00:00:00.000Hey, everybody, today's Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:02.000John Ratcliffe joins us, and then Dr. Scott Jensen, who is running for governor of Minnesota.
00:00:07.000And finally, Elon Musk is going to be forced to buy Twitter.
00:00:10.000We unpack the implications of all of that.
00:00:12.000Email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:15.000Get involved with TurningpointUSA today at tpusa.com.
00:00:19.000Start a high school chapter or college chapter today at tpusa.com.
00:00:24.000As always, you can email me, freedom at charliekirk.com and get involved with turningpointusa, tpusa.com, and see us when we are on tour at tpusa.com/slash tour.
00:00:49.000His 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.
00:00:58.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:42.000And you said in your memoir, I think he's been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.
00:01:52.000Would he be an effective commander-in-chief?
00:02:20.000So I want to kind of begin by framing this.
00:02:23.000We did a whole hour on, quite honestly, how frustrated I personally am and our audiences on how people in Washington, D.C. seem to be escalating the conflict in Ukraine unnecessarily.
00:02:35.000What is it that when you were there at the Trump administration, how did you guys handle this to try to keep things at least at bay with Putin and with Ukraine?
00:02:45.000Where obviously Putin would have loved to have done this earlier, but there were decisions that were made by the Trump administration that obviously Putin made a separate, a different choice.
00:02:57.000Well, one single biggest reason, Charlie, and that was who was in the Oval Office and who was calling the shots.
00:03:05.000Because it's not just what Putin is doing now that he wasn't doing or had stopped doing in the Obama-Biden administration and then continued miraculously in the Biden administration and didn't do during the Trump years, but it's also President Xi Jinping.
00:03:23.000It's also, you know, mullahs in Iran, all of these people acting badly now in ways that they weren't during the Trump administration.
00:03:33.000And the common denominator there is Donald Trump.
00:03:35.000And so it was a president of the United States who, you know, call it what you want, Charlie.
00:03:42.000Some people would say respect, some people would say fear.
00:03:47.000But either way, the bottom line is it was all about the fact that, you know, President Trump made clear to foreign leaders that things like this wouldn't be tolerated.
00:03:58.000And so, you know, the example is the removal from the planet of Iranian Revolutionary Guard cuts force General Qasim Soleimani in a very public way, you know, to make sure that Iranian bad actors stopped acting badly.
00:04:16.000So Putin knew that he couldn't get away with it during the Trump administration.
00:04:21.000And it's not a coincidence that it was just two months into this Biden administration that he starts mobilizing troops in the Donbas region.
00:04:32.000Yeah, so then we have the Nord Stream question.
00:04:35.000And I know you have to be probably careful in some ways how you answer this, but just kind of talking more broadly, I don't quite understand, at least from a logical perspective, why Putin would bomb his own kind of cash supply.
00:04:48.000Despite that, though, I'm being told that it was Putin from Brennan and all these other people, or at least they're alluding to it.
00:04:54.000How should we think about the Nordstream incident?
00:04:56.000What are the facts and the prerequisites we know in how we try to unpack this act of industrial sabotage?
00:05:49.000To your point, the first question is, yeah, why not just turn off the gas?
00:05:53.000Why blow up a $20 billion pipeline project to accomplish this?
00:06:01.000And what John Brennan would say, or some folks in the intelligence community fairly, unfairly would say is, well, it's a Russian, it's a classic Russian false flag.
00:06:15.000I don't know that that would be the motivation so much as I've tried to look at it and say, okay, if I were in charge of the intelligence community, we were in the process of determining attribution.
00:06:27.000One of the factors could be for Putin doing it is, look, in the old days, that natural gas had to transit through Ukraine.
00:06:35.000And so with those pipelines out of place, if Europe wants Russian natural gas, it's got to go through Ukraine.
00:06:42.000And for it to go through Ukraine, there has to be a peace agreement.
00:06:45.000So would there be some sort of, would this be some way of sort of forcing an off-ramp and some sort of agreement where everyone would get on board so that that could take place and give Putin an out to a war that's not going well.
00:07:00.000But the other way to look at that is who else would benefit from that?
00:07:04.000And an off-ramp and an ability to end the war would be Zelensky and Ukraine.
00:07:12.000And then, of course, there's the United States.
00:07:14.000If Ukraine isn't providing natural grass to Europe, the United States for decades to come, you know, would be a huge profit center.
00:07:21.000And when you couple that with the things that Joe Biden has said or Victoria Newland, who worked for him, all of those things, can we rule that out?
00:07:32.000No, but what I would say is this, Charlie, we'll know this answer in short term because attribution for this is not going to be particularly difficult.
00:07:44.000It's likely that the United States has or will soon determine from the intelligence community, from our assets, our ability to determine who pulled this off.
00:07:54.000And if it's not the United States, then we would make that clear publicly.
00:07:57.000We would want to make sure that that was communicated.
00:08:01.000And so I would expect that the Biden administration would have the opportunity in the coming weeks to be able to say, look, we've determined attribution and this is who it was.
00:08:13.000So we should know that answer definitively.
00:08:19.000I have my own personal opinions, but I'll hold those until there's further attribution from actual intelligence, current intelligence sources.
00:08:28.000Yeah, I mean, I guess what's concerning is that the United States hasn't denied it.
00:08:46.000And so, you know, and so that would be one of the factors.
00:08:49.000And it's fair to look at is when we perform, I say we, when I was in charge of the intelligence community and when we engaged in covert or clandestine activities in proximity that were going to other countries and were going to influence them economically, militarily, and whatever, it would be appropriate to give them a heads up, you know, obviously in confidence.
00:09:33.000We talk about nuclear weapons and would Putin use a tactical nuclear weapon.
00:09:37.000And there's been a lot of speculation about that.
00:09:40.000One thing I've been disappointed in folks out of the Pentagon, you know, not sort of spokespeople not talking about this issue is, look, when it comes to nuclear weapons and nuclear protocols, Vladimir Putin has wide latitude to use certain weapons of mass destruction, and he has to the detriment of populations around the world.
00:10:04.000And that would include chemical and biological.
00:10:06.000But I will say this: when it comes to the use of nuclear weapons, ever since the Cuban Missile Crisis and the old Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev, the old Politburo stepped in and said, when it comes to nuclear weapons, we don't want a crazy person making a one-off decision.
00:10:26.000And so they've got some pretty rigid protocols when it comes to the use of actual nuclear weapons that Vladimir Putin wouldn't be making those decisions by himself.
00:10:35.000And that's something that I think should give everyone some comfort as this thing goes.
00:10:40.000Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest, I just, that's one factor.
00:10:43.000I don't trust the fools that pulled off Afghanistan right now in our own government.
00:10:47.000I mean, Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley, they gave us the Afghanistan debacle.
00:10:52.000And I'm supposed to, I mean, I want the checks and balances on our guys.
00:10:56.000Not to say they're going to use nuclear weapons, but I mean.
00:10:59.000To your point, I mean, the world is on fire.
00:11:01.000I mean, look, we talked about Russia's doing things they weren't doing.
00:11:05.000China's doing things with Taiwan that they weren't doing.
00:11:08.000North Korea is doing things that they haven't done since 2017, the first year of the Trump administration.
00:11:13.000I mean, all of these things are because of what you said, Charlie.
00:11:26.000So, John, one of the reasons why I'm so frustrated with Republicans right now sending $70 billion to Ukraine, and we've kind of been toying around with this, is I have zero faith in the current national security apparatus.
00:11:36.000People like yourself, people like Rick Grinnell are no longer there.
00:11:40.000We have Jake Sullivan and so many others that just seem to be funding and strengthening this very corrupt and foolish group of people.
00:11:52.000And I mean, I know that Donald Trump's heart, because I spoke to the president recently, would be try to broker peace here, not trying to further a conflict.
00:12:02.000Is it the Americans' position right now?
00:12:04.000Is it the position of the American government to get us closer to peace?
00:12:19.000I mean, you know, you're absolutely right, Charlie.
00:12:24.000We have a war in regardless of who wins at this point, Ukraine or Russia.
00:12:28.000This war didn't take place in the Trump administration, wouldn't have taken place, you know, with strong leadership.
00:12:36.000You know, we could say the same thing about what's happening with Taiwan and China.
00:12:41.000You know, the things that China has started doing to Taiwan in and around Taiwan, you know, weren't taking place during our administration.
00:12:49.000And so, you know, do I think that it's, you know, that it's likely that we could have conflict in the Taiwan Strait in the Biden administration?
00:12:57.000Absolutely, for the same reason that we have a conflict in Ukraine.
00:13:01.000You know, so these are a factor of the people that you're talking about.
00:13:05.000And so, you know, it's Joe Biden in the White House, but it's also the national security apparatus and the people like Blinken and Austin and Sullivan.
00:13:15.000And they do not inspire confidence because they've made one bad decision after another.
00:13:19.000I mean, you know, from Afghanistan that had a ripple effect everywhere.
00:13:23.000So, you know, the thing I would say is, like so many of the crises that are happening, you know, from a foreign policy standpoint, we started out with Robert Gates, and we know the answer now, Robert.
00:13:36.000Joe Biden would not make a good president.
00:13:47.000You know, people ask me all the time about things are going so terribly wrong.
00:13:52.000But in all of those instances, Charlie, I think what people have to keep in mind is if you send the right people to Washington, these problems are all manufactured.
00:14:01.000They're not organic, meaning they are reversible and they are fixable with the right policies.
00:14:07.000So, you know, policy at the border, you know, remain in Mexico.
00:14:11.000Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I guess our frustration is, though, currently Republicans are funding these people, right?
00:14:27.000As you know, Charlie, before I was DNI, I was a member of Congress.
00:14:31.000And if you go back and check my record, you know, at the end of the year, as we approach these things, there'll be some sort of an omnibus that probably gets loaded up with all sorts of stuff.
00:14:41.000And, you know, in this case, with a potential change in Congress, even more so, because what you'll have is Republicans, you'll have Democrats wanting to spend money and leave a mark.
00:14:53.000But will you have Republicans go along?
00:14:58.000It's a Washington issue and Republican issue.
00:15:01.000So, you know, why did 10 Democrats or why did 10 Republicans go along with Joe Biden's infrastructure bill?
00:15:09.000And what they would say is, well, it's the right thing to do.
00:15:11.000But we've heard Democrats now use that and say, well, it's part of our string of successes why you should vote for Democrats.
00:15:19.000My fear, and you're right, Charlie, and the frustration was one of the things I hated about Congress, which you had people, particularly as they're, they'll say, you know, a continuing resolution is no way to run an end, you know, a military.
00:15:31.000And so therefore, we've got to pass an NDAA and we've got to load it up with all kinds of stuff.
00:15:35.000And I'm for a strong military, but all sorts of other things get loaded in these omnibuses, you know, that will fund the defense industry in places like Ukraine that most Americans are tired of supporting.
00:15:47.000Why aren't we spending this money on border security issues?
00:15:50.000Why aren't we spending this money to help all of the people in Florida that have been now hit by Hurricane Ian?
00:15:57.000You know, all of those things are good.
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00:17:30.000One of my favorite states in America is Minnesota.
00:17:37.000And I just don't think it gets the attention it deserves.
00:17:40.000It really is, it's a beast of a state.
00:17:42.000It's one of the nation's largest states and has really made a favorable, phenomenal contribution, I should say, to America in more ways than one.
00:19:57.000There has always been this kind of working-class, you know, Minnesota tradition, Democrat farmer-labor union, if not mistaken, DFLs, which I think are spending a lot against you, if not mistaken, right?
00:20:12.000Even though ironically, a lot of their kind of interests align.
00:20:17.000Talk about kind of the history of Minnesota politically.
00:20:22.000It was one of the only states to vote against Ronald Reagan, if I'm not mistaken, either 84 or in 80.
00:20:26.000At the same time, it's a very kind of conservative state in other ways.
00:21:05.000The DNR has slipped at times, to be sure.
00:21:08.000The Met Council is responsible for the largest cost overrun of a project in probably the history of Minnesota with a light rail project that's gone from $2 billion to nearly $3 billion.
00:21:20.000The labor is also leaving the Democratic Party because, frankly, the Democratic Party's heavy on promises, but short on, if you will, actually producing what they said they would do.
00:21:31.000And we're seeing the same thing, Charlie.
00:21:33.000And I heard earlier on your program with the Latino Hispanic community.
00:21:39.000They're saying, you know, we're not buying what you're selling because you just come in every four years, make a bunch of promises, and then you're nowhere to be found.
00:21:47.000And frankly, your policies aren't helping us.
00:21:49.000People are furious with Tim Walz for hooking our wagon to the California car mandates.
00:21:55.000And in so doing, he's helped drive inflation higher in Minnesota in terms of our gas prices, our fuel, our oil prices, our groceries are 20% up.
00:22:05.000People are just saying, listen, Tim Walz might be hiding in the bunker.
00:22:09.000He might spend $12 million to demonize Scott Jensen as some sort of extreme character.
00:22:14.000But the fact of the matter is, Charlie, six years ago, I was family doctor of the year in Minnesota.
00:22:28.000And there's some incredibly radical elements.
00:22:31.000It'd be one thing if the Democrat Party in Minnesota would kind of weigh both options and govern from the middle, but there's been some extraordinarily radical ideas that have been implemented.
00:22:41.000And just one that's so fundamental towards human flourishing, which is crime.
00:22:45.000You know, I've visited Minneapolis my entire life.
00:23:11.000It's more depressed than I've ever seen.
00:23:13.000And I know a lot of people that are moving out of the Minneapolis metropolitan area because of that.
00:23:17.000Can you talk about the rise in crime and what really kind of what triggered that?
00:23:26.000Tim Walz arguably is the godfather of lawlessness that's crept across Minnesota, but it's also, if you will, poisoned our nation.
00:23:35.000Tim Walz in 2020 during the riots was more concerned about making certain that Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Maxine Waters were happy with his performance.
00:23:48.000Was more concerned about the hard left base.
00:23:51.000He didn't put the National Guard on the streets.
00:23:53.000And when he finally did, after three days, he called on a bunch of 19-year-old cooks.
00:23:58.000He tried to blame the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Fry.
00:24:01.000But if you actually look back, Charlie, at Tim Walz' history, in 2005, he quit on the National Guard.
00:24:08.000He had been promoted to the highest rank that you could get as an enlisted officer.
00:24:13.000He was the command sergeant major, and he was supposed to go with his battalion.
00:24:17.000But when they found out they were getting deployed to Iraq, Walls quit.
00:24:21.00015 years later, when it comes time to let the National Guard restore lawful behavior in Minnesota, Tim Walz quit on him again.
00:24:29.000Three days later, on May 28th, when Tim Walz made the decision to stand down and let the third precinct building burn and absolutely surrendered to the rioters, he quit on the cops.
00:24:44.000And what we're seeing now is the downstream problems where we're seeing women in Minneapolis-St. Paul targeted rape, robbery, carjacking.
00:24:54.000We didn't even used to keep track of carjacking, but I think in 2021, we had almost 800 carjackings.
00:25:01.000And many of these are women being targeted as they're coming out of a daycare center or a grocery store.
00:25:08.000People are literally having to decide how far back they want to come to a stop before a stoplight so that they have a little room to wiggle if all of a sudden someone's coming at them in terms of a carjacking attempt.
00:25:36.000He should have, with this $250 million fraud in terms of feeding our children, he should have gotten on it once he saw that there was a problem.
00:25:43.000But he let hundreds of millions of dollars continue to be paid to these fraudsters.
00:25:48.000And now he's trying to blame the judge.
00:25:50.000He's trying to blame the Department of Agriculture.
00:25:52.000And Minnesotans are getting tired of it.
00:25:55.000And for those of you listening in the national audience that might say, oh, I don't know if a Republican can win in Minnesota, play cut 56.
00:26:03.000My sleeper is actually Minnesota governor's race.
00:26:06.000I think given the way that that state has moved over the last couple of cycles, and you've got Tim Walz there, the incumbent Democrat running against Scott Jensen, who's a doctor, Republican.
00:26:20.000That race is one to keep an eye on because you'll see if the electorate, if Republicans turn out on Election Day, that could very well be an upset.
00:26:41.000Charlie, we've set all records for raising funds for Republican gubernatorial candidates.
00:26:46.000By the time it's all said and done, we'll have raised over $5 million.
00:26:49.000We've got 110,000 people that have joined our email team.
00:26:53.000We've got thousands of people door knocking and phone banking for us every weekend.
00:26:58.000We have over 35,000 unique donations come our way.
00:27:02.000There's an energy, there's an excitement in Minnesota, and there's a recognition that our Constitution that calls for a government that's devoted to the security and the benefit and the protection of its people has got to be restored.
00:27:16.000And I think that's why we're going to win and we're very excited.
00:27:19.000Well, it seems as if it's kind of the final push.
00:27:22.000Talk about your website and how people can support you, doctor.
00:27:31.000And I think one of the things that's separated us from Tim Walz is we've put out 10-point programs for the last four months.
00:27:38.000We're trying to combat inflation, energy, public safety, education.
00:27:45.000And we've even gone so far as to say, listen, we want people to be physically fit themselves.
00:27:51.000So we put out a 10-point program with Matt Burke, my lieutenant governor candidate.
00:27:56.000He had to go to Baltimore to get a Super Bowl ring, but we forgave him for that.
00:28:00.000But the bottom line is we're trying to help people take charge of their own health and recognize that there are things they can do when we're in the midst of a pandemic as well.
00:28:09.000They can lose five pounds, walk every day for 15, 20 minutes.
00:28:12.000And we put out a 10-point program to help people get motivated.
00:28:15.000And to all of this, Tim Walz has been crickets.
00:28:37.000And as we close our conversation, this is not the only state this is happening, though.
00:28:40.000I can point to at least five or six gubernatorial races across the country, Arizona, Kerry Lake being one of them, where the Democrat just doesn't want to debate.
00:28:48.000They're going to just hide under this barrage of money.
00:28:52.000They're going to, and John Fetterman in Pennsylvania refuses to debate till late October.
00:28:56.000That's so unhealthy for our country, isn't it, Dr. 30 seconds?
00:29:00.000I mean, you can say what you want about Republicans or conservatives or whatever, but if you're not going to have a conversation, you shouldn't be in office.
00:29:08.000What they're telling voters is we really don't need you.
00:29:10.000We're just going to rely on the machine, the money, and the media.
00:29:14.000And they're going to get us across the goal line.
00:29:16.000But what they don't have this time around, Charlie, is the movement.
00:29:20.000I think a lot of people recognize there's a moment right now.
00:29:23.000And in that moment, what we're doing is we're telling people the millennials and the Gen Zs, the minorities, the moms and the dads, the mama bears, they're rising up and they're going to do exactly in Minnesota and in Arizona what they did in Virginia in 2021.
00:30:14.000You see, the most common type of magnesium is actually used as a laxative.
00:30:18.000So if you're taking it, you're probably, let's just say, depositing it in a place you shouldn't be.
00:30:25.000With 80% of Americans who are actually magnesium deficient, what if I told you you could be making that deficiency worse by actually taking the wrong kind of magnesium?
00:31:56.000What does that tell you about the health of the Democrat Party?
00:32:00.000Well, it tells you that they're in a very compromised position.
00:32:04.000They must be so certain of the federal government's ability to censor voices like this program, so certain of the ability to raise money synthetically and artificially to run ads to destroy their political opponents.
00:32:16.000It's a very, very troubling thing for our republic, though.
00:32:19.000It is not healthy to be able to just hide from reporters and hide from political opponents and run political ads.
00:32:26.000That is a bad, bad, bad sign for the country.
00:32:28.000And honestly, it shows that Republicans are in a position of truth.
00:32:33.000You know, the next time I come across one of the degenerates that work for the New York Times and they want to ask me questions, I'm going to ask them, like, hey, what do you think about the idea that you guys never press Democrat candidates that are running for office that refuse to debate?
00:32:48.000Now, in all fairness, some of the local media here in Arizona, they've been going after Katie Hobbs for this.
00:32:53.000I want to say going after her, but they've been covering her pretty negatively, saying, why won't she debate?
00:33:08.000Kerry Lake is on television for 30 years.
00:33:11.000And plus what, Katie Hobbs is going to defend homelessness, vagrancy, open-air drug use, CRT, the sexualization of our children, and open borders?
00:33:56.000Look, Twitter has huge opportunity, huge upside.
00:33:59.000But I think the first thing that Elon Musk has to do, if he does end up buying Twitter, is to purge it of its bots and trolls.
00:34:07.000Secondly, I want Elon Musk to publicize all of the communication and actions that Twitter has agreed to via federal enforcement of censoring political opponents.
00:34:19.000For example, since Elon Musk now will own Twitter after this lawsuit, maybe he can get into the story that showed that this program, the Charlie Kirk show, and my own personal social media sites, Twitter, were censored by third-party groups for the reason of the federal government insisting to do that.
00:34:41.000So, look, Elon Musk has an opportunity to liberate American discourse.
00:34:47.000And I said yesterday, and I'll say it again, I'm not trying to put all of our eggs in the Elon Musk basket because he does some stuff I really don't like.
00:34:54.000Elon Musk's recent artificial intelligence stuff, not a fan.
00:35:01.000But him buying Twitter and turning it into a legit marketplace of ideas and pushing back against the woke mind virus, I will be the biggest Elon Musk fan in that regard, especially if he can turn Twitter into a place where censorship is no longer the norm.
00:35:14.000And I said it yesterday, I'll say it again as I finish my thought here.
00:35:18.000Without censorship, I don't think the Democrats win anything.
00:35:21.000If Elon Musk is legitimately able to get Twitter, I don't think it'll be done in time for the midterms, but if Elon Musk is legitimately able to get Twitter into a marketplace of ideas, at least the semblance of free speech, a Republican will win the White House in 2024.
00:35:35.000If Twitter is able to be a place that is fair, open, and transparent, where the algorithms aren't hidden, where censorship doesn't happen because the FBI wants it to happen, or the Department of State wants it to happen, or the DHS or DHS wants it to happen, a Republican will in the White House in 2024.
00:35:50.000And more than that, we will be a happier country and our politics will be de-radicalized.
00:35:59.000So I certainly support Elon doing this.
00:36:01.000Am I going to say that it's our great hope?