00:00:43.000His 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.
00:00:51.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:14.000The Turning Point Straw Poll confirmed it.
00:02:18.000I really think that was a mistake by Governor DeSantis not going there, especially considering they had the summit with evangelical leaders with Bob Vanderplatz.
00:02:29.000Trump did not go to that, and the media made a lot of hay about that.
00:02:33.000But in truth, I thought it was a bigger mistake for Ron DeSantis not to go to an event in his own state where the real base of his party is.
00:02:43.000And he wants to be president of Iowa, I guess.
00:02:46.000You cannot win a nomination by being the president of Iowa.
00:02:50.000But we just polled that state, Charlie.
00:02:52.000And as you can see from what I sent you, that doesn't even look like that's going to happen.
00:02:56.000So you needed to appeal to a greater number of people.
00:03:45.000If you don't want to talk to 6,000 voters, just walk me through it.
00:03:51.000I mean, I'm a Trump guy, but I'm also an interested patriot who doesn't want to see a conservative governor become so deeply unpopular that it's going to turn Florida blue.
00:04:11.000It's one we've seen a lot on the Republican side, unfortunately, where they take somebody with a bright future and they being the consultant class.
00:04:19.000They take somebody with a bright future.
00:04:21.000They see dollar signs around these people, Charlie.
00:04:24.000The filings just came out, and people like me, even from NBC News to the Washington Post to the New York Times, I hate to say it, but they all see what I see, which is what you and I have been talking about for months.
00:04:37.000This is a donor's you-know-what dream.
00:04:40.000This is not a campaign for the people.
00:04:42.000This is not a campaign to reach the future of the party.
00:04:46.000And by the way, it might have been 6,000 people in attendance at the turning point, but action conference, but how many people watched online?
00:04:53.000How many people watched speeches online, clips online?
00:05:08.000He was obviously told by consultants not to go there because he was afraid of the reception that he was going to get, which, by the way, if you're afraid of turning point activists, how are you going to fare in front of Vladimir Putin?
00:05:20.000How are you going to fare in front of Xi Jinping?
00:05:23.000You can't stand up to the base of your own party?
00:05:26.000I just, it's sad because it's really worse than people are saying when I'm looking at these numbers.
00:05:32.000I'm looking at a lot of consultants getting rich.
00:05:34.000I'm looking at a lot of vendors who have failed Republican campaigns time and time again, getting rich.
00:05:40.000I'm looking at millions upon millions of dollars that could have been spent at vote, you know, some more sophisticated get out the vote operation being spent on making them rich.
00:05:49.000Meanwhile, his poll numbers just completely tank.
00:05:52.000IBD Tip out today, we took a lot of flack because we were the first ones to put him in the teens.
00:05:57.000Well, at least we still have him at 17.
00:05:59.000IBD and TIP have him at 14 nationally now.
00:06:41.000And the truth is, look at the FEC filings, and then you'll see clear as day why it was easy to convince him to do this and why people tried to convince him.
00:07:04.000A burn rate is basically the ratio of how much have you got coming in versus how much you're putting out.
00:07:10.000They're churning and burning through the money he's raised.
00:07:12.000And he has nowhere to go to get more money because not only have people maxed out, most of his vast majority of his donations not only came from big donors who are maxed out and cannot come back, but not just for the primary, Charlie, but most of them have even maxed out for the general election.
00:07:31.000And then the one out of six that he has remaining cash on hand, which is about $21 million, is actually not really the case because one out of six dollars of that $21 million can only be used in a general election.
00:07:44.000So the truth is, Trump outraised him on what can be used before Iowa and New Hampshire.
00:07:51.000So again, no low-dollar contributions.
00:07:54.000No, and to be fair, every non-Trump candidate is having problems with low-dollar contributions.
00:10:56.000Adidas might as well have a big sign that says, we hate you.
00:11:02.000Look, progressive left-wing companies are taking over the market, and it's time for us to fight back.
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00:11:17.000Look, we don't have to fund these companies, the left-wing companies.
00:11:20.000We finally have an alternative, public square.
00:11:32.000Join the movement of millions of patriotic Americans who love truth, our country, and our Constitution at publicsq.com.
00:11:40.000I use this app all the time when I'm traveling and also my local neighborhood.
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00:13:47.000Rich Barris, why are Republican politicians so hostile out of touch with their voters?
00:13:55.000Yeah, I think that's going to come to an end here soon, Charlie.
00:13:59.000You know, I sometimes wonder about the future of the Republican Party because any time in American history a party has not been responsive to their voters, it does not last.
00:14:09.000You know, the Republican Party does not have some kind of like special sticker stuck to it where it's going to be exempt from the rules of history.
00:14:17.000I think they're going to have a reckoning this cycle.
00:14:21.000You know, it's funny because just to go back, what we're saying the last segment, immediately that poll that did come out today, which JD Vance, someone who has been pushing back on Ukraine spending, he commented on it.
00:14:34.000And it's like this inability for these people.
00:14:37.000They don't have the ability to listen to criticism, Charlie, or they tune it out.
00:14:42.000They're like petulant little children.
00:14:43.000They stick their fingers in the ear and la la la la instead of paying attention to what people are saying and giving them the respect they deserve, that their grievance may be legitimate.
00:14:56.000They feel that they could just ignore it and go on and continue to ignore it.
00:15:00.000And still somehow their condition will improve.
00:16:07.000I believe he's going to pop into second place as a contender above Ron DeSantis, which is amazing because Vivek Ramaswamy started basically at zero.
00:16:15.000He is not the governor of a major swing state.
00:16:18.000He's not a governor who has done amazing things like Ron DeSantis.
00:16:22.000And so it goes to show that the Republican base, it really is an open question.
00:16:28.000So Vivek Ramaswamy, what do you attribute all this to?
00:16:32.000He's played a lot of these key issues very, very smart, from Ukraine to the indictments.
00:16:37.000And that I think was a major problem with DeSantis, which is just as voters were looking at him as when he made a mistake with Tucker over Ukraine.
00:16:45.000Just when voters were giving him the most scrutiny, the most, you know, they were giving him a look.
00:16:51.000Just as he did that, he made the wrong decision with how he handled the indictments.
00:16:55.000Vivek has always been very smart with this.
00:16:57.000And the new line of attack this week, seeing that Vivek is coming up on their heels, Team DeSantis wants to point to some of the things Vivek had done during the pandemic.
00:17:06.000And that's not going to land, Charlie.
00:17:08.000And I'm going to tell you why it hasn't hurt Vivek so far.
00:17:11.000Because the truth is everyone fell for the pandemic nonsense.
00:17:14.000Everybody at some point fell for the lockdown.
00:17:16.000Everyone at some point fell from, or mostly everybody.
00:17:20.000And those who didn't were not politicians or not political figures, right?
00:17:28.000Most of the politicians, the only question is, how quick did you come out of your days?
00:17:34.000That has always been the real question.
00:17:37.000So it doesn't land because it's not honest.
00:17:40.000So when they dig up old tweets of Vivek and they put them out there, it's not honest because we all saw the governor, you know, appraising the jab and how readily available they were for the elderly in Florida.
00:18:31.000Every day, the parallel economy grows bigger and bigger.
00:18:33.000It's powered by everyday Americans who are sick and tired of all the woke nonsense being jammed into every product they consume.
00:18:40.000Big mobile companies are no different.
00:18:42.000For years, they've been dumping millions into left-wing causes, and we had to take it because you need a cell phone and probably thought that there was no alternative.
00:18:50.000Patriot Mobile is America's only Christian conservative wireless provider.
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00:19:14.000Just go to patriotmobile.com/slash Charlie or call 878-PARTRIOT, get free activation today with the offer code Charlie.
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00:19:33.000All right, with us now is Vivek Ramaswamy, who got 50% of the second choice for president.
00:19:40.000Vivek was kind enough to come down to our event.
00:19:45.000He then had an influencer reception afterwards.
00:19:48.000And I believe he'll be rewarded by the 6,000 MAVENs that we had in the room, super activists, and the well over 50 million people that saw clips or part of the event.
00:19:58.000Vivek Ramaswamy, tell us how you believe the campaign is going.
00:20:15.000In fact, there are some of the things that I've said that before I was actually planning to say them, some of the policy proposals I've adopted, my campaign team insisted on poll testing them.
00:20:26.000And I still come out with my own convictions anyway.
00:20:29.000That's actually been working well for us because I think voters can tell the difference between somebody who's just trying to pander and tell them what they want to hear versus somebody who actually tells them and gives them their true beliefs.
00:20:42.000And so I'm going to stick to that strategy.
00:20:46.000I do think that there's something that I'm trying to bring to this campaign, Charlie, that's a little bit different, which is that I am genuinely an optimistic person and push come to shove.
00:20:55.000I'm actually optimistic for our nation.
00:20:58.000But I'm not a big believer in kumbaya, it's morning in America again, until we have reconciled ourselves with the truth of what happened in the last eight years, in the last four years in particular, even the touchy subjects of 2020 in particular.
00:21:14.000And so I think that combination of my willingness to unsparingly recognize the truth about COVID, about the election, about exactly what happened with censorship in this country, about what's happening in Ukraine now.
00:21:28.000But on the other side of that, to say that if we get this right, we can still be in our ascent.
00:21:38.000And I think we're just getting warmed up.
00:21:40.000One of the most insightful things you said, Vivek, I want you to walk through it in great detail.
00:21:43.000We have some time here, is your diagnosis on January 6th, which makes so much sense.
00:21:49.000And you repeated it at the Turning Point Action Conference.
00:21:52.000This is considered to be a heresy in the mainstream narrative because the only acceptable narrative on January 6th is that this was a rebellion insurrection brought to you by Donald Trump to try to overthrow our government.
00:22:06.000You have a different take on it, which I think is an incredibly important contribution to the Zeitgeist.
00:22:14.000How should we think about January 6th, Vivek Ramaswamy?
00:22:17.000First of all, Charlie, I don't think we can really move forward and heal as a country until we come to terms with exactly what happened, not just on January 6th, but in the year 2020 leading up to it.
00:22:30.000I think January 6th was the culmination of what you see when a culture censors people from speaking, when a government repeatedly tells people, and I'm talking about the administrative state here, not the elected government, tells people to shut up, sit down and do as they're told.
00:22:46.000That's what happened in the year 2020.
00:22:52.000Told you had to hide in your basement, stay locked down while BLM and Antifa roamed the cities of this country freely, burning many of them to the ground.
00:23:01.000You were told that you had to take a vaccine when normally, and by the way, I've been in biotech.
00:23:06.000You have to take 10 years to develop a medicine for the public to believe that it's safe and effective.
00:23:10.000You can't even choose to take one that hasn't been through that.
00:23:13.000And yet here, something that went through the process in less than one year, you couldn't choose not to take it.
00:23:19.000You were told that all of this, all of the grievances and vengeance that you wanted to get up on the table, you could do that through an election, through the democratic process.
00:23:28.000And yet, on the eve of that election, the most damning story about one of the two candidates, Biden, his son, and being compromised financially by our enemies from Ukraine, from China in the case of an enemy to Ukraine in the case of a corrupt actor, is had to be suppressed.
00:23:44.000You couldn't even send that on your social media accounts to individual people without being silenced.
00:23:49.000So, if you think about the systematic silencing, using tech companies to silence anti-lockdown speech through the back door that government could not censor through the front door under the Constitution, you have a repeated pattern of telling people they can't speak.
00:24:02.000Then, when they step up and start to protest in various civil ways across the country, now you tell them they can't scream.
00:24:09.000Well, if you tell people they can't speak, that's when they scream.
00:24:12.000And what I said on stage at the conference is you tell people they cannot scream.
00:24:19.000And my concern, Charlie, is unless we reconcile ourselves with what the truth of the matter was that led to January 6th, that's really just going to be a friendly preview of what's to come in this country.
00:24:30.000I don't want to see a national divorce.
00:24:32.000I want to see a national revival, one nation under God, e pluribus unum from many one.
00:24:43.000But we're not going to get there by just saying, hey, we're going to sweep all of that under the rug and just move on to be a shining city on the hill, claim it's morning again in America.
00:24:51.000We can't get there without being honest about the truth of how we got to where we are.
00:24:57.000And I think it is so easy to point the finger at one man and say, oh, you were responsible for what happened on that day.
00:25:03.000And we're going to be sanctimoniously indicting one individual without actually taking a long, hard look in the mirror.
00:25:12.000And I didn't say this part on the stage, but I think it's true, Charlie, is I think every American has to look, especially much of the left in this country that denounces January 6th and the supposed threats to our democracy.
00:25:24.000Everyone in this country has to take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves what role each of us played in getting to that day.
00:25:32.000And once we're honest about that, then we've had all of our cards on the table.
00:25:36.000We can then have a conversation about how we heal and move forward as a country, which I care about, but we're not going to get there without honesty.
00:25:44.000Well, but the regime doesn't want healing, Vivek.
00:26:12.000It's totally what we need to be doing.
00:26:14.000But I think you would agree, Vivek, that there is a beauty of life that is outside of just which side is going to then be able to call the shots.
00:26:23.000We need to because the godless Marxists are destroying the country.
00:26:27.000So, Vivek, speak a little bit then also about the Ukrainian issue.
00:26:30.000You had a very good interview with Tucker Carlson.
00:26:36.000The neocons were out in full force, kind of fine, like they were basically trying to compete who could send the most cluster bombs to kill the most amount of civilians and children in eastern Ukraine.
00:26:48.000America has no business involving ourselves in a thuggish border dispute between two bad actors.
00:26:54.000Vivek, how should we think about Ukraine?
00:26:57.000The way we should think about it is protect American interests.
00:27:00.000We should not use our money to protect somebody else's border when we could use that same money and that same military to protect our own southern border and a conversation that doesn't get talked about enough, Charlie, our own northern border eventually, too.
00:27:15.000You squeeze it in one place, it's going to show up in the next place, too.
00:27:18.000So that's where I think our focus ought to be.
00:27:21.000But on Ukraine in particular, it's actually staggering.
00:27:24.000In that lead up to 2020, what was in the Hunter Biden laptop?
00:27:28.000$5 million payment to Hunter Biden, the part of the Biden family, that's now using $200 billion of American taxpayer money to that same nation.
00:27:42.000Now, my view is that we should end the Ukraine war with a clean peace treaty that advances an American interest.
00:27:49.000I would freeze the current lines of control.
00:27:51.000I would further make a hard commitment that NATO should not admit Ukraine.
00:27:56.000This is not some paragon of democracy.
00:27:58.000This is a country where you have a leader in power that is going after churches and pastors in his own country, that has shut down 11 opposition parties in his own country, that has consolidated media into one state media arm.
00:28:11.000So, this idea that Zelensky is some model for democracy is a joke.
00:28:25.000You exit your military partnership with China.
00:28:28.000I do worry about the China-Russia military alliance.
00:28:31.000I don't think that we want two allied nuclear superpowers in the form of Russia and China.
00:28:35.000And I think that's a deal that Putin would do if we also reopened economic relations with Russia, which I would favor as part of this deal.
00:28:42.000And I think it is disastrous, Charlie, that NATO has expanded far more after the fall of the USSR than ever did during the USSR's existence when supposedly the purpose of the institution was to deter the USSR.
00:28:57.000Now NATO is taking us closer to nuclear war with Russia.
00:29:04.000And I am disappointed, Charlie, that most of the Republican Party, nearly the entire Republican field, save for Trump and myself, is on the same side of this issue as Joe Biden is.
00:29:16.000And so this is probably the most important foreign policy issue of our time.
00:29:20.000Foreign policy is, I think, arguably the top priority of the U.S. president, certainly on the global stage.
00:29:26.000And yet, nearly the entire Republican Party and Republican field of presidential campus is locked stock and barrel with from Joe Biden to Liz Cheney.
00:29:35.000Who needs them when you have the existence of the rest of that Republican field?
00:29:38.000And so that's why I'm particularly vocal and passionate about this topic.
00:29:42.000And the idolatry of NATO, I think it's probably been a good idea, but when an alliance drags you into wars, they've gone seriously awry.
00:30:55.000If I were somebody else sitting on the outside who had never heard of me, and there's this guy who's suddenly surging out of nowhere, I would have the same questions.
00:31:04.000And so I'm asking people to elect me as their president.
00:31:07.000Yes, I should be vetted and we should have it out in the open.
00:31:11.000Let me address the World Economic Forum allegations first.
00:31:16.000So what happened was a few years ago, the World Economic Forum asked to give me an award as a young global leader, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and others show up on the list of people who have received this award.
00:31:28.000This was mysterious because I have been one of the biggest critics of not only ESG, but the entire World Economic Forum agenda.
00:31:36.000No bigger critic of it from Woking to my most recent book, criticizing the ESG movement.
00:31:47.000I'm always open to debate our views in the open, but I declined the award.
00:31:51.000A few months later, I get a phone call saying from a bunch of people saying, oh, congratulations, you've been named as a young global leader for the World Economic Forum.
00:33:11.000And I believe that this is exactly how we deliver accountability.
00:33:14.000Now, here's what I've seen more recently.
00:33:16.000And people should be skeptical of what they see on the internet.
00:33:19.000So there's been an article now circulating recently.
00:33:22.000This might be what some of your listeners were responding to, saying that, no, no, no, how could Vivek be doing this?
00:33:26.000Because he's attended the World Economic Forum of Davos in all of these years.
00:33:30.000And I was like, that's really weird because I never have.
00:33:32.000Turns out that was generated by ChatGPT, AI, okay, an AI-based made-up article that literally on the internet, you couldn't tell if somebody took a screenshot of it.
00:33:43.000Nobody can find the original article, but there's screenshots of that now circulating the internet, literally made by ChatGPT.
00:34:10.000No, I want to defend you in this way, because look, getting started in politics and all this, the World Economic Forum, especially six or seven years ago, was not exactly exposed in the mainstream of conservatism.
00:34:23.000I was never specifically invited, but there was kind of like, oh, I'm going to Davos, going to Switzerland, good networking and panels and all this.
00:34:30.000The World Economic Forum largely revealed their agenda post-COVID.
00:34:36.000And it's also, I want to be very precise, everybody.
00:34:40.000It's understandable to have skepticism about it, but also, let's pretend Vivek did go to Davos, which he didn't.
00:35:13.000Yeah, so the bottom line is in this particular case, I actually didn't.
00:35:17.000And there's not everything I'm going to take credit for being early on, Charlie, but this is one of them.
00:35:21.000Before anybody was talking about stakeholder capitalism or woke capitalism or anything else, I actually did believe in indicting the World Economic Forum for their agenda.
00:35:29.000That's what my whole first book was about.
00:35:31.000But in this case, I think it's good for people to be skeptical.
00:35:34.000I'm asking people to be the next president.
00:35:37.000If we have time to address it now, Charlie, I don't know, with people talking about a scholarship that I won, which was, yeah, but we'll talk.