00:00:00.000Today in the Charlie Kirk Show, we go through some disturbing election integrity news out of Arizona.
00:00:06.000And then we talk about one industry that is experiencing a boom in the kingdom of Washington, D.C. Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:17.000Subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast by taking out your phone and typing in Charlie Kirk Show and make sure that plus sign is hit and that you are subscribed to our podcast.
00:00:28.000And come to our Turning Point USA Student Action Summit.
00:01:23.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:29.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:19.000You can't believe the amount of new interest and clients that you're able to recruit.
00:02:26.000The amount of people you have to hire just to be able to sustain the volume of work.
00:02:35.000OpenSecrets.org reports unprecedented $1 billion first quarter lobbying haul puts 2022 on track for a record year.
00:02:47.000This year is on track for record lobbying spending after lobbyists collectively clocked the first biggest, the biggest first quarter haul in history with more than $1 billion disclosed during the first quarter of 2022 alone.
00:03:03.000The federal budget was the most lobbied issue from January through March with 3,394 clients paying for lobbying on the issue.
00:03:13.000Health issues are also heavily lobbied with 2,068 clients.
00:03:20.000You see, the bigger the government, the more the opportunity for corporations not to worry about how to make better products or to persuade you to buy their products or to be able to develop better services, but instead, they want to be able to sneak their way in to the federal treasury, your taxpayer money, and get their part.
00:03:44.000This is all while Business Insider, which is a rag of a website, says a wave of layoffs is sweeping the United States.
00:03:53.000Here are the firms that have announced cuts so far from Compass to Coinbase.
00:04:12.000Peloton has already laid off thousands of employees.
00:04:14.000Online car dealer Carvana has slashed 12% of its workforce.
00:04:18.000Companies like Netflix are making cuts.
00:04:21.000Business growth is slowing while labor costs are increasing.
00:04:25.000This is the crash crashflation that we've been talking about for some time.
00:04:30.000But what we're seeing now is the economy is in such fragile footing unless you work for a lobbying firm.
00:04:41.000Lobbying related to health continues to dominate spending as recovery from the coronavirus pandemic continues.
00:04:48.000So while they were always talking about public health and stopping the spread, while they were pushing forward to pushing aggressively to try to have more spending against COVID, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Johnson Johnson, amongst many others, bio and tech, saw a once-in-a-generation opportunity to be able to skim off the federal treasury off your money to make them rich.
00:05:41.000Then why would you want to make that government bigger and more powerful?
00:05:48.000Why would you make the government stronger?
00:05:52.000Pharmaceutical research and manufacturers of America ranked third overall in the first quarter of 2022, with nearly $8.3 million in spending during that period.
00:06:01.000The pharmaceutical industry trade group was the third largest spending of 2021 at over $30 million for that year.
00:06:08.000So you have a billion dollars being spent on corporate America, an unprecedented sum, according to Open Secrets.
00:06:14.000Think about what they're not spending money on.
00:06:16.000They're not spending money on new products.
00:06:18.000They're not spending money on research and development.
00:06:20.000They still are, but that money isn't being allocated as much for those things.
00:06:24.000Instead, they see the greatest bang for their buck hiring a lobbyist for $150,000 a month.
00:06:31.000By hiring a lobbyist for $150,000 a month, they're able to navigate the halls of Congress.
00:06:40.000And number one, Pfizer doesn't want to be aggressively investigated by the federal government.
00:06:44.000They want to continue to be able to approve vaccines for children.
00:06:47.000They want to continue to be doing all sorts of sneaky and deceitful and treacherous things.
00:06:53.000But Pfizer also wants to continue to receive billions of dollars from the federal government in mandatory vaccine expenditures, in all sorts of different things.
00:07:02.000So what Pfizer will do is they will go hire a lobbying firm on what is metaphorically called K Street in Washington, D.C.
00:07:11.000And so on K-Street, it's kind of known as the lobbying capital of Washington, D.C.
00:07:16.000They will hire, let's just say, Sal and Moe's lobbying shop.
00:07:20.000So they will pay Sal and Moe an extraordinary amount of money.
00:07:25.000Now, this is one of the ways that corporations are able to give money directly to politicians without giving money directly to politicians.
00:07:32.000So what they will do is they will give these lobbyists, let's say, $150,000 to $200,000 a month.
00:07:38.000And these lobbyists will, of course, take some of it for themselves.
00:07:44.000But they'll use a lot of it to then go give direct contributions to Senator Chuck Schumer or to Senator John Cornyn.
00:07:53.000So what they'll do is Sal and Moe's lobbying shop will take that amount of money from Pfizer.
00:07:58.000They'll take that amount of money from AstraZeneca.
00:08:00.000They'll take that money from Raytheon.
00:08:02.000They'll take that money from Northrop Grumman.
00:08:04.000And they'll host a fundraiser at the Capitol Hill Club saying, join us in support of the candidacy for Chuck Schumer for Senate Majority Leader or join us for this fundraiser for Nancy Pelosi.
00:08:16.000And by the Republicans and Democrats are equal offenders of this.
00:09:00.000They'll say, yes, we have all these people waiting for you in the next room, all of whom, by the way, are lobbyists that work for them, who all give the $1,000 or $2,000.
00:09:08.000And there's kind of a wink and a nod that you're supposed to give to these candidates.
00:09:11.000Now, you're not allowed to reimburse campaign contributions.
00:09:15.000But there's an expectation that if you work at the highest levels of these lobbying firms, that you better put aside money every single year to give money to politicians.
00:09:24.000Now, that's borderline legal and illegal.
00:09:27.000And that's something that lobbyists are always kind of on the edge with.
00:09:30.000But they'll sit down with the politicians.
00:09:31.000They'll say, okay, Senator Schumer, you know, I think it's really important that we send $40 billion to Ukraine.
00:09:41.000And they'll be saying this to the politician, and Schumer will be listening to all of this or whomever, Pelosi or Cornyn or whatever, and they'll be listening to this.
00:09:50.000And the politician knows why the lobbyist is saying that.
00:09:52.000The lobbyist is being paid to say this.
00:09:55.000The politician knows that when they walk into the next room in the fundraiser, they're going to receive money under kind of the wink and nod promise that they're going to advance the interests of the corporation, whatever that corporation might be.
00:10:08.000Now, this system has been getting more and more broken, but these corporations have just become so cavalier and brazen.
00:10:16.000And we live now in a situation where the wealthiest counties in America are surrounding Washington, D.C. Instead of trying to extract oil or trying to develop new products or build cars, the wealthiest counties are where you don't make anything of value.
00:10:31.000You extract from everywhere else and you redistribute it and launder for your own part.
00:10:36.000As you struggle to pay your bills, lobbyists are richer than ever.
00:10:40.000And it's boomtown in Washington, D.C. We're blessed to live in the greatest nation ever to exist in the history of the world.
00:10:49.000Luke 12, 48 says, quote, to whom much has been given, much will be required.
00:13:52.000All the surrounding counties of Washington, D.C., they're having a heyday.
00:14:00.000While the health industry dominates overall, OpenSecrets.org writes, the top spender of this year's first quarter was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, about $19 million in lobbying spending.
00:14:11.000A longtime top lobbying spender with more than $1.7 billion spent since 1998, the chamber spent over $66 million on lobbying in 2021 alone.
00:14:23.000The business lobbying group's heavy spending made it the top lobbying spender, despite fallout among Republicans after the chamber's endorsement of 30 Democrats seeking House seats in 2020.
00:14:33.000The Biotechnology Innovation Organization spent $3.2 million on lobbying in the first quarter of this year.
00:14:41.000$1.2 billion spent on lobbying your government.
00:14:51.000Because when you have these potential multi-trillion dollar bills that are passed, there's so many carve-outs for the lobbyists to be able to send on D.C., be able to get a senator or two, host a fundraiser for them, donate to their PAC.
00:15:06.000Now, another way the corporations are able to circumvent this is they're able to donate to social welfare organizations.
00:15:12.000So, how many of you have seen these advertisements in your state where it's an attack ad, but it's kind of worded a little bit weirdly, where you kind of look at it and it starts really negative for part of it.
00:15:24.000For example, it will say something along the lines of Senator Mark Kelly is fighting, or it could be a positive one.
00:15:34.000Senator Mark Kelly is fighting for lower drug prices.
00:15:38.000Call this number to thank Senator Mark Kelly for his amazing job fighting for lower drug prices.
00:15:44.000I'm sure all of you have seen these ads and you wonder if they're just going to do an attack ad, why they have to put a phone number there to call.
00:15:51.000Well, it's because the corporations are able to give to those organizations and remain anonymous and give unlimited if it's technically lobbying and social welfare versus a total attack ad.
00:16:06.000So they're able to run those ads that have the effect of a positive kind of takeaway or the effect of a negative one.
00:16:13.000So they'll say, call Raphael Warnock right now and say he's doing a wonderful job fighting for racial justice in Washington, D.C. Here's the number.
00:16:23.000Where it's a little different than we need to defeat this candidate or defeat that candidate.
00:16:28.000Corporations pump in hundreds of millions of dollars into these 501c4 organizations, these social welfare groups.
00:16:35.000They can remain anonymous and that money can come directly from corporations.
00:16:40.000And it's important for you to know that as you watch these ads, especially the one around like drug prices with Mark Kelly, that it's the very same companies that are spending billions in Washington, D.C., that are the ones that are flooding your airwaves.
00:17:23.000We're gathering a coalition of 1 million patriots to say no to court packing, no to the liberal agenda, and no to the Supreme Court coup.
00:17:30.000Franklin Graham, former U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese, Dr. James Dobson, the Family Policy Alliance, so many others, and 400,000 people like you are all on board.
00:17:51.000My friend Kelly Shackleford runs this great group, supremeco.com.
00:17:59.000So, look, we have something really important to share with you of what's happening in Arizona, and this has national implications.
00:18:05.000I'm going to read the tweet from the Maricopa County Republican Party.
00:18:09.000Maricopa County Recorder's Office told me that there would be one or two drop boxes, the Maricopa County Republican Party said, in the primary election.
00:18:17.000And yet, newly published lists, there are 16.
00:18:21.000Sure, 15 are in government buildings and not open 24 hours a day.
00:18:24.000Voter can drop off ballots and vote centers.
00:18:27.000Why are there still drop boxes after what we have learned?
00:18:33.000With us to help unpack this is the Arizona expert himself who runs Turning Point Pack and Turning Point Action in the family of Turning Point efforts.
00:18:44.000Charlie, it's crazy what we're up against still, even after 2000 mules of what we're seeing with so-called Republicans just not understanding what we're up against.
00:18:54.000And it's just a wild situation that we're in right now because this guy, his name is Steven Richer.
00:19:01.000He is the recorder for Maricopa County, which is the chief elections official for Maricopa County, which is the fourth largest county in America, is still implementing drop boxes.
00:19:14.000And the excuse that the left and establishment Republicans are going to make was like, well, we've always done this.
00:19:45.000I might be mispronouncing it, but yeah.
00:19:48.000Yeah, no, that's perfect pronunciation of Coconut.
00:19:52.000Yeah, this is just Maricoba County that we're focused on.
00:19:54.000So, this is the slugfest that we have right now, which has been traditionally a big Republican county, the biggest Republican county in the country.
00:20:03.000You know, Democrats are trying to totally take it over.
00:20:06.000Yeah, but we have even uglier counties in Arizona.
00:20:09.000Coconino, Pima, that's where U of A, NAU are at.
00:20:53.000So Arizona, like a lot of states, has implemented a couple of things, two really bad things.
00:20:59.000One is drop boxes, which they're trying to make early and earlier and more available and less and less watched.
00:21:06.000And so what happened in the last general election essentially was that there were a bunch of drop boxes.
00:21:12.000We know the Zuckbucks helped fund a lot of these and they were uncameras on them.
00:21:19.000And so this was part of the issue that was unveiled in 2000 Mules.
00:21:23.000Those are open for essentially early ballot collection.
00:21:27.000And vote centers were implemented for the first time.
00:21:30.000And this is where you kind of get in the weeds.
00:21:32.000And this is what everybody in America should be aware of, because what we're seeing happening in Maricopa County, we're seeing happen all across the rest of the country here is that what they're trying to do is get away from precinct by precinct voting.
00:21:46.000And the reason why they want to do that, they want to eliminate precincts is because a precinct is a designated data set of individuals who essentially we know who is voting in that place and then we can track the physical ballots that are attached to that precinct.
00:22:04.000Once they implement vote centers, what that basically means is that you can come in and vote from any precinct into that one place.
00:22:10.000And then that means all the ballots are all mixed up all across the county.
00:22:14.000And so essentially, when you have a county of 4 million plus people and millions of votes, you can't go back and actually track and associate ballots to specific precincts and know for certain where ballots essentially came from.
00:22:28.000And this is a huge threat to our elections because now not only do you have drop boxes that are being unattended and we have people maybe taking advantage of the system, but now you have individual precinct by precinct destruction.
00:22:43.000So, yeah, this is something that I think is really frustrating for me and for people to understand, which is Republicans have political power in Arizona.
00:22:53.000And yet it becomes more and looking more and more like a Mark Elias-run experiment in states like Colorado or Washington or Oregon.
00:23:03.000And so I cannot wrap my head around why the establishment in Arizona is so comfortable.
00:23:10.000I mean, with this, Martha McSally ran for Senate twice and lost.
00:23:15.000If we would have had secure elections, maybe she would have won.
00:23:19.000I mean, she had her failures as a candidate, obviously.
00:23:21.000However, the point is that even their own establishment kind of candidates don't benefit from this kind of loosey-goosey type balloting.
00:23:30.000And Arizona, which used to be a comfortably 8 to 12 point Republican state, is now a battleground state that the electoral votes were sent to Biden and we have Kelly and now we have cinema.
00:23:42.000I mean, it's quickly turning into a Colorado.
00:23:46.000And so, you know, can you talk about now concretely how this can impact the coming race in November?
00:23:52.000Because whomever wins the Republican primary here, Blake Masters looks like he's the frontrunner.
00:24:26.000And what happened in Colorado, which can happen in any state, by the way, and by the way, this is exactly what happened in Virginia.
00:24:32.000And it wasn't this big Democrat blueprint that they just became so much more successful overnight.
00:24:38.000The reality was that the Republican Party full of establishment hacks went into conservative areas, basically put conservatives into a box.
00:24:47.000And then from that point forward, just allowed the state just to turn over.
00:24:51.000And that's essentially what's happening now with Arizona, where we have a bunch of establishment Republicans in the county offices.
00:24:59.000So they right now, most people don't realize this.
00:25:02.000Maricopa County has four supervisors who are Republican and one who's a Democrat.
00:25:08.000And so there should be no question when it comes to this stuff on election integrity, on supporting Republicans, on proposing a conservative agenda for voting where we have any issues whatsoever.
00:25:20.000The problem is that we have Republicans totally acting like Democrats, working with Democrats, not even communicating with the Republican Party.
00:25:28.000And we have a pretty conservative Republican leadership group now in Arizona, maybe one of the most conservative in the country.
00:25:34.000And these guys just refuse to even work with them.
00:25:37.000And so that's what you're seeing happen is, you know, like this situation with the drop boxes is that right now there should be no drop boxes.
00:25:44.000You know, after 2000 mules, it should be a very simple, the Republican base is saying, we don't want drop boxes.
00:26:18.000If I understand correctly, and you'll know it a lot better than I, there's a potential ballot referendum that they're collecting signatures for as well that could be on the midterm ballot that could almost make HR1 style Arizona kind of permanent.
00:26:36.000And what they essentially what the Democrats want to do in every state, if they could, is just make sure that everybody gets what they call motor voter in some states or automatic vote by mail, which is that everybody essentially gets flooded with a vote in their box for any given reason.
00:26:56.000And again, if you haven't watched 2000 Mules, you have to.
00:26:59.000If you watch 2000 Mules, you'll know right away why that's a bad idea.
00:27:02.000The bad idea here is that if you start doing that, and look, Arizona State University is the largest ground campus in America.
00:27:11.000You have hundreds of thousands of students come from all over the place into Arizona just for an education and then they leave, but they register to vote while they're here.
00:27:34.000You have retirement facilities, the exact same way.
00:27:36.000People move here and then they unfortunately move out to you know, live out their last days in their home hometown, or or they pass away and you have stacks of votes that are now ending up in the hands of really bad people.
00:27:50.000And you should if you, if you care about America you shouldn't want that to happen.
00:27:54.000You should want people to have the responsibility to say hey, i'm going to go vote.
00:27:57.000You know, that's how America has always functioned since day one is that We take a lot of pride as Americans that we have the ability to vote in our communities.
00:28:10.000Them trying to change that is a really huge, weird precedent that they're setting that allows, I think, a huge slippery slope for a lot weirder election law.
00:28:20.000Just let's talk about more nationally here.
00:28:22.000Turning point action, turning point PAC.
00:28:23.000Turning point action just hired a bunch of field staffers.
00:28:27.000Do you think we have a better chance of taking back the house after Ron DeSantis' maps in Florida?
00:28:31.000You were warning about the maps for quite some time.
00:28:33.000Where do you think we're at with that?
00:28:35.000Yeah, I mean, the truth is that it's hard to separate.
00:28:38.000We've had a couple of battles that we've won on the redistricting front, but the maps this year are about as bad as they were 10 years ago.
00:28:48.000Probably slightly worse if you were to evaluate it.
00:28:51.000And thank goodness for governors like Ron DeSantis, who laid down the law and said, no, we're not doing this.
00:28:57.000I'm not going to approve any maps that are bad.
00:29:00.000And, you know, that's what the RGA should be doing is making sure that Republican governors are actually standing up for redistricting every 10 years.
00:29:08.000Like it's like their one and only job because it should be.
00:29:12.000But yeah, I mean, look, we're in a good position to take back the house.
00:29:18.000It probably won't be as much as we should, quite frankly.
00:29:21.000It should be 50 or 70 seats, but it might be 20 or 30 because of bad maps, right?
00:29:26.000Well, and I'll say this is that conservatives winning in conservative places is good and moderates winning in moderate places is probably okay.
00:29:34.000I actually think that Kevin McCarthy is a little bit better than Paul Ryan because he's left conservatives mainly alone in conservative areas and he deserves some credit for that.
00:29:44.000But we've got to keep fighting for conservatives to win conservative states in conservative areas.
00:29:49.000That's the only way that the movement is going to grow.
00:29:52.000And that's what we're fighting for on the front lines.
00:29:55.000It's a super important point that we're going to have a wave.
00:29:58.000We have a wave effect coming in November.
00:30:00.000Are we going to get every possible point we can or are we just going to win by a little?
00:30:06.000We may never get this kind of alignment of a midterm opportunity where we could win so significantly, it could actually give us an advantage for six to eight years to come.
00:30:19.000Did you know that if you shop at Nike, they turn around and give your hard-earned dollars to pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and the Population Council?
00:30:27.000Did you know that Airbnb gave $500,000 to the Marxist Black Lives Matter organization?
00:30:32.000Your first vote is at the ballot box, but that isn't enough to defend our traditional Judeo-Christian values.
00:30:37.000Left-wing corporations are subverting our republic by taking money from conservative customers and giving it to radical organizations that support abortion, gun control, and critical race theory.
00:30:47.000You have another vote, a second vote at the checkout line.
00:30:50.000And that is where a massively important organization called Second Vote comes in.
00:30:55.000The courageous people at Second Vote are exposing corporations for how you spend your money.
00:30:59.000Second Vote is developing incredible tools and engaging the smartest minds in the country to help inform Americans purchasing decisions.
00:31:06.000Their work is arduous, complex, and exhaustive, and it does not happen for free.
00:31:11.000Please support their work so we can defend our future from the woke Marxist mob.
00:31:49.000Um, so Stephen Richer came into Arizona, uh, came in real hard and fast from out of state.
00:31:57.000And what he was trying to do, what he was trying to accomplish was uh, run for office, quite honestly.
00:32:03.000I had met Stephen at when I was, I believe, he was county chair of Maricopa County, and he he came into he came into town and was basically looking for somewhere to run.
00:32:14.000I mean, he admitted so much to me when I had met him for lunch because of some mutual relationships and friends that said, Hey, you should go sit down with him.
00:32:22.000And I got some real bad vibes from that.
00:32:25.000Anybody that just wanted to run for office, anyway.
00:32:27.000So, what ended up happening after a few months was that he started showing up and started knocking what was then our Democrat County recorder.
00:32:36.000Uh, and you know, rightfully so, going after him for a number, a vast number of things and appearing to be very conservative and wanted to stand up for election integrity because we were up against what seemed to be a Soros-funded Democrat county recorder.
00:32:52.000And then, you know, wouldn't you know it?
00:32:53.000As soon as the guy got elected and into office, which he barely won by, you know, I think it was just like a few thousand votes, has immediately just joined the moderate Republicans and Democrats on doing anything and everything in his power to not work with people on these major election integrity initiatives.
00:33:17.000He actually announced launching a PAC to go after anyone that actually supports election integrity, which is even more frightening that a guy who's serving as county recorder.
00:33:27.000I would say the same thing about a Democrat and a Republican, a guy who's the chief elections official running a PAC to go after anyone that supports election integrity.
00:34:33.000He's saying that he wants to have mass mail-in voting, HR1, everywhere.
00:34:39.000He is a tool of the very same people that destroyed Colorado, destroyed Oregon, destroyed Washington, destroyed by using the mass mail-in balloting scheme.
00:34:50.000Yeah, I mean, look, at very least, he's doing everything in his power that allows the left to just take total advantage of the voters, in my opinion, with these, with these, with these methods.
00:35:03.000And so that, I mean, that's what you have to understand as Republicans today is that the Democrats are trying to implement a very specific playbook in exactly what they did in California, exactly what they've done down in Colorado, exactly what they've done to New Mexico.
00:35:19.000And what they're doing is trying to implement these things so that the voters actually have less voice because they're washed out by this massive wave of unattended voters, essentially, people who are uneducated, who are not even aware that they're voting, that they're sometimes trading their vote to friendly or for food or help.
00:35:40.000And so we need to be getting in the middle of this and demanding that every Republican that serves in a county position is 100% lockstep with us and they're showing up and they're good natured.
00:35:54.000And the best way that you can really see this is when they show up and they pick up your phone calls and they participate and they want to listen to you and they sit down with you.
00:36:01.000If they're not doing that, they're helping the other side.