00:01:37.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:20.000They write, pay attention to what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida.
00:02:25.000Not a week goes by, CNN writes, without Florida's governors, Ron DeSantis, proposing or signing some bill that aggravates progressives, worries civil rights leaders.
00:02:34.000I love that term civil rights leaders.
00:03:01.000So teaching a six-year-old about sex and transgender and puberty blockers makes you a politically correct corporation.
00:03:13.000CNN writes, Ron DeSantis is a generational talent at seizing headlines.
00:03:19.000This is the stuff presidential ambitions are made of.
00:03:22.000This week it was Florida's second major election overhaul in as many years in which DeSantis created a new election police force focused on election fraud.
00:03:31.000It would be under his control, even though he's up for reelection in November.
00:03:58.000CNN writes, but what kind of a president would Ron DeSantis be?
00:04:01.000Heir to Trump, with the exception of former President Donald Trump, who wants his old job back, no single person has generated more major campaign inevitability than DeSantis.
00:04:10.000But while Trump is cloistered at his private clubs and doing some rallies and fundraisers, DeSantis has turned his state position into a national platform more than any governor in recent memory.
00:04:20.000So I get asked this question all the time: Charlie, who will you support?
00:04:59.000Do you want DeSantis or do you want Trump in 2024?
00:05:07.000Friend from the Midwest emailed us both.
00:05:10.000Now, the only problem is that they're both from the same state.
00:05:15.000So one person would have to leave Florida like Trump could get a condo in Texas.
00:05:20.000The 12th Amendment does not allow someone from the same state to be president and vice president.
00:05:25.000With DeSantis to win his reelection campaign, CNN writes in November before he can really start thinking about a run for the White House, but hasn't officially announced.
00:05:33.000Look, DeSantis, I think, is going to win the Florida reelection by five to 10 points easily.
00:05:39.000CNN asks the question: is it too early to talk about 2024?
00:05:43.000Joe Biden's approval ratings are stubbornly underwater.
00:05:46.000I love how CNN writes this as a news article, and they write that the approval ratings of a president are stubbornly underwater.
00:06:05.000It's a really weird way to put it for a news organization.
00:06:09.000Like maybe if you're a Democrat super PAC, the country is divided as ever, and at least one major bank is girding for a recession in the near future.
00:06:18.000I do believe a recession is in our cards, unfortunately.
00:06:21.000Is that crazy to think these things, disappointment, division, and the threat of a downturn, create a difficult environment for Biden's reelection?
00:06:28.000I love how this kind of like slow self-discovery process, they're like, wait, Biden might be in trouble?
00:07:58.000Where did these people get this stuff?
00:08:00.000The imperial governorship reached new heights when the actions of Florida's legislature demonstrated how he is not only bending state government to his will, but also to his whims.
00:08:11.000About time someone in the Republican Party does something meaningful.
00:08:17.000In a special session, lawmakers approved new congressional maps proposed by his office that appears all but to certain to dilute the voting power of people of color.
00:08:27.000On the same day, the legislature carried out DeSantis' threat to punish Disney for speaking out against the law he recently signed that limits certain classroom discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity.
00:08:40.000This is incredible the world they live in.
00:08:43.000One person just emailed us their vote.
00:08:45.000Definitely DeSantis because Trump is too polarizing, but we'll be behind 100% Trump if he's the nominee.
00:09:03.000In a response to the killing of George Floyd, while other states reviewed policing policies, DeSantison called for a so-called anti-riot bill that opponents say target peaceful protesters.
00:09:15.000If you're a peaceful protester and you're burning down a Wendy's, are you really a peaceful protester?
00:09:22.000Anti-woke, DeSantis has been on the forefront of attacking wokeness and critical race theory, signing a new law that bans businesses and schools from teaching about white privilege.
00:09:35.000His administration has always rejected, has recently rejected math textbooks from publishers, claiming some included elements of critical race theory and emotional social learning.
00:09:46.000In closing, CNN writes, they say, it's easy to imagine very different uses of a massive federal apparatus if someone with such talent for the politics of division were to assume office.
00:10:00.000Email me your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:10:03.000DeSantis or Trump, where do you think?
00:11:15.000Gaspron's announcement that it is unilaterally stopping gas deliveries to certain EU member states is another provocation from the Kremlin.
00:11:26.000But it comes as no surprise that the Kremlin uses fossil fuels to try to blackmail us.
00:11:33.000Yeah, I mean, look, of course they're going to try to blackmail you.
00:12:25.000Declaring a war on American energy turns out not to be a very smart idea.
00:12:32.000Have you looked at how much of Russia is inside your 401k or IRA?
00:12:36.000Did you know my friends at PAX Financial Group have zero investments in Russia through their biblical investment strategy?
00:12:42.000Those companies were screened out long ago because they didn't pass the treat people right test.
00:12:46.000One of the most important tenets of the Christian faith is to love your neighbor, and this includes to love your employees.
00:12:52.000Based on PAX's biblical responsible investment strategy, a company, domestic or international, is excluded from an investment from your portfolio if it violates our innate God-given fundamental rights.
00:13:14.000PAX Financial is rooted in biblical wisdom.
00:13:18.000So if you have $150,000 or more and would like to know more about biblical responsible investing at PAX Financial Group, text Charlie to number 74868.
00:14:54.000Yes, I'm incredibly supportive for the simple reason that Twitter really is, as Elon characterizes it, the global public square.
00:15:04.000And the question of who controls information flows on the global public square and whether or not there's free speech on the global public square is an existential one.
00:15:16.000It's existential from the point of view of the stakeholders in our regime, which I believe will do everything in their power possible to prevent this from happening.
00:15:26.000And it's also existential for us because if we're not able to have free speech at scale, we're never going to be able to have genuine political victories.
00:15:38.000And so I support this because even though probably a realistic and fair assessment would be the odds are stacked against Elon.
00:15:47.000Now, he's already done an incredibly impressive job for how far he's taken it, but this is just the start.
00:15:54.000And so, you know, he's up against a lot.
00:16:01.000But what's important is that this is the greatest show on earth.
00:16:04.000This is the place where the meaningful battle is taking place right now.
00:16:09.000Because if we can liberate the global public square, the optionality increases tremendously in terms of what we can achieve politically.
00:16:17.000And this seems to be such an unexpected development, right?
00:16:20.000Only someone with the, I will use a nicer term, a spine, like there's other body parts I could use, of Elon could actually be able to do this.
00:16:30.000So we as conservatives need to look, I suppose, what you're arguing, and I agree wholeheartedly, that we need to look at this in terms of power dynamics, right?
00:16:38.000That if Elon is helpful now to the liberation of humanity from this kind of technocratic regime, then let's do it.
00:16:49.000Is that the way we need to look at it?
00:16:50.000The same way the kind of left designed kind of power and allies and all this, and less about just whether or not somebody agrees with me on everything?
00:16:59.000Yeah, I mean, I think that's looking at it from the perspective of what Elon's personal political affiliations might be versus what the policy implications would be for Twitter as a service in terms of the terms of service governing speech.
00:17:15.000I think that's probably the least sophisticated way to look at it.
00:17:20.000And looking at it that way is a way to ensure continued failure.
00:17:25.000You know, I know a lot of conversation sort of it's been a trope within conservative dialogue to talk about, oh, our ideas are better.
00:17:45.000The game is not about, okay, there is no marketplace of ideas.
00:17:49.000There's the meta game of who controls the marketplace that decides what ideas are allowed to prevail.
00:17:57.000And that's the game that Elon's playing.
00:17:59.000He's playing it at the very highest level, and he's shown every indication, which is a rarity among people of his station at that level of being a billionaire, to actually play for keeps and put things on the line.
00:18:11.000Because Sai said, this is an existential threat.
00:18:15.000This amounts to a declaration of war on our corrupt and illegitimate regime.
00:20:13.000These people aren't just going to be like, oh, I guess we lost.
00:20:16.000I mean, I anticipate subpoenas for Musk.
00:20:19.000I anticipate his government contract to SpaceX to be put into jeopardy.
00:20:22.000I anticipate electric vehicle subsidies to be put in jeopardy.
00:20:25.000I anticipate major audits, DOJ investigations, SEC investigations, a public propaganda campaign, sexual assault allegations, Me Too allegations.
00:20:39.000Well, you covered a lot of it, and it's really interesting there, as you point out, a great deal of Elon's success.
00:20:49.000He's a tremendously talented person, but a great deal of his success comes from his willingness and ability to play ball with the government, to use government contracts.
00:21:00.000SpaceX is essentially the government deciding, you know what, NASA is basically a mess at this point.
00:21:08.000So here, Elon, we're basically allowing you to be the private NASA.
00:21:13.000And the whole kind of the pitch of Tesla, yeah, it's cool.
00:21:17.000It's these cars are cool and everything.
00:21:19.000But a huge part of the pitch and the narrative was riding that wave of, okay, this is how we're going to fight climate change and everything.
00:21:26.000So he's really been kind of sailing in the direction of the establishment.
00:21:32.000And this is why it's so rare to see people like Elon actually turn against the system.
00:21:37.000It's kind of, it's equivalent to in academia, there's something called tenure.
00:21:41.000And if you play ball for enough time, after seven, eight years or so, they'll give you tenure and they can't fire you.
00:21:48.000The only thing is the kind of person with such a slavish personality that they can make it seven years just being a yes man and pretending to believe what the others say, that kind of person generally is not going to rock the boat after seven years once they have tenure.
00:22:04.000There's a similar thing at a bigger scale when it comes to what sort of person does the system allow to get to Elon's level.
00:22:11.000And he's gotten to that level by playing ball.
00:22:14.000And now he's totally turning against them.
00:22:16.000And as you point out, they can sabotage Tesla.
00:22:19.000And actually, a lot of this deal is predicated on, I would imagine, the value of Tesla shares.
00:22:25.000So they might be able to sabotage the deal completely by going after Tesla.
00:22:31.000European Union countries can say, oh, if you don't play ball with our interpretation of censorship and censoring hate speech, we're just going to ban Twitter.
00:22:41.000You can have various news outlets institute a kind of a link, a domain ban on Twitter links.
00:22:49.000So whereas now it's typical to see Twitter links embedded into stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, and so forth.
00:22:56.000They can just say, okay, we're no longer doing that.
00:22:59.000They can punt up the censorship level to basically having Google and Amazon try to disrupt any type of distribution.
00:23:07.000And then if that doesn't work, we're already hearing remarks from Elizabeth Warren and others that they're willing to take aggressive government action, ironically, using Section 230 and other things to go after Elon.
00:23:21.000So they have a lot of materials at their disposal.
00:23:24.000And we're just talking about the somewhat above board and clean methods.
00:23:28.000There are much dirtier methods, much darker methods that they can use as well if it comes to that.
00:24:06.000I think he might be looking at this as saying, if I'm going to be prevented from being allowed to get people to speak, then I might have to just rebuild the entire ecosystem.
00:24:15.000And something tells me about him, and this is pure conjecture, though, or speculation.
00:24:22.000He just might keep going until they just take him off the chessboard, right?
00:24:27.000And, but you bring up an interesting point.
00:24:29.000And a quick answer to this, only a minute.
00:24:32.000Is there a calculus in Elon's mind that the government needs him more than he needs the government?
00:24:38.000For example, SpaceX is doing basically all of the work of the United States Space Force right now, from satellite technology to missions to international space mission.
00:24:48.000Does Elon feel as if he's got the U.S. government over a barrel?
00:25:56.000And although I would have to say, from the point of view of the stakeholders of the regime, preventing free speech domestically is more important to them.
00:26:42.000It's a new credit card built for conservatives.
00:26:44.000I'm moving all my credit card activity under COIN.
00:26:47.000And the Coin credit card is an unlimited cashback Visa credit card that is just like every other credit card you've ever owned with one huge exception.
00:26:54.000Every time you use the Coin card, they contribute to conservative charities that support your values.
00:27:14.000Join Coin, and let's start spending right.
00:27:20.000But you made a really interesting point that even if those kind of internal discussions were unfolding in Washington, D.C., right, with a five-star general and, you know, kind of a White House staffer and the vice president or whatever, you would have to say that they would have to rank the suppression of domestic speech to be more important than actually preventing Chinese hegemony.
00:27:42.000And I think even as you see the relationship between sort of the foreign policy agenda and the domestic agenda, so much of this ostensible concern for Russian disinformation and foreign meddling, that's simply a pretext to suppress the popular will at home.
00:28:03.000And so so much of the alleged concern for foreign policy is simply a smokescreen in order to further suppress speech and political activity at home.
00:28:14.000So I think, and, you know, to a certain extent, I don't blame them.
00:28:18.000Free speech is an existential threat to them.
00:28:21.000Free speech is not compatible with the regime as it exists today.
00:28:26.000And that really says something interesting about what media companies are at the highest level.
00:28:33.000They don't exist really to generate profit or revenue.
00:28:37.000They exist because of their influence.
00:28:41.000Their influence at that level will always exceed the value of whatever kind of revenue comes in in monetary terms.
00:28:48.000So even though the price tag of Twitter is $44 billion, the question of who controls information flow in the global public square is vastly more important.
00:29:04.000And so, but so let me ask you, Elon has been a creation of the left.
00:29:08.000If it wasn't for the electric vehicle push, I don't know if his net worth would have exploded the way it did.
00:29:15.000Is there any credence, you think, to the theory that he has been steadily and patiently building this influence and power where he becomes virtually uncancelable, where he has almost, he's also can look him in the eyes like, you really want to do this, guys?
00:29:40.000I mean, is there anything to the argument that Elon's cards outweigh the regimes?
00:29:47.000I think it's a situation where if anyone can pull it off, it's Elon.
00:29:52.000I think just given the magnitude of what he's up against, he's still the underdog in this fight, and we should correctly understand him to be the underdog.
00:30:01.000There's probably somewhat of an analogy to be made to the 2016 election where another intrepid billionaire stepped out into the arena, played the highest stakes game against the coordinated opposition of every powerful institution in the Western world, and he won the election in the same way that Elon now looks like at least he's going to win Twitter, but that's only the start.
00:30:27.000Winning the election is only the start.
00:30:29.000It doesn't presuppose actual authority over the executive branch.
00:30:33.000Similarly, this is just the start of the battle for Elon in terms of his war against the Z.
00:30:38.000Well, and so, but what if, and this is where the only difference in the analogy is, is that what if now this inspires at least five other billionaires to have solidarity with Elon, right?
00:30:48.000What if all of a sudden this creates kind of the dissident billionaire?
00:30:51.000Five to ten billionaires come alongside, they could do a lot of damage.
00:30:55.000That could make a big difference, right?
00:30:58.000And it almost goes to show instead of all the money that's spent on campaigns, what if we just took an election cycle, pooled it into a SPAC and said, okay, we're going to take over one media company per election cycle.
00:31:11.000We might be in a better position than we are now, frankly.
00:31:14.000That would be rational, smart, and it would only make the greatest show on earth more interesting.
00:31:22.000Revolver.news, Darren Beattie, his IQ is immeasurably high.
00:31:27.000He thinks about these things very deeply.
00:31:29.000And he was calling for Elon to do this before it was actually in the mainstream.
00:31:34.000If you go back, he was calling for this.