The Charlie Kirk Show - Forging a War-Hawk Free Future for the GOP with Sohrab Ahmari

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show with Saurab Amari, we go through what is the Republican Party's position on foreign policy and what should it be.

00:00:09.000 Also, the Biden regime has announced crack pipes for addicts.

00:00:14.000 And also, should Ron DeSantis support a bill that prohibits the teaching of gay agendas in our schools? 0.63

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00:00:36.000 Buckle up everybody here.

00:00:37.000 We go.

00:00:38.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:40.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

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00:00:45.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:48.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:49.000 He's an incredible guy.

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00:01:22.000 So we have Saurabh Amari coming up, who is terrific and has really made me think deeply about a lot of different topics and issues.

00:01:30.000 But first, I want to get into two separate issues.

00:01:33.000 And I don't even know if they're related.

00:01:34.000 I actually haven't thought that deeply about whether they're related or not, but we can talk about them.

00:01:38.000 But they're definitely, one is just an outrage, and one is actually a solution that is being called an outrage.

00:01:46.000 So it's actually, I guess they're unrelated in that way.

00:01:48.000 Okay, we'll get into it.

00:01:49.000 The first, and I'm sure you've heard about this story.

00:01:51.000 And if you haven't, you actually probably live a better life than I do because I've been inundated with this story.

00:01:57.000 It's just so depressing.

00:01:58.000 I mean, again, we do our best on the show not to just do kind of like the doom and gloom news about the citizen is rising and things are happening.

00:02:04.000 And then you got stories like this.

00:02:05.000 You're like, oh my goodness.

00:02:07.000 Okay, so it's almost hard to believe.

00:02:10.000 And I want to make sure I get the facts right on this.

00:02:12.000 And Connor, Andrew, you can send it to me.

00:02:15.000 But the Biden administration, the Biden regime, has made a decision that we need to subsidize drug use.

00:02:24.000 And this is something where they want to try.

00:02:26.000 So there is a belief that started from colleges.

00:02:29.000 Of course, it came from colleges that if people are using drugs, they are victims.

00:02:36.000 Now, I fully admit that some people who use drugs can be victims.

00:02:40.000 They can be victims of rape or sexual abuse or trafficking, and they go to drugs as a way to try to cope with that.

00:02:46.000 I'm sure that's a percentage.

00:02:47.000 I don't know what percentage it is.

00:02:48.000 But most people who do drugs are not victims.

00:02:52.000 Almost most people, even the people that have that stuff happen to them, that's not an excuse to just go do cocaine or put meth into your body.

00:03:00.000 And this is a way that the left views the world versus how we as conservatives view the world.

00:03:07.000 Generally, and with some exceptions, especially with some of the inflation exceptions and some of the lockdowns, generally we believe that if you are going through a less than desirable circumstance, first and foremost, you as the individual should take responsibility for the condition of life that you are in.

00:03:26.000 And we definitely believe that when it comes to smoking crack cocaine, smacking crack cocaine, smoking crack cocaine on the side of the street in San Francisco.

00:03:36.000 Now, a belief from the colleges that is just so hard to believe it got taken seriously was that, hey, we have all these meth addicts and all these people doing drugs on the side of the streets in San Francisco or Los Angeles.

00:03:49.000 What we need is drug injection sites to make it easier for people to be able to do drugs.

00:03:57.000 Because who are we to say what they are doing is wrong?

00:04:00.000 What we need to be able to do is to actually assist them and help them do drugs.

00:04:08.000 So there's a new story that came out, which is that the federal government was going to help people that are doing drugs by providing them with funds to make drugs used safer for addicts.

00:04:22.000 It's a $30 million grant program, which closed applications on Monday and will begin again in May.

00:04:30.000 It'll provide funds to nonprofits and local governments to help make drug use safer for addicts, including the grant, which is overseen by HHS, our funds, quote, for smoking kits and supplies.

00:04:44.000 Now, the director of the smoking kits and supplies is not Hunter Biden, although he is a subject matter expert in smoking crack cocaine and getting away with it.

00:04:54.000 But the position of the federal government now that we have 100,000 drug overdose deaths is, you know, the problem is we don't have enough crack pipes.

00:05:02.000 If you think I'm joking, listen to it yourself.

00:05:04.000 Cut 65.

00:05:06.000 So the Biden administration now has a new plan.

00:05:09.000 They are funding a $30 million program that will distribute smoking kits.

00:05:14.000 These kits include crack and meth pipes.

00:05:18.000 Okay, they're using taxpayer dollars for this.

00:05:21.000 President Biden claims this is part of his executive order that is supposed to help reduce harm in marginalized communities.

00:05:28.000 Now, I'm just going to point out the obvious here.

00:05:31.000 That's the very same federal government that went on an all-out jihad against ivermectin.

00:05:36.000 So they go out on an all-out campaign against hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, all in the same breath saying, hey, you know what we need to do?

00:05:43.000 We need to go give people pipes so they can smoke crack on the side of the street because equity. 1.00

00:05:48.000 So ivermectin, which could potentially be life-saving in the battle against COVID, I have dozens.

00:05:54.000 Let me say this again.

00:05:55.000 Dozens of first-hand experience of people that have taken ivermectin that had it, were taking a turn for the worse, and ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, melatonin, aspirin, and other early interventions helped them tremendously.

00:06:09.000 But the position of the regime is: hey, who are we to judge that crack cocaine is wrong?

00:06:21.000 I mean, how many lives could have been saved if 30 million pills of ivermectin were distributed or $30 million worth of ivermectin was distributed?

00:06:32.000 That's a lot of ivermectin because ivermectin is super cheap.

00:06:35.000 It's like pennies on the dollar.

00:06:38.000 How much ivermectin could $30 million have actually done?

00:06:41.000 What would our COVID rates be?

00:06:42.000 How many Americans would still be alive? 0.86

00:06:47.000 It shouldn't be easier to get a crack pipe in America than a life-saving drug in America in the midst of a pandemic launched by the Chinese Communist Party. 0.99

00:06:56.000 And ivermectin is a lot cheaper and a lot safer than crack pipes.

00:06:59.000 Let me say that again.

00:07:00.000 Ivermectin is a lot safer than crack.

00:07:04.000 But that's the controlled substance that your government decides to declare war on.

00:07:10.000 And by the way, the crack pipes are probably made in China anyway.

00:07:16.000 Health and Human Services spokesperson Sarah Lovenheim claimed the Free Beacons report was blatant misinformation.

00:07:22.000 Really, why?

00:07:23.000 When asked to clarify what was in the safe smoking kits, she said they could contain alcohol swabs, lip balm, and other materials to hygiene, promote hygiene, and reduce the transmission of diseases like HIV and hepatitis.

00:07:35.000 There's a really easy way not to get HIV.

00:07:38.000 Don't have premarital sex. 0.98

00:07:40.000 But the Biden regime doesn't want to say that.

00:07:42.000 This grant is designed to assist applicants serving underserved populations, especially the black and LGBT populations.

00:07:49.000 It is part of an executive order Biden issued shortly after taking office.

00:07:55.000 Now, Jen Psaki is denying this, but you can only deny what's actually in your executive order so much.

00:08:02.000 I mean, it's right there.

00:08:03.000 It's in writing.

00:08:04.000 It's $30 million for smoking kits for drug addicts.

00:08:08.000 And you know what's so amazing about this is that I was watching Tucker Carlson as he kind of did a monologue on this.

00:08:14.000 And my wife and I were watching this together. 0.59

00:08:17.000 And this goes to show the kind of awful position America is in, or just the complete garbage we've grown accustomed to. 0.98

00:08:25.000 Neither of us were surprised. 0.97

00:08:28.000 It's not like it was like, oh, this is outrageous.

00:08:30.000 I was like, yeah, it makes sense.

00:08:32.000 Okay, what's for dinner?

00:08:35.000 That's how conditioned we've become.

00:08:37.000 It wasn't like this major outrage thing or I can't believe it.

00:08:40.000 I was like, we were just kind of like, yeah, that's probably right.

00:08:44.000 I could totally see that.

00:08:46.000 But Jen Psaki, they're denying it.

00:08:48.000 Play cut 123.

00:08:51.000 They were never a part of the kit.

00:08:52.000 It was inaccurate reporting, and we wanted to put out information to make that clear.

00:08:56.000 What is in the safe smoking kit?

00:08:59.000 A safe smoking skin may contain alcohol swabs, lip balm, other materials to promote hygiene and reduce the transmission of diseases like HIV and hepatitis.

00:09:09.000 What I love about this is that the White House has to talk about like a $30 million grant.

00:09:13.000 That's nothing.

00:09:14.000 That's like an insignificant amount of money in the federal government.

00:09:16.000 And they have to get into the specifics.

00:09:17.000 Like, yeah, it's lip balm and it's scissors to cut their hair. 1.00

00:09:21.000 And it's the amount of defense they have to play on this issue.

00:09:25.000 And honestly, God bless the Washington Free Beacon again for hitting a home run and revealing this.

00:09:29.000 But she's not wrong.

00:09:30.000 I mean, in the grant, it says this: quote, included in the grant will be smoking kits and supplies.

00:09:38.000 Lip balm is not a smoke.

00:09:40.000 Is that part of smoking supply?

00:09:41.000 Again, smoking crack cocaine.

00:09:43.000 Not exactly a subject matter expert on this.

00:09:47.000 I guess that their lips get chapped after they overdose for the fifth time on crack cocaine.

00:09:56.000 For $20 per package of 40 ivermectin pills, it could go to 1.5 million people.

00:10:02.000 But instead, your government, our government, taxpayer-funded dollars, don't worry, everybody, $30 million is not going towards hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or aspirin or melatonin, monoclonal antibodies, intravenous therapy, vitamin D regimen.

00:10:18.000 No, it's okay.

00:10:19.000 You can rest assured that the crack addict that defecated on your lawn and showed his junk to your six-year-old, his lips won't be chapped anymore. 0.99

00:10:30.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here. 0.94

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00:11:33.000 So Ron DeSantis is just terrific.

00:11:35.000 He really is.

00:11:37.000 And every time you think, ah, Ron DeSantis might let you down, he just kind of doubles and triples down.

00:11:45.000 And so if you want to know about, you kind of look at the landscape, and one of the groups that you should never try to provoke, unless you really know your stuff and you are in a position where you have freedom to talk like we do, is the alphabet mafia.

00:12:07.000 The alphabet mafia is no joke. 0.74

00:12:09.000 The LGBTQ, ISA, LGBT, XYZ, whatever it is. 0.98

00:12:15.000 They are brutal.

00:12:17.000 Now, we've been in, I think, a, what's a good way to say this?

00:12:21.000 An arm wrestling match with the alphabet mafia, I'm putting it nicely, for quite some time. 0.99

00:12:29.000 Now, let me be very clear. 0.97

00:12:30.000 Some of my closest friends in the world are gay.

00:12:33.000 And they're some of the sweetest people.

00:12:35.000 We have people that work for us, and they're tremendous.

00:12:37.000 Dave Rubin.

00:12:39.000 However, and Dave Rubin, I'm going to be on his show in just a couple of hours.

00:12:42.000 And I think the world of Day Rubin, he's a great person, and he loves liberty.

00:12:46.000 I have a traditional view of marriage.

00:12:48.000 I believe marriage is one man, one woman. 0.96

00:12:49.000 I believe it should stay that way, and our laws should reflect that.

00:12:52.000 But I believe, of course, in the decency and dignity of all people.

00:12:56.000 Of course I do.

00:12:57.000 But a disturbing trend has been more than just recognizing gay people for their beliefs or their lifestyle.

00:13:09.000 No, now all of a sudden there has been a trend of recruiting more people into that lifestyle.

00:13:16.000 And we see that in this first clip.

00:13:19.000 Okay, let's start with 124.

00:13:21.000 So let's try to frame the problem before we try to go to the solution.

00:13:24.000 And cut 124, this is a mom from California who is suing the state of California for in a predatory fashion going after her daughter and encouraging her daughter to change her gender. 0.88

00:13:36.000 Play cut 124.

00:13:38.000 Let these teachers come in and act as if they have nothing wrong.

00:13:42.000 They've done nothing wrong.

00:13:43.000 A mistake?

00:13:44.000 How long of a mistake?

00:13:45.000 How many mistakes are we going to take before my child almost lost her life?

00:13:49.000 They didn't tell me that my child is suicidal.

00:13:53.000 You allowed these teachers to open their classrooms, teaching predatorial information to a young child, a mindful child that doesn't even know how to comprehend it all.

00:14:05.000 What an unbelievably powerful statement by that mother.

00:14:09.000 That's right.

00:14:09.000 These teachers, many of them that are members of the alphabet mafia, have become predators.

00:14:15.000 So Ron DeSantis is recognizing this.

00:14:17.000 He's realizing that six and seven year olds are not emotionally mature enough to be able to process what a gay person is, what transgender is, and he wants to remove that topic altogether from the schools.

00:14:32.000 I am fully supportive of this.

00:14:34.000 And anyone who isn't, the fact that you want like six and seven year olds to talk about really, let's just say graphically sexual topics, awfully creepy.

00:14:46.000 Play cut 85 of Ron DeSantis, and then we're going to play Alfred E. Newman, who responds.

00:14:52.000 Play cut 85.

00:14:54.000 And look, at the end of the day, you know, my goal is to educate kids on the subjects math, reading, science, all the things that are so important.

00:15:05.000 I don't want the schools to kind of be a playground for ideological disputes or to try to inject.

00:15:12.000 So I think it's just let's get parents involved.

00:15:15.000 Let's make sure anything that's discussed is age appropriate, but let's keep the focus on where it needs to be.

00:15:22.000 That's exactly right.

00:15:23.000 Age appropriate.

00:15:24.000 And if a seven or eight year old has an inclination to be gay or lesbian, that's where a parent needs to be actively involved.

00:15:33.000 It is not the role of the state to do that.

00:15:35.000 But Pete Boot Edge Edge says that this is going to contribute to suicide attempts.

00:15:41.000 Oh, really?

00:15:41.000 All of a sudden, now the regime cares about suicide attempts.

00:15:46.000 As you guys lock down the entire country and keep masks on kids, now you're worried about suicide attempts.

00:15:51.000 Play cut 84.

00:15:53.000 Absolutely.

00:15:54.000 Yeah.

00:15:54.000 And the reason is that it tells youth who are different or whose families are different that there's something wrong with them out of the gate.

00:16:02.000 And I do think that contributes to the shocking levels of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts among LGBTQ youth.

00:16:11.000 Now, I'm not going to get into some of the psychological literature as to why that might be the case, but if you are confused about your identity and then you are told to wear that identity as if everything is normal and good, then maybe there might be something deeper at play there.

00:16:25.000 I fully support Ron DeSantis protecting the Floridian children from these predatory topics that they do not understand and they do not comprehend.

00:16:35.000 This is the role of parents, not the role of the state, not the role of some creepy 28-year-old that just graduated from the University of Florida and wants to try to recruit more people to become transgender. 0.66

00:16:47.000 God bless you, Ron DeSantis.

00:16:48.000 Takes real courage for you to stand on that topic, and you have our support.

00:16:54.000 Someone I really respect who's made me think deeply about a lot of things is Saurabh Amari, who has an unbelievable piece that he wrote for the New York Times.

00:17:01.000 And I don't think he works for the New York Times.

00:17:04.000 I don't know.

00:17:04.000 I wouldn't hold it against him because he's so consistent and so good.

00:17:07.000 But I'm glad he wrote it in the New York Times because it got wide distribution.

00:17:10.000 And I think that's a very good thing.

00:17:12.000 And I think that one of the most important debates someone can watch is his debate versus David French.

00:17:18.000 And what is a conservative?

00:17:20.000 And I have to say, Saurabh's argument is looking better and better every single day.

00:17:24.000 And I'm completely in his camp on that one.

00:17:26.000 And I wasn't at first.

00:17:27.000 And I think that's a really good thing.

00:17:28.000 And he's with us right now.

00:17:29.000 So Rob, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:17:32.000 Charlie, thanks for having me back.

00:17:33.000 And good to see you since our time in Florida where it was much warmer and nicer and freer.

00:17:39.000 Yes, all those things are true.

00:17:40.000 So you have this great piece.

00:17:42.000 I want to explore it with you.

00:17:43.000 It's called Hawks Are Standing in the Way of a New Republican Party.

00:17:48.000 And you go through in great detail, and you're a phenomenal writer of how you describe this, about how the neoconservative posture remains, especially with this Ukrainian-Russian dispute, and how almost the muscle memory impulse of the Republican Party is to saber-rattle and to try to say that if you do anything except wanting to have a full-fledged kinetic war with Vladimir Putin, then you're an agent of Russia and you actually might be on KGB payroll.

00:18:15.000 Walk us through that.

00:18:17.000 Yeah, so, you know, I'm one of the people who's been arguing over the past three, four years that the Republican Party took a right turn, a correct turn on foreign policy, starting with President Trump, where he called out, you know, some of the party's most cherished orthodoxies on foreign policy.

00:18:41.000 The notion that NATO is always and everywhere a good thing and the U.S. should continue to tolerate our European allies, not really doing any fair share of their burden, not lifting their fair share of the burden for our common defense and the United States committing so much more than they do.

00:19:00.000 He pointed that out.

00:19:01.000 I think that really resonated with the base of the party.

00:19:04.000 I think that it resonated popularly when he just forthrightly spoke out against the post-9-11 regime change wars, which have been disasters.

00:19:14.000 Let's be honest.

00:19:14.000 I used to be a hawk as well, and I've evolved on that.

00:19:18.000 I used to champion this kind of the Arab Spring and liberating this and that.

00:19:22.000 And you just have to be intellectually honest and look at the outcome.

00:19:26.000 So our argument is that that instinct is right.

00:19:30.000 It's the instinct of the Republican base.

00:19:33.000 It actually is also widely shared even beyond the GOP base of people are tired of our kind of expansive foreign policy abroad.

00:19:40.000 And we need to focus internally.

00:19:42.000 We have a country where we have a huge fentanyl crisis.

00:19:46.000 We have an unguarded border where a million, two million people, illegals are crossing at an astonishing rate.

00:19:55.000 We have declining working class life expectancy, something that's actually unheard of in the rest of the developed world.

00:20:02.000 And we have our own internal kind of confusion and crises.

00:20:05.000 We have a country where we can't agree why this country was founded.

00:20:09.000 One half of the country says it was because of slavery.

00:20:12.000 The other half tells the accurate story that it was not mainly to defend slavery that the American Revolution was launched.

00:20:19.000 We have a country where we can't agree on what man and woman are. 0.99

00:20:22.000 You know, there are a large chunk of our elites who believe that there are 57 genders and that gender can be changed and so forth.

00:20:32.000 So all that being said, we, the conservative movement, have to work internally.

00:20:36.000 We have to consolidate internally.

00:20:39.000 And yet, and even sort of America first people or populist people in the party who get that domestically still can't let go of that, like you said, that reflex, that muscle memory of escalate all the time.

00:20:52.000 So that, for example, Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Cotton, of whom I'm fans and beyond friends, you know, who are trying to take the party in a more populist direction on a lot of issues, and that's good.

00:21:04.000 But then the Ukraine thing happens and they're right away, you know, accusing Biden of appeasing Putin or kind of drawing these overdone and frankly kind of inept analogies between Putin and Hitler and Churchill.

00:21:18.000 And not every time and space in history is 1933 all over again, right?

00:21:23.000 Or 1939.

00:21:25.000 There are other things that are different from World War II and demand a different response than like total mobilization against Nazis.

00:21:33.000 No, I'm laughing because it's so wise.

00:21:36.000 And it's this kind of overdone that everything is going back to the 1930s.

00:21:43.000 Like, yeah, it also could be the 1960s.

00:21:45.000 It could be Vietnam.

00:21:46.000 And that was really bad too.

00:21:48.000 So I want to ask you, I have a lot of respect for Tom Cotton.

00:21:51.000 We have him on our program.

00:21:52.000 I think he's actually the best on immigration, legal immigration, I should say.

00:21:56.000 He's terrific on family values.

00:21:58.000 He's number one, I think, on crime in the whole Senate.

00:22:01.000 He was willing to tell, I think he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that he got canceled about using the Insurrection Act before that word was overused in American society against BLM.

00:22:14.000 But why is it, so Rob, that Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio, again, who we both have respect for, why is it they go to that immediate position?

00:22:22.000 What is the incentive there?

00:22:24.000 Well, I think it's, I'm more sophisticated or maybe too sophisticated to think that it's like, it's what the donors want.

00:22:35.000 I don't think that's the case.

00:22:36.000 I think this is genuine conviction.

00:22:39.000 I think it's a product of conservatives who came of age at a time, it was an unusual time during the Cold War, when we had this very clear ideological adversary and you wanted to limit its reach everywhere.

00:22:56.000 And that was the anti-communist project.

00:22:58.000 And if I were around, if I were a conservative in that age, I'm pretty sure I'd be a very hardcore Cold Warrior.

00:23:05.000 I get that at that time.

00:23:07.000 And the US was very cohesive internally.

00:23:10.000 It was an attractive model around the world.

00:23:12.000 Then you have Soviet communism trying to enslave a large chunk of humanity in vast swaths of the planet.

00:23:20.000 So you get that.

00:23:21.000 And that was the model.

00:23:22.000 Then the Cold War ends.

00:23:24.000 The United States is this kind of unit in this unipolar moment.

00:23:29.000 It's this one global power.

00:23:32.000 And that mentality that we should continue to kind of expand liberalism into our model.

00:23:37.000 When I say liberalism, I don't just mean the left or leftism.

00:23:40.000 I mean our general model.

00:23:42.000 We should seek to expand it everywhere.

00:23:44.000 And that American foreign policy just means this bipartisan consensus on this expansive view of what America's mission is in the world.

00:23:54.000 It's not just to be a country like other countries.

00:23:57.000 It's to be a global hegemon, a values hegemon.

00:24:02.000 And that did not work out well over the past 20 years, right?

00:24:05.000 I mean, we launched these regime change wars.

00:24:08.000 Again, I confess I cheered some of them at the time, but the result was we created stateless, ungoverned spaces across the Middle East and North Africa. 0.80

00:24:16.000 We sent millions of refugees and economic migrants into Europe, destabilizing Europe's politics. 1.00

00:24:25.000 We obviously created spaces in which terrorism could thrive and then we had to get involved in a different way.

00:24:31.000 And we shattered the Arab state system in some ways. 0.87

00:24:34.000 And that was a mistake.

00:24:35.000 And so you just got to reassess.

00:24:38.000 But that mentality that the U.S. is always on offense ideologically won't go away.

00:24:46.000 And it's in tension with what conservatives worry about domestically, right?

00:24:51.000 Domestically, we sense that there's this weird alliance of corporate power and woke values under which we labor.

00:24:58.000 Now add to it the kind of COVID medical regime.

00:25:01.000 And we don't like it.

00:25:02.000 But you don't understand that when you promote NATO expansion everywhere, what is NATO expansion?

00:25:08.000 It's the expansion of this same way of life that we domestically find increasingly intolerable.

00:25:14.000 NATO just recently, one of the official blue check NATO accounts just tweeted something about how NATO is integrating gender issues at every level of its operations or something like that.

00:25:25.000 And it's like, first of all, yes, I'm sure Vladimir Putin is like shivering in his boots thinking about such a gender diverse NATO.

00:25:33.000 But second of all, that's the ideology.

00:25:35.000 So if you don't like it at home, why have the same kind of liberal imperialist mentality of like the post-9-11 era?

00:25:43.000 Things have changed.

00:25:43.000 Like maybe conditions will come where the U.S. has to be on a really kind of a war footing again.

00:25:49.000 But right now, it just feels like normal and natural to say, no, we need to, you know, domestically look internally, consolidate domestically.

00:25:58.000 You know, certainly we have allies to whom we have treaty commitments, and we wouldn't want to back away from those.

00:26:04.000 But to try to expand that further to places like NATO where it needlessly creates points of tension with Russia, I think that's crazy.

00:26:11.000 I think most Americans thinks that crazy.

00:26:13.000 In fact, the polls show that most Americans don't want any kind of military involvement over Ukraine.

00:26:19.000 I agree completely.

00:26:21.000 And the reason I used incentives is because you close your article by saying the persistence of donor-backed Republican hawkishness remains an obstacle to national development.

00:26:31.000 That's why I asked that.

00:26:33.000 No, that's fair.

00:26:34.000 I think that's part of it.

00:26:35.000 Let's be honest.

00:26:36.000 There is a kind of a foreign policy architecture that's part of the GOP.

00:26:39.000 That's part of it.

00:26:40.000 But what I meant to say is that it's not like these lawmakers are mindless and they're just like, yes, sir, Mr. Donor.

00:26:49.000 That's right.

00:26:50.000 They're not.

00:26:51.000 They're sophisticated people.

00:26:52.000 They think through things.

00:26:53.000 They're sincere in their convictions is what I'm trying to say.

00:26:55.000 It's just that I think it's a mindless set of convictions right now.

00:26:59.000 So we have two minutes left in this segment.

00:27:00.000 In the last segment, I want to talk about China because I don't know if I agree with you completely on it and it'll be fun to explore.

00:27:05.000 But I want to ask you about this idea of liberalism.

00:27:08.000 Liberalism does not rest well.

00:27:10.000 Liberalism almost has an insatiable appetite to try to always shackle the next, unshackle the next victim group.

00:27:17.000 You wrote about this in your book, which I found to be super fascinating.

00:27:20.000 And you find it with the alphabet mafia here with the transgender stuff or with the racial groups. 0.96

00:27:25.000 And you also see it in the foreign policy establishment.

00:27:27.000 Can you kind of connect all those through lines together?

00:27:29.000 Because the same group of people that want to increase literacy rates for Pakistani girls or whatever are the ones that also want to try to have predatory transgender practices in high schools in California. 0.66

00:27:42.000 Yeah, I mean, this is very painful, I think, for the right.

00:27:45.000 Again, you know, we are the right rallies to the military and rightly so, because patriotism is a natural virtue.

00:27:57.000 The right rallies to the flag, and that's a good thing.

00:28:00.000 But sometimes it seems like the flag that the United States unfurls around the world is not what the flag that most Americans or certainly most American conservatives cherish.

00:28:12.000 It's the rainbow flag.

00:28:14.000 And I mean that sometimes literally.

00:28:15.000 That's exactly right.

00:28:17.000 Our embassies will display it everywhere to make an ideological point.

00:28:22.000 And they do it, you know, in places, especially in some places where it's meant almost to offend local Catholic sensibilities in some place like Poland.

00:28:32.000 Or frankly, how insane it is to do it in Afghanistan, right?

00:28:35.000 Like we support women's rights in Afghanistan.

00:28:37.000 Of course, women are brutalized in Afghanistan, but do they really need the latest Oberlin College LGBT alphabets theories in Afghanistan? 0.98

00:28:45.000 Was that a useful question?

00:28:46.000 Yeah, I mean, look, it's replacing one tyranny for the other, right?

00:28:49.000 It's like, okay, we're going to get rid of Taliban so you can go live under Robin DiAngelo's universe or whatever, right? 0.99

00:28:55.000 So we're going to get rid of Taliban and we're going to put planned paranoids at every clinic. 0.97

00:29:00.000 Okay, Saurabh Amari with us.

00:29:01.000 He writes in the New York Times, Josh Hawley suggests the move to shift our focus on East Asia.

00:29:07.000 But even there, Americans should be aware of mindless China hawkism.

00:29:10.000 I do agree with that.

00:29:11.000 Nothing should be mindless.

00:29:12.000 Yes, the United States has real differences with Beijing.

00:29:15.000 We must punish industrial espionage.

00:29:17.000 We must defend treaty allies.

00:29:18.000 We must seek a more balanced trade relationship.

00:29:20.000 We also must find areas of cooperation, exchange, and shared interest, seeking to avoid any future wars and instead communicating with mutual respect for a civilizational equal.

00:29:30.000 Now, I'm going to take a little exception, Saurabh, with the last part.

00:29:33.000 Communicating mutual respect for a civilizational equal.

00:29:37.000 I don't trust the Chinese at all. 1.00

00:29:38.000 I think they're soulless and godless, Chinese Communist Party. 1.00

00:29:41.000 I think they have worldwide ambitions, and I think any communication with us, they take advantage of.

00:29:46.000 Prove me wrong.

00:29:47.000 So I think that it's important to recognize that China is a very old civilization, and they've had dynasties come and go.

00:30:00.000 And the Chinese people, most of them, there are certainly dissidents, but most of them don't make that distinguishing that you just that distinction that you just made between their regime and their country.

00:30:13.000 It's their country and they're a rising power.

00:30:16.000 And they're a rising power about whom we should worry for all the reasons I laid out, we laid out my co-authors and I in that op-ed, right?

00:30:24.000 I want America to do well relative to China. 0.98

00:30:27.000 I don't want this to be the 21st century to be a Chinese century. 1.00

00:30:33.000 But I think that the next kind of hawkish trap for America first people, for populists, is to be worked up about issues that are in the grand scheme of things, pretty marginal.

00:30:48.000 But in trying to seek those things, you end up expending a lot of energy.

00:30:53.000 And that speaking about, for example, the issue of Taiwan.

00:30:57.000 So what level of military resources are we prepared to expend to include China in our ambit as opposed to where it is geographically?

00:31:09.000 So like, how do we compete with China? 0.61

00:31:11.000 China right now is making deals in South America.

00:31:15.000 It's making deals in Africa.

00:31:17.000 It's securing its own energy needs in a very aggressive way.

00:31:22.000 It is creating these kind of very complex supply chains that work very well for it.

00:31:27.000 Meanwhile, for the United States, despite all the kind of value hawkism and talk about human rights in China and so forth, when the height of the pandemic hit, we were so coupled to China that we couldn't secure our own masks initially and personal protective equipment, right?

00:31:44.000 In many ways, still there are fears about, okay, defense critical industries, how much are our supply chains tied up with China?

00:31:53.000 So what am I trying to say here?

00:31:54.000 I'm trying to say the way to deal with the East Asian challenge is not to go in all headlong with this kind of rah, rah, rah human rights rhetoric.

00:32:05.000 That's what got us into trouble.

00:32:06.000 I think that's right.

00:32:08.000 Over the 20 years earlier, but to be kind of realistic and say, look, like right now, how are U.S. supply chains?

00:32:16.000 You know, like if we need to mobilize for a real crisis, a real military crisis, can we repurpose factories for defense production?

00:32:24.000 Do we have the legal architecture, the will, the technology?

00:32:27.000 How do we, if semiconductors are in trouble in Taiwan, can we manufacture our own?

00:32:33.000 These are the kind of questions that I think kind of America first people populists should be asking.

00:32:38.000 And so it's not like paying undue obeisance to the Chinese Communist Party, but yes, you know, like not needlessly provoking 1.6 billion.

00:32:48.000 And I think what you're getting at is like the real way to go after China, and that would actually help our country is like not importing vitamin C from Wuhan anymore. 0.94

00:33:00.000 But the bargain that is coming, and I agree with you, is they want to go build another five aircraft carriers where we really should be talking about tariffs and redesigning the supply chain, where the national security apparatus would love nothing more than an excuse to try to expand the leviathan of military strength in East Asia when the real actual thing that would benefit America is economic implications or, you know, kind of what I think that's what you're getting at.

00:33:27.000 I'm getting at, and I think it's what you're getting at is industrial policy.

00:33:31.000 They have serious industrial policy.

00:33:33.000 I want us, I think my co-authors and I want the U.S. to have similar industrial policy.

00:33:40.000 It's bonkers because the same people who will attack us for saying, well, don't get all worked up about Taiwan.

00:33:47.000 Just five years ago, they were prepared to let China build national security infrastructure, sensitive infrastructure for the United States.

00:33:54.000 I think that's a mistake.

00:33:57.000 I'd rather stop that than to thub tump tub thump about issues that we can't do anything about unless we're prepared to get into a massive war.

00:34:06.000 I don't think they're ever going to have mutual respect for us, but we can have you back on and we could talk about that.

00:34:11.000 Wise take.

00:34:11.000 So, Rob, thank you so much.

00:34:12.000 God bless you.

00:34:13.000 I really appreciate it.

00:34:14.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

00:34:15.000 Email us your thoughts.

00:34:16.000 As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:34:18.000 If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.

00:34:21.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

00:34:23.000 God bless.

00:34:25.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - February 11, 2022

Forging a War-Hawk Free Future for the GOP with Sohrab Ahmari

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