we've been essentially doing a swarm on LA's Skid Row.
00:18:28.000This is a human dumping ground, homeless drug addicts.
00:18:32.000And what we've essentially uncovered is that ballot petition gatherers are now paying these people on the streets for their signatures for all kinds of what we believe is voter fraud.
00:18:45.000So let's go ahead and play one of these clips that you have provided, Cho, just because I think it's shocking when you see it actually play out.
00:20:24.000And then he asked me, do you have a conscience?
00:20:26.000Essentially, do you have a conscience?
00:20:28.000What was happening was that not only were they having me sign this ballot initiative for money, they were having me sign under someone else's name.
00:20:37.000So not only are the homeless drug addicts the victims here, there are actual victims of identity fraud.
00:20:43.000So then you actually interviewed, it looks like a whistleblower that knows something about this, SAT9.
00:20:50.000How do you decide whether somebody uses their name or somebody else's name?
00:20:54.000Well, I asked some questions like, when are you registering to vote?
00:20:58.000And if they remember something, like, okay, then I've like, I just let them go.
00:22:06.000So again, they've been operating with total impunity.
00:22:09.000So this has not been going on for just the last two weeks.
00:22:12.000It's been going on for years, according to people on the ground.
00:22:15.000That whistleblower was also alleging that there are Democrats involved in this, along with gangbangers.
00:22:22.000I'm talking about local LA gangbangers.
00:22:24.000And this is where it got really murky and sensitive.
00:22:26.000He didn't want to name anything, any of the actual gangs or the people behind it, because he was afraid for his own safety and life.
00:22:34.000He took an enormous risk talking to us.
00:22:37.000At the same time, he's one of the few now that are starting to flip because he's had a crisis of conscience.
00:22:44.000Because once we got the footage of all of this undercover signature gathering happening, you know, cash for ballots, he kind of started to realize he's in big trouble.
00:22:53.000He's either going to get outed one way or the other.
00:23:32.000I can't imagine that a system that organized with that many people in on it exists without them having pretty high confidence.
00:23:39.000No one's ever going to do anything about it.
00:23:41.000It's just like the hospice fraud that's happening a few miles to the north of Skid Row, where when you have 70 fraudulent hospices in a single building, they are operating with the assumption the state knows what we're doing and they don't care.
00:23:54.000Yeah, that line total impunity stands out, Cho, because it just feels like the problems in this state are so huge and it's so vast and there's so many people corrupt and corrupted within the system that nobody's going to be held accountable is what it feels like.
00:24:12.000Yeah, Blake Andrew, that's what we're concerned about.
00:24:14.000This one-party rule controlling every aspect of this investigation.
00:24:19.000And again, this has now been going on for two weeks.
00:24:21.000James O'Keefe's crew and the rest of the independent journalists, we're calling ourselves the Citizen Justice League.
00:24:27.000We're going to put out a video, a story every single day until someone gets arrested and we see charges.
00:25:14.000That's sort of been what I've been thinking this whole time is they're taking advantage of drug addicts, the mentally ill, the homeless, the impoverished, the desperate, and they're just using them in pawns in this sort of, like you said, one-party rule state to further entrench their own power.
00:25:48.000Then you know it's the entire area, again, as I refer to it as a human dumping ground.
00:25:53.000It's also where all of the social service agencies, nonprofits funded by taxpayers are concentrated and based.
00:26:01.000So all of this is happening right there.
00:26:04.000And these nonprofits, what I call and refer to as Homeless Inc., they allegedly are supposed to be there to take care of these vulnerable men and women.
00:26:13.000But my question is, how have they allowed this to go on for so many years now without sounding the alarm?
00:26:21.000So it's not just the lawmakers here who need to be held to account or law enforcement, but we've got to be asking questions about the others in the area who I believe are in on this grift.
00:26:33.000And I think you zoom out to the bigger picture.
00:26:36.000We get a lot of emails from people asking, you know, can we save California?
00:26:40.000And we would love if California could be saved.
00:26:43.000But you really have to appreciate kind of the scale of the atrocity that they have enacted, which is to have, they have a blob of thousands, tens of thousands of people who are basically impossible to track, which they can use as a vote bank, as a fraud depository.
00:27:00.000You know, you can dump $40 billion in homeless funding on them and it'll show no impact whatsoever.
00:27:08.000And they just have built this like perfect machine.
00:27:11.000Meanwhile, if you check other headlines, I think they've stopped repaving roads in Los Angeles because that was proving too expensive.
00:27:21.000You know, they'll dump $100 billion in that high-speed rail and that's never going to get built.
00:27:26.000There's something really dark about it.
00:27:28.000And I feel like it'll never get fixed unless the federal government were able to find a nice, sustained way to imprison a very large number of people there.
00:27:36.000And I don't even know if this admin has the idea.
00:27:40.000It's like however many billions that have been dumped into this homeless crisis, and it just persists.
00:27:45.000It doesn't seem like there's any will to actually clean it up, remove them forcibly off the streets so that you can't be taking advantage of them like this, so that they don't live in squalor.
00:27:55.000Do you see any indications, Jonathan Cho?
00:27:59.000I mean, away from the fraud with the ballots and the cash rebouts, that people are actually being helped down there.
00:28:06.000Yeah, look, the only saving grace here, quite frankly, is I think we've lost all faith in California officials, but the feds are aware, and so is the Trump administration.
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00:29:56.000There's a new clip that I just saw from Marco Ruby that I want to get to.
00:30:00.000And I see some House leadership slamming the Senate GOP on that DHS video.
00:30:53.000I mean, it's it was always possible that would happen.
00:30:58.000President Trump built a very eclectic coalition to win in 2024, but it was not a coalition that really existed in the past.
00:31:07.000This collision of podcast bros and crypto bros, crypto bros, tech bros, liberal.
00:31:15.000Yeah, the tech, the tech right, the conventional conservatives, Christian right, some people coming in from racial groups that normally didn't join.
00:31:23.000And a lot of them were getting on board with different problem, you know, for various promises that were made.
00:31:30.000And if not all of those are delivered on, it's going to fracture apart.
00:31:34.000And also, some of it's just going to be a reversion to the mean.
00:31:36.000Joe Rogan was this Obama bro, Bernie bro years ago.
00:31:41.000There's going to be some reversion to the mean.
00:31:44.000These guys, it's a type of person who very quickly gets disillusioned with people or movements and attaches to the new system.
00:32:05.000He's got no devotion to this broader project, this broader movement.
00:32:09.000And so, like, on the one hand, I'm not at all surprised.
00:32:12.000But I think it is important to watch his evolution from, you know, actually endorsing President Trump in 2024, which he did it late, but listen, he did it.
00:32:21.000It was noteworthy, to basically calling everybody a bunch of dorks.
00:32:26.000And, you know, this is where I go back to our first segment.
00:32:30.000If the Senate is not going to pass common sense stuff, if they're not going to fight, they're not going to fight as hard as unpaid activists in their local communities, then listen, man.
00:32:41.000You're not giving us anything to defend this with.
00:32:44.000Pass the Save America Act, pass DHS funding, or, you know, fight to the absolute brutal end to make sure it happens.
00:32:53.000You're not giving the base anything to get up for.
00:33:11.000Just being sent to the Middle Eastern.
00:33:13.000What role could they serve other than preparing the way for a potential Browns invasion?
00:33:18.000And while you speak about several weeks, are you concerned that this could embroil the U.S. in the kind of prolonged conflict that President Trump came to office promising to avoid?
00:33:28.000This is not going to be a prolonged conflict.
00:33:31.000The objectives I've outlined to you, again, I repeat them because I see these reports.
00:33:34.000It's like, are the users not clear on what objectives are?
00:33:37.000We've been as clear as you can possibly be from the very first night of what the objectives of this mission are.
00:33:41.000We're going to destroy their factories that make missiles and rockets and drones.
00:34:09.000And again, I want to reiterate: President Trump has never given us any indication from past conflicts that he's at all interested in a prolonged quagmire forever war.
00:34:18.000As a matter of fact, he was the original critic of the way that the neocons in the Bush era conducted these types of conflicts.
00:34:26.000And so, like, listen, President Trump's earned a lot of trust, but we've lost trust can be lost.
00:34:36.000And so, again, we're kind of doing a quick wrap-up of all the main stories here.
00:34:41.000This is a Tom Emmer and Mike Johnson, whip Tom Emmer, are absolutely lambasting the Senate GOP for what they did last night.
00:34:59.000Our whole leadership group, what the Senate did was, frankly, not right.
00:35:05.000We are going to make sure that border is funded.
00:35:09.000This is about making sure that President Trump's number one promise was that the border was going to be secure.
00:35:17.000He's accomplished with Republican leadership incredible things with the southern border.
00:35:21.000It has never been as tight as it is right now.
00:35:24.000But we are not going to allow these radical, anarchist, Marxist, socialist Democrats to literally stop or create an open border situation again like we experienced under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
00:35:38.000And we're going to make sure that we continue to deport criminal, illegal aliens.
00:39:02.000And we got one from somebody who is, I think, a really thoughtful email.
00:39:07.000It says, as a MAGA voter and someone who voted for Trump three times, it's very disappointing to hear troops are heading to the Middle East.
00:39:14.000It's hard not to think we're headed to a Bush 41 lie of read my lips.
00:39:19.000My husband and I have three sons, two of draft age, one more to be in a year.
00:39:39.000We in the lower middle class have never yet felt the relief that he brags about time after time.
00:39:44.000Low-info voters will remember this in November.
00:39:47.000Trump needs to come down with a hammer on all the weak rhinos, U.S. oil companies price gouging us.
00:39:53.000He needs to take this as seriously as he did the border, or he'll lose the Republican Party.
00:40:00.000I saw a great post on X that just said there's policies, there are policies you can do that will have a damaging effect on the economy.
00:40:07.000And the obvious one you could have done was real mass deportations would hurt the economy.
00:40:11.000We've seen a ton of businesses, in the short run, of course, a ton of businesses have gotten so addicted to illegal labor, low-wage immigrant labor, that it is massively disruptive to pluck those people out from them.
00:40:24.000And it would take them a while to adapt.
00:40:26.000That would have an economic consequence, but the long-term benefit would be great.
00:40:30.000And I think a lot of people are frustrated that we might get a similar level of economic disruption.
00:40:38.000Yeah, from a conflict that he didn't run on fighting, and no one was particularly excited for him to fight.
00:40:46.000And that even right after it begins, you're stuck trying to win people over to it rather than getting the usual rally around the flag effect.
00:40:54.000Every other war we've fought in my lifetime, certainly, Iraq, Afghanistan, you know, the involvements we had in Yugoslavia, and then fire wars, going way further back.
00:41:07.000You know, yeah, Venezuela is similar, going way further back, Vietnam, Korea, World War II, World War I. Every war starts with a big surge of popular enthusiasm.
00:41:15.000They're patriotic, rally behind the flag.
00:42:19.000You know, probably the thing in this email that you should be most concerned about is this line.
00:42:24.000We in the lower middle class have never felt yet the relief he brags about time after time.
00:42:32.000And to Blake's point, if you were going to take a big shot, if you were going to do something bold that you knew was going to be disruptive, why couldn't it have been just massively going after illegal aliens that are employed, right?
00:42:48.000By the way, this is what's so interesting about the Cesar Chavez stuff.
00:42:51.000We talked about this, I think, on Thought Crime.
00:42:53.000You know, he's lifted up as this, you know, left-wing hero.
00:42:58.000The truth is, Cesar Chavez, well, beyond being a pedophile and a rapist, which are obviously these are new revelations, but he would go through the state of California and his goons would literally beat up illegal immigrants.
00:44:19.000This does not mean that the war itself is bad.
00:44:22.000It does not mean that the war itself is unjustified.
00:44:25.000But what we are warning is, regardless of whether the war is justified or not, whether it's a good idea or not, whether it's necessary or not, the war with the people who took President Trump over the hump in 24, it is unpopular with those marginal new members of the Trump coalition.
00:44:44.000And a lot of them are leaving the coalition over that, are feeling discouraged over that.
00:44:48.000And we have to recognize that, or we're going to walk into a political disaster.
00:44:53.000You have to approach all political questions with clear eyes like that.
00:44:57.000It's something Charlie always emphasized and was very good at.
00:44:59.000Well, here's where it really becomes a red flag for me.
00:45:02.000And I know we haven't taken any calls yet, and I'm sorry.
00:45:05.000This email I thought was really thoughtful.
00:45:09.000Our chapter leaders, we had Gabe Saint on from Wyoming, and he said something that I have not stopped thinking about since he came on the show.
00:45:18.000And he said, when we're tabling, whether we're getting confronted from other conservatives or libs on campus about these items, they can't defend them.
00:45:30.000And we are left in a position of, we are in limbo.
00:45:37.000President Trump has done a great job on many fronts.
00:45:40.000He started this rebellion against foreign adventurism.
00:45:45.000He gets all the credit in the world for that.
00:45:47.000He's not gotten us into forever wars and quagmires.
00:45:51.000And so we're basically left in a position where we're just trusting that that's going to be the case here too, while also acknowledging Iran is the biggest challenge yet.
00:46:01.000The ground troops is going to be the biggest challenge yet if those end up happening.
00:46:06.000I don't know how to defend that because we didn't run on it.
00:47:38.000So I had an idea that I would hope would bring the youth vote back and also get us everything that we want.
00:47:44.000With student loans, I didn't realize like the interest goes on forever and like you can make payments, it doesn't really affect the balance.
00:47:51.000So I thought if Congress passed a bill where, for example, you took out $100,000 in loans, after you've paid $120,000 back, you're paid off.
00:48:08.000It's just that you never have to pay back more than 20% of what you've actually borrowed.
00:48:13.000And we tie this to everything we've ever wanted.
00:48:17.000Immigration reform, border funding, ICE funding, all of those executive orders from President Trump all tied in to this one option of we restructure the financing and make it retroactive for student loans.
00:48:31.000And also it would bring in a youth vote, I would think.
00:48:34.000And also it would help with like family information and buying homes.
00:49:31.000They get something ostensibly that they want.
00:49:34.000And therefore, if they're going to reject it, if they're going to block it, then they have to go on record blocking something that young people really like.
00:49:41.000I love the creativity, and I'm going to think about it more.
00:49:44.000But to Blake's point, I don't know that this is the silver bullet that we need, but it's creative.
00:49:53.000And maybe there's a way to work something like this where they get something that they want, we get to claim credit for it, and we get a lot of things we want.
00:50:00.000The big strategic picture to acknowledge, which you are correct to see, is that student loans are a huge problem in America, just the number of people who are on them, the scale of them.
00:50:22.000And it makes them very sympathetic towards this socialist nonsense that gets fed to them by huckster candidates like Zorhan Mamdani, AOC, and so on.
00:50:31.000And we want to find ways to break that hold.
00:50:35.000The other reason we'd want to break the student loan cartel, if you will, is this is what a big part of what's enriching colleges, which are basically left-wing organizations.
00:50:46.000It's their giant reserve of jobs for left-wingers, spending for left-wingers, institutional power for the left.
00:50:54.000And so we do want to find a way to change the way student loans work.
00:50:58.000Well, the federal government broke student loans when they got involved in them, right?
00:51:02.000So we work with YReFi that handles private student loans.
00:51:05.000Well, a lot of the loans are now federal, right?
00:51:07.000Which the College Cabal took as a blank check to just keep inflating tuition prices, building fancy buildings, stadiums.
00:51:15.000Every year they would hike the max for how much you could take on.
00:51:18.000The Trump administration, one of the accomplishments they've done quietly is they've stopped automatically increasing how much in loans you can take out.
00:51:26.000And lo and behold, a bunch of schools are no longer hiking their tuition automatically.
00:51:41.000But I think in general, private student loans make a whole lot more sense than federal, and I'll explain why.
00:51:48.000Private student loans, if you're a private entity, you have actual skin in the game that you have to make sure you get your money back.
00:51:55.000Because why give a loan out if you're not going to get paid back?
00:51:57.000That's the whole point of a loan is you make it back with interest and you make a profit on it.
00:52:02.000If you are giving loans out for somebody that is not a good candidate to have a loan, that they're not going to make that money back, they're not going to be able to repay you, then you're not going to give that loan out.
00:52:12.000That would have a forcing function effect across the college cabal to make sure that their degrees are worth it, that students are actually getting jobs on the other side of their degree process, that they get into a marketplace and they can actually make money.
00:52:27.000And it would sort of weed out the terrible degrees.
00:52:30.000Only the people with rich parents could afford the underwater basketball.
00:52:33.000Yeah, I think in general, a big problem, a big source of problems for student loans is that they are basically anyone can claim an entitlement to them, whether they're studying anything useful, whether they are likely to be able to pay them off, whether the school they are going to is particularly good.
00:52:49.000Basically, we have some standards for for-profit institutions, but for nonprofit institutions, there's very little expectation that a program be worth it.
00:53:17.000Yeah, some of that could be a pack on how much you have, a cap on how much you have to repay.
00:53:21.000But the best reforms of all are we shouldn't give student loans unless there is a reasonable expectation this loan will be worth it.
00:53:28.000And the other reform I'm a big fan of is we should shift towards a system where colleges are on the hook if a person who attends them on loans is unable to repay it.
00:53:38.000Make a college effectively, whatever word you want to use, but make them co-sign a loan.
00:53:51.000Because it will also help with admissions.
00:53:53.000They're not going to start, keep admitting people that they don't have a strong belief that that person is a good candidate for a degree, that they are qualified, that they are smart enough to get a good job that can actually pay that loan back.
00:54:04.000Right now, they're getting all mixed up in this ideology.
00:54:13.000And by the way, the whole reason the federal government got involved in the student loan process is because you could make an argument that this was good for the country.
00:54:20.000Like we are doing a public good by ensuring more and more young people get college degrees.
00:54:26.000Well, I'm not so sure that it is in the public interest to get more and more people educated beyond their intelligence or to get degrees that don't mean anything, that don't train them for anything.
00:54:36.000So the whole system needs reform because it's broken and it's actually ending up in results that don't help the country.
00:54:47.000I don't know if young people will get the memo, but I just remember when I was coming, a lot of this came up when I was coming of age because, you know, they're like, well, Europeans, they give a free education.
00:54:57.000And they all sit in school for 40 years and they have a youth unemployment rate of 25%.
00:55:24.000Get them a bone and we get everything we want.
00:55:28.000And so I'm going to think on that more.
00:55:32.000You know, we spend a lot of time on this show talking about culture, about why strong families matter, why values matter, why faith matters.
00:56:18.000If faith is central to your life, or even if it's something that shaped how you were raised and how you see the world, Upward connects you with people who take that seriously.
00:56:27.000If you're tired of the confusion and you're ready to date with intention, with marriage and family in mind, download Upward and start building on the right foundation because strong relationships don't just happen by accident.
00:56:44.000Mary asks, what advice would you give young adults struggling to find the point of continuing to advocate and fight for what's right?
00:56:52.000I am in the middle of a massive legal battle with the third largest healthcare group and medical school in my home state.
00:56:58.000I guess that's kind of a big picture question.
00:57:00.000Unfortunately, we can't get the details on that suit, but I do think the bigger question, how do you find the motivation to keep fighting when stuff is tough, is the thing a lot of people are asking.
00:57:12.000That was a big theme of our first hour.
00:57:14.000And maybe we can get that clip from Charlie because I know we've aired it before, but as Charlie would say, guys, we don't fight because we are likely to win.
00:58:14.000Ultimately, we fight because our faith compels us to, because our value set compels us to, as Blake was saying, and what Charlie was saying, is that you fight because it's the right thing to do.
00:58:24.000Well, how do you know what the right thing to do is?
00:58:28.000You lean on the eternal things, the good, the true, the beautiful.
00:58:32.000And I think without an anchoring in the eternal, without an anchoring in what God wants for this world, you know, we pray that the one prayer that Jesus taught us to pray was, you know, our Father, right?
01:01:13.000So the key there is those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.
01:01:19.000And in a lot of ways, this whole season that we're living through on the show, what we're living through with TPUSA, what we're living through when it comes to Iran, when we're living through the economic promises and all of this affordability stuff that we talk about, what you're living through, Mary, with your lawsuit, with this health care, sometimes you've got to wait on the Lord, and the waiting can be the hardest part.
01:02:48.000Wives, submit to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.
01:02:51.000For the husband is the head, and the wife, as Christ, is the head of the church, his body of which he is the savior.
01:02:57.000Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
01:03:02.000Here's the key, though, because you could stop there and it ends in a domination.
01:03:07.000Husbands love your wives, just as Christ loved the church, and here's the key, and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.
01:03:26.000In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies.
01:03:32.000After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body just as Christ does the church, for we are members of his body.
01:03:39.000For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.
01:04:03.000This is what this is what it says in the word.
01:04:05.000But the exchange is a profound mystery because the husband will then sacrifice himself, his own wants, his needs, his desires to serve his wife, to serve his family, to make his wife radiant and holy and good.
01:04:21.000And when a wife trusts the good intentions, the good faith intentions of her husband, that he is doing everything in his leadership power and his authority power, in his headship power to serve his wife, to make her holy and radiant, then a beautiful mystery happens.
01:04:37.000And the wife will not fight the husband.
01:04:39.000The husband will not domineer over the wife.
01:05:50.000You see which ones make it and which don't.
01:05:53.000But I think instead, what I turn to, I think a very good perspective on marriage was actually offered by Erica at Charlie's Memorial.
01:06:01.000She very much wanted to talk about Charlie's attitude towards marriage, that his goal when he wanted to save young people wasn't just a religious revival.
01:06:12.000He cared a lot about reviving the American family.
01:06:14.000She said, if Charlie had entered politics, his number one priority would be a revival of the family.
01:06:20.000And so she talks about what an ideal marriage looks like.
01:06:24.000She used her own marriage with Charlie as an example.
01:06:28.000And it did involve that excellent, strong leadership from Charlie, definitely submission from Erica, but in that positive way, that your wife is your helpmate.
01:06:47.000I think we'll play that before the segment is out.
01:06:49.000But that's one of those things where if you're going into it with the right attitude, certainly with an attitude of faith for one, it shouldn't be that difficult because it's almost like you should practically be competing with each other to see who can serve the other one better.
01:07:06.000Like the wife is really going all out to show how much she can submit, which is how much of a great helpmate she can be to her husband, while the husband is going all out to show what an amazing provider he is for the spouse, an amazing servant leadership.
01:07:21.000And if they're basically competing with each other on that front, I don't see how the marriage can really go badly.
01:07:28.000And it's when you start turning marriage into a rivalry, when you start turning it into a power struggle, of course it's going to end up being toxic.
01:07:37.000And distrust runs amok and so many other bad things.
01:09:24.000But that's why we had the Shaq chair here.
01:09:27.000Like, legitimately, one of the things when people come into the studio and they always want to take pictures and stuff like that, I always tell them, you know, this was the cheapest chair option that we presented him because he was such a giant human.
01:09:38.000So we had this, you know, it was a $1,000 chair and a $500 chair and all this stuff.
01:10:39.000But I would like to know: how can Congress be the only people that can vote on their salary, leave their job, and also get paid when the company is shut down?
01:10:51.000Because that sounds like a fantastic job.
01:10:53.000And, you know, it just seems kind of crazy to me.
01:11:06.000Oh, man, if you wanted to get that disaster.
01:11:11.000Are you trying to trigger me into another angry ranting?
01:11:15.000One of a kind of eccentric idea of mine is they're very frustrating.
01:11:21.000They do like to vote themselves pay raises.
01:11:23.000Although, in some ways, they don't get paid a ton.
01:11:25.000One of my, and that's why they're always maneuvering to cash in as lobbyists after they leave office.
01:11:31.000So many of them are looking to the next thing.
01:11:34.000I have sometimes wondered, what if we, this would make people mad.
01:11:38.000What if you did something like you said?
01:11:39.000Actually, senators are paid a million dollars a year, but you are never allowed to work anything government adjacent as soon as you leave office.
01:12:52.000This is actually, these are some good thoughts here.
01:12:54.000I will say, to your point, though, Senator Kennedy did propose that budget amendment or that amendment on the floor, I think, basically saying, hey, we shouldn't get paid while the government is not fully funded.
01:13:06.000So he tried, and then the Democrats, you know, spiked it.
01:13:10.000And then the guy, I guess, who issued the motion ran out of the chamber.
01:15:49.000I mean, even Charlie, you know, went around in 2024 and described President Trump as the peace president, no new wars, first president not to get us into another foreign conflict.
01:16:00.000You know, for whatever reason, President Trump looked at the math, looked at the intel, and decided this was the time to strike.
01:16:07.000You can disagree with it, but the truth is he has been consistent about Iran throughout the years.
01:16:56.000I think what we saw in Venezuela probably made a lot of the warmongers within the military-industrial complex and the intel community, whatever, sort of say, hey, we can do this and it can be really seamless and really clean.
01:17:10.000I hope that ultimately proves to be right.
01:17:12.000And I'll say what I've said before, that this could ultimately be the right foreign policy decision, national security decision, and it could be politically unpopular.
01:17:22.000And that's a trade-off that a lot of us are very uncomfortable with, but that's where we are.
01:17:26.000And what every young person that I've talked to, Gen Z, is they all thought Venezuela was awesome.
01:17:33.000They were so behind it, even though it was still a military.
01:17:40.000But they're on this new thing where we saw this yesterday when we were talking to him, where that if a single American dies in a conflict, they immediately go off that we should have never been in there in the first place.
01:17:52.000And so they're kind of tying American deaths to whether or not they're not.
01:17:57.000Yeah, Gen Z, of whether or not we should be going to war.
01:18:00.000And so they're very against the Iran war right now.
01:18:03.000And one of the main things is because they're mentioning that we've lost 13 soldiers.
01:18:07.000And so that's why Venezuela was great because we didn't lose any.
01:18:10.000So it's kind of a weird path that they're going down because you can't really have a country if you're not going to lose some soldiers at some point.
01:18:37.000I think a lot of, you know, even people that are uncomfortable with this concept of American empire can get behind the fact that we're the big dog in the Western hemisphere and everybody needs to kind of like get in line.
01:18:50.000And so, you know, you've blown up drug boats.
01:18:53.000That was kind of rad too because these guys are bringing in poison to kill Americans and, you know, feed this black market of drugs and fentanyl and cocaine.
01:19:53.000Let me hold my email real quick so I remember as I sent it to you guys.
01:19:58.000So basically, it's regarding how Democrats want to control things by putting bills on the floor in federal government and in certain states to control limit of movement, what you can do with energy, what you can install in buildings and houses.
01:20:13.000And the reason I ask this is because now we're seeing, I think it's in Massachusetts, I said, this thing called the Move Act that will limit how much you can drive a day, a week, a month, a year.
01:20:24.000Is there any way to stop this or kind of put the brakes on it?
01:20:28.000Because, and I know it's at the state level, but is there a federal thing that can be done through EPA, Zeldin's department?
01:20:34.000Because you're limiting the motion of freedom.
01:20:47.000Yeah, like Massachusetts moves to limit miles people can drive because of climate change.
01:20:54.000But I don't know if that like a strict rule or is it more of some they're trying to pass it as a bill.
01:20:59.000And the only reason I ask this is because we all know like when California usually does something, the next blue state will do it, like Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and so on.
01:21:09.000Like, this is kind of like you're stopping freedom here.
01:21:14.000It looks like it sets statewide goals, which, yeah, it's the left is very good at taking vague goals and then suddenly they somehow have legal force.
01:21:22.000They're good at a thing that is difficult with the left, the left is generally better at decentralized action in the sense they really are almost like the Borg or the Hive mind.
01:21:34.000Like memetic stuff gets out where they're suddenly all on the same page and they all get aligned and they don't necessarily even need to communicate with each other.
01:21:41.000And so all of their judges are suddenly with the program, whether it's on open borders or on global warming or on race communism or everything.
01:21:52.000And ideally, we could take steps to stop it.
01:21:55.000But on the other hand, one of the best things that does protect us when the left inevitably has more power in this country is we do have a federalist system that allows red states to push back against this as well.
01:22:05.000So to some extent, that's the double side of the coin in terms of blue states being able to, you know, destroy themselves.
01:22:13.000Yeah, I mean, listen, I think this sounds really unpopular.
01:22:16.000It reminds me of that you'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
01:22:18.000Instead of fixing underlying problems, they just want to limit freedom, limit access, limit the size of your house, limit all these kind of things.
01:22:25.000I think it's going to be wildly unpopular.
01:22:28.000But Anthony, thank you for your question.