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.
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk show, we shot down someone's balloon project that certainly doesn't build trust for our military.
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00:01:12.000There 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.
00:01:26.000Felt 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.
00:01:38.000There's just so many things happening simultaneously.
00:01:42.000But new information shows exactly what our government did this last weekend.
00:01:48.000If we are to believe this to be true, which it looks like it is true.
00:01:54.000You see, there's a lot of threats out there: Chinese Communist Party, drones.
00:01:59.000We 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.
00:02:14.000Look, the idea of deterrence is a very important one.
00:02:18.000Have we really gamed out why we need to deter 14 and 15-year-olds from putting balloons in the sky?
00:02:29.000It 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.
00:02:49.000That's right, a $13 hobby balloon was floating above Canada.
00:02:55.000It 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.
00:03:16.000And the name of their group is here somewhere.
00:03:18.000It's the Northern Illinois Bottle Cap Balloon Brigade, the NIBBB.
00:03:27.000They have now officially said that one of their balloons is missing in action.
00:03:34.000Around the same time and same location, a U.S. Air Force jet downed an unidentified object using a $400,000 Sidewinder missile.
00:04:35.000A hobby club in Illinois called the Northern Illinois Bottle Cap Balloon Brigade.
00:04:40.000Yep, the balloon brigade says they're missing their balloon.
00:04:44.000The 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.
00:04:53.000Now, the Bottle Cap Balloon Brigade's balloon cost $12.
00:04:56.000So Joe shot a $12 balloon with a half a million dollar missile.
00:05:00.000All because Biden got some bad polling after taking a week to pop the Chinese spy balloon.
00:07:08.000If 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.
00:07:19.000You're trying to tell me that a hobby club is getting treated by our military with the same sort of force and mobilization.
00:07:44.000If 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.
00:09:27.000They have not even had just like a little bit of apology.
00:09:30.000Has anyone apologized, by the way, from the federal government?
00:09:34.000Now, 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.
00:09:42.000That would actually turn it into a probably a political win.
00:09:44.000He probably will if he gets good advice.
00:10:12.000But 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.
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00:11:06.000You got to have a little bit of levity at times.
00:11:08.000And 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.
00:11:57.000I don't think our military is prepared to fight and win a battle.
00:12:00.000You 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.
00:12:08.000And I want to believe that, obviously, I love America.
00:12:12.000I 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.
00:12:56.000They 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.
00:13:06.000There has been a non-stop flow of news that does make you feel very demoralized.
00:13:19.000You 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.
00:13:41.000Maybe 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.
00:15:18.000They know that the spirit, the grit, the resolve of the American people is the greatest the world has ever seen.
00:15:32.000The 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.
00:15:47.000And they must crush and break the morale of the middle-class patriot.
00:15:55.000If you are a middle-class patriot, they must break your resolve.
00:16:00.000They'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.
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00:17:48.000Former 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.
00:18:40.000Because 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.
00:18:54.000In 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.
00:19:11.000Most 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.
00:20:05.000You 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.
00:20:15.000And they have no reason to because the story has changed several times.
00:20:19.000Even today, Mike DeWine changed his story again this morning.
00:20:23.000He told people two days ago that, you know, you should probably be using bottled water.
00:20:29.000You know, keep in mind, that was a week after he declared it's safe to be here.
00:20:33.000And I don't know about you, Charlie, but I don't consider my house safe if toxic chemicals are coming out of the faucet.
00:20:39.000So, 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.
00:21:25.000It's all in the bottom of the creek bed.
00:21:36.000Can you just illustrate that and tell us the significance of what you saw?
00:21:41.000So 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.
00:21:52.000Pretty much Norfolk Southern has total control over the entire cleanup process and monitoring themselves.
00:22:00.000Now, what they had told us before was that they had burned off all the chemicals in the water here, right?
00:22:07.000And 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?
00:22:18.000And their entire point was to make it so chemicals wouldn't come downstream.
00:22:40.000However, obviously, they don't want to bring their kids here.
00:22:43.000They don't want to come anywhere near this thing because it smells like chemicals.
00:22:46.000Standing right here gives me a headache, Charlie.
00:22:48.000So, you know, that's another just reason not to blame anything the government is or not to believe anything the government is telling them.
00:22:56.000Well, it's sad and it's also not sustainable.
00:22:58.000On the ground, what do the citizens and residents of East Palestine believe is happening?
00:23:03.000Do they think it's safe to live there, to breathe the air, to drink the water?
00:23:07.000Are they generally trusting of the government?
00:23:09.000And what do they think of Governor DeWine's response?
00:23:14.000I 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.
00:23:24.000That's why we had such a contentious town hall here the other night.
00:23:28.000And Mike DeWine is at the bottom of the pit here.
00:23:34.000He is one level above Joe Biden, Pete Buddha Judge, which is not very good in terms of approval ratings here.
00:23:41.000You 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.
00:23:54.000And when the senators showed up as well, we had both senators here yesterday.
00:24:12.000They think the federal government is going to abandon them, as well as the state government, right after this ends up leaving the news cycle.
00:24:20.000What is the story with these waivers that are being circulated to citizens?
00:24:39.000Essentially, 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.
00:24:52.000That way they can't jump into a class action lawsuit.
00:24:55.000And, you know, I mean, obviously, that's the best financial.
00:24:59.000That's the best thing for them to do financially.
00:25:02.000They are, you know, right now, Norfolk Southern is really hated here because they didn't come to the town hall.
00:25:11.000They didn't show up and they acted like it was because of safety reasons.
00:25:13.000These are some of the nicest people I have ever met in my life, right?
00:25:17.000They have no intention of being violent or anything like that.
00:25:25.000They're trying to be, you know, as opaque as possible.
00:25:29.000And, you know, some people here, when it comes to that thousand dollars, this is not a tremendously wealthy town.
00:25:35.000They lost one of their largest employers.
00:25:36.000They were a big ceramics manufacturer here.
00:25:41.000And once they lost that, a lot of people dropped down into poverty.
00:25:46.000And 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.
00:26:08.000So 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.
00:26:18.000But these people are now basically going to have to live in a rather risky containment zone.
00:26:26.000And 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?
00:28:06.000I want to ask them critical questions.
00:28:08.000I want to challenge some of their assumptions and some of the dogma.
00:28:13.000And 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.
00:28:23.000Nikki Haley is a believer, unapologetic believer in neoliberalism.
00:28:32.000And she says this as she talks about the war in Ukraine.
00:28:36.000So in CUT 110, if you guys begin to get that ready, she's talking about this is not about the war in Ukraine.
00:28:44.000This is precisely the same talking point.
00:28:47.000It'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.
00:29:05.000When she says freedom, she means invade the world, invite the world.
00:29:54.000I mean, the foundational elements that led to America's self-government revival was a spiritual reset.
00:30:01.000It 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.
00:30:15.000Remember, the Israelites wanted to go back to Egypt.
00:30:18.000Unfortunately, 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.
00:30:54.000We 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.
00:31:02.000And that, therefore, is America first, in essence.
00:31:05.000It is taking care of America because we're preventing wars.
00:31:08.000Yeah, that's not America first, right?
00:31:10.000And by the way, David deserves credit.
00:31:45.000She 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.
00:31:51.000So, 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.
00:32:02.000When in reality, they're completely, they're two totally different things.
00:32:05.000Israel is a functioning country, Israel is a country actually founded on biblical principles.
00:32:11.000Israel is also a country of very, very strong borders and commonality of rule of law.
00:32:18.000So, I would definitely not compare those two things.
00:32:21.000Now, 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.
00:32:31.000And whether Ukraine wants it or not is actually irrelevant.
00:32:33.000The 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.
00:32:55.000It gets kind of put on the back burner as it should.
00:33:01.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:33:02.000Email me your thoughts as always: freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:33:06.000Thank you so much for listening, and God bless.
00:33:11.000For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.