The Charlie Kirk Show - December 26, 2021


How The Senate Can Save America From ‘The Void’ with Senator Ted Cruz


Episode Stats


Length

28 minutes

Words per minute

169.69911

Word count

4,794

Sentence count

448

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

11

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) joins Charlie to talk about the debt ceiling, infrastructure, and why he thinks the Democratic Party is a lunatic asylum. Charlie also talks about why he doesn t think Joe Biden should be re-elected.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:00.000 Our conversation with Senator Ted Cruz into the details, what's happening in the Senate, debt limit versus infrastructure bill versus build back better.
00:00:07.000 We talk about lots of different things, and I think Senator Ted Cruz is one of the best senators, if not the best senator, in Washington, D.C.
00:00:13.000 He does a wonderful job, and I think very highly of him.
00:00:16.000 He's a great friend.
00:00:17.000 And I just want to say, Ted Cruz always shows up to our events.
00:00:20.000 He always shows up to our events.
00:00:22.000 And not every politician does that.
00:00:24.000 A lot of ones say, yeah, yeah, whatever.
00:00:25.000 I'll be there later.
00:00:26.000 Senator Cruz, he's terrific.
00:00:29.000 He's special.
00:00:30.000 If you want to support our show, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:00:33.000 If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, where we play offense with a sense of urgency to win the American Culture War, go to tpusa.com.
00:00:40.000 Senator Cruz is here.
00:00:41.000 Buckle up. 0.96
00:00:42.000 Here we go.
00:00:42.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:44.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
00:00:46.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:00:50.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:00:53.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:00:54.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:00:55.000 His spirit, his love of this country.
00:00:57.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
00:01:02.000 Turning point USA. 0.65
00:01:03.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:02:45.000 Hey, everybody.
00:02:46.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:47.000 With us is probably my favorite senator.
00:02:50.000 I'm going to get in trouble for saying that.
00:02:52.000 Senator Ted Cruz from Texas.
00:02:53.000 How are you doing?
00:02:54.000 Charlie, always great to be with you.
00:02:55.000 Thanks for having me.
00:02:56.000 You're doing amazing work.
00:02:56.000 You're a true fighter for liberty and very articulate and really inspiring to us all.
00:03:02.000 But I don't envy what you have to fight right now.
00:03:05.000 And tell us about it.
00:03:07.000 Hi, look. 0.98
00:03:08.000 D.C. is a lunatic asylum. 0.61
00:03:10.000 I mean, it is, it's always been crazy, but this year has been unlike anything we've ever seen before.
00:03:17.000 That Biden, when he came in, made a conscious decision to hand control of the party over to the radicals.
00:03:24.000 And so the people setting the agenda are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and AOC.
00:03:30.000 And it is, you know, you think back, we used to think the Obama administration was radical and extreme.
00:03:38.000 And they didn't even imagine what we're seeing now.
00:03:44.000 Now, that being said, I'm having fun.
00:03:47.000 I'm having fun because we really are fighting to save the country. 0.95
00:03:50.000 Like what they're doing is so nuts that I view my job as leading the fight to stop every dumbass idea coming from this administration, and there are a lot of them.
00:04:01.000 So why do you think that this regime is continuing in this direction despite bad poll numbers, unpopularity? 0.82
00:04:09.000 Prior administrations like the Obama administration will at least slow down a little bit.
00:04:12.000 Why do you think that is?
00:04:14.000 I don't know for sure.
00:04:16.000 You know, one question is who's driving the truck?
00:04:19.000 It's not clear how much Joe Biden is making decisions.
00:04:23.000 You know, most of the senators I've talked to haven't spoken to him.
00:04:27.000 I haven't said a word to Joe Biden since he became president.
00:04:31.000 That's weird.
00:04:32.000 That was certainly not true with Trump, but it wasn't true with Obama either.
00:04:35.000 It is strange.
00:04:36.000 I've been talking to more and more of my colleagues saying, hey, have you talked to Biden at all?
00:04:41.000 Even the more establishment side?
00:04:43.000 Lindsey Graham said he has not spoken to Biden once since he became president.
00:04:48.000 Lindsay and Joe are friends.
00:04:49.000 They've traveled all over the world together.
00:04:51.000 Why do you think that is?
00:04:53.000 I think his capacity is severely diminished.
00:04:56.000 And so I think the White House handlers are protecting him.
00:05:03.000 I also think there's a phenomenon with Democrats.
00:05:06.000 We're seeing it in the Senate too and in the House, where they're afraid of the far left, that they've made a judgment that the extreme left is where the anger is.
00:05:18.000 It's where the pitchforks are and the torches.
00:05:21.000 And they don't want to mess with them.
00:05:23.000 And I think Biden made a rational decision.
00:05:28.000 I'm going to give the radicals all the policy, and I get to be president.
00:05:33.000 I get to fly on a big fancy plane.
00:05:35.000 I get to be a bit of a fan.
00:05:35.000 Two scoops of ice cream every night.
00:05:37.000 Indeed.
00:05:40.000 And so you're right that ordinarily a president, even if you had made that decision coming in, a president would look at plummeting poll numbers, at the disasters that are unfolding, at the bloodbath in the Virginia election.
00:05:55.000 In fact, they even almost lost New Jersey.
00:05:58.000 A rational president would say, okay, tap the brakes.
00:06:01.000 Let's change direction.
00:06:02.000 This isn't working.
00:06:04.000 I don't think there's anybody home.
00:06:06.000 And the kids that are the staffers, either they're too much of zealots or they're too ideological or they're too scared, but they're not changing direction.
00:06:19.000 Yeah, I mean, there's only a couple explanations, and you basically hit it perfectly.
00:06:23.000 The other one is that they want what's happening.
00:06:26.000 They don't really care about the popularity, and it's a means to the end.
00:06:29.000 You know, Biden's president as long as he is, and we'll find somebody else to run in the future.
00:06:33.000 But when will we ever have three chambers to pass our build back better thing, which thanks to President Manchin, it's...
00:06:40.000 Look, I mean, the Build Back Broke Bill, and that's, by the way, the only thing I'll call it, was it was Bernie Sanders' socialist budget.
00:06:52.000 Bernie is an avowed and unapologetic socialist.
00:06:57.000 It used to be five years ago, Democrats pretended they weren't socialists.
00:07:02.000 Now Bernie's the chairman of the budget committee, and Biden's number one priority is passing the budget committee.
00:07:08.000 It's insane.
00:07:10.000 But, you know, so right now, I'm very glad Manchin put out a statement.
00:07:13.000 It's a great statement.
00:07:15.000 I hope he sticks to it.
00:07:18.000 But it, you know, I will say the left is so mad with Manchin.
00:07:27.000 I've tried.
00:07:27.000 A lot of us have tried to recruit Manchin over to the Republicans.
00:07:30.000 At least being an independent, right?
00:07:32.000 That would break their caucus, wouldn't it?
00:07:34.000 So we were, a couple of weeks ago, I was standing with Joe and five or six Republican senators, and we were on the Senate floor, and one of them, Dan Sullivan, said, Joe, why don't we do Cruz's idea?
00:07:46.000 Will make you the chairman of the Committee on Everything.
00:07:51.000 Senate president, basically.
00:07:53.000 And I told Joe, I said, Joe, look, at least one of the two parties actually likes you.
00:07:58.000 And Manchin howled laughing at that.
00:08:02.000 You know, people ask me all the time, is Manchin going to become a Republican?
00:08:05.000 I doubt it.
00:08:06.000 And I just think culturally, he's spent his entire life as a Democrat.
00:08:11.000 He's the godfather of Democrats in the West Virginia.
00:08:15.000 That being said, you know, you know, the one group that might make him a Republican are Bernie and AOC and Elizabeth Warren.
00:08:24.000 If they're so nasty, that they drive him away.
00:08:28.000 I mean, they could be vicious enough that, you know, on our end, we're just trying to be nice and welcoming and say, look, you know, on the Republican side, we got a diversity of views.
00:08:38.000 There are a ton of things Manchin votes for that I would never vote for in a million years. 0.96
00:08:43.000 But I don't think we would be the kind of nasty sons of bitches to him that the extreme left is right now. 0.95
00:08:52.000 Yeah, and also, I mean, Manchin gets a lot of power by being the Democrat that won't go along with it. 0.97
00:08:59.000 But there has to be a breaking point at some point, you would think.
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00:10:03.000 And so looking more broadly, there's now a conversation to try to bring this voting rights legislation forward.
00:10:11.000 What are your thoughts on that?
00:10:13.000 I don't think it's going to go anywhere.
00:10:14.000 Really?
00:10:15.000 I hope and pray it does not go anywhere.
00:10:16.000 Because the more watered-down John Lewis writes one.
00:10:19.000 It's still a disaster.
00:10:20.000 Okay, yeah, I think it's a total disaster.
00:10:22.000 It would require the Justice Department to approve states for changing their voting laws.
00:10:27.000 So it says something about the Democrats that of all their priorities, they embrace socialism.
00:10:36.000 They want open borders.
00:10:37.000 They want American weakness.
00:10:38.000 They want to downgrade the military.
00:10:41.000 They want the Green New Deal.
00:10:44.000 You look at all their different priorities, but their number one priority, what was the first bill they introduced in the British Committee?
00:10:50.000 And the first bill they introduced in the 1990s?
00:10:50.000 HR1.
00:10:52.000 SB1, HR1.
00:10:54.000 It is what a lot of us are calling the Corrupt Politicians Act.
00:10:59.000 Their priority is power more than anything else.
00:11:04.000 The Corrupt Politicians Act is designed to strike down every federal, every state voter integrity law across the state.
00:11:11.000 That's exactly right.
00:11:12.000 Strike down every photo ID law, strike down prohibitions on felons voting, strike down prohibitions on ballot harvesting.
00:11:19.000 It's designed to register millions of illegal aliens to vote.
00:11:24.000 It is welfare for politicians.
00:11:26.000 It's billions of dollars that goes to political campaigns.
00:11:31.000 The Democrats' purpose is simple in this bill.
00:11:34.000 It is to keep Democrats in power for the next hundred years.
00:11:39.000 Ironically, there have been a number of hearings where they inevitably label the hearing something about Jim Crow.
00:11:46.000 That's their favorite talking point.
00:11:47.000 And I've been leading the fight against the Corrupt Politicians Act, both on the Judiciary Committee and on the Rules Committee.
00:11:53.000 I'm on both, and those are the two committees that have jurisdiction over this stuff.
00:11:58.000 And one thing that I have pointed out many times is, you know, for Democrats to talk about Jim Crow with this bill is actually quite fitting. 0.76
00:12:07.000 Because Jim Crow laws were written by Democrats for the purpose of keeping incumbent Democratic politicians in office and making it impossible for the voters to vote Democrats out of office.
00:12:20.000 And today, the Corrupt Politicians Act is written by Democrats for the purpose of keeping incumbent Democrats in office and making it impossible for the voters to vote those corrupt Democrats out of office.
00:12:30.000 It's the same fundamental assault on the right to vote.
00:12:34.000 I mean, the irony is the Democrats' rhetoric is exactly opposite what they're doing.
00:12:38.000 They're trying to make it so that we, the people, so the voters, can't throw the bums out. 1.00
00:12:45.000 And their first iteration was the Corrupt Politicians Act.
00:12:48.000 Their second iteration is, as you noted, the so-called John Lewis Act.
00:12:52.000 Now, look, John Lewis was someone I knew, John.
00:12:54.000 I respected him as a civil rights leader.
00:12:55.000 And they're misusing his name, quite honestly.
00:12:58.000 The bill would require every substantive change in voting laws in every state to not be able to go into effect until unelected bureaucrats of the Department of Justice signed off on them.
00:13:13.000 Now, who are those unelected bureaucrats? 1.00
00:13:15.000 They are radical leftists, hard radical leftists.
00:13:20.000 I mean, they are Joe Biden nominated Kristen Clark to be the head of the Civil Rights Division, who she was the one who would personally have to sign off on it.
00:13:29.000 Vanita Gupta, who's the Associate Attorney General.
00:13:32.000 Those two are two of the leading advocates in the country of abolishing the police.
00:13:38.000 They are partisan zealots.
00:13:41.000 And, you know, you think about it.
00:13:43.000 The Democratic language is, we protect democracy. 0.83
00:13:48.000 What utter horse manure.
00:13:49.000 No, having one bureaucrat in Washington say to the people of Texas, we got 29 million people in Texas.
00:13:56.000 And the 29 million people in Texas want voter ID because we don't want illegal voters stealing our right to vote.
00:14:03.000 And the Democrats are saying, you know what?
00:14:05.000 One bureaucrat trumps 29 million voters.
00:14:08.000 If you believe in democracy, then let the people vote.
00:14:11.000 And these people don't believe in democracy.
00:14:13.000 They believe in power.
00:14:16.000 And that's what this is all about.
00:14:17.000 And so you think the chances of that passing are.
00:14:19.000 You don't think Manchin could come to some sort of I know you hated me about that, but I look, that's my fear that there's going to be like a fake consensus brokered.
00:14:28.000 That fear is real and it's dangerous.
00:14:33.000 So I got elected to the Senate in 2012.
00:14:37.000 When I showed up in 2013, I still remember Jim DeMitt pulled me aside.
00:14:41.000 He said, Ted, Manchin is like a purple unicorn.
00:14:46.000 He will always, always, always be with you, right until the moment you need him.
00:14:53.000 And I've served nine years with Joe.
00:14:55.000 Prior to this year, I had never once seen him stand up to Schumer on any issue that matters where he was the deciding vote.
00:15:06.000 Manchin was someone who, if we had 51 votes, he'd give you a 50-second.
00:15:10.000 He'd make it bipartisan.
00:15:12.000 That was valuable.
00:15:13.000 But he was never the deciding vote that decided.
00:15:16.000 Now, this year, so I came into this year very pessimistic that Manchin would have the courage to stand up to Schumer.
00:15:28.000 Manchin has blown me away.
00:15:30.000 I am astonished, and I'll put on top of that Kirsten Sinema.
00:15:34.000 You and I are in Arizona right now.
00:15:36.000 She's been great.
00:15:37.000 She has had real courage to stand up, and she's, that surprised all of us.
00:15:42.000 None of us saw that coming.
00:15:43.000 She's been demonized. 0.91
00:15:45.000 You know, there'd been leftist activists who chase her in the ladies' room. 0.99
00:15:48.000 Illegals illegally going into the restroom and filming her, which is many laws broke.
00:15:53.000 It is so the two of them are all the stands between America and the void and the utter darkness.
00:16:01.000 Because if you look at legislation, I'd break it in two buckets.
00:16:06.000 One is bad policy, spending trillions of dollars, trillions of dollars in debt, maybe trillions of dollars in new taxes.
00:16:13.000 They've been doing that, and they'll keep being able to do that.
00:16:16.000 They can use budget reconciliation to do that with 50 votes.
00:16:21.000 The second set is structural.
00:16:23.000 It's about rigging the game.
00:16:25.000 And what falls into that, the Corrupt Politicians Act falls into that.
00:16:30.000 Packing the U.S. Supreme Court falls into that.
00:16:35.000 Granting amnesty and the right to vote to tens of millions of aliens, that falls into that.
00:16:39.000 D.C., Puerto Rico.
00:16:40.000 D.C., Puerto Rico, statehood.
00:16:42.000 All of those are not about substance.
00:16:44.000 They're about keeping Democrats in power forever.
00:16:47.000 As long as the filibuster remains the rules of the Senate, bucket two is not going to happen.
00:16:55.000 The chances of it happening are zero.
00:16:56.000 So the only way, because all 50 Republicans are a hard no on all of those, the only way they happen is if you end the filibuster.
00:17:04.000 Now, Manchin has said he's not going to end the filibuster.
00:17:08.000 Cinema said she's not going to end the filibuster.
00:17:10.000 I hope they stick to their guns.
00:17:13.000 Schumer and the Democrats are trying to create a crafted, narrow exception for the filibuster for voting rights.
00:17:22.000 I don't think they will do it, but they could easily do it.
00:17:26.000 And I will say on this, Republican leadership screwed up with the debt ceiling deal we just cut, where there was an exception to the filibuster written into the bill that a bunch of Republicans voted for.
00:17:38.000 And I look, I stood up at our Senate lunch and said, you know what?
00:17:41.000 They're going to point to this and say this is precedent for going after the filibuster on voting rights legislation.
00:17:48.000 What was the response from leadership Barasso, Thun and McConnell?
00:17:53.000 Shrug.
00:17:54.000 We got to do it.
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00:19:25.000 So can we focus on the debt ceiling for a second?
00:19:27.000 Because it's really confusing to a lot of our listeners, and I kind of get my wires crossed.
00:19:32.000 So the infrastructure package was passed, which was a garbage bill.
00:19:36.000 It was terrible. 0.99
00:19:38.000 It's not like country-ending garbage, but it's just garbage and gave way too much power to the wrong people. 0.99
00:19:44.000 But that was separate than the Buildback broke bill. 0.98
00:19:46.000 Totally separate.
00:19:47.000 They tried to tie them together.
00:19:50.000 But then also in the midst of that was a debt ceiling increase.
00:19:53.000 Now, McConnell authorized the debt ceiling increase, I think, like a month and a half ago, and just Ben Schumer basically mocked him on the Senate floor.
00:20:01.000 Is that correct?
00:20:03.000 And so then McConnell then said, if my memory serves me, because sometimes they don't want you to remember that we're never doing this again.
00:20:10.000 Right?
00:20:10.000 Like, good luck doing this in December.
00:20:12.000 But then what happened?
00:20:14.000 They did it in December.
00:20:16.000 Okay, so it's just, was there any caveat or nuance or concession?
00:20:21.000 All right, let's break down the different pieces because it's confusing.
00:20:25.000 Look, you know, I do this for a living and it's confusing to me.
00:20:27.000 So I so the so-called bipartisan infrastructure bill, which was a $1.2 trillion bill, that passed.
00:20:35.000 That is law.
00:20:38.000 I didn't support it.
00:20:39.000 I voted no.
00:20:40.000 I vocally opposed it.
00:20:43.000 That being said, that bill was not nearly as bad as Buildback Broke.
00:20:48.000 It's two different universes.
00:20:50.000 The $1.2 trillion, you know, there was a significant amount of real infrastructure spending in it.
00:20:56.000 Why do they call it infrastructure?
00:20:57.000 Because infrastructure is popular.
00:20:58.000 People like infrastructure.
00:21:00.000 People like roads and bridges.
00:21:01.000 Of the $1.2 billion, $1.2 trillion, sorry, $110 billion of it was roads and bridges.
00:21:07.000 I actually stood up and said, you know what?
00:21:08.000 Let's pass $110 billion in roads and bridges.
00:21:10.000 We all support.
00:21:11.000 You get 95 votes for let's spend money on roads and bridges.
00:21:15.000 That's an important role of government.
00:21:16.000 Everyone supports it.
00:21:19.000 But there was $1.1 trillion that wasn't roads and bridges, that they were using the roads and bridges to sell it.
00:21:24.000 It's like the old con man who offers to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.
00:21:27.000 They were selling the same bridge over and over again because it's popular.
00:21:33.000 That passed.
00:21:34.000 A chunk of Republicans supported it.
00:21:37.000 You had secondly the debt ceiling.
00:21:41.000 So the debt ceiling is a limitation on the total amount the country can borrow.
00:21:49.000 And it is my view is not that we should never raise the debt ceiling.
00:21:55.000 You sometimes get politicians who say that, but frankly, they're not being serious or credible when they say that because you've got it varies at time to time, but it's roughly 40 cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed.
00:22:08.000 So unless you're prepared to slash federal spending 40% overnight, you're going to continue to borrow some.
00:22:15.000 And by the way, there is nobody, zero members of the Congress who advocate slashing 40% of spending overnight.
00:22:23.000 So if that is the case, then you do have to continue to borrow.
00:22:28.000 My view has always been we should not raise the debt ceiling without using it as leverage to pass real, meaningful structural reform that limits spending and addresses the debt, that fixes the underlying problem.
00:22:46.000 It doesn't have to be a magic wand.
00:22:47.000 You don't have to solve all of it.
00:22:49.000 You know, we don't live in, we don't have Harry Houdini who can just magically make things go away, but we should use the tools we have to address the real problem.
00:22:59.000 I think that's the responsible way to do it.
00:23:01.000 That's the honest way to do it.
00:23:05.000 In this instance, for several months, the position of every Republican in the Senate was, we're not going to help with the debt ceiling because the Democrats can do it on their own.
00:23:15.000 They have majorities in both houses.
00:23:17.000 They can raise the debt ceiling under budget reconciliation.
00:23:21.000 So if they're going to bankrupt the country, they ought to take responsibility for it and vote for it on their own.
00:23:27.000 Mitch McConnell was very vocal and clear in making that argument repeatedly and in urging even some of the wobblier members of our conference to hold that line.
00:23:35.000 So for a couple of months, all 50 Republicans posture.
00:23:41.000 Very effective.
00:23:42.000 What happened at the end of the day was Mitch blinked.
00:23:45.000 Now, I will say this, I disagree with him.
00:23:47.000 And actually, we had some hot, hot discussions and lunches.
00:23:53.000 I've been in some really intense screaming matches in the Senate.
00:24:00.000 This approached some of us in prior years.
00:24:03.000 You mean the one back when you called him a liar on the Senate floor?
00:24:06.000 You know, we have had our disagreements.
00:24:11.000 I think it was a serious mistake what Mitch did.
00:24:15.000 Now, that being said, I'll tell you his reasoning because his reasoning is not crazy.
00:24:20.000 His reasoning was he believed if he didn't give in that Mansion and cinema were about to nuke the filibuster.
00:24:29.000 That he was convinced that they were getting ready on the debt ceiling to nuke the filibuster.
00:24:34.000 And what Mitch argued to us is he gave in and went back on what he said to preserve the filibuster.
00:24:40.000 So basically, he was afraid that cinema and mansion don't usually want to break the filibuster, but they would to raise the debt ceiling.
00:24:48.000 That they were persuaded that a default of the debt would be so calamitous that they would end the filibuster on that.
00:24:56.000 Which would then set the precedent for...
00:24:57.000 Oh, got it.
00:24:58.000 I don't agree with Mitch's assessment of the likelihood that they would do that, but I do think he genuinely believed that.
00:25:05.000 And if that's the case, what he did wasn't crazy.
00:25:11.000 I think we could have held the line.
00:25:13.000 And certainly, once a bunch of Republicans came the first time, then the Republicans said, okay, we did it once, but we're not going to do it again.
00:25:23.000 And then they did it again.
00:25:24.000 And it was just like...
00:25:26.000 How many people voted for it?
00:25:27.000 10, 15?
00:25:28.000 I think it was 14.
00:25:29.000 Yeah.
00:25:30.000 But it's all the same cast of characters, right?
00:25:32.000 You know, and it's the problem is when you demonstrate you're not credible.
00:25:38.000 That's right.
00:25:39.000 Nobody believes you.
00:25:40.000 It's.
00:25:42.000 Makes bad foreign policy, too.
00:25:44.000 So one of the reasons why I've won a lot of legislated fights in Washington is that when I say I'm going to do something, people believe me.
00:25:52.000 It's one of the reasons Trump was so effective is our enemies, you know, whether Russia or China, they're like, that dude's so crazy, we don't know what he'll do.
00:26:00.000 That's right.
00:26:01.000 And that credibility is important.
00:26:04.000 I think Republicans really hurt themselves because the next time they say, okay, this is a line we won't cross, Schumer laughs and says, yeah, you will.
00:26:11.000 We'll just give you another month and then you'll cross it.
00:26:14.000 Yeah.
00:26:14.000 We could talk for a while, but I've got to get you on stage.
00:26:16.000 We're here at AmericaFest, TPUSA.com.
00:26:19.000 The Verdict with Ted Cruz is a phenomenal podcast co-hosted with my friend Michael Knowles.
00:26:24.000 Just a short little soundbite, promote it.
00:26:27.000 So we launched Verdict two years ago, January of last year, launched it brand new.
00:26:33.000 Within a few weeks, it became the number one ranked podcast in the world.
00:26:37.000 We just did our 100th episode.
00:26:39.000 Wow.
00:26:40.000 So we do it about once a week.
00:26:42.000 We've had over 40 million downloads.
00:26:45.000 And it's typically 30, 40 minutes of the inside story on what's going on in the Senate, what's going on in the Supreme Court, all of the stuff that the news doesn't tell you.
00:26:58.000 But frankly, Charlie, you do a good job in your podcast of engaging.
00:27:01.000 But, you know, it's hard to learn what's really going on.
00:27:04.000 And what I try to do in Verdict is pull the curtain back and bring people inside.
00:27:10.000 And so, you know, everyone listening to your show, let me encourage you, come over to Verdict.
00:27:15.000 Go subscribe.
00:27:16.000 Subscribe.
00:27:16.000 Give us five stars.
00:27:18.000 We're on YouTube, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast.
00:27:22.000 Do the whole thing.
00:27:24.000 And look, we're saving the country.
00:27:27.000 And I appreciate the work you do every day to do that, Charlie.
00:27:30.000 It makes a big difference.
00:27:31.000 And I appreciate the work your listeners are doing.
00:27:34.000 I mean, it really is an army of freedom lovers.
00:27:37.000 And I'm really optimistic.
00:27:38.000 We're going to pull the country back from the brink.
00:27:40.000 Amen.
00:27:41.000 Well, I want to thank you for making the special trip out to Phoenix to our students.
00:27:44.000 It means a lot.
00:27:45.000 A lot of lawmakers say no, but you've always been there.
00:27:47.000 You speak at all of our stuff.
00:27:48.000 It really goes, it doesn't go unnoticed and it really touches us.
00:27:52.000 Thank you.
00:27:53.000 You guys are making a difference, and it's now or never.
00:27:57.000 Amen.
00:27:58.000 Thank you so much.
00:27:59.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
00:28:00.000 Email us your thoughts as always freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:28:03.000 And if you want to support our show, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:28:06.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
00:28:07.000 God bless.
00:28:11.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.