00:00:00.000Hey, everybody, Tana Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:02.000Jack Pesobic and Darren Beattie join us to talk about the balloon, Ron DeSantis, and will the United States lose its position as the world reserve currency?
00:00:12.000Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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00:01:34.000Yeah, thanks for having me on, Clark Kent.
00:01:36.000And I just really wanted to, well, just follow up on what you're saying, but I couldn't agree more about how that is something that's a struggle, right?
00:01:44.000When you're looking at suffering in the world or, you know, like children who get terminal diseases and things like this.
00:01:49.000I mean, I go back to the book of Job a lot to get that understanding of why God allows suffering in the world.
00:01:56.000And it is one of the hardest parts of faith, 100%.
00:01:58.000When it comes to this balloon, this platform from China, that what I'm hearing on this situation is that it's very interesting that, you know, of course, China wouldn't do something like this out of the blue, that this actually was the culmination of an escalatory trend that the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese Intelligence Services, Chinese Military Working Conjunction have conducted to the United States for years.
00:02:26.000At some points, this included small platforms, drones in places like our naval facilities on the coast, on other military facilities on other coasts.
00:02:37.000Did it occur during the Trump administration?
00:02:39.000That's obviously been this huge pushback from the Biden administration to say that this type of probing did occur.
00:02:46.000Now, obviously, we all know, by the way, that nothing like this specific event occurred during the Trump administration.
00:02:51.000We would know Alexander Vinman would have been there to save America by telling us and blowing the whistle.
00:02:57.000But I don't think that Americans in this day and age of social media would have missed a giant balloon or a zeppelin, which is basically what this is, the size of three school buses flying overhead and flying over our nuclear facilities.
00:03:09.000No, obviously this didn't happen while President Trump was in office.
00:03:13.000But were there smaller nibbles, escalatory events that occurred that at some point, because I don't think this is telling the narrative that actually, again, they're talking to Bloomberg, they're talking to Fox News about this.
00:03:24.000There's intelligent, no, unnamed intelligence officials reporting that apparently things like this may have happened during the Trump administration.
00:03:31.000But apparently, the Trump administration and the civilian leaders like the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the DNI, and the president himself were not informed that these events were taking place.
00:03:45.000And if you go back to who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at this point, none other than General Milley, the very same General Milley, who informed the world, apparently that on His own recognizance that he decided to take it upon himself to conduct U.S. foreign policy and U.S. domestic policy,
00:04:03.000not the duly elected president of the United States, the commander-in-chief, his own commander-in-chief, the constitutional authority, by telling the Chinese Communist Party when and if the United States was going to be conducting military action in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait.
00:04:18.000And apparently, it's the same individual, General Milley, who didn't want to brief the White House, didn't want the president knowing that these Chinese spy operations were going on because he rightfully, by the way, predicted that President Trump probably would have ordered them to be blown out of the sky, as we obviously should have from day one, not on day 10.
00:04:41.000But what is the CCP's calculation here?
00:04:49.000But was this just kind of an act of defiance?
00:04:52.000Not even defiance, but just kind of a reminder that they're in charge.
00:04:55.000I mean, what is the CCP's motive, a giant troll operation?
00:05:01.000Because they knew it was going to be discovered.
00:05:03.000Well, Charlie, I think there's two things going on here.
00:05:06.000Number one, obviously, from their perspective, is they want to know what's going on with our nuclear facilities.
00:05:12.000They want to conduct collection, signals collection when it comes to the types of codes that we're using, the encrypted codes that we're using for communications around these facilities.
00:05:22.000They could be using a number, by the way, of scientific sensors, not for the cloud cover, but potentially, obviously, these are our underground facilities.
00:05:29.000So they could have been using LIDAR or other sensors to look into these at a lower level, where a low and slow, persistent collection platform would be much easier and gain much greater fidelity for those collection operations rather than a high-flying satellite that may only have a very low, very low window as it's flying over in high Earth orbit.
00:05:52.000But there's also exercises that were held, actually exercises that included defense of the Pacific from Nellis Air Base that were just about one week prior to this.
00:06:02.000So we can be looking at it from a timing perspective that they're collecting on our exercises the way that, of course, they always collect on our exercises, but not within the continental United States.
00:06:10.000So I think we really need to look at this as a series of escalations that's been going on for years that our government has not only been gaslighting us about, but apparently they were gaslighting the previous administration about as well.
00:06:22.000And General Milley needs to absolutely be subpoenaed by this new Congress.
00:06:27.000We need all of them to be subpoenaed to understand exactly what's going on with these operations because now the Chinese have been given a free hand and it's spilled over to the point where now Americans are asking, are the Chinese spying on our cell phone calls?
00:06:44.000Are they sucking up all the signals that we produce on a regular basis as it's given complete impunity to fly over the United States?
00:06:51.000And I saw people say, oh, well, it's being jammed.
00:06:53.000Well, it certainly wasn't jammed the entire time.
00:06:55.000If that thing's got burst transmission on it, which I'm sure it does, it was obviously sending back burst signals and downloaded signals to their collection platform back home.
00:07:06.000And the fact that we allowed it, Charlie, I think it really speaks to the overall emasculation of the United States, not only as a country, but specifically for our military.
00:07:16.000There was a time under the Trump administration or in the Cold War where something like this would have been shot down immediately and we wouldn't have had to wait for local press or local folks on Twitter just to be posting about it.
00:07:29.000I think we would have shot it down and then we would have asked them what was going on.
00:07:33.000Yeah, I mean, it's just such an insult to all of us.
00:07:35.000I, as a layman, someone who's not been in the military, I look at this and it just doesn't make any sense to me at all.
00:07:41.000And I feel as if the regime doesn't care to explain or elaborate.
00:07:46.000What's the explanation, Jack, that they've given that we allowed them to complete their tour of the United States and then shoot it out over water?
00:07:54.000They were that worried about debris hurting somebody?
00:07:57.000Well, Charlie, yeah, they're saying, oh, we can reduce the risk to zero, but I mean, there's massive swaths of Alaska, the Yukon wilderness that this flew over in Western Canada, Montana itself, the Aleutian Islands, where it easily could have been shot down prior to all of this.
00:08:11.000We're told they were tracking it for something like 10 days.
00:08:13.000But we know that Blinken had his trip coming up, and that's why they didn't want to upset the emperor.
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00:10:18.000I want to play a piece of tape here, Jack, and get your reaction.
00:10:22.000This is Senator Tom Cotton talking about how, hey, if you're fired up about the balloon, wait till I tell you about TikTok, play cut two.
00:10:31.000Well, China has been waging a cold war against the United States for decades.
00:10:35.000And unfortunately, not many of our leaders have acknowledged that.
00:10:38.000They want to deny that it's happening.
00:10:40.000But when a nation like China is waging a cold war against us, the only choice is whether to win or to lose.
00:10:45.000I think this spy balloon that so vividly went across America is a very high-profile reminder to Americans about what the Chinese communists have been up to.
00:10:57.000Because I got to tell your viewers, if they're worried about a spy balloon flying across Middle America, let me tell them about the TikTok app that they may have on their phone, what it means for their security and their privacy and that of their children as well.
00:11:10.000Yeah, and not to mention TikTok is turning kids trans.
00:11:13.000Jack, we're already in a Cold War, if not an increasingly hot war with the CCP.
00:11:22.000Middle America knows the threat that the CCP poses, but our athletic elite, our academic elite, our financial elite, our technological elite, and our political elite, they want to grow warmer and closer with China.
00:11:51.000Americans detest losing, as a certain general once told us.
00:11:55.000They can detest, they can detect strength.
00:11:58.000They can sense when someone is strong.
00:11:59.000They can sense when we're getting weaker.
00:12:01.000They can sense when we're in a country where it seems like basic things that we all used to take for granted, like supply chains or trains running on time or buildings that wouldn't collapse, airports malfunctioning, airlines malfunctioning all the time seem to be in the headlines every single day.
00:12:18.000Basic things that we used to just take for granted as matters of routine are all seemingly falling apart because we're living through the collapse of complex systems.
00:12:27.000Meanwhile, we see countries like the People's Republic of China.
00:12:30.000We see others that are completely on the rise.
00:12:33.000And they're beginning not only to dominate us from, they're certainly challenging us economically around the world.
00:12:38.000They're challenging us when it comes to the international financial system.
00:12:41.000They're setting up one belt, one road around the world.
00:12:43.000They're building now shipyards and ports in the Caribbean.
00:12:48.000They're building a port at Tierra del Fuego down at the southern tip of South America.
00:12:52.000So they're going to be having naval ports within the Atlantic Ocean.
00:12:56.000And I certainly hope that that's something that helps Americans wake up to this.
00:13:00.000But then also to fly a low and slow, low and slow spy platform, this skyship across the United States in such a dramatic fashion.
00:13:12.000It reminds me of when Teddy Roosevelt flew the, or sailed, I should say, the great white fleet around the world to say that America has arrived as a global power.
00:13:21.000China sending this across the United States.
00:13:40.000We are now above you in the hierarchy.
00:13:43.000The very same people that gave us the virus that was never held accountable, that's putting fentanyl into our country and killing our children.
00:13:50.000They're now doing the CCP Goodyear blint equivalent.
00:13:56.000I mean, Charlie, we're going to have the Super Bowl this weekend.
00:13:59.000When the blimp flies over, we know that it's meant for the people to see it.
00:14:04.000When this blimp from the Chinese Communist Party flew over, it was meant for people to see it as well.
00:14:08.000And I think they're sending a message.
00:14:10.000I think they're sending a very clear message.
00:14:12.000And I certainly hope that American leaders would take this much more seriously.
00:14:16.000And instead of simply kowtowing and going into this monetary pipeline that they've built going back to the 1990s, and we described this on Human Events Daily when we did the China files, that there was sort of this deal made with the Chinese Communist Party between our elites following the events of Tiananmen Square, particularly, where they would become the manufacturing hub for the world.
00:14:37.000And the West would allow Western capital and Western IP intellectual property to be sent there with the hopes of increasing the manufacturing.
00:14:47.000Of course, all our jobs go over there.
00:14:51.000And then we, you know, the elites gain the profit.
00:14:53.000The elites are the ones who benefit from all of this.
00:14:56.000We gut the middle America, we got the Midwest, we got the South, and the steel belt becomes the Rust Belt in the midst of all of this.
00:15:03.000It's done by policy because there are people making billions of dollars over this.
00:15:06.000But along the way, China decided, wait a minute, what if we don't want to be the junior partner anymore?
00:15:11.000But maybe we want to be the senior partner.
00:15:12.000And we used to have a president that talked about how all of these industries that we were shipping overseas were actually a national security concern.
00:15:20.000And we didn't take it seriously until all of a sudden a virus comes again from the same country.
00:15:24.000And we realize that we are relying on that.
00:15:26.000It's just, it's so illuminating where we have leaders that get so fired up because Ukraine gets invaded and yet our own borders get violated by our greatest enemy, the CCP.
00:15:38.000And it's just kind of passively addressed.
00:15:40.000Like, oh, yeah, you know, Zelensky's our priority.
00:15:42.000Hey, if that balloon got too close to Kyiv, they would have shot it down.
00:15:46.000Maybe that's why they shot it down once more in the Atlantic.
00:15:53.000What have you done to preserve your family's legacy?
00:15:56.000It's one of the most important things you can do.
00:15:57.000Well, think of all the time and money that went into cataloging and remembering your wedding, your high school or college graduation, your sports memories, your vacations.
00:17:32.000Well, I think it's important to note what's at stake in a piece like this because it gets somewhat academic.
00:17:41.000And, you know, it's written by a very, very high-level and extremely intelligent economist who, again, given the political pressures in our clown world dystopia is not able to write under his own name, which is a shame because this is a piece that's more sophisticated than anything you'll find in The Economist.
00:18:01.000It's an excellent analysis on an important topic written by an expert who can't publish on his name and something that should be entirely uncontroversial.
00:18:12.000So, you know, I think what it does, other than sort of the economic argument and sort of geopolitical argument, it addresses a psychological tendency on the right that I'm a victim of.
00:18:29.000And I think, you know, a lot of people who have common sense and a sense of internal sense of justice have, which is that we see the obvious decline, precipitous decline in standards of living in our country.
00:18:47.000We see the demotion from first world country to what in many cases can look like a third world status.
00:19:44.000And the thing is, is that type of inference is not as sound as we would think or maybe we would like, because for better or worse, the factors that are involved in the standard of living issues that I described are much further removed from the factors that are essentially pertinent to maintaining America's position as a geopolitical superpower.
00:20:12.000And I think this is especially so when it comes to the question of whether America can or will maintain, the dollar will maintain a global reserve status indefinitely, meaning that basically dollars is what people, you know, third parties, you know, other countries will use in a lot of transactions.
00:20:32.000They'll sit on dollars as basically a safe currency when times are in trouble.
00:20:38.000And the reason they do that, there are a couple of reasons, but the principal reason is as bad as our system is, it still kind of functions better than the alternative systems.
00:20:52.000No, I think that's interesting, just to kind of recenter it for our audience.
00:20:55.000So what you're saying, though, is that there is not an inevitable transition that will happen from the United States dollar being the world reserve currency to the one.
00:21:34.000One is it's actually counter, it's not a good thing to be the world's reserve currency if you're a manufacturing and export-based economy, because you basically want your currency to be weaker.
00:21:49.000That gets into the whole like currency thing, why Trump kept complaining that China was debasing its currency and screwing us over in trade.
00:21:59.000Because Trump is, you know, his mindset is always oriented by, well, what makes America great would be having a strong manufacturing base, a strong industrial base, export-based economy, which is not quite the reality in the United States anymore, unfortunately.
00:22:17.000And so, and there are a lot of very powerful domestic industries that rely on imports that would not want to let go of the dollar status for analogous and reciprocal reasons.
00:22:32.000So in China, they don't want the burden of the reserve currency for that reason.
00:22:38.000And in their behavior, I know you've talked about the Belt and Road Enterprise, which is a very important, really kind of historic move on the part of China to gain geopolitical influence in their broader region.
00:22:54.000And when they get leverage over these countries for construction projects and so forth, it's interesting.
00:23:02.000They never use that leverage in order to force other countries to pay debt in their own currency, which is interesting.
00:23:10.000If they were interested in building up the leverage of their currency, at the very least, it would be a no-brainer to say, okay, so-and-so country that we've basically debt-trapped, you have to use our currency now to pay us back the debt.
00:23:47.000So, the thing is, you can look at the problems of the United States, but you don't understand there's no other currency that even comes close.
00:23:54.000And historically, when you look at what it takes to actually replace one currency with another, we're nowhere near, we're nowhere near close to that either.
00:24:04.000There's another component of the analysis that's important, but again, it gets into the weeds, but it is actually an important point, maybe the most important point.
00:24:12.000Well, what you're saying, Darren, and I'm just trying to glean this, is that this actually is a good piece of good news.
00:24:19.000I say that hesitantly because everything is just so negative.
00:24:23.000The argument you're making is: look, we actually, the U.S. dollar is far more durable and resilient and has more staying power than some of the chattering class on CNBC might lead you to believe.
00:24:38.000And I think to the extent that we can extrapolate that from saying, you know, we can't infer from the collapse in standard of living that America's geopolitical superpower status will be lost.
00:24:50.000Generally, to the extent you can extrapolate that, that it's up for the audience to decide whether that's good news.
00:24:58.000And, you know, to decide whether it's good news, you have to decide: is America still a positive influence on the world?
00:25:04.000Like, is it a good thing that we maintain superpower because it's questionable whether we're using that influence for good or not?
00:25:14.000And there's also a question of whether it's a good thing for the average American worker that we maintain reserve currency status.
00:25:23.000There are several economists who are deeply America first who question whether we want to keep the reserve currency status precisely for the kind of manufacturing.
00:25:34.000Let me tell you why I think they're wrong.
00:25:36.000I think that property values estimate, just profit estimates on publicly traded securities, there's a 20 to 30 percent baked in markup that people are willing to put their liquidity into the U.S. homeland because we are the world's reserve currency.
00:25:53.000So I don't think it's a good thing for a teacher in Dayton, Ohio for the market to tank 20% because investors in Hong Kong and Dubai all of a sudden say, well, they're no longer the world's reserve currency.
00:26:17.000From a manufacturing side, you want to almost deteriorate your currency.
00:26:21.000But I think there's got to be some balance there, right?
00:26:23.000Because there's winners and losers in argument, but I think on the whole, it's good news from the standpoint of kind of the major stakeholders in American power.
00:26:39.000And, you know, but again, I think you see this everywhere on the right that there's this real inclination toward sort of apocalyptic fantasies because it appeals to people's inherent sense of justice.
00:26:51.000Like if things are So incompetent and ridiculous, they have to collapse, right?
00:26:56.000It's like it's very hard to process mentally that the connection between the factors that will remain, you know, contribute to the strong dollar in America's geopolitical status are actually quite far removed from the factors that are relevant to the standard of living and well-being of average Americans.
00:27:19.000What you're also saying, though, Darren, is with proper leadership and a regime that lists their citizens with a moral philosophical base, we could turn this thing around, is what you're also saying: is that this thing is waiting to be revitalized, is that regardless of the damage that is done by this current group of deep state sycophants, that with the right leadership and the right agenda, we actually can get back to some form of prosperity, which would be amazing.
00:27:47.000Darren, tell us about your piece with Ron DeSantis.
00:27:52.000Well, I'm very happy about this piece.
00:27:54.000And one of the subjects of the piece, the hero, shall we say, other than DeSantis himself, Chris Rufo, said it's the best analysis he's seen by far on the strategy behind some of the recent moves by the DeSantis administration.
00:28:10.000And specifically, this is about the takeover of this college in Florida that the left is absolutely apoplectic about.
00:28:19.000I was just looking at Twitter recently.
00:28:21.000They're going nuts about, in particular, the analysis that we just did at Revolver.news.
00:28:27.000And in a nutshell, I mean, we can get into the specifics of what they're doing, but I think the general approach is really important to understand because there's no law that says only DeSantis can be doing these things.
00:28:40.000In fact, we call out Tennessee, which has a Republican governor, they can and should and really must do something similar.
00:28:49.000And that is to understand these school boards, the members, they're appointed by a governor.
00:28:56.000They're fundamentally political positions.
00:28:58.000There's simply no excuse for any GOP governor not to treat all governor-appointed positions as political and use them as instruments to fight back against this national endemic of wokeness.
00:29:16.000And DeSantis has done this to great effect.
00:29:21.000It's a trial balloon to use that phrase of how it could be expanded throughout the education sector in Florida.
00:29:28.000Simply put, these college board positions are political.
00:29:32.000And he decided, God forbid, to appoint people who actually have a political orientation that is against indoctrinating students into anti-American woke nonsense and putting people that have a more pro-education, pro-America, really kind of pro-intellectual perspective.
00:29:55.000It's easy, it's simple, but only DeSantis is really doing it at the highest and most aggressive level.
00:30:03.000And I think it's time for other governors to follow suit and step up and just to pluck off this low-hanging fruit, which should be a no-brainer for any Republican governor.
00:30:13.000So tell me, Darren, why do you think other Republican governors have refused to do that?
00:30:20.000You know, to answer that question fully and adequately, I think we need to do it case by case.
00:30:26.000I suspect generally it's just that, you know, the type of standard Republican is just really profoundly uncreative.
00:30:36.000Like it's probably not even occurred to most of these people that you can simply, you know, use your, you know, use your authority as governor to totally recapture institutions in the way that DeSantis just did with this news college in Florida.
00:30:52.000I mean, it could, there are some other considerations like these type of appointments, I think, typically are reserved to like reward donors and things like this.
00:31:00.000But even that, it's like it's not mutually exclusive and it doesn't really explain why the governors have not fully availed themselves of these powers.
00:31:09.000And also, like, if you do that, that would actually be doing something meaningful.
00:31:13.000And therefore, you'll get attacked by the media.
00:31:16.000And unfortunately, a lot of these GOP governors are probably so weak and pathetic, they don't want any of the publicity that comes with that.
00:31:23.000I don't know, but I think they definitely need to be called out for it because the model is there.
00:31:29.000And it's simply a no-brainer in some of these states, including Tennessee.
00:31:34.000So, Darren, I want to ask you a question.
00:31:36.000I'm going to read a statement because you're very careful at Revolver.news on who you platform and who you think is acting in a heroic way.
00:32:00.000He said that the revelations about Ron DeSanctimonius doing far worse than other Republican governors, including that he's unapologetically shut down Florida and speeches.
00:32:08.000And he said that that's actually not this one.
00:32:11.000He did call him a rhino-globalist in a different one.
00:32:32.000I'm pro-Trump and I support Trump in 2024.
00:32:36.000But I mean, that doesn't mean that we can't acknowledge and celebrate this really kind of innovative and effective approach that Governor DeSantis has taken to governance in Florida.
00:33:08.000He can solidify his status as one of the greatest governors in recent American history and exercise, indulge his presidential ambitions later.
00:33:19.000I think now is the time for Trump in 2024, as far as presidential is concerned.
00:33:25.000But I don't think it's really productive or necessary.
00:33:29.000You know, people getting into this Trump versus DeSantis thing.