00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:01.000I visit the kingdom of Washington, D.C. Rather entertaining and important episode about what our nation's capital has become while the rest of the country largely disintegrates.
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00:05:06.000I haven't seen a lot of those when I visit Illinois or when I visit Wisconsin or when I visit Montana or when I visit flyover country, West Virginia, or when I and I started to see one, I started to count them: construction cranes.
00:05:26.000So I started to count them: one, two, three, four, five, 61 construction cranes from Dulles International Airport to downtown Washington, D.C.
00:05:37.000We turned off to go get some coffee, and I kid you not, at Tyson's Corner, the buildings that have now been built in the last couple of years in Washington, D.C. are some of the most elaborate structures that I've seen.
00:05:53.000I've been to all 50 states multiple times over, given a speech in 49 of the 50 states.
00:05:59.000There are not buildings like this anywhere, not even in New York City.
00:06:03.000I'm talking about the most sophisticated, elaborate architecture and expenditures.
00:06:08.000If you have no budget whatsoever in front of you, you build buildings like this.
00:06:15.000When America was a great country, one thing that set America apart was how unimportant Washington, D.C. was relative to the rest of the country.
00:06:23.000D.C. was this kind of provincial city.
00:06:28.000But it's been bloating up for decades now, and the boom never stops.
00:06:33.000Washington is now America's sixth largest city, and it is pouring over into the surrounding counties.
00:06:40.000And we've said for a while that eight out of 10 of the wealthiest counties in America are around Washington, D.C.
00:06:46.000And when you see the restaurants, to the hotels, to the Porsche dealerships, to the Mercedes-Benz dealerships, to the fashion outlets, you say, my goodness, this is beyond high income.
00:07:01.000You would think that you are in Paris, London, Dubai, Beverly Hills.
00:07:08.000I drove by a Maserati dealer that is right next to a Tesla store.
00:07:15.000I stopped and I thought to myself, and I asked our team in the car, I said, guys, have you ever seen such opulence, such spending?
00:07:25.000And then the most obvious point: what do they create here?
00:07:32.000What do they create in the surrounding counties of Washington, D.C.?
00:07:46.000Washington, D.C. and the surrounding counties collect tribute from the rest of the nation.
00:07:54.000Their cottage industry is forcibly extracting money from you so that they can get so fabulously wealthy.
00:08:03.000There is one recession-proof city in America, one, and it's right here, Washington, D.C.
00:08:10.000The trillions of dollars that we have borrowed, the trillions of dollars that you guys have to pay in taxes, it is not going to make East Palestine wealthier.
00:08:20.000It's not going to make Rapid City South Dakota go through a middle-class renaissance.
00:08:26.000The middle class and the ordinary class are poorer than before.
00:08:50.000While you're getting poorer, the entire kingdom of Washington, D.C. has never been cleaner.
00:09:01.000And that really hit me too is you drive through these suburbs of Northern Virginia, perfectly manicured streets, and you think to yourself, the cities that aren't in Washington, D.C. have become unbelievably filthy that are not around there.
00:09:19.000You go to San Francisco, to Seattle, you go to Portland, you go to Denver, go to Chicago, Philadelphia.
00:09:25.000The core fabric of America, which actually made America a beautiful and great country, is disintegrating, while the capital itself is growing infinitely wealthy.
00:09:40.000The answer is it's a cesspool of legalized payouts and kickbacks.
00:09:45.000How do modestly paid politicians and bureaucrats like Fauci live so well?
00:09:49.000This disparity, everybody, is unsustainable.
00:09:54.000If you're a Republican consultant out there and you say, boy, why is Donald Trump so popular?
00:10:01.000Drive through the suburbs of Washington, D.C. from Dulles International Airport to the United States Capitol, and then drive from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to East Palestine, Ohio, and you have your answer.
00:10:14.000There used to be factories in East Palestine, Ohio, where we made stuff.
00:10:20.000And Washington, D.C. was kind of this, you rolled your eyes, you go there if necessary, but now it's a destination.
00:10:28.000Now it's a place where you make a career of how much graft can I extract from the United States taxpayer?
00:11:09.000Very thankful for Speaker McCarthy for how he hosted us today.
00:11:11.000He was great for all of our student leaders.
00:11:14.000400 of our top student leaders were treated really well.
00:11:17.000But I'll be honest, I looked at our Capitol and I stood there outside this morning after we were done with some of our meetings and we had a really great speech and gave the students a tour of the Capitol.
00:11:31.000And I stood there and I just kind of put my phone in airplane mode and I looked at the Capitol building and something was missing.
00:11:36.000I did not have the reverence for that capital that I did 10 years ago.
00:11:42.000Not that I don't respect it, but I felt like an outside regime is currently occupying our government.
00:11:52.000It felt as if an un-American pathogen has taken over the host, consumed the Constitution, and consumed the instruments of power, and that the promise of America is currently in jeopardy from an outside force.
00:12:13.000The holiness that many of us have once felt when looking at that beautiful Capitol building feels like it has been desecrated and profaned.
00:12:22.000And that idealism has been chipped away.
00:12:27.000Goodranchers.com is an amazing resource.
00:14:12.000I have no idea the intent behind Hollywood's production of these films.
00:14:17.000But regardless of the intent, the actual product is a perfect picture of what we are living through.
00:14:24.000If you don't know the Hunger Games films, the framing is that there are several external districts that work hard in manual labor, coal, natural resources, that constantly send their hard-earned resources to the Capitol while the Capitol is perfectly manicured, living opulent lives.
00:14:41.000And again, I don't know if the intent of that film or the books before the film were to actually display what is happening right outside the window here in the kingdom of Washington, D.C.
00:14:51.000But I'm a big believer that when there is a piece of art that confirms something true, you should pursue that piece of art because then all of a sudden you see it differently and you're able to look at it more analytically.
00:15:02.000Again, there's plenty wrong with the Hunger Games, but I will say Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of America's greatest ever actors, fortunately passed away.
00:15:09.000He gives a great performance, and so does Donald Sutherland, who I think is now 88 years old, gives a first-class performance.
00:15:15.000I'm not a fan of Jennifer Lawrence, but she actually did a really good job in that.
00:15:18.000And so I'm reflecting on this, and I remember the first time I came to Washington, D.C., and I was struck with awe and grandeur.
00:16:00.000I'm total in agreement with that, right?
00:16:02.000And I think we've all felt that way about our government institutions.
00:16:05.000Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Capitol Building.
00:16:10.000You want to have that be a place where there's a little bit sacred.
00:16:14.000But if I'm being honest with you, walking the streets of Washington, D.C. this morning, I feel as if it's been desecrated, that it's not the center of liberty, that it's kind of this heartbeat of degeneracy, the center of payoffs and back slapping deals and debt and avarice and pride, literally.
00:16:36.000And I, and I, a cronyism, and I'm driving by these remarkably ugly government buildings, Department of Interior, Department of Labor.
00:16:44.000And so we stop at a stoplight this morning in Washington, D.C.
00:16:47.000And I look out the window, and Mikey and our team say, So what's this building?
00:18:09.000Those are the guys, probably Jack Smith has a standing office right in that building right there.
00:18:13.000Currently going after someone running for the presidency.
00:18:17.000So I was driving through Washington, D.C. What once I had a sense of reverence and the holy at every building I could pinpoint how they're at war against you.
00:18:28.000Federal Reserve is destroying your purchasing power.
00:18:31.000The Treasury is covering up the international crimes of the Biden family.
00:18:35.000The FBI is coming after moms and dads and school boards and infiltrating Latin mass.
00:18:43.000Driving through Washington, D.C. this morning, it was a museum of tyranny, authoritarianism, degeneracy.
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00:20:26.000Now, it's hard to know which tweet, so I'll try to combine the best of the messages of the 18,000 tweets I sent yesterday because I was fired up about this.
00:20:47.000But I'm going to combine those and tell you what I was referring to generally.
00:20:51.000So just 16 Republican senators, only 16, and not a single Democrat voted to affirm a very simple principle, one offered up as an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act by Senator Rand Paul.
00:21:06.000And that amendment was just one sentence long.
00:21:09.000It just affirmed that Article 5 of the NATO Treaty doesn't supersede the constitutional process ordained by Article 1, Section 8, in which it's Congress that decides whether to engage the United States in war.
00:21:24.000So not only is this just taking this out of Congress where it belongs, that's typically where we see this power eroded, is at the expense of or in deference to the executive branch, to the President of the United States.
00:21:36.000But here, it's to an international treaty, an international body, a group of other nations.
00:21:43.000Now, look, even a plain reading of the text of the NATO treaty makes clear that under Article 5, the United States agrees to nothing specific.
00:21:55.000It certainly doesn't have an ironclad agreement to go into a full-blown war or to do anything more than, quote, take such action it deems necessary, close quote, to help an ally under attack.
00:22:11.000And so this is hardly tantamount to an unqualified agreement to go to war.
00:22:21.000In another tweet, Charlie, I referred to the fact that Article 11 of the NATO Treaty adds to this by saying that the treaty should be ratified and its provisions carried out by the parties in accordance with their respective constitutional processes.
00:22:37.000This completely refutes the underlying assertion that they were making.
00:22:47.000I mean, the obvious, sorry to interject, Senator, the obvious kind of initial reaction I have is we have an experience about 100 years ago, 105 years ago of World War I starting because of a chain reaction of kind of interlocked alliances.
00:23:02.000And I'm afraid that NATO Article 5 could stumble us into an all-out kinetic war against Russia, which then does beg the question, Senator, aren't we technically at war against Russia?
00:23:37.000It doesn't mean that those, what we are doing isn't serious, because it is serious.
00:23:43.000Doesn't mean that what we're doing uh doesn't carry substantial risk.
00:23:48.000That scares me to death, so much so that it's uh caused me to uh publicly express, and and and vote reflecting those concerns, uh my, my reluctance to do this.
00:24:00.000But there is a difference at this point between us providing weapons, uh material training, money and so forth, but it becomes a difference by degree What these guys are trying to do, and it's far too close to comfort for me.
00:24:16.000I'm not comfortable with where we are and have indicated that publicly and have voted accordingly.
00:24:20.000I'm not comfortable with where we are.
00:24:22.000What I'm saying is these guys want to take us, they want to close the loop, Charlie.
00:24:26.000They want to take us to the next step where we would be at war the second Russia does anything with regard to any NATO ally, anything that they can characterize as a war, because they're characterizing Article 5 as Article 5 not only allows but compels us to go to war the second that happens.
00:24:48.000And so there are two huge problems with that.
00:25:08.000Remember that the constitutional process for adopting an amendment requires two-thirds supermajority vote from both houses of Congress, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the states.
00:25:20.000You can ratify a treaty just by two-thirds supermajority in the Senate, and that's all.
00:25:26.000You can't allow that to modify the Constitution, and we have never purported to do so.
00:25:32.000But ultimately, what you saw yesterday didn't even have to do with the misunderstanding of the plain language of the NATO Treaty.
00:25:38.000No, it had everything to do with protecting the interests of Ukraine and of our European allies, doing so with reckless disregard to our own interests.
00:25:49.000And the Department of Defense even had the audacity to publicly officially oppose the Rand Paul Amendment because they said it could, quote, send an inappropriate signal to NATO allies and potential adversaries.
00:26:08.000Our own Pentagon seems to be more concerned about the interests of Berlin and Paris and London than upholding the laws that these leaders swore to defend.
00:26:20.000And I think every American ought to be very concerned about this.
00:26:24.000So, Senator, I want to ask, where is all this money going?
00:26:58.000There are some fig leafs in that direction, but I don't think we have adequate visibility into what they're doing to be able to assess that.
00:27:06.000And in any event, when you're dealing with sums that large, you know, between $120 and $200 billion, or whatever sum it actually is, the sum keeps changing in part because our Department of Defense and others have acknowledged that they made some accounting mistakes that dramatically inflated, dramatically escalated the amount of aid that we gave them.
00:27:35.000And it's just yet another indication by the fact that we don't know what's going there.
00:27:40.000Even if there weren't other problems, even if we had full visibility, which we don't, the mere fact that it's half a world away and that we're dealing with sums this large, and that we're dealing with a country that, let's just say, to put it really mildly, doesn't have the best anti-corruption record on the planet.
00:28:07.000And so to kind of put a cap on this, Senator, you're one of the few voices that is speaking out against this, Senator JD Vance's, Senator Josh Hawley, Senator Rand Paul.
00:28:17.000So there's a growing chorus of you that are asking the critical questions.
00:28:22.000But amongst your colleagues, Senator, can you fill us in into what success looks like here?
00:28:27.000I mean, this feels as if we're about to get into another quagmire of decades of proportion of trillions of dollars spent.
00:28:36.000What do your colleagues say in the hallway in private as to what a, let's just say, a reasonable level of success would be here in our involvement in eastern Ukraine?
00:28:47.000Okay, most of them don't talk about it.
00:28:50.000Most of them say to speak only in generalities, those who support this effort by saying, hey, we're weakening Russia.
00:28:56.000This is good for us because it's wearing down Russia.
00:29:00.000And we got to make sure we don't send the wrong signal to Russia.
00:29:03.000But they don't often articulate what it is that they think that looks like that's reasonably possible.
00:29:10.000For a long time, many of my colleagues have said that, you know, what could happen is that after we wear down Russia long enough, Putin gets tired of it, he gets weary, and he decides to accept some sort of cessation of hostilities in which he walks away and maybe there's some form of more formal recognition of Russia's position,
00:29:37.000say, in Crimea and Crimea, in order for Russia to walk away from the Donbass.
00:29:43.000I bet they've been talking about that sort of thing for over a year, and it hasn't materialized.
00:29:51.000And that's one of the reasons why not a lot of talk about specific details as to how this ends.
00:29:56.000Look, their best case scenario still is kind of abstract.
00:30:00.000Our worst case scenario, or even just the reasonably likely scenario, is potentially horrific.
00:30:08.000Because you just, when dealing with a foreign advertising, this is why I have concerns about even doing what we're doing without taking the additional steps of formally going to war.
00:30:17.000Every step we take in this direction are steps in the direction of a nuclear-armed geopolitical adversary.
00:30:26.000It doesn't mean that their military top to bottom is as good as ours, but their nuclear weapons program is in many ways second to none.
00:30:38.000Some would argue that it is more capable of even more destruction than ours, in part because of personnel and part because of equipment and the cultures of our respective governments.
00:30:54.000But regardless, any way you look at it, whenever you're getting into a fight of one sort or another, whenever you're moving in the direction of something that could easily turn to war with a nuclear-armed adversary, you've got to tread cautiously.
00:31:11.000And we're not showing any caution at all.
00:31:14.000We're acting with reckless disregard for the safety of Americans and ignoring the fact that this isn't, not every war is our war.
00:31:26.000It's as though they want to lead us into a land war in Europe by blatantly ignoring the Constitution, elevating the NATO treaty to do something that it doesn't do and doesn't say, contrary to what it says, in fact, let alone the Constitution, and putting American blood and pressure on the line despite decades of European indifference toward prioritizing their own security.
00:31:48.000So, in many respects, one could argue what we're doing, what we've been doing, is subsidizing Western European socialism because we provide so many needs.
00:32:09.000Thank you for your clarity on this topic.
00:32:11.000For your colleagues that think you are going to outlast Russians, Russians are good at a couple things: chugging vodka, writing long, depressing novels, and suffering for long periods of time in military environments.
00:32:24.000I wouldn't want to fight a long war against Russia.
00:32:31.000So it's well known that the Democrats are the party of sexual anarchy, and they really are the party of outright pornography.
00:32:37.000Whether it be the trans individual that was stripping on the White House lawn, whether it be supporting the perverts that dance nakedly in front of children, and they call that pride parades, whether it be the widespread proliferation and acceptance of quote-unquote sex work as real work, AOC, Rashida Talib, Corey Bush, they would keep on tweeting sex work is real work or the decriminalization of prostitution.
00:33:05.000The Democrat Party is the pro-pornography party.
00:33:11.000So Marjorie Taylor Greene really broke the system yesterday in a brilliant way.
00:33:17.000So Marjorie Taylor Greene holds up a picture in the hearing of pictures from the Hunter Biden laptop, blacked out, mind you, showing all of the sex acts that Hunter Biden engaged in.
00:33:30.000And of course, they are profane, but it goes to show these are real things.
00:33:34.000And by the way, it ties together with what Hunter Biden used as legitimate tax deductions, not legitimate, illegitimate tax deductions on his IRS tax returns.
00:34:09.000Marjorie Taylor Greene's just holding them up.
00:34:14.000Now, it says, it's so rich to me to see the American Democrat Party and the regime media get angry about somebody showing grotesque images in public.
00:34:30.000Whether it be the Hollywood films, the textbooks that they put forward, and Marjorie Taylor Green should know the only acceptable place to put pornography is in an eight-year-old's book.
00:34:42.000That's where pornography belongs, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:34:45.000How dare you show pornography at an adult congressional hearing where no children are around?