Sarah Rogers is the new Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy at the State Department. She joins us to talk about her path to the job, her passion for public diplomacy, and what it means to be a public servant.
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.
00:01:10.000All right, welcome back, hour two of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:39.000I'm going to kind of throw this over to Blake, but she is what Charlie helped when, you know, was very involved with the transition and helping with certain appointees.
00:01:50.000And man, Charlie just completely was just really impressed by Sarah.
00:03:28.000So before I get into that substantively, I'll just say it's absolutely correct that I wouldn't be here if it weren't for Charlie, for his trust and confidence, as well as that of President Trump and Secretary Rubio.
00:03:38.000And one of my greatest regrets is that I couldn't work with him longer on issues dear to both of us, like free speech, during his life.
00:03:45.000So now my duty and my goal when I wake up every day in this job that I'm thrilled to have is to work in his memory for the president and on behalf of the American people to advance those goals and get done the things that Charlie would have wanted and we still want.
00:04:03.000So public diplomacy refers, you know, when we think about diplomacy, we usually think about the relationship between the American government and foreign governments.
00:04:11.000Two ambassadors shake hands, sign a trade deal.
00:04:14.000But public diplomacy, which is my silo of the State Department, deals with the relationship between the American government and the foreign public.
00:04:21.000And this is a critical instrument of national security because when we have to do something like secure a strategic port or convince a foreign populace to use our AI or our 5G instead of China's, the public barometer matters a lot.
00:04:36.000And now today's public is very different than the one we confronted during the Cold War.
00:04:41.000Information during the age of mass media flowed downhill.
00:04:45.000So legacy authorities like governments, like legacy media would speak and the masses in the mass media age would listen.
00:04:53.000But that's not the age we live in now.
00:04:57.000They're more reactive than ever before.
00:05:00.000And predecessors of mine, both within state and other parts of the government we now know, saw this democratized, chaotic information environment and they panicked.
00:05:09.000They said, we've got to sanitize and censor everything.
00:05:12.000They even tried to censor Charlie, which I worked with him on and Blake on, as you guys know.
00:05:17.000And that is one of the vignettes, that whole Murphy Supreme Court case that we will be doing thorough truth and reconciliation on.
00:05:26.000We will be releasing documents as soon as we are able to complement the ones that have already surfaced through the Twitter files and other sources.
00:05:34.000And it is my job to hold out to the world what America's values and priorities are.
00:06:04.000In Britain today, 30 people a day are arrested for offensive posts on social media, according to the Telegraph.
00:06:11.000Praying silently within 600 feet of an abortion clinic can get you arrested in Scotland, as a 74-year-old woman named Rose just learned weeks ago.
00:06:20.000Members of parliament scold British citizens for thinking they have the right to say things, say that they do not have the right to say things that offend Muslims.
00:06:28.000So I think a lot of our, you know, our foreign charm offensives, we've gotten used to seeing stuff in the Middle East where we're saying, oh, why you should be more secular or more pro-gay or something.
00:06:40.000But now I think, especially on the right, we've seen a lot of interest in, well, why don't we try to pressure Europe to embrace free speech instead of censorship?
00:06:50.000And do you see a role in the Trump State Department where we're going to see more of that?
00:07:03.000Charlie obviously was very fired up on this too.
00:07:05.000So what's going on in the UK and Germany?
00:07:08.000What's going on is that there's no First Amendment, and there's a much more safetyist approach to speech that has really had some absurd effects that I think even sectors of these societies are becoming quite embarrassed of.
00:07:21.000So there's a case in Germany that Americans are shocked whenever I tell them about it.
00:07:26.000And so I talk about it whenever I can because our failure as free speech activists is that more Americans don't know it.
00:07:32.000This case regrettably involved a gang rape in a public park of a German teenager by nine men.
00:07:43.000During their trial, their expert witness said they'd committed the rape for cultural reasons.
00:07:47.000They were traumatized by the migration experience.
00:07:51.000So most of those rapists did not receive jail time because in Germany, if you profess to be a minor or considered to be under the age of majority by the court, it turns out you can commit gang rape and walk free.
00:08:04.000But someone did go to jail in connection with this gang rape, and that was a woman, because a woman texted one of the rapists and called him a disgraceful rapist pig, which of course is true.
00:08:38.000In the UK, which Charlie just mentioned, there's actually a recent incident that occurred following the tragedy, so Charlie couldn't comment on it.
00:08:46.000There's a relatively accomplished comedy writer named Graham Linehan who was arrested, detained, and jailed for joking on Twitter about transgenderism.
00:08:55.000And I'll paraphrase here because I don't have the tweet, but it's something like, if you see a man in a ladies' room, you can kick him in the nuts.
00:09:01.000And that apparently was, it was a threat of violence in Britain in the way that some of the Islamist demonstrations in the street apparently don't rise to.
00:09:12.000And by the way, I'll just say that if there were ever a case for censorship, right, it would be a memetic internet contagion like transgenderism that targets children results in either death in a lot of cases, suicide, or lifelong permanent disfigurement or sterility.
00:09:29.000And the censorship apparatus did not protect us or our children from trans.
00:09:34.000The censorship apparatus suffocated even the most reasoned criticism of it.
00:09:39.000So really, like even the steelman case for censorship fails there.
00:09:44.000Also in Britain, as Charlie mentioned, we have people arrested for acts like praying silently or wearing a priestly collar within a visible radius of an abortion clinic because the idea is in Britain, it's not merely a crime to do something like block the clinic doors, which might actually impede someone from obtaining an abortion.
00:10:04.000You're not even allowed to try to dissuade someone from obtaining an abortion.
00:10:12.000Yeah, we'll continue this past the break, but we've really got to lay out that it's very bad when our closest cultural compatriots, so to speak, are just our allies are just embracing this ideology that's totally hostile to the world.
00:10:26.000I did not realize, Sarah, that you can't wear a priestly collar near an abortion clinic.
00:11:51.000So we're talking about the importance of free speech abroad, but people have claimed that the criticisms of like Antifa, for example, in the U.S., that there's a tension there, that the administration is becoming anti-speech in other ways.
00:12:04.000So I thought you'd be a good person to lay out the differences.
00:12:07.000Like what's the real difference between some of what we've seen from a quite, in my opinion, violent radical left, and then just what we see in Europe where you have crackdowns on basically any publicity on what migrants do or just dissent against the trans issue or Islam or a whole bunch of other lines.
00:12:26.000I mean, there are lots of important lines on First Amendment jurisprudence, but I think this is the brightest and most critical one.
00:12:33.000And that is the difference between actual violence, political violence, and political speech.
00:12:39.000And by anathematizing and unequivocally opposing and crushing political violence, which is what Antifa engages in, we preserve the right to political dissent.
00:12:50.000Because the First Amendment is what it really is, is the right to bring any viewpoint to the public square, any viewpoint, an unpopular one, a racist one, an inconvenient one.
00:13:02.000Bring that viewpoint forth and aim to persuade people instead of kill them.
00:13:07.000And the ability to do that, the ability to go out into the public square and persuade without having to shoot anyone and certainly without getting shot yourself, that is the sin quenan of a free society.
00:13:21.000And it's by opposing these groups that we preserve that right and make America safe for the First Amendment in the future.
00:13:27.000Seems like a pretty obvious bright line.
00:13:30.000If your freedoms impede my ability to have my freedoms or to live or to not be able to go out in the public space and not get punched or assaulted.
00:13:42.000I like the clarity on that because we've had to endure so much of this BS of they love to muddle that where violent things, you know, burning down a police station is actually just speech, as long as they didn't directly kill anyone.
00:13:53.000Or just that in general, they do this nonsense where, oh, your speech is actually violence because it upset me, because it traumatized me.
00:14:00.000And I do think it's very important that we have people like Sarah here to really insist on the difference between those things and that there's consequences for real violence, but speech has to be sacrosanct.
00:14:12.000So Sarah, obviously what you're doing is the State Department.
00:14:17.000There's a lot of, a lot of people would say America first means focusing on America.
00:14:21.000It's getting away from what you might call foreign entanglements.
00:14:25.000Now, obviously that includes wars, but we also saw that with U.S. aid, people are, or AID, where people were frustrated that we were spending money on various programs overseas and that these are distractions.
00:14:37.000They get away from what's really important.
00:14:39.000So I assume what you do does involve to some extent spending money outside of the United States.
00:14:45.000So I thought you could explain to our audience why is it worthwhile?
00:14:55.000So first of all, when we're talking about the scope of what we're spending, the foreign aid budget, and this is my understanding as of now, I don't have the spreadsheet in front of me.
00:15:05.000That is a lot of American taxpayer money.
00:15:08.000By contrast, we can do very high impact, very high-impact initiatives in the field of public diplomacy for much less.
00:15:14.000So for example, my office just recently expanded the scholarship where we trade some of our top STEM AI like tech guys with Hungary.
00:15:24.000So we take like the two smartest AI or math or technology scientists in Hungary, we bring them here, and critically, they don't immigrate to America.
00:15:32.000They cross-pollinate their expertise with our experts and then we send them back.
00:15:36.000So that costs less than $100,000 to do, and that actually benefits the United States instead of delusion us with migrants we don't want or advancing some kind of nebulous NGO network in a country that doesn't want or appreciate it.
00:15:51.000So that's the first point I would make is dollars and impact.
00:15:54.000The second point I would make is about unilateral disarmament.
00:15:57.000So every time our side wins or even comes within range of it, there's this debate about, you know, do we unilaterally disarm or do we wield against the left the same kinds of weapons and tactics they wielded against us.
00:16:09.000The woke left formulation of the same debate is, can you use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house?
00:16:15.000And my answer is it depends on the weapon.
00:17:01.000We're spreading like trans and kids and LGBTQ.
00:17:04.000We can spend millions of dollars to sponsor, you know, CRT and sponsor trans radicalism all around the world.
00:17:12.000It strikes me as insane that we can't spend, as you pointed out, not that much money in the grand scheme of things to instead say, actually, America is going to promote freedom of speech and like conventional American liberties instead of these novel woke ones.
00:17:26.000And I'll also just point out quickly that the free speech issue is a national security nexus too, because these countries that are arresting their citizens for calling a rapist a pig, which is true, or for praying outside of an abortion clinic, are now trying to enforce their laws against American citizens and American companies.
00:17:41.000So the UK is in litigation right now with the website 4chan, based in America, no operations in Britain.
00:17:48.000The UK takes the position that merely because the speech is accessible in Britain, UK censorship law must apply.
00:17:54.000There's also an American citizen, a Trump supporter, who was confronted by UK police for posting a meme the UK police did not like.
00:18:04.000And if our tech companies and certainly our speech marketplace are subject to this kind of censorious safetyism, this kind of perverse regulation, we will never win the AI race against China.
00:18:15.000Our rate of advancement will be slowed and it'll affect all of our critical interests, of which free speech is one.
00:18:20.000Well, we are here at Turning Point in the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:18:23.000We are passionate about spreading free speech around the world.
00:18:26.000I used to not think about it like this, but truly, if we become an island of free speech, the last remaining island of free speech, guess what happens the next time the Democrats are going to get in power?
00:18:35.000They're going to be looking at no more Europeans.
00:18:37.000Yeah, they're going to be looking at their European allies in the UK and saying, well, they crack down on everything.
00:18:41.000We're just doing this transatlantic crackdown on speech because we live in a scary world and these far-right extremists are going to, they're coming for us and they're going to crack down.
00:18:50.000We need allies around the world that hold these values as top priorities.
00:18:56.000You should tell us what we're hoping to do going forward.
00:18:58.000So my office, when we engage in all these educational and cultural programs around the world, we hire organizations to implement them for us.
00:19:06.000These are nonprofits in the past, an assortment with which other administrations chose to work.
00:19:11.000I'm privileged to announce on this show that we'll be working with Turning Point USA to implement multiple international programs dealing with topics like free speech.
00:19:23.000Charlie, that's why he was going to South Korea, going to the UK.
00:19:25.000He wanted to go to Germany, the Netherlands, and say, you know, American free speech is one of our greatest things, and the whole world deserves to have it.
00:19:34.000That's a beautiful, beautiful way to end this interview.
00:19:37.000Sarah Rogers, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy.
00:19:47.000Today I want to share something that should fill every Christian with wonder.
00:19:51.000We are living in the time of history's great homecoming.
00:19:55.000For thousands of years, God promised through his prophets that he would gather the Jewish people from every corner of the earth and bring them back to their homeland.
00:20:01.000Many thought these were just beautiful words that would never come to pass, but we're witnessing what many thought was the impossible.
00:20:08.000Since 1948, over 3 million Jewish people have returned to Israel from more than 100 countries.
00:20:13.000Russian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, European Holocaust survivors, all coming home exactly as scripture said they would.
00:20:21.000These are the holy scriptures being fulfilled before our very eyes.
00:20:24.000When you support the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, you're not just helping people return home, you're participating in the scriptures coming true before our eyes.
00:21:07.000This is JD Vance on H-1B visas last night, 259.
00:21:11.000We let in about a million legal immigrants into the United States of America every single year.
00:21:15.000And I think the evidence is pretty clear that a lot of those immigrants are actually undercutting the wages of American workers.
00:21:21.000It's one of the reasons why the President of the United States, it's one of the reasons why the President of the United States and a lot of us in the administration have encouraged H-1B reform.
00:21:30.000Because if you look at the H-1B visa, what it's supposed to be, what it's supposed to be is that you have a super genius who's studying at an American university, who's working at a great company.
00:21:41.000You want that super genius to stay in the United States of America and not go somewhere else.
00:21:46.000What it's actually used to do is hire an accountant at a 50% discount to an American citizen.
00:21:53.000I don't think that we should be hiring accountants from foreign countries when we've got accountants right here in the United States that would love to work for a good wage.
00:22:01.000J.D. Vance is masterclass just taking questions from students.
00:22:05.000By the way, the students were throwing a tough question.
00:22:07.000I was actually a little worried that people were going to think we screened them because there's so many, you know, conservative and fans of the administration in that part of the country.
00:22:16.000And man, they came up with some good questions, I have to say.
00:22:19.000Welcoming to the show now are two of the student leaders at our chapter at Ole Miss that made yesterday evening possible.
00:22:26.000That'd be Leslie Lachman and Kent Tonos.
00:22:28.000Leslie, you are the chapter president, Ole Miss.
00:23:05.000I found out just about two weeks before.
00:23:07.000I think immediately I thought to myself, oh my goodness, this is going to be the event of the year, not only for Ole Miss, but for Turning Point USA.
00:23:32.000And actually, it's odd because somebody random came up to me when we were telegating for the LSU Ole Miss game and said, do you know who the speaker is?
00:24:13.000Yeah, I might have had a little advance notice on that because I was part of the team working behind the scenes to figure out if we were going to be, because we were kind of getting down to the wire and it was like, oh, he's either going to do November 5th at Auburn or he's going to do October 29th.
00:24:28.000And obviously when you're working with a vice president's schedule and all the travel and all the other obligations, it's tough to get it locked in.
00:24:35.000And man, I just, so take us into this, to the campus, though.
00:24:39.000I mean, first, I think I would love to know how your chapter is doing in the aftermath of Charlie's assassination.
00:25:20.000Students not only want to be involved with this campus, but you can see the impact it's had across the country.
00:25:26.000We've become a forefront chapter for what Turning Point USA should look like, kind of a model guide, everything from buttons custom made to what the table should be set up as to how can you do positive conservative conversation on the campus of Ole Miss.
00:25:39.000And I'd say not only is it growth and a win for Ole Miss, but I think it's a win for all Turning Point chapters.
00:25:44.000Yes, as Leslie said, we've grown exponentially.
00:25:47.000And it's crazy to see the access that, you know, through the Regroup Me and just our university site, I think call it the forum.
00:25:56.000We get almost 20, 10 to 20 people that want to join every single day.
00:26:01.000And it's just, it amazes me how many people want to be involved.
00:26:25.000Like, sometimes at our events, we have mostly students and some adults because, you know, there's a little room left over and we can get some, the adults sit in the standby line and we get them in as soon as all the students get seated.
00:26:36.000We had to turn away students last night.
00:26:39.000I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure that's a first in, especially one of these bigger tour stops.
00:26:44.000It's a 10,000 person arena and it was 10,000 students packed to the brim, standing in line in the rain.
00:26:51.000And I'm told that you guys have about 27,000 student body count or whatever.
00:26:55.000There was 14,000 student registrations, 13,000 adult registrations, and we had to work to tell the adults, please do not come.
00:27:46.000And it's great to have this positive feedback from not only our tour, but hopefully other tour stops that come along just to see the young people get involved.
00:27:57.000And the conservative way is the right way.
00:27:59.000So I love the way that people view that.
00:28:03.000You know, Charlie always, he loved to talk to Gen Z people.
00:28:06.000He just, he loved to hear what motivated them, what had they seen to try to understand them better.
00:28:12.000So you guys have seen that there's been a conservative shift among young people.
00:28:17.000So I thought I'd ask, you've probably talked to a good number of freshmen who've just arrived on campus.
00:28:23.000Have they said what shaped them, what shapes their worldview the most?
00:28:27.000And how do they even differ from maybe seniors on your campus?
00:28:29.000What have we seen just over the past four years in terms of how American young people are feeling politically?
00:28:36.000I'd say that conservative values on the campus of Ole Miss have always been alive and well, but this freshman class is passionate.
00:28:43.000I think Charlie's Kirk really pushed off that conversation of deeper involvement in the Conservative Party.
00:28:49.000I think it's one thing to, you know, go out and say you love it, but to see the persuasion of almost everyone around you, it's immaculate.
00:28:59.000And the freshmen have a different mindset.
00:29:02.000The seniors that I've talked to are like, well, am I even going to be able to get a job?
00:29:06.000As J.D. Vance pointed out, you know, with the visas that we have, am I even going to be able to get a job when I graduate?
00:29:12.000Can I even be, you know, come from this accounting school and go be an accountant where I want to be an accountant, or am I going to get beat out somewhere?
00:29:20.000So it's one of those things where the drive for our seniors is a different type of drive than the freshmen.
00:29:27.000And the freshmen are, you know, they're happy, they're excited, and they have different values.
00:29:32.000But when they get to that senior level, they'll go back and be like, well, I want that job too.
00:29:37.000So another thing to note also, you just brought up, we have a freshman on our team.
00:29:43.000She wants to make these buttons and design them and spend hours versus, you know, if you're a senior, you know, you've gone through college, you've done it.
00:29:50.000You're a little bit, you know, but I think it's crucial to have both parts because at the end of the day, everyone needs to go to those polls.
00:29:57.000So I think whether you're hands on at that table or stepping a little bit back just to be a part of the events, all of it is very important to us.
00:30:04.000Well, so tell me, to kind of piggyback off what Blake said, what was the reaction of students to some of the answers that JD gave?
00:30:12.000What was the reaction to students about Erica's speech?
00:30:15.000I mean, what are you people telling you?
00:30:56.000I said later in the group chat, haha, he's got to be on exec.
00:30:59.000And so I think even how raw and true it was to what Ole Miss was, I couldn't be prouder.
00:31:05.000It also shows like, you know, we all don't have to agree on everything.
00:31:09.000And they even pointed that out yesterday as like, you know, even if they have only 20% to something in common that you have, that doesn't mean you get to turn them away.
00:31:17.000That means that they can ask questions and you can even ask questions because JD even said there is no neutrality.
00:31:23.000You're always going to be biased on one side or the other.
00:31:25.000So, and it was great to see that last night.
00:31:29.000You know, Leslie, I have to tell you, I ran into a reporter there.
00:31:34.000The outlet will remain anonymous for our sake here.
00:31:38.000This is off-the-record conversation, and those do go both ways.
00:31:42.000But I will tell you, this reporter was singing your praises, and she was like, we have to, you know, Turning Point has to make sure we hold on to Leslie.
00:32:33.000And Kenneth, I didn't get a chance to meet you.
00:32:34.000Leslie, I was backstage when you met the vice president.
00:32:38.000So I didn't want to interrupt that at that moment, but I saw the way you comported yourself and handled yourself, and it was very impressive.
00:32:44.000So congratulations to Leslie and Kent from Old Miss.
00:32:48.000They run a great chapter there that's bursting at the seams.
00:34:22.000You know, Blake, it occurs to me that we've had a very eventful second hour here.
00:34:27.000First, we had Sarah Rogers makes a smart woman, very based woman, giving kudos to Charlie and paying her respects for Charlie's role in getting her into her current position as Undersecretary of State for Foreign Diplomacy.
00:34:47.000And then she just kind of slides in there that the State Department works with nonprofits, groups like Turning Point to achieve certain ends internationally.
00:34:57.000And obviously, we are America first through and through, but we do have a foreign interest.
00:36:28.000So Michael in our studio, he says, when I was in a TPSA chapter at U of A in 2018, there was like maybe 15 people, which, you know, I'm sure a lot of chapters.
00:36:55.000Turning point was, you know, you could have fit all of Turning Point in the studio room 12 years ago and then what he built it up into from there.
00:37:03.000Yeah, and Michael says, I'm sure it's way bigger now.
00:37:05.000Yeah, I actually know for a fact it's way bigger now.
00:37:07.000And we actually saw this, you know, Mike, it was funny.
00:37:09.000Mikey made a comment about his high school, which is Oaks Christian in Thousand Oaks, California.
00:37:15.000Well, we tried to get a chapter there for a long time and couldn't get it through.
00:37:18.000And then they, so Mikey was under the impression that it didn't exist still.
00:37:23.000But they have now started a chapter, and it's hundreds and hundreds of students have joined that chapter.
00:37:27.000And so in death, Charlie's legacy obviously expanded even more.
00:37:32.000And these chapters have ballooned all across the country.
00:37:35.000And I just loved seeing Leslie and Kenneth and their passion and their, you could just tell they were very dedicated.
00:37:41.000They took this like a job and they're really pouring their whole self in.
00:37:44.000So if you're a chapter member listening around the country, you have that same opportunity right now.
00:37:53.000And you would be amazed at the amount of power and influence that you can exert on your own campus and your local community.
00:38:00.000And yeah, if there's a, it's funny because Leslie brought that up.
00:38:02.000If there's a lockdown or some sort of COVID V2 that comes out, you can be a firewall in your community to stand up to tyranny if you have this large group on a campus like Ole Miss and other places.
00:38:14.000So please, please, please pour your whole self into it.
00:38:31.000But so this, there were rumors about this a few weeks ago, but it just hit.
00:38:35.000The Trump administration is formally cutting the annual refugee admission amount from $125,000 a year to $7,500 a year.
00:38:45.000And then this is what really has people, you know, you know who, extremely upset about it because they said they're going to give some priority to white South Africans who have faced a lot of violence, a lot of discrimination.
00:38:56.000We've had Ernst Roots and others on the show about this.
00:38:59.000And so they're going to say, we're going to give some priority for them coming here because they haven't really been treated as refugees by other places.
00:39:06.000And on top of that, they're often very talented people, very immediately economically useful people.
00:39:12.000And so they'll be able to support themselves and they're facing real violence in their home country.
00:39:17.000And people are going to be very mad about this because they're Western-ish.
00:39:27.000What you've really seen is America's Americans have gotten fed up with what is clearly the scam, where we take people, first of all, they're often not really refugees from anything other than the fact that their societies are really rotten and poor.
00:39:41.000And then they're deliberately brought in and they're settled where they can cause the maximum disruption.
00:39:46.000So we get all these refugee resettlements in small towns in Idaho, small towns in Iowa, small towns in the Dakotas, in Texas.
00:40:22.000They're part of a community that routinely defrauds the American system.
00:40:26.000And it's so obvious that what the refugee system had become for the left was it was just another lever for what their overall agenda was, which was to do the great replacement to demographically transform the United States, to just get people in by whatever door is available.
00:41:10.000But secondly, if you look at what J.D. Vance talked about at Ole Miss last night, I think the one huge big takeaway in something Charlie railed against.
00:41:20.000I could find you dozens of tweets and posts on X about this.
00:41:25.000We have to reform our legal immigration system.
00:41:28.000And I understand that there is a limitation with our current GOP and the way it is made up.
00:41:32.000But J.D. Vance is pointing to the future.
00:41:35.000And for him to say out loud, question after question, we need to reduce and reform our legal pathways to immigrate into this country.