The Charlie Kirk Show - February 17, 2023


East Palestine to $13 UFOs—Why We Stopped Trusting 'The Experts' with Nick Sortor

Topics
Norfolk Southern waivers and town survival freedom
Hosted by
Charlie Kirk
Guests
Nick Sortor
Mentioned
Joe Biden Norfolk Southern Nick Sorter Mike DeWine Bashar Assad Alfred E. Newman Hillary Clinton Muammar Gaddafi Yuri Bezmenov Chris Miller Pete Buttigieg Pete Buddha Orwellian Andrew Saddam Gorka David Felt
The World's Longest Pregnant Pause with Steve Cortes and Col. Douglas MacGregor If Parents Won't Stop Perverts, Who Will? with Riley Gaines and Pedro Gonzalez

Episode Stats


Length

33 minutes

Words per minute

159.76

Word count

5,312

Sentence count

442

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

28

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A $13 hobby balloon was shot down by the U.S. military over Lake Huron, Ontario, Canada, on February 11th, 2019, and the story gets even more bizarre when you realize that the incident happened on the same day that a $400,000 Sidewinder missile was fired at an unidentified object.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk show, we shot down someone's balloon project that certainly doesn't build trust for our military.
00:00:08.000 Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast and hit subscribe in the upper right-hand corner.
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00:00:23.000 Support our program at charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:00:26.000 And as always, you can email me freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:29.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:30.000 Here we go.
00:00:31.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:33.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
00:00:35.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:00:38.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:00:41.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:00:42.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:00:43.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
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00:01:12.000 There was all this news over Super Bowl weekend of unidentified flying objects and balloons and spy reconnaissance aircraft that felt as if our country was under attack.
00:01:26.000 Felt as if that maybe the Chinese or the Russians are sending all this spy equipment and we might have to mobilize and get the National Guard and activate the nuclear arsenal.
00:01:38.000 There's just so many things happening simultaneously.
00:01:42.000 But new information shows exactly what our government did this last weekend.
00:01:48.000 If we are to believe this to be true, which it looks like it is true. 0.98
00:01:54.000 You see, there's a lot of threats out there: Chinese Communist Party, drones. 1.00
00:01:59.000 We got all sorts of different threats, but I don't think we have really thought deeply enough about the existential threat that hobby ballooners pose to Western society. 0.99
00:02:13.000 Look, I think we got it.
00:02:14.000 Look, the idea of deterrence is a very important one.
00:02:18.000 Have we really gamed out why we need to deter 14 and 15-year-olds from putting balloons in the sky?
00:02:29.000 It turns out that, according to all available information, Joe Biden and the federal government mobilized F-16 fighter jets to shoot down a hobby balloon.
00:02:49.000 That's right, a $13 hobby balloon was floating above Canada.
00:02:55.000 It turns out that in an act of desperation or trying to act like a machismo tough guy, Joe Biden mobilized the F-16s to shoot down a balloon that cost $13 from a group in Illinois.
00:03:16.000 And the name of their group is here somewhere.
00:03:18.000 It's the Northern Illinois Bottle Cap Balloon Brigade, the NIBBB.
00:03:27.000 They have now officially said that one of their balloons is missing in action.
00:03:34.000 Around the same time and same location, a U.S. Air Force jet downed an unidentified object using a $400,000 Sidewinder missile.
00:03:46.000 But no, the story gets better.
00:03:49.000 The story gets even better.
00:03:51.000 And by the way, this balloon brigade was inspired by the movie Up.
00:03:55.000 They got together, these great patriots and great citizens, and they said, We want to float a balloon in the sky and see what we can do.
00:04:03.000 And they measure it and they see how far it can go and how high it can go.
00:04:08.000 But no one is safe in Biden's America, including the hobby of ballooning.
00:04:13.000 You see, you can come across the southern border with fentanyl on your back. 0.80
00:04:17.000 You could flow into our country sex trafficking children.
00:04:20.000 You could bring any illegal guns, but you should not dare to have a hobby balloon floating above Lake Huron. 0.95
00:04:28.000 We will mobilize the military and make an example out of you.
00:04:33.000 Play Cut 108.
00:04:35.000 A hobby club in Illinois called the Northern Illinois Bottle Cap Balloon Brigade.
00:04:40.000 Yep, the balloon brigade says they're missing their balloon.
00:04:44.000 The last time the bottle cap balloon brigade saw their balloon, it was floating over Canada on February 11th, the same day Biden shot down a balloon over Canada.
00:04:53.000 Now, the Bottle Cap Balloon Brigade's balloon cost $12.
00:04:56.000 So Joe shot a $12 balloon with a half a million dollar missile.
00:05:00.000 All because Biden got some bad polling after taking a week to pop the Chinese spy balloon.
00:05:05.000 Oh, no, it gets better than that.
00:05:07.000 The first missile missed.
00:05:10.000 The military that we're told by all these people, it's the best military in the world.
00:05:14.000 We got this.
00:05:14.000 We can't even shoot down a balloon on the first attempt with a half a million dollar missile.
00:05:22.000 We had Chris Miller, who I really respect, like, oh, our military is better than ever.
00:05:25.000 No, it's not.
00:05:26.000 Stop fooling us, okay? 0.94
00:05:27.000 You guys are more worried about LGBTQ woke stuff. 0.96
00:05:32.000 Literally, the military announced yesterday: you get three weeks' paid leave to go have an abortion. 0.55
00:05:36.000 And here is a child school project equivalent of a $13 balloon that is a complete hobby of the Northern Illinois Balloon Brigade.
00:05:45.000 That's actually their name.
00:05:46.000 And you put up a picture of them.
00:05:48.000 They look like the sweetest people.
00:05:50.000 They just, they look so happy.
00:05:51.000 And Joe, you crushed their dreams.
00:05:53.000 And you didn't just crush their dreams.
00:05:55.000 It took a missile to do it.
00:05:58.000 What kind of, who is running our military?
00:06:00.000 You know, people come on, like, well, yeah, I really trust NORAD.
00:06:03.000 You shouldn't.
00:06:04.000 They can't differentiate a Chinese spy reconnaissance balloon from a school project.
00:06:11.000 You put the picture of these guys up.
00:06:13.000 They just wanted to fly a balloon.
00:06:16.000 That's all they wanted.
00:06:18.000 I mean, I mean, this actually, these poor folks from Northern Illinois, I know Northern Illinois well, great people.
00:06:25.000 They get together.
00:06:26.000 They have a great dream.
00:06:28.000 They have an ambition.
00:06:29.000 They have a vision that they can fly a balloon into the highest portions of the stratosphere, that they can see the world from above.
00:06:39.000 But no, no, no, no.
00:06:40.000 Joe Biden says not going to happen.
00:06:43.000 I mean, how are we supposed to trust the Pentagon in our war against Russia?
00:06:48.000 How are we supposed to trust our military in any of our conflicts?
00:06:52.000 And it missed on the first attempt.
00:06:56.000 That person's probably going to be promoted, obviously.
00:07:00.000 Now, some of you are emailing us, Charlie, this story doesn't seem right.
00:07:03.000 It seems it might be, you might be right, but it's just too good to pass up.
00:07:07.000 I'm going to be honest.
00:07:08.000 If there's even a small chance that this is true, this is worthy of us kind of marinating it in just a second and saying, hold on a second.
00:07:19.000 You're trying to tell me that a hobby club is getting treated by our military with the same sort of force and mobilization.
00:07:29.000 So there's a couple explanations.
00:07:30.000 And the first explanation, if this is true, our military is becoming a joke.
00:07:36.000 That's not to insult the amazing people that serve every day.
00:07:39.000 They're heroes.
00:07:40.000 They deserve our credit.
00:07:41.000 But this is a laughingstock.
00:07:43.000 It is.
00:07:44.000 If you can't, if you do, you're trying to tell me in a $1 trillion annual budget for our military, you can't tell the difference between a $13 balloon and a massive Chinese spy balloon, there should be widespread resignations.
00:08:00.000 This is humiliating beyond belief.
00:08:03.000 No one will resign.
00:08:04.000 No one resigned after Afghanistan. 0.62
00:08:06.000 No one resigns as our border remains wide open.
00:08:09.000 No one resigns when there's 107,000 drug overdoses every year.
00:08:12.000 No, you fail upward in Washington, D.C. There's no resignation.
00:08:16.000 You get promoted the more you mess up.
00:08:19.000 So someone's probably going to get a medal for this.
00:08:21.000 Ah, yes.
00:08:24.000 Let's have a medal ceremony to the brave fighter pilot over Lake Huron that saved us from the elementary balloon school project.
00:08:36.000 No wonder why there was nothing recovered.
00:08:38.000 Remember, they said, well, there's nothing recovered from the unidentified flying object over Lake Huron.
00:08:44.000 I found that to be really suspicious.
00:08:46.000 Like, of course, there's nothing.
00:08:48.000 You obliterated it.
00:08:49.000 There's nothing to recover.
00:08:53.000 It's a $13 balloon.
00:08:55.000 All of this because Joe Biden got some bad polling because he wants to act really tough. 0.64
00:09:00.000 Like, I'm tough on the Chinese. 1.00
00:09:02.000 I'm going to show you. 1.00
00:09:03.000 We're going to send in, we're going to send in the best fighters that we have.
00:09:08.000 I mean, honestly, this only makes me more cynical and more distrustful of our government institutions.
00:09:17.000 And this connects directly to Ohio.
00:09:19.000 Are we really supposed to trust our experts?
00:09:24.000 And no, we shouldn't.
00:09:25.000 They have not earned your trust.
00:09:27.000 They have not even had just like a little bit of apology.
00:09:30.000 Has anyone apologized, by the way, from the federal government?
00:09:34.000 Now, if Joe Biden wanted to turn this into a political win, he should invite the Northern Illinois Balloon Brigade to the White House and kind of make light of it.
00:09:42.000 That would actually turn it into a probably a political win.
00:09:44.000 He probably will if he gets good advice.
00:09:46.000 It'd be hilarious, right?
00:09:48.000 Like, hey, just want to make sure you know the homeland is safe from all people.
00:09:51.000 And these guys know how to make a great balloon. 0.96
00:09:53.000 That would kind of be turning into a kind of a PR win.
00:09:55.000 But that aside of kind of the propaganda spin tactics, this is humiliating.
00:10:00.000 And it would be hilarious if like Joe Biden launched a new balloon with them or something like that.
00:10:05.000 But that's just where my mind always goes from a marketing point.
00:10:08.000 We should make fun of it.
00:10:09.000 It's humiliating.
00:10:10.000 It's a joke.
00:10:11.000 People should resign. 0.96
00:10:12.000 But all things being equal, it makes me look at our government as a bunch of clowns that are more concerned with diversity experiments rather than actually doing their job. 0.87
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00:11:01.000 What is the goal of all this?
00:11:02.000 And some people say, Charlie, you shouldn't make fun of them shooting down the balloons.
00:11:05.000 I disagree, okay?
00:11:06.000 You got to have a little bit of levity at times.
00:11:08.000 And when you take two missiles that cost $500,000 each from an F-16 to shoot down a $13 balloon, yeah, you should be humiliated and you should be mocked because that's a joke.
00:11:17.000 But the goal is demoralization.
00:11:19.000 Demoralization is part of the steps to take over a country that Marxists have successfully been able to use for quite some time.
00:11:31.000 They want you to feel demoralized about your key institutions.
00:11:36.000 And quite honestly, some of that demoralization is warranted.
00:11:41.000 I don't believe that our southern border is being monitored.
00:11:44.000 3,000, 5,000 people come across the southern border every single day.
00:11:50.000 I do not believe that our leaders actually care about the American people.
00:11:54.000 I don't think that at all.
00:11:57.000 I don't think our military is prepared to fight and win a battle.
00:12:00.000 You know, we have some of the apologists for the military-industrial complex that come on the program, and they keep on saying, well, we have the best military in the world.
00:12:08.000 And I want to believe that, obviously, I love America.
00:12:12.000 I love this country, and I love the people that serve, but I'm going to need some evidence to show that our military is ready to win a war.
00:12:18.000 When was the last time we won a war? 0.88
00:12:20.000 Persian Gulf War would be the answer to that.
00:12:23.000 Okay, so not in my life then.
00:12:26.000 Iraq, we did not win the Iraq war.
00:12:29.000 We took over Iraq, we displaced Saddam, and then we pulled out NISIS took over. 0.88
00:12:33.000 Afghanistan, complete and total disaster. 0.85
00:12:35.000 Libya, yeah, we did a lot of good work there.
00:12:38.000 Thank you, Hillary Clinton.
00:12:40.000 Syria, proxy war, and Bashar al-Assad is actually more powerful today than he was five years ago.
00:12:48.000 And that was an awful civil war.
00:12:49.000 Never should have gotten involved in that.
00:12:52.000 Demoralization is the goal.
00:12:56.000 They want you to view every institution through a cynical lens, through rather be depressed, and just be depressed about where the country is and where we're headed.
00:13:06.000 There has been a non-stop flow of news that does make you feel very demoralized.
00:13:17.000 Trains that are being derailed.
00:13:19.000 You know, and then Alfred E. Newman, the chat GPT cyborg, the Department of Transportation Secretary, Pete Budajej, he goes on television and he's like, oh, yeah, look, there's a thousand train derailments every year.
00:13:32.000 Okay, pal, who's in charge?
00:13:35.000 Whose job would it be to fix that?
00:13:37.000 Did you get a $1 trillion infrastructure bill?
00:13:40.000 Yeah, you did.
00:13:41.000 Maybe you could talk about fixing that, but no, I mean, Budajej is an academic bureaucrat who has been programmed by the Silicon Valley elite to basically regurgitate precisely what will make powerful people more powerful.
00:13:55.000 That is Budajej's role in the world.
00:13:57.000 There's not a unique thought.
00:13:58.000 There is not an interesting thing that he has to offer, but it animates me and it should make you furious.
00:14:05.000 Like, you're in charge.
00:14:06.000 Do something about it.
00:14:07.000 Oh, you just got to get used to it.
00:14:08.000 There's a thousand train derailments every single year. 0.92
00:14:11.000 Meanwhile, let's send money to Ukraine and build their country while our country falls apart. 0.96
00:14:16.000 We can't. 0.96
00:14:17.000 Have you seen the price of eggs recently?
00:14:19.000 Has anyone looked into this or thought about it or talked about it?
00:14:22.000 Why chickens are not laying eggs at the same rates?
00:14:24.000 It's a big story.
00:14:25.000 No one really seems to care.
00:14:27.000 Guardian, the front page of the Guardian, which is a foreign paper, incredible story.
00:14:32.000 They're actually asking the right question.
00:14:34.000 It's not that complicated, but they say American teenage girls are experiencing high levels of emotional distress.
00:14:39.000 Why? 1.00
00:14:39.000 Yeah, they're right. 1.00
00:14:40.000 They want to kill themselves and they are.
00:14:42.000 Suicide is one of the leading causes of death for young people.
00:14:45.000 That should demoralize you.
00:14:46.000 I'm not trying to demoralize you, but it just seems everywhere you turn, the news is so dark and depressing and heavy.
00:14:54.000 Economic news, inflation worse than we thought.
00:14:56.000 The market went down 480 points yesterday.
00:14:58.000 I have no idea where it's at today.
00:15:01.000 But that is the goal.
00:15:02.000 It is not some sort of unintended consequence.
00:15:06.000 They are focused on a national demoralization campaign.
00:15:12.000 This is orchestrated.
00:15:14.000 The Dow is down another 0.66%.
00:15:17.000 Okay.
00:15:18.000 They know that the spirit, the grit, the resolve of the American people is the greatest the world has ever seen.
00:15:32.000 The same tactics that are used in other countries that our central intelligence agency uses via a color revolution to go displace a duly elected president is now being used domestically against us.
00:15:47.000 And they must crush and break the morale of the middle-class patriot.
00:15:55.000 If you are a middle-class patriot, they must break your resolve.
00:16:00.000 They're trying to get you to surrender or give up and throw up your hands and say, we can't even shoot a balloon out of this sky.
00:16:09.000 We can't keep our border open. 0.99
00:16:10.000 We can't withdraw from Afghanistan. 1.00
00:16:12.000 Our economy is in tatters and shattering. 1.00
00:16:16.000 So you must know that the way you are feeling is warranted, but it's also by design.
00:16:24.000 They want you to be demoralized.
00:16:28.000 Look, it is time to consider a rollover of that 401k into an IRA.
00:16:34.000 The investment world is completely different in 2023, and you cannot do the same thing as last year.
00:16:39.000 Woke companies are aggressively implementing ESG.
00:16:43.000 Interest rates are going up and inflation is still lingering.
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00:16:54.000 I put my money with PAX, and guess what?
00:16:56.000 It's up 12% since last year.
00:16:58.000 And that's while everyone else is down.
00:17:00.000 No joke.
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00:17:02.000 Text Charlie to the number 74868.
00:17:05.000 That's it.
00:17:06.000 Just take out your phone.
00:17:07.000 Text Charlie, C-H-A-R-L-I-E to 74868.
00:17:15.000 So take out your phone.
00:17:16.000 Text Charlie to the number 74868 for biblical responsible investing.
00:17:21.000 Text Charlie to 74868.
00:17:26.000 In just a second, we're going to have Nick Sortor join us live from East Palestine, Ohio.
00:17:33.000 But let me just put a little bit of a finishing touch on this point that I was saying.
00:17:39.000 We are living through a national demoralization strategy.
00:17:44.000 It is not a mistake.
00:17:46.000 It is by design.
00:17:48.000 Former KGB informant and spy, Yuri Besminov, did a series of interviews in the 1970s and 80s educating the West on what the communists and the Marxists did in other countries and were trying to do in America.
00:18:08.000 He said it is a four-step move.
00:18:11.000 We've played these tapes before.
00:18:13.000 All of you should be familiar with this.
00:18:15.000 But one of them is the intentional demoralization of a once-strong country.
00:18:21.000 PlayCut 148.
00:18:24.000 It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and it's divided in four basic stages.
00:18:33.000 The first one being demoralization.
00:18:35.000 It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation.
00:18:39.000 Why that many years?
00:18:40.000 Because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy.
00:18:54.000 In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism.
00:19:08.000 The result?
00:19:09.000 The result you can see.
00:19:11.000 Most of the people who graduated in the 60s, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, educational system. 0.66
00:19:24.000 You are stuck with them. 0.63
00:19:25.000 A national demoralization campaign.
00:19:29.000 It is not a byproduct.
00:19:31.000 It is the goal.
00:19:32.000 Joining us now is Nick Sortor, co-host of the Roundtable Show.
00:19:37.000 He took the video that has been viewed tens of millions of times live from East Palestine, Ohio.
00:19:43.000 Nick, welcome to the program.
00:19:44.000 Thank you for having me, Charlie.
00:19:46.000 So why don't you walk us through and separate fact from fiction?
00:19:50.000 What exactly is happening in East Palestine, Ohio?
00:19:53.000 Is the water safe to drink?
00:19:54.000 Is the air quality safe?
00:19:57.000 I mean, the government says it's not that big of a deal.
00:19:59.000 What's the truth?
00:20:01.000 Well, see, that's the problem here.
00:20:02.000 We don't actually know the truth.
00:20:05.000 You know, judging based on what we found out yesterday with looking at the water, actually in this creek right behind me, it's something that people don't trust anything their government is telling them.
00:20:15.000 And they have no reason to because the story has changed several times.
00:20:19.000 Even today, Mike DeWine changed his story again this morning.
00:20:23.000 He told people two days ago that, you know, you should probably be using bottled water.
00:20:29.000 You know, keep in mind, that was a week after he declared it's safe to be here.
00:20:33.000 And I don't know about you, Charlie, but I don't consider my house safe if toxic chemicals are coming out of the faucet.
00:20:39.000 So, you know, and then today, after he saw the video that we had yesterday of all the chemicals rising from the bottom of this stream, he came and said, well, no, we've done tests in the tap water.
00:20:53.000 It's fine.
00:20:54.000 Okay, what happened in the past two days that changed that?
00:20:57.000 Nothing.
00:20:58.000 Nothing.
00:20:59.000 And I do not believe them when they say that they knew this was already happening before.
00:21:05.000 They hid this.
00:21:06.000 And we ended up finding it out yesterday.
00:21:09.000 So just by throwing a rock in the room.
00:21:11.000 Let's play that tape.
00:21:13.000 Let's play 115. 0.96
00:21:21.000 Wow.
00:21:23.000 Look at all that.
00:21:24.000 Look at it.
00:21:25.000 It's all in the bottom of the creek bed.
00:21:36.000 Can you just illustrate that and tell us the significance of what you saw?
00:21:41.000 So the EPA, as well as the contractors from Norfolk Southern, which are not being, let me just say, they are not being watched over very well by the EPA.
00:21:52.000 Pretty much Norfolk Southern has total control over the entire cleanup process and monitoring themselves.
00:22:00.000 Now, what they had told us before was that they had burned off all the chemicals in the water here, right?
00:22:07.000 And I'm going to turn this a little bit and I'll let you see that they had these buoy things or these barriers, right?
00:22:18.000 And their entire point was to make it so chemicals wouldn't come downstream.
00:22:22.000 That's upstream.
00:22:24.000 The crash scene is actually up there.
00:22:26.000 Okay.
00:22:27.000 So these residents have been told, I'm standing about 25 feet behind somebody's house right now.
00:22:36.000 And so this is in their backyard.
00:22:40.000 However, obviously, they don't want to bring their kids here.
00:22:43.000 They don't want to come anywhere near this thing because it smells like chemicals.
00:22:46.000 Standing right here gives me a headache, Charlie.
00:22:48.000 So, you know, that's another just reason not to blame anything the government is or not to believe anything the government is telling them.
00:22:54.000 And that's sad.
00:22:56.000 Well, it's sad and it's also not sustainable.
00:22:58.000 On the ground, what do the citizens and residents of East Palestine believe is happening?
00:23:03.000 Do they think it's safe to live there, to breathe the air, to drink the water?
00:23:07.000 Are they generally trusting of the government?
00:23:09.000 And what do they think of Governor DeWine's response?
00:23:14.000 I have not, I have spoken with, I mean, 50, 60 people this week, and not a single one of them trusts anything the government is telling them.
00:23:24.000 That's why we had such a contentious town hall here the other night.
00:23:28.000 And Mike DeWine is at the bottom of the pit here.
00:23:34.000 He is one level above Joe Biden, Pete Buddha Judge, which is not very good in terms of approval ratings here.
00:23:41.000 You know, they don't, they think that the only reason that the EPA administrator, Biden's EPA administrator, showed up yesterday was because of the amount of pressure they have gotten this week from journalists like me and yourself.
00:23:54.000 And when the senators showed up as well, we had both senators here yesterday.
00:24:00.000 We're talking 13 days into this.
00:24:02.000 Okay.
00:24:03.000 Nobody came here before.
00:24:04.000 Joe Biden won't even talk about it.
00:24:06.000 Have you seen a Joe Biden press conference on this thing?
00:24:08.000 No.
00:24:08.000 No, neither of any of these people.
00:24:10.000 So they don't trust anything.
00:24:12.000 They think the federal government is going to abandon them, as well as the state government, right after this ends up leaving the news cycle.
00:24:20.000 What is the story with these waivers that are being circulated to citizens?
00:24:27.000 What is the story about that?
00:24:28.000 That Norfolk Southern is hitting the pavement to try to get people to sign waivers.
00:24:35.000 Yes.
00:24:36.000 Yes.
00:24:36.000 So that's exactly what's happening.
00:24:39.000 Essentially, what Norfolk Southern would love to do, the most ideal situation for them would be to have people sign a whole harmless waiver like this, give them $1,000.
00:24:52.000 That way they can't jump into a class action lawsuit.
00:24:55.000 And, you know, I mean, obviously, that's the best financial.
00:24:59.000 That's the best thing for them to do financially.
00:25:02.000 They are, you know, right now, Norfolk Southern is really hated here because they didn't come to the town hall.
00:25:11.000 They didn't show up and they acted like it was because of safety reasons.
00:25:13.000 These are some of the nicest people I have ever met in my life, right?
00:25:17.000 They have no intention of being violent or anything like that.
00:25:22.000 And Norfolk Southern knows this.
00:25:24.000 So they don't want to talk.
00:25:25.000 They're trying to be, you know, as opaque as possible.
00:25:29.000 And, you know, some people here, when it comes to that thousand dollars, this is not a tremendously wealthy town.
00:25:35.000 They lost one of their largest employers.
00:25:36.000 They were a big ceramics manufacturer here.
00:25:41.000 And once they lost that, a lot of people dropped down into poverty.
00:25:46.000 And so $1,000, Norfolk Southern is expecting them to take something like that just so they can actually survive because these people can't leave.
00:25:57.000 They can't leave.
00:25:58.000 And so they're forced to stay here.
00:26:01.000 They can't go get a hotel by themselves.
00:26:02.000 If they're going to run out of money, then they got to take that $1,000.
00:26:06.000 They're forced to.
00:26:08.000 So since people are now being asked to sign these waivers, and I know that there are class action lawsuits that are starting to pile up, no one should sign anything without a lawyer present.
00:26:17.000 I wouldn't sign that document.
00:26:18.000 But these people are now basically going to have to live in a rather risky containment zone.
00:26:26.000 And so, I mean, look, without getting too deep into the speculation of the specifics of what this could mean, I mean, are you feeling on the ground that there has been a mass government mobilization to look after the welfare of the people of East Palestine?
00:26:42.000 Not in the slightest, Charlie.
00:26:45.000 The only time I ever saw anybody from the EPA here was yesterday.
00:26:51.000 And I think that had to do with the fact that there were a lot of cameras here yesterday.
00:26:54.000 There were a lot of local news outlets that came here just to follow the EPA administrator and the two senators.
00:27:01.000 But as soon as they were gone, all the media left.
00:27:04.000 I have not seen a single camera here today, right?
00:27:07.000 And so that's part of what I was saying earlier: that once these guys leave, once the media is out, then everybody else is out.
00:27:17.000 And I definitely don't expect the federal government to step in after all the media leaves.
00:27:21.000 What incentive do they have at this point?
00:27:24.000 So, you know, they're going to leave it to Norfolk Southern.
00:27:27.000 And maybe the guilty party here will end up being the hero.
00:27:31.000 So it's a little unlikely, though.
00:27:33.000 Nick, thank you so much.
00:27:34.000 Appreciate your coverage.
00:27:35.000 Thank you.
00:27:37.000 Thank you for having me, Charlie.
00:27:41.000 Okay, I want to play a couple pieces of tape here of Nikki Haley, who is now a presidential candidate. 0.99
00:27:47.000 Nikki Haley is a believer, an adamant believer and advocate in neoliberalism.
00:27:55.000 And I want to make sure this is very clear.
00:27:57.000 Nikki Haley is welcome on this program anytime.
00:27:59.000 Any presidential candidate is welcome on this program anytime.
00:28:02.000 And I say that as a Trump supporter, I want to talk to them.
00:28:05.000 I want to listen to them.
00:28:06.000 I want to ask them critical questions.
00:28:08.000 I want to challenge some of their assumptions and some of the dogma.
00:28:13.000 And one of the issues in particular where I think there's going to be a massive difference in the Republican primary is around the issue of foreign policy.
00:28:23.000 Nikki Haley is a believer, unapologetic believer in neoliberalism.
00:28:32.000 And she says this as she talks about the war in Ukraine.
00:28:36.000 So in CUT 110, if you guys begin to get that ready, she's talking about this is not about the war in Ukraine.
00:28:41.000 This is about freedom.
00:28:44.000 This is precisely the same talking point.
00:28:47.000 It's the same line of thinking that we used to invade Ukraine, to prop up the failed toppling of Moamar Gaddafi in Libya, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, what we did in Afghanistan.
00:29:05.000 When she says freedom, she means invade the world, invite the world.
00:29:10.000 That is neoliberalism.
00:29:11.000 Invade the world, invite the world, and port a bunch of stuff we should be making here.
00:29:14.000 Those are kind of the three elements.
00:29:16.000 Foreign policy, trade policy, and then, of course, immigration policy.
00:29:21.000 Now, is it really about freedom?
00:29:24.000 When I was having my dialogue with Dr. Gorka, one of the points that I made is that a citizenry must do the work.
00:29:35.000 Sometimes it takes 100 years or 150 years, and overwhelmingly demand self-government.
00:29:42.000 Now, every human being on the planet deserves self-government, but not every human being wants it.
00:29:50.000 Not every human being has done the work.
00:29:53.000 What do I mean by that?
00:29:54.000 I mean, the foundational elements that led to America's self-government revival was a spiritual reset.
00:30:01.000 It was many decades of thought, thoughtfulness, and diving deep into ancient texts to finally figure out, like, yes, we do want to take the risk and assume the responsibility to govern ourselves.
00:30:15.000 Remember, the Israelites wanted to go back to Egypt.
00:30:17.000 They wanted a king.
00:30:18.000 Unfortunately, most of humanity will reject self-government and go back to the easy convenience of a dictator or a despot that will give them free stuff.
00:30:31.000 This is Nikki Haley playing Cut 110.
00:30:33.000 She says, look, this is about freedom.
00:30:36.000 Play Cut 110.
00:30:37.000 We have the backs of our friends and we hold our enemies to account.
00:30:42.000 And, you know, whether it's Ukraine or Israel, we take care of them because it's about freedom.
00:30:48.000 And we can never stop fighting for freedom.
00:30:50.000 This isn't a war about Ukraine.
00:30:52.000 This is a war about freedom.
00:30:54.000 We have to make sure we send a message to every enemy that if you mess with our friends, you're messing with us and you don't want to do that.
00:31:02.000 And that, therefore, is America first, in essence.
00:31:05.000 It is taking care of America because we're preventing wars.
00:31:08.000 Yeah, that's not America first, right?
00:31:10.000 And by the way, David deserves credit.
00:31:12.000 He did a good job there.
00:31:14.000 But I actually think he demonstrated that it's not America first.
00:31:20.000 It's somewhat Orwellian, I gotta say, that somehow putting your country first is sending money abroad.
00:31:26.000 It's like war is peace.
00:31:28.000 And it's like, wait, that's it's a lot of things.
00:31:33.000 I mean, it's just not America first at all. 0.51
00:31:39.000 So, look, first of all, Israel is not the same as Ukraine.
00:31:41.000 And Nikki Haley knows what she's doing here.
00:31:43.000 She's very smart. 0.99
00:31:45.000 She knows that if she mentions Ukraine and Israel in the same sentence, a lot of American evangelicals have a soft spot for Israel, and they should.
00:31:51.000 So, as soon as she kind of compares Israel and Ukraine as moral equivalents, she thinks she'll be able to win people over, and that will justify public opinion and public support for greater intervention into the Ukrainian theater. 0.60
00:32:02.000 When in reality, they're completely, they're two totally different things.
00:32:05.000 Israel is a functioning country, Israel is a country actually founded on biblical principles.
00:32:11.000 Israel is also a country of very, very strong borders and commonality of rule of law.
00:32:17.000 Ukraine is none of those things.
00:32:18.000 So, I would definitely not compare those two things.
00:32:21.000 Now, again, I'm going to reiterate: every human being on the planet deserves the right to self-government, which is the greatest form of government.
00:32:28.000 But not every single people want it.
00:32:31.000 And whether Ukraine wants it or not is actually irrelevant.
00:32:33.000 The more relevant question should be: when your own country is falling apart, when you can't keep trains on rails, when you can't identify a hot air balloon from a spy reconnaissance aircraft, when you have 107,000 of your own people dying from drug overdose and your southern border is open, I really don't care about family disputes and border conflicts 5,000 miles away. 0.55
00:32:55.000 It gets kind of put on the back burner as it should.
00:33:01.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:33:02.000 Email me your thoughts as always: freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:33:06.000 Thank you so much for listening, and God bless.
00:33:11.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.