In this episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, host Charlie Kirk is joined by special guest Erica and Blake as they discuss the latest in Venezuela, Iran, and much, much more! The show is sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver company, and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
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.
00:01:09.000Welcome back for hour two of the Charlie Kirk show.
00:01:12.000So the top talent of this operation is off at Ole Miss.
00:01:15.000We've got Erica out there, but we've got our talented team of Zoomers here and also me.
00:01:21.000And so we wanted to bring back a segment that was a lot of fun last summer, and I think a lot of people liked it.
00:01:26.000Last summer, we had the conflict, you know, the temporary war with Iran.
00:01:30.000And so we sort of did a segment where we had one of our Gen Z members, Daisy, ask me questions about Iran.
00:01:49.000We're going to do a Q ā A. And if you are in Gen Z and watching, you should also send in questions to Freedom at Charlie Kirk that you would like them to ask.
00:01:55.000And we can do those in the second segment.
00:01:57.000Yes, I told Blake I always love doing this segment because I don't have to prepare because these are actual questions that I have about actual things that I don't understand.
00:02:09.000So when we did the segment about Iran, I had questions because I didn't understand what's happening, but I still knew that there's always been some sort of conflict we've had in the Middle East.
00:02:20.000This conflict with Venezuela seems to be coming out of nowhere, at least from my perspective.
00:02:25.000I don't really remember hearing much about Venezuela being in the news.
00:02:28.000I don't remember hearing much about us being in conflict with Venezuela.
00:02:31.000So I don't know if, are they at war and with who?
00:02:42.000There are signs we are moving in that direction that the administration says it's not for that purpose, but just for context, we've sent a carrier group to the Caribbean.
00:03:55.000He was a sort of presidential dictator of Venezuela.
00:03:59.000I say presidential because he did win an election, but he was very authoritarian.
00:04:03.000And then he sort of converted to being a strongman.
00:04:06.000In a lot of ways, he actually, he was a colorful figure.
00:04:11.000He had a radio show and he'd just ramble for three to four hours at a time, which is a funny thing for a president to do.
00:04:17.000But he was this like left-wing Marxist.
00:04:19.000So he did a lot of very bad stuff to the Venezuelan economy.
00:04:24.000Venezuela has more oil than any other country on earth.
00:04:27.000They have more oil than America, more than Russia, more than Saudi Arabia, more than any of them.
00:04:33.000And yet, Venezuela is one of the poorest countries in the world because communism and Marxism are that dumb and he messed up the economy that bad that they can't properly produce oil.
00:04:44.000They can't properly run their economy.
00:04:47.000And as a result, a lot of people have left Venezuela.
00:04:50.000A ton of Venezuelans, especially their middle class, fled, a lot of them to the U.S. So it's kind of like an updated version of the Cuba issue.
00:04:58.000Castro took over Cuba, a ton of Cubans moved to Florida, and we have these kind of conservative Cubans who always have, you know, are interested in the Cuban regime.
00:05:08.000Now we also have a lot of Venezuelans, and there also a lot of them live in Florida.
00:05:12.000And so a lot of those want to see, frankly, they want to see regime change in Venezuela.
00:05:17.000They want to see the government switch to someone else.
00:05:20.000And it's just been this nagging soar in U.S. foreign policy, mostly because it's a country in our own backyard.
00:05:55.000The most important thing, of course, is this doesn't have anything to do with, you know, it doesn't have anything to do with containing like China or Russia.
00:06:01.000It doesn't have anything to do with fighting Islamic extremism.
00:06:06.000I shouldn't say it has nothing to do with China because Venezuela has aligned with these countries that are hostile to us mostly because they just don't like us.
00:06:14.000They're like, we're going to join the other team of countries that don't like America.
00:06:18.000But the biggest factor with it is primarily just that they're a pretty radically left-wing anti-American government that is only a few hundred miles away from the U.S. And they have persistently been problematic.
00:06:34.000They've had some fraudulent elections.
00:06:36.000So they still tend to have elections, but they're highly disputed results.
00:06:40.000And so I believe in 2024, most recently, they had a pretty rigged election where the opposition wasn't allowed to seriously compete.
00:06:48.000The announced numbers were not considered very credible.
00:06:51.000And the dissident wing of Venezuelan politics has been very pro-Trump as a result.
00:06:58.000You may have heard the Nobel Peace Prize that Trump wanted to win.
00:07:01.000It instead went to a Venezuelan political dissident who in turn dedicated her Nobel Peace Prize win to Donald Trump.
00:07:09.000So who is currently in charge of Venezuela?
00:07:47.000We had a very funny clip the other day where he's saying, no war, war bad.
00:07:51.000He says he doesn't want conflict with us, but he is still a guy who has clung to power through illegitimate elections, who is running this incredibly bad regime.
00:08:06.000They're not mass murdering thousands of people, but they've definitely been authoritarian with dissidents in their country.
00:08:12.000They have had rigged elections, and they've totally ruined their country.
00:08:15.000That's the saddest thing is Venezuela should be, has essentially free money buried underneath it in the form of oil, and yet they remain a poor country because that is how bad left-wing economics is.
00:09:14.000Because in my friend group circles, we're not really discussing Venezuela, which is different because when October 7th, Israel Hamas, like that has been a huge topic of conversation, as well as Iran, huge topic of conversation just amongst very apolitical people.
00:09:31.000Are your friends discussing or worried about Venezuela at all?
00:09:36.000The only thing that we had talked about with Venezuela ever is bombing the drugs coming in from Venezuela on the boats, as we've seen in those videos that Trump has posted on social media.
00:09:46.000That's really all that I've ever talked about with my friend group about.
00:09:56.000So my thought has long been I worry about it just because if you bomb the wrong boat once of innocent people, that's atrocious and that's very bad.
00:10:05.000But if they have the ability to be very highly certain on this, I have no problem blowing up drug dealers.
00:10:10.000Yeah, I'm all for blowing up drug dealers that are trying to kill thousands of people.
00:10:14.000As we have established, I have a highly unmillennial view towards capital punishment generally.
00:10:20.000So I should not be taken as a representative elder on that front.
00:10:23.000But I can kind of, to reframe this, it's sounding more similar to like any sort of conflict we've had with Mexico.
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00:11:24.000So I'll give the last word to Charlie.
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00:11:40.000Tell them about the text messages you see.
00:11:42.000I'm getting text messages from my friends that are watching right now, and they're all saying how much they support blowing up all the drug dealers.
00:11:49.000They want us to go further and start blowing up the cartels in Mexico, which I would also support, but as Blake was saying, we'd need to have some intelligence.
00:11:57.000It's not good if you blow up innocent people.
00:11:59.000It is very good if you blow up evil, the guilty, though.
00:12:01.000We would have to do a whole other no-dumb segments, no-dumb question segments on that then, if we, if we're considering it.
00:12:29.000I, because I run in a very conservative bubble, I have seen all of Caroline Levitts, everything we've talked about that Trump is building this beautiful ballroom that can't wait to see.
00:12:43.000But why, I mean, there have been arguments that this is unconstitutional.
00:12:48.000There have been arguments that he's not allowed to do this, that this is desecrating American property.
00:12:53.000Why are people so upset and what is happening?
00:12:55.000This might be that you're a younger person, Daisy, but those of us who are older, we know that the East Wing is the heart of America.
00:13:21.000And as America got bigger and the president's staff got larger, the White House was not really big enough to house everything that you needed to do with the White House.
00:13:30.000So they added wings to it, hence why they're called East and West Wing.
00:13:34.000Now, contrary to what you think, I think a lot of people in their heads, they think the East Wing of the White House means like the eastern half of the White House.
00:13:41.000And there were photos going by viral when they were knocking it down.
00:13:44.000And I think people thought they'd literally clawed off the side of the White House.
00:16:01.000But it's going to be able to house 600 people.
00:16:04.000And the problem he's solving is up to this point, if we wanted to do a state dinner at the White House with a lot of people at it, you had to put up tents on the White House lawn.
00:16:26.000And people are freaking out because they freak out about everything.
00:16:28.000So there are no actual legal issues or ramifications for this.
00:16:32.000Well, they'll probably find some district court judge who's going to say that it was illegal, but they find district court judges who say everything's illegal.
00:18:49.000It's a pleasure, sir, because of so many reasons, but namely because of how much Charlie loved and adored and respected you, both in your role at the college, but just as a personal friend of his.
00:19:01.000And I know that that was a bond you both shared, and you loved each other and you supported each other.
00:19:05.000And so it's an honor to have you here.
00:20:41.000And I will say that, and Blake can attest, one of the speeches from the memorial that has been most oft quoted to me or referenced as this moment, of the powerful moment that helped encapsulate the memorial at State Farm Stadium was your speech.
00:24:39.000He always spoke well of Hillsdale as the best college in America.
00:24:41.000And it's because you're probably one of the only college heads in America who could give an answer to that about why a university, why a college education would matter, why, you know, what the goal of it should be beyond just sending a bunch of money to a college bureaucrat or getting some credential.
00:25:00.000And it's the ability to actually answer that question.
00:25:03.000Why are you bothering to learn any of these things in the first place?
00:25:06.000Why does it actually matter that you read these books or understand these things?
00:25:10.000And that's, you know, I think I imagine that's why we're going to continue touting Hillsdale going forward is because there aren't many schools that do that.
00:25:18.000And our goal still remains to make more schools like that.
00:25:21.000And that's what Charlie would care about.
00:25:23.000He didn't just want to burn down higher education because it, you know, caused him a tiff.
00:25:28.000He wanted it to be something more worthy of the people who attended.
00:25:31.000This is a really good point that you're making because often Charlie would be accused of being anti-intellectual or anti-education.
00:25:40.000Charlie was the most pro-education person I have ever met.
00:25:44.000He was the most pro-intellectual person I have ever met.
00:25:48.000And he loved being connected to you, Dr. Arne.
00:25:52.000He loved being connected to Hillsdale because he believed that you were doing it the right way.
00:26:00.000Well, he, you know, he called me once before he published that book and said, I'm going to publish a book telling kids not to go to college, but I'm exempting Hillsdale.
00:27:35.000But I, you know, mostly the most important thing, you know, from my point of view, Charlie was a student who succeeded in making himself knowledgeable of the best things to know and living in light of them.
00:27:53.000And he was an encouragement to why young, especially young men who are lost these days, right?
00:28:31.000They got up a letter-writing campaign.
00:28:34.000You know, we have a, I don't know if Erica showed you, but we have a whole basic warehouse filled with these beautiful presents and letters that have come in from all over the country and people have dropped them off.
00:28:48.000And the outpouring of love and support.
00:28:51.000I mean, we make much of some of the negativity, some of the really vile behavior that we've seen because it deserves to be taboo.
00:31:34.000There's a little piece, a little taste.
00:31:36.000I mean, you guys had these conversations.
00:31:37.000I mean, you had so many of these conversations.
00:31:39.000We could have picked any number of clips, but I just think it's powerful to see you and Charlie just interacting.
00:31:45.000It just, this is a cat, like the comfort, the casualness of it, the ability you guys had to riff off one another was you were singing from the same hymnal.
00:32:27.000You know, the crisis in America is a crisis of principle and thought, which has given rise to a distortion in our institutions in America.
00:32:37.000The Constitution's not working right, right?
00:32:40.000Charlie, you know, to the extent that he helped get Donald Trump elected, and that is some considerable extent, it's fundamentally important that now it's been shown that you can dismiss a civil servant.
00:32:54.000And that's, you know, who would have thought it, you know?
00:32:57.000Well, Charlie had to do with that, right?
00:32:59.000But he understood the arguments behind that.
00:33:03.000He, he, you know, I mean, first of all, politics, you know, politics is like a bad word, right?
00:33:09.000Politics is the method by which a free people govern themselves.
00:33:17.000And so we've built this state that is not responsive.
00:33:24.000You know, in the scholarship on the administrative state, there's an argument how many rulemaking how many rulemaking bodies in America there are.
00:34:31.000But Charlie would want us to get every ounce of enthusiasm and love that has been poured out after his death and make use of it and turn it to good.
00:37:03.000Date the modern world from that because politics changes after Jesus is born because he's everyone's savior and he doesn't set up a government.
00:37:15.000And so you have to have freedom of religion.
00:37:17.000And you still have to have all the things that countries do now devoted to freedom.
00:37:22.000The name on the t-shirt, the day Charlie was shot.