The Charlie Kirk Show - Elon Musk and the Rise of the Dissident Elites

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show, the latest on Elon taking over Twitter.

00:00:03.000 What happens when a government is dissolved?

00:00:05.000 Well, you are seeing that happen right now.

00:00:08.000 Authoritarians are weeping.

00:00:10.000 And we dive into that here on this program.

00:00:12.000 Email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com, and get involved with TurningPointUSA today at tpusa.com.

00:00:18.000 Short of high school or college chapter, tpusa.com.

00:00:21.000 And then we have Kelly Shackelford, who had a case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, a very important case, and joins us today.

00:00:27.000 Email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:30.000 Buckle up, everybody, here.

00:00:31.000 We go.

00:00:32.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:34.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:36.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:39.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:43.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:44.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:45.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:00:53.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:02.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:04.000 Brought to you by Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage.

00:01:08.000 For personalized loan services, you can count on.

00:01:10.000 Go to andrewandodd.com, the wonderfulandrewandodd.com.

00:01:17.000 Who is sovereign on social media?

00:01:20.000 Who is the sovereign on social media?

00:01:22.000 Now, if I were to ask you who the sovereign was in America, it's the people.

00:01:27.000 We the people is how the United States Constitution starts.

00:01:31.000 I have a copy of our Turning Point USA Constitution right here.

00:01:36.000 In 1787, the founding fathers wrote, We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity to ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

00:01:54.000 Now, for many years, we have been warning on this program and in my speeches all across the country, my nearly 1,000 speeches that we have given in the last couple of years, that there are two governments in America, that there's the government of Washington, D.C. and the government of Silicon Valley, and that the government in Silicon Valley was becoming increasingly more powerful than the government of Washington, D.C.

00:02:18.000 That the government of Silicon Valley was able to do what they wanted, restrict God-granted constitutional liberties, whether it be kicking somebody off of Twitter, restricting the ability for a Facebook post to go viral, or Google not even allowing for you to find out whether a story says what you think it says, manipulating search results.

00:02:37.000 Silicon Valley formed its own government, and the left was not only okay with it, they were the architects and the designers of it.

00:02:45.000 They were the ones that knew that if they could have an extra governmental system, an extra constitutional system, that they could rise above those pesky checks and balances that our founding fathers and framers put in place.

00:02:56.000 They knew that through an extra governmental system, that the sovereign is no longer the people, but instead it's the oligarchs that run the Silicon Valley companies, that run Facebook, Google, and yes, at one point, Twitter.

00:03:11.000 When we see a dissolution of a government, when we see a government topple and fall, it's important to stop and look at it.

00:03:19.000 When the Soviet Union fell, when George H.W. Bush was president, many people ask, what was the speech that George H.W. Bush gave?

00:03:28.000 Did he give a remark or did he give a series of remarks where he celebrated the end of the Soviet Union?

00:03:36.000 No, George H.W. Bush did very little to nothing because he said, quote, I didn't want to rub it in.

00:03:42.000 I think that was a great mistake by President George H.W. Bush.

00:03:46.000 When governments fall, we usually look and we remember.

00:03:50.000 When the government of Afghanistan fell last summer and the Taliban took over, we'll never forget that.

00:03:55.000 When Vietnam completely collapsed when we barely were able to get our troops off, we looked and we remembered.

00:04:02.000 In 1917, when the Bolsheviks took over the government of Russia, they took over the Tsars and they implemented their own communist Marxist war against the West.

00:04:13.000 People who were alive at the time and historians, they never forget that when governments fall, it's worthy of notice.

00:04:20.000 You are witnessing the dissolution of a government.

00:04:24.000 And not a government in the traditional sense, but a separate type of government, not the USSR, not Cuba, but instead the rule of the administration of Silicon Valley.

00:04:35.000 And I'm not to say they don't have any power.

00:04:37.000 I'm not to say that there won't be any poison pills or traps along the way.

00:04:41.000 But Elon Musk, the world's richest man, who was created by the left, by the way, Elon Musk is a creation of the needs, wants, and desires of the American left, and I'll prove it to you, has just liberated France.

00:04:54.000 Not France, the country, but the metaphor.

00:04:56.000 Elon Musk is on the march.

00:04:58.000 You see, what Elon Musk has pulled off, the improbable, some people thought the impossible, and certainly I was cynical and skeptical, has showed that all of a sudden, the government of Silicon Valley, this extra governmental constitutional order that the left has implemented, it's now all fair game.

00:05:18.000 And the tech oligarchs know that others could possibly now soon follow.

00:05:24.000 You see, tech companies were supposed to be untouchable because tech companies are close to trusting the science.

00:05:30.000 These are people that are able to make things happen quickly.

00:05:34.000 They're able to better police speech than anybody else.

00:05:37.000 They're supposed to be the fifth branch of government.

00:05:41.000 The fourth, of course, being the bureaucracies.

00:05:44.000 But the fifth branch needed to be this kind of private sector, untouchable, ruling elite that share all the values of the Harvard and the UC Berkeley and the Stanford types.

00:05:54.000 Men can become pregnant, can't talk about transgender people, open borders are good, can never talk about voter irregularities, can't talk about vaccines. 0.84

00:06:03.000 All of that is supposed to go through the final gatekeepers of the police of speech.

00:06:10.000 But Elon changed all of that.

00:06:13.000 And he changed all of it out of a pure move of the will.

00:06:18.000 Instead of will to power, Elon Musk prioritized the will to meaning.

00:06:24.000 There are three types of wills.

00:06:25.000 There's more than three, but three major ones that Viktor Frankl outlines in his book, Man's Search for Meaning, which is the will to pleasure, the will to power, or the will to meaning.

00:06:36.000 The most desirable one and the one that all of us should strive for is the will to meaning.

00:06:42.000 Elon Musk put what was right above what was expedient.

00:06:46.000 He put what was good for the people above what felt good.

00:06:50.000 And Elon Musk is a dissident.

00:06:54.000 I want you to think about how paradoxical that sounds when you think about how strange that is the process.

00:07:02.000 That the man with the most money on the planet is himself a dissident.

00:07:07.000 You see, when we think of a dissident, we think of the lone tank man in Tiananmen Square, China, standing up to one and hopefully inspiring the actions of other.

00:07:17.000 When we think of a dissident, we think of someone that is unafraid of the consequences.

00:07:23.000 We think of a dissident as someone who's willing to go to jail for a broader and greater purpose.

00:07:34.000 But you see, Musk, him being a dissident, as an elite, the elite dissident, is something worthy of study because he very well could have gone along with his fellow, very rich and wealthy counterparts.

00:07:50.000 Now, the interesting part of Elon is that he's a creation of the left.

00:07:55.000 Elon Musk got rich off of the push and the insistence and the subsidy for green cars.

00:08:00.000 The state of Washington recklessly has announced that they want every car to be electric in the next 10 years.

00:08:06.000 Well, you're going to make Elon Musk very powerful and wealthy.

00:08:09.000 What do you think was going to happen?

00:08:11.000 You think that the Department of Energy is going to make all these electric cars?

00:08:14.000 Do you think the EPA is going to make electric cars?

00:08:16.000 No.

00:08:17.000 It takes someone eccentric, brilliant, ruthless, creative to be able to pull off the reinvention and the mass proliferation of an electric vehicle.

00:08:31.000 Ford, GM, and Chrysler have not been able to pull it off.

00:08:35.000 They're trying, but they're failing.

00:08:37.000 Musk did it out of pure will.

00:08:40.000 Tesla was a couple weeks from going under in 2008.

00:08:44.000 Musk doubled and tripled down and secured the financing and is the world's richest man.

00:08:51.000 How do you think he got rich from SpaceX?

00:08:53.000 Obama defunded major NASA programs back in 2010 and 2011.

00:09:00.000 And Musk saw an opportunity to create a private space force, and he did.

00:09:07.000 The insurgency of Musk as a dissident is something that we have not seen in recent memory.

00:09:14.000 It's the closest example I could give is John Hancock, who was one of the richest people for the American founders, obviously was eccentric.

00:09:21.000 He signed his name biggest on the Declaration of Independence, never wore the uniform of the Continental Army, but was in the trenches through financing, through support, and didn't want to live under the tyranny or the authoritarianism of King George.

00:09:36.000 Elon Musk, being the renegade, the rebel, the objector, is making this entire government that is now being dissolved of Silicon Valley increasingly paranoid and nervous.

00:09:51.000 They know that it's fair game, and even more so, they know that this decades-long reign of a small unelected tech oligarchy has now been put in jeopardy.

00:10:01.000 By whom?

00:10:03.000 By the billionaire of their own creation.

00:10:05.000 By the billionaire who puts rockets into space because they defunded NASA, by the billionaire who made money off of their electric vehicle push.

00:10:14.000 He's your creation, and now you're not angry that he's doing what he's doing.

00:10:17.000 You're angry you can't control him.

00:10:20.000 You created Elon Musk, and now he's dissolving the very government that you benefit from.

00:10:26.000 The empire is going to strike back against Elon, but I think he knows that.

00:10:33.000 MSNBC is now really worried that now Twitter can help rig an election if it's privately controlled.

00:10:40.000 Of course, they don't care about rigging elections if Google is not allowing coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop, or Twitter didn't allow coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop, or Google manipulating search results, where according to Dr. Epstein said that Google flipped millions of votes through their search engine optimization manipulation, or Facebook not allowing critical stories of Biden to be shared.

00:11:03.000 But now MSNBC goes and puts the I hate rich people hat on, even though they're a Microsoft-started company by the formerly world's richest man, Bill Gates.

00:11:14.000 Hard to keep all this straight, because now they hate rich people because the rich person they created, Elon Musk, because they all want to drive electric cars, isn't obeying and is not healing to their demands.

00:11:28.000 You see, once there is an objector, a renegade, or a dissident, or an insurgent, the left will do everything they possibly can to stifle that person.

00:11:40.000 The problem is that Elon is probably too big to stifle.

00:11:46.000 Play cut 28.

00:11:48.000 If you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don't have to explain yourself.

00:11:53.000 You don't even have to be transparent.

00:11:54.000 You could secretly ban one party's candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else.

00:12:05.000 And the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the election.

00:12:10.000 Elon Musk says this is all to help people because he is just a free speech, philosophically clear, open-minded helper.

00:12:19.000 Who is this guy?

00:12:20.000 Ari Milber?

00:12:21.000 That's exactly what they've been doing to conservatives the last six years.

00:12:25.000 Shadow banning, changing the ability for people to be able to see trends, manipulating trends.

00:12:34.000 A friend of mine here in Phoenix, very smart guy.

00:12:39.000 He said, Charlie, you know what I want to see?

00:12:41.000 I want to see what James O'Keefe recovered or uncovered, where they showed that special bar.

00:12:46.000 Do you remember that special dashboard that they say did not exist, where it allows you to ban certain people, that allows you to suppress certain accounts?

00:12:58.000 That I want to actually go see that.

00:13:00.000 That I want to go after the dashboard that is suppressing potential disagreeable accounts.

00:13:10.000 Part of Elon Musk's project is going to be actually uncovering all of the censorship that Twitter has been openly and privately involved in the last couple of years.

00:13:25.000 Wonder how different our country would look politically if we actually had a free and open Twitter.

00:13:29.000 This is why they're so nervous.

00:13:31.000 If people are actually able to have transparent information and news, the country might not actually have a Democrat-controlled Senate.

00:13:39.000 Pelosi might not be Speaker of the House.

00:13:41.000 The government of the Silicon Valley elites is crumbling.

00:13:47.000 Almost every day we hear about another major corporation that has gone woke.

00:13:50.000 Disney hates you, and everyone should cancel Disney.

00:13:55.000 They hate families.

00:13:56.000 Disney made tons of money off of being family-friendly and family-safe.

00:14:01.000 Now it's time to divest from Disney.

00:14:03.000 It's a lot of companies like T-Mobile that's firing all their unvaccinated employees.

00:14:07.000 They're tormenting their employees with leftist propaganda and funding organizations who seem to hate this country.

00:14:12.000 And so I was on a mission.

00:14:13.000 I was seeing how much I was spending on my cell phone bill, how much Turning Point USA was spending on our cell phone bill.

00:14:19.000 I said, I'm so sick and tired of giving these anti-American cell phone companies my hard-earned money and our amazing donor money at Turning Point USA.

00:14:27.000 So I told my team, I said, go find the cell phone company that shares our values.

00:14:31.000 And I remember I met this guy, Glenn.

00:14:33.000 We'd run into each other a couple of times, and he was super enthusiastic, always wore this red polo, some Patriot Mobile on it.

00:14:40.000 And I saw him again at an event.

00:14:41.000 I said, okay, now you really got to sit down.

00:14:43.000 Like, let's plan some time together and talk about this.

00:14:46.000 So we had this meal in Dallas.

00:14:47.000 This was back in November, and he laid it all out.

00:14:49.000 And I got it.

00:14:50.000 I was like, wow.

00:14:50.000 Okay.

00:14:51.000 So you're a conservative Christian cell phone provider and I don't have to pay all these woke companies.

00:14:56.000 And it just like clicked in a minute.

00:14:57.000 I said, let's partner together.

00:14:58.000 Let's have you on the show.

00:14:59.000 Let's do some things.

00:15:01.000 And that's how it all started.

00:15:02.000 So Patriot Mobile, they have plans to fit every budget.

00:15:05.000 And their U.S.-based customer support team provides exceptional customer service.

00:15:10.000 Most importantly, Patriot Mobile shares your values and supports organizations fighting for religious liberty, constitutional rights, and the sanctity of life.

00:15:19.000 So make the switch today.

00:15:20.000 I know the whole management team behind Patriot Mobile, Glenn, all of them, they support Turning Point USA.

00:15:25.000 They support us beautifully.

00:15:27.000 So you go to patriotmobile.com slash Charlie or call 972 Patriot.

00:15:31.000 People ask all the time, Charlie, what do I do?

00:15:33.000 What do I do?

00:15:34.000 Well, a good way to start is, you know, make your cell phone bill, whatever.

00:15:38.000 If you see it on your cell phone statement, you get your cell phone statement.

00:15:41.000 You might as well just say, oh, that money's going to the DNC or that money's going to Christian conservative organizations or company like Patriot Mobile.

00:15:49.000 So you get a free activation with the offer code Charlie.

00:15:51.000 They also have special discounts for veterans and first responder heroes.

00:15:55.000 It's patriotmobile.com/slash Charlie, or call 972 Patriot.

00:15:59.000 Join me and the Charlie Kirk Show in our change to Patriot Mobile and forgetting all these woke, awful, terrible cell phone companies.

00:16:06.000 Portions of this program, the Charlie Kirk Show, are brought to you in part by Patriot Mobile.

00:16:10.000 It's patriotmobile.com/slash Charlie, patriotmobile.com/slash Charlie.

00:16:18.000 I want to just kind of expand on a point I made previously, which is only in the American entrepreneurial system could someone like Elon Musk be able to pull off what he's been able to do.

00:16:30.000 Now, look, I mean, markets have externalities.

00:16:33.000 We admit that markets at times can have flaws because we're dealing with flawed people.

00:16:39.000 But markets are by far the best system for people to flourish.

00:16:43.000 There's no question, there's no debate.

00:16:45.000 Markets, especially one that support private property rights, entrepreneurship, it's the greatest way to empower people of all backgrounds, cultures, religious views to be able to maximally flourish.

00:17:02.000 And so you have Elon Musk, who made $280 billion, largely solving a problem that the left has been framing.

00:17:13.000 The problem that Elon Musk was framing, that was solving, is that we have too many carbon emissions.

00:17:18.000 Now, we at times push back against that premise, and we should, because if you extrapolate that to its furthest logical conclusion, it would be the eradication of all oil and natural gas, liquid, natural gas, and fossil fuel exploration, which is not just unrealistic, it's immoral and really bad for a society.

00:17:36.000 But you look at this, you say, okay, would you rather have a government agency try and create an electric car, which would be a joke, or you have someone that had to go near go up to the edge, go up to the ledge of not making payroll in 2008 during the financial crisis, when everyone thought Tesla was a stupid idea, all the while trying to pull off SpaceX,

00:18:03.000 where he really had to believe in himself and get the tech and the engineering right, pull it off, and now has revolutionized the way that we are engaging in transport in the West.

00:18:13.000 That alone is a pretty amazing story.

00:18:16.000 And that should also tell you a little about who now owns Twitter.

00:18:19.000 Just out of a general rule of thumb, and it's not a perfect rule, but it's generally good.

00:18:24.000 The guy that almost went bankrupt after he used the billions of dollars he made from PayPal and didn't sleep for years and went up against all the greatest critics to create one of the most valuable companies.

00:18:35.000 That's a guy I trust more than some creepy weird guy in his pajamas like Parag Augerwal or whatever that wants to censor people he doesn't like.

00:18:43.000 Just as a general rule of thumb.

00:18:45.000 If you have to choose, generally, I prefer the gritty guy versus the fragile person.

00:18:55.000 With us right now is someone who has successfully been able to bring many cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

00:19:02.000 And yesterday was a big, big case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

00:19:06.000 And based on oral arguments, it looks very good.

00:19:08.000 It's all about religious freedom and expression that could have ramifications for people of faith all across the country.

00:19:15.000 Firstliberty.org, Kelly Shackelford is with us right now.

00:19:18.000 Kelly, welcome back to the program.

00:19:21.000 Happy to be on, Charlie.

00:19:22.000 So, Kelly, you had the case, the Coach Kennedy case, that went up to the Supreme Court yesterday.

00:19:27.000 Tell us about the case and then tell us how you think arguments went.

00:19:33.000 This is the coach.

00:19:34.000 Coach Kennedy was a coach.

00:19:36.000 He was a Marine for about 20 years.

00:19:38.000 And when he was really trying to figure out whether he should be a coach, he prayed that God would give him some sort of sign.

00:19:45.000 And in the middle of the night, he turned on the TV and the movie Facing the Giants was on, which is about Christians and coaching.

00:19:52.000 And it just floored him.

00:19:54.000 And what he saw them do is after every game, winner or lose, to pray and give thanks to God.

00:20:00.000 So he made a pledge right there that after every game, I'm going to take this coaching job.

00:20:05.000 And after every game, winner or lose, I'm going to go to the center of the field where we had the battle, and I'm going to go to a knee for 15, 20 seconds, and I'm going to thank God for the privilege of coaching these young men.

00:20:16.000 And he did that.

00:20:18.000 And after a while, some of the kids were like, hey, can we pray when you pray?

00:20:21.000 And he said, it's a free country.

00:20:22.000 Do what you want.

00:20:24.000 And it started to develop into a bunch of kids.

00:20:27.000 And so he, you know, at that point, he was like, well, you know, hey, that sounds like great.

00:20:32.000 I'm happy to do it with the kids.

00:20:34.000 But eventually, the school came and said, hey, you can't do that.

00:20:37.000 You can't really, you know, lead because you're a coach.

00:20:41.000 And so he said, oh, okay, I didn't understand that.

00:20:43.000 He said, I won't do that anymore.

00:20:45.000 But he wanted to go back to do what he did by himself, go to a knee and pray.

00:20:50.000 And they said, if you do that again, we're going to fire you.

00:20:53.000 And so he did that because he made a pledge to God to do that.

00:20:57.000 And they fired him.

00:20:59.000 And so this is where we are.

00:21:01.000 Went up to the Ninth Circuit, unfortunately for him.

00:21:04.000 He lives in the Ninth Circuit, which is out of San Francisco, and a very liberal court.

00:21:09.000 And they said coaches are not allowed to pray if anyone can see them.

00:21:14.000 And this is what went up to the Supreme Court.

00:21:16.000 And it's his rights to free speech and free exercise of religion versus the, you know, the idea that schools have some sort of duty to make sure that to make sure that they had to stop all religion, essentially, because somebody might see it.

00:21:40.000 And then that will cause a problem because they might think the school district is promoting religion because the coach on his own time is going to a knee to give thanks.

00:21:49.000 Yeah, I mean, there's so many wrinkles to this.

00:21:52.000 First of all, the great work you've been doing, Kelly, we've known each other for a couple of years.

00:21:56.000 And since I first met you, you've been working on this case.

00:21:58.000 And to get it in front of the U.S. Supreme Court is very significant.

00:22:02.000 The Supreme Court rejects most cases.

00:22:04.000 Let's play Cut 31.

00:22:06.000 I want you to listen to this, Kelly, then let's react.

00:22:08.000 It's Justice Kagan arguing that the school can punish him because it pressures other kids to join.

00:22:14.000 Play Cut 31.

00:22:16.000 The idea of why the school can discipline him is that that puts a kind of undue pressure, a kind of coercion on students to participate in religious activities when they may not wish to, when their religion is different or when they have no religion.

00:22:35.000 What's your reaction to that, Kelly?

00:22:38.000 Well, this is the argument.

00:22:40.000 This is what they've been doing.

00:22:41.000 And by the way, I apologize if there's background noise.

00:22:44.000 I'm near the airport.

00:22:45.000 But this is the battle we've been in now for almost 50 years where what happens is the liberals have been saying, well, we've got to shut down private speech, First Amendment rights of students, of parents, of teachers, because people might get the wrong perception and think that it's really not private speech.

00:23:09.000 It's really the school district or the government pushing religion.

00:23:13.000 And so they've used this excuse as the excuse to strip away First Amendment rights of people, private citizens like Coach Kennedy, because of this alleged, you know, people will be confused argument.

00:23:27.000 And I think what was great about the argument yesterday in the Supreme Court is I think they're ready to be done with that.

00:23:35.000 We've got a court now that actually cares about the Constitution, not, you know, whatever liberal things are going around these days or in the culture.

00:23:45.000 And so they talked about this called the Lemon Test, and they talked about being ready to be rid of it.

00:23:50.000 And if they do, it'll be a huge change and a very good change because it'll mean that private First Amendment rights, free speech, free exercise of religion, you won't have government saying that they have some excuse to strip that away from you because they're scared that somebody might think the government is promoting religion.

00:24:09.000 Sort of a basic concept is it's not difficult to understand that the government doesn't endorse everything they fail to censor.

00:24:18.000 That's called freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and whether it's a coach or a student, they have a right to live their faith.

00:24:24.000 The government doesn't have a right to coerce anyone with regard to their religion, but private individuals, whether it be a teacher or a coach or a student or a parent, has a right to pray, to express their faith, to wear a yarmulke, to wear a cross around their neck.

00:24:40.000 These are basic freedoms under the First Amendment.

00:24:42.000 That's correct.

00:24:43.000 And for whatever reason, these school districts are really upset about that.

00:24:48.000 So in closing here, Kelly, how do you think this one is going to turn out?

00:24:52.000 What could the ramifications be for other religious liberty type cases?

00:24:57.000 And finally, you know, just kind of give us an idea of kind of the broader picture of what you're seeing happen in the courts.

00:25:06.000 Are we going in a more liberty, you know, oriented direction or totalitarian one?

00:25:12.000 Yeah, I mean, you know, with the judges appointed under the Trump administration, we have the highest credential judges ever during that time appointed and more that were committed to originalism, which is to look at the original meaning of the text or the Constitution.

00:25:27.000 Not a living, breathing Constitution that you change how you want.

00:25:30.000 But what was the original meaning to be faithful to that?

00:25:33.000 And that is changing things.

00:25:34.000 And it's doing that in religious liberty in incredibly positive ways that are opening up freedom.

00:25:40.000 I think I'm hopeful, I'm prayerful.

00:25:43.000 I mean, those justices are going to go into a room on Friday and they're going to vote.

00:25:47.000 Nobody's going to know how they voted.

00:25:49.000 They're going to start writing the opinion.

00:25:51.000 And we won't know until late June.

00:25:53.000 But I feel confident that we're going to get a good decision.

00:25:57.000 This will be the first decision ever in the history of our country from the Supreme Court on the rights of teachers or coaches with regard to their faith.

00:26:06.000 And I think we're going to start to turn a corner that stops this excuses of liberals who are anti-religious, who don't want to hear religious expression, coming up with excuses of reasons why to take away private citizens' right to go to a knee for 15 seconds, to have a Christian club.

00:26:24.000 I mean, they've gone against these things for 50 years, and they've used this excuse that, well, people will think the government is pushing religion.

00:26:32.000 I think we might be through with that because it's pretty simple that private citizens have a right to free speech and free exercise of religion.

00:26:41.000 If it's a government entity, that's a different story, but we can't use sort of people not understanding as an excuse to strip away people's First Amendment rights.

00:26:51.000 And I'll tell you, Charlie, one other thing, if people want to listen to the argument, we have an audio recording of the argument.

00:26:57.000 They can go to firstliberty.org and they can listen to it and hear an actual oral argument, what it's like, some of the things you just mentioned, and be in prayer between now and the end of June when this decision will come down.

00:27:10.000 And most people think it's going to be a landmark decision because it's going to be a first of its time.

00:27:14.000 I think so highly of the work that you're doing, Kelly, and we're glad to be partnering with you in a variety of different ways.

00:27:18.000 It's firstliberty.org.

00:27:20.000 That's firstliberty.org.

00:27:22.000 You guys could check it out.

00:27:23.000 God bless you, Kelly, and we'll talk to you soon.

00:27:25.000 Thank you.

00:27:26.000 You too.

00:27:30.000 When the New York Times does an entire article about you, Twitter under Elon Musk will be a scary place.

00:27:39.000 Elon Musk is without a doubt one of the world's most interesting people, regardless of your opinion of him.

00:27:45.000 Which, if you have nothing but a negative opinion of him, you're an ideologue and that's a pathological view.

00:27:51.000 I'll be very honest.

00:27:52.000 You can have criticisms.

00:27:53.000 I do.

00:27:53.000 I don't like that he does business in China.

00:27:55.000 I don't like the Neuralink thing.

00:27:56.000 I've said that.

00:27:57.000 But if it's nothing but negative, I mean, come on, really?

00:28:00.000 There's got to be some admiration for the companies he's built, his incredible engineering mind.

00:28:08.000 Maybe I misspoke.

00:28:09.000 An entire page about Elon.

00:28:12.000 So it says here, Twitter under Elon Musk will be a scary place.

00:28:16.000 Twitter has never been a place for rational nuanced speech, they say.

00:28:20.000 Expected to get much, much worse is what the New York Times says.

00:28:25.000 Expect the service to be even worse when owned by the world's richest man.

00:28:29.000 So for Greg Bessinger, who's a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, what has Elon Musk ever made worse in his life?

00:28:38.000 PayPal?

00:28:39.000 That seems to be a little bit of a success.

00:28:41.000 Tesla, you probably drive one, Greg Bessinger.

00:28:46.000 SpaceX, the boring company?

00:28:50.000 No, it probably is going to get a lot better.

00:28:51.000 It'll probably be worse for you, though, Greg Bessinger, because you just want to control what people think and say.

00:29:00.000 It writes here, quote, Mr. Musk is correct that Twitter has become the de facto public square, but consider the fate of another public square led by a billionaire with no real check on his power.

00:29:10.000 Yeah, that would be really bad.

00:29:12.000 I mean, the idea of no check on his power.

00:29:15.000 Facebook.

00:29:16.000 Leaks over the past year have shown that Meta, under Mark Zuckerberg's leadership, has overlooked evidence that hurtful comments on the company's platform have caused emotional damage to companies' teenagers and increased users' anxiety and anger.

00:29:27.000 That's the least of Facebook's problems right now.

00:29:30.000 The company knows its algorithms are deeply flawed, but because Zuckerberg holds a controlling share of votes on the board, external internal pressures on the company to change have proven to be futile.

00:29:42.000 You see, for people like Greg Bessinger and the New York Times, they think Twitter has been serving its purpose.

00:29:50.000 They think the fact that you're not able to speak freely about vaccines, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, early interventions, masks, that's a good thing.

00:30:02.000 One of the reasons why we were not able to lift the mandates earlier is because we were not able to speak freely at the place where public opinion is shaped, which is predominantly Twitter.

00:30:15.000 Now, I know a lot of you listening say, I don't use Twitter.

00:30:17.000 I don't care about Twitter, but the people you watch use Twitter, and that's where they decide what to think.

00:30:24.000 They don't think independently by reading trusted sources.

00:30:28.000 They flip through a Twitter news feed, and that is where your Apple news gets composed.

00:30:36.000 That's where the newspapers you read get composed.

00:30:39.000 Whether you know it or not, or whether you want to admit it, Twitter is the top.

00:30:44.000 It is the tributary.

00:30:45.000 It is the beginning of the tributary, I should say.

00:30:52.000 If the New York Times thinks that Twitter is going to become a scary place, it's going to be probably pretty awesome.

00:30:58.000 Twitter under Elon Musk will be a scary place.

00:31:01.000 Look, so there's two opposite sides that are operating here, right?

00:31:05.000 We have the free market of ideas versus the narrative industrial complex.

00:31:10.000 We want the free market of ideas.

00:31:12.000 If you have a bad idea, then it won't stand up to scrutiny.

00:31:16.000 If you have a good idea, well, then it will spread with virality.

00:31:20.000 But the left doesn't believe that.

00:31:22.000 They believe that a good idea might be disinformation.

00:31:27.000 They think that a good idea might really be a threat.

00:31:30.000 Where we as conservatives are so confident in our position, we're confident because we're rooted in reality, not some sort of abstract theory, that we're perfectly fine with people with bad ideas to be able to keep talking.

00:31:43.000 Where is the conservative push to try to ban CNN?

00:31:47.000 It doesn't exist.

00:31:48.000 We just mock it because no one watches it.

00:31:51.000 We know that no one watches Brian Stelter or takes them seriously, but yet they're the ones that are trying to cancel Fox and now trying to debase Twitter.

00:32:00.000 Their ideas seem good when they're unchallenged.

00:32:04.000 Can you show one person, show me one person on the left that goes to hostile territory and regularly takes questions from conservatives?

00:32:13.000 I do that at Berkeley and Boulder.

00:32:15.000 Ben Shapiro does that at campuses across the country.

00:32:17.000 Candace Owens does that at campuses across the country. 1.00

00:32:20.000 Yet CNN would not be able to even take a couple critical questions from two University of Chicago students.

00:32:27.000 I say this as humbly as I possibly can.

00:32:30.000 The fact that we are willing to take antagonistic and confrontational line of questioning means that we're closer to the truth than the people that don't do that on a regular basis.

00:32:43.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

00:32:44.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com, and support the Charlie Kirk Show at CharlieKirk.com/slash support.

00:32:50.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

00:32:51.000 God bless.

00:32:55.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - April 26, 2022

Elon Musk and the Rise of the Dissident Elites

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript