00:00:56.000Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
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00:01:46.000We got to get right into it here because it's a huge day.
00:01:49.000The grassroots is rising up, the base is rising up in Texas, and it is the last day to vote in the runoff between Attorney General Ken Paxton and incumbent establishment John Cornyn.
00:02:04.000And here to help us out is Ken Paxton himself.
00:02:07.000Mr. Attorney General, welcome back to the show, sir.
00:02:10.000Hey, so good to be back on a very important day for Texas and I think for the entire nation to send the right message to Washington, which is hey, we're done with the establishment telling us that we're going to keep a guy that doesn't do the things that Texans care about and does exactly what Washington wants him to do.
00:03:01.000So you have, what, eight hours to go vote?
00:03:03.000I would really encourage people to get out, vote today, take a friend, take a family member, call a couple of friends because voter turnout or runoff.
00:03:45.000Absolutely, once and for all, put an end to the establishment's hostile takeover of the base and of Texas.
00:03:53.000I mean, this is, let's just give the audience a little bit of an understanding here, Mr. General.
00:03:59.000How much money has been spent against you at this point, and whose interests are vested in Senator Cornyn?
00:04:08.000This is almost a very high percentage of money.
00:04:11.000It's probably close to $150 million at this point.
00:04:14.000We won't really know until it sells out, but it was about $100 million during the original primary.
00:04:18.000In the last three months, they're probably in the $40 to $50 range.
00:04:22.000So lots of money coming from DC for the most part.
00:04:26.000And the idea that they're used to being successful, and if you look at the last 40 or 50 years, Other than Bill Cassidy, there's only been two other incumbents that I know that have lost from the U.S. Senate during a primary.
00:04:37.000That was Richard Luger in 2012, because it was a small state and it was self-funder who beat him, Richard Murdoch.
00:04:43.000And then Mike Lee in a convention state, Utah, where money didn't matter, he was able to win.
00:04:48.000So it's very unusual because there's so much money coming in and they try to convince you from D.C. that your guy is just what you want.
00:05:12.000This is not a, you know, but look, candidly, that's one of the few places that'll have him right now.
00:05:18.000And by the way, we do Fox, and there's nothing there.
00:05:20.000I'm just saying this is one of the few places that'll hear him out right now because base conservative movement shows like ours, like War Room, it's not going to happen.
00:05:42.000I know the president cares a lot about the congressional races that are right below the Senate race, and I won by 10 points in 2020.
00:05:49.000So I think I could be the most help to the president and his agenda in the last two years of his term of office and all the down ballot races.
00:05:59.000He could well lose, but even if he doesn't lose, he will win by such a razor thin margin that it's likely to have a negative drag on the down ballot races in Texas.
00:06:10.000So, this is his new talking point today, sir, that you are an albatross.
00:09:36.000Middle finger to you, the $150 million they pumped into this race that should have been spent in North Carolina, Georgia, should have been spent in Michigan.
00:09:44.000Instead, they're trying to take out a good man that the grassroots loves, the base loves.
00:10:24.000We'll talk to you soon on the other side of hopefully a victorious day in Texas.
00:10:30.000How much are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness worth to you?
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00:10:46.000So, ordinary people had to make extraordinary choices and risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to fight for independence.
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00:12:15.000All right, so it's a huge day in many respects.
00:12:17.000We just spoke with Attorney General Ken Paxton in the state of Texas, who is taking down a Goliath.
00:12:32.000Not even to beat a Democrat, to beat a Republican, a good Republican who has President Trump's endorsement, who has Turning Point Actions endorsement.
00:12:40.000You just think about the conversations they might have after this, because they probably told some people, you know, you're expected to pony up for this sure thing 100%, and it's going to be a very awkward phone call the next day.
00:13:46.000In a midterm election, it's a base turnout election.
00:13:49.000That means if you get rid of the guy that gives the base enthusiasm they actually want to get behind, you're going to be an albatross to the rest of the down ballot elections.
00:14:02.000Meanwhile, this weekend, President Trump's skipping Don Jr.'s wedding.
00:14:09.000Everybody's going back to D.C. We're all speculating that there's going to be more kinetic warfare in Iran, that the war was going to restart in a really aggressive way, more fighting.
00:14:51.000I learned that this expression, no dust, no dollars, okay, what does that mean?
00:14:56.000It means a step by step process where if Iran makes good on something, then there will be a carrot as opposed to a stick.0.72
00:15:05.000And if they restart, we saw this weekend that we did strike some of these small boats trying to lay mines in the strait.0.79
00:15:12.000Now, what you need to understand is that we have a growing appreciation, understanding, and confidence in the leadership structure that has emerged after our strikes and taking the head of the snake operations that happened in Iran.
00:15:25.000So we know kind of more now than we did before about who we're dealing with, who the hardliners are, who the moderates are.
00:15:32.000And what we're trying to do is empower the moderates over the hardliners.
00:15:37.000That war has not been won internally, but it does appear that the moderates are ascended.
00:15:42.000So that's one thing you need to keep in mind here.
00:15:44.000But something like the Strait of Hormuz mine land, it could be hardliners that still have power, still have some authority over some soldiers, dispatching them and going rogue and intentionally trying to blow up a peace deal.
00:15:56.000We have our own hardliners in America that are trying to blow up the peace deal.
00:16:01.000We need to empower and celebrate people that are actually trying to drive peace.
00:16:05.000Because, listen, if you get the Strait open and gas prices go below three, if you can get the nuclear dust, then we've accomplished our missions that we set up.
00:16:51.000I think we've seen there's been a lot of controversy over this.
00:16:56.000There's been a lot of anger over this.
00:16:58.000I think I go back to what I said when this first broke out.
00:17:04.000I was talking about how Charlie felt about these things.0.53
00:17:07.000And I think the best way you can sell this to the public is if this is the last war we have to fight in the Middle East, if we can say we can come home, we're like, we don't have this Iran thing hanging over our heads forever, we don't need to have.
00:17:23.000Tens of thousands of U.S. troops hanging around in the Middle East all the time because this could blow up at any point.
00:17:28.000If President Trump is able to get a deal where he can say, this looks like a durable, long term peace, you know, we can have a few jets there, but we don't need these huge outlays.
00:17:37.000We don't need to be spending billions and billions of dollars every time some radical decides to go off and start a fuss there.
00:17:46.000I think he can present that as a long term win to the American people.
00:17:49.000And then that can even hopefully win over the people who feel betrayed by the war breaking out in the first place.
00:18:19.000But if you can empower the moderates, if you can get the nuclear material, and this was the big breakthrough, this is why this big breakthrough is for the first time.
00:18:28.000Iranian officials are seriously talking in depth about how to get that out of their country, whether it's China that helps, whether it's America, whether it's some third party.
00:18:37.000They're actually understand that they need to give on that crucial topic, and that's the breakthrough.0.88
00:18:43.000If it comes true, we'll be very happy.
00:18:48.000If you're about to turn 65 and you're already on Medicare, this message is for you.
00:18:53.000Charlie cared about America's seniors.
00:18:56.000He was outraged that so many were paying too much for their Medicare coverage and getting less than they deserved in return.
00:19:56.000So I wanted to have you on because I saw you over the weekend and I thought you were hitting just the perfect note on X. You said President Trump just delivered another historic win for America and the world.
00:20:08.000After showing unmatched strength against Iran, he's now securing a major deal to open up the Strait of Hormuz, stabilize energy markets, and prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon.
00:20:17.000Now, since you have put that out there on socials, there has been some back and forth, right?
00:20:24.000We see that there was a skirmish in the Strait, that we actually struck some boats that were apparently attempting to lay some more mines.
00:20:32.000But we can't let that derail this overarching, this bigger project of getting peace with Iran.
00:20:39.000Sir, lay out the stakes for our audience here.
00:21:18.000They will attack us with a nuclear weapon.
00:21:21.000President Trump had the courage to actually go in there and absolutely hammer them, destroy their Navy, destroy their Air Force, destroy their industrial capacity.0.57
00:21:31.000But of course, there are pieces left to do, which is open the strait, get that trade flowing back up, and collect all of their nuclear dust.0.87
00:21:40.000Now, we'll use a tool that allows us to release the frozen assets of Iran as they deliver that uranium dust back to us.0.91
00:21:51.000But we're going to do this on our terms.
00:21:53.000President Trump doesn't believe in deals that are in any way other than to the benefit of the United States.
00:22:00.000So, what we got to do is not buy into the talking points of the left.
00:22:05.000Because, look, the Democrats are cheering, actively cheering for our country to fail, for our military to fail, for Iran to succeed.
00:22:15.000They have no idea what the deal is, and yet they comment about it.0.55
00:22:17.000This is going to be a strong, great deal for the U.S.
00:22:20.000That, yeah, what your point is really well made there, especially with.
00:22:24.000People commenting on the deal when they don't know the specifics of it.
00:22:27.000You know, that was happening even before this kind of background call that I was on, and, you know, people are trying to clear it up.
00:22:33.000I mean, nobody has seen the actual deal points.
00:22:35.000And by the way, nothing, there's no final deal.
00:22:40.000And one of the things that people in the audience really need to understand is that getting these final points over the finish line is extremely difficult because they're trying to hide the location of this, you know, the son, the new Ayatollah, if you will.0.65
00:22:54.000So, I mean, they're basically using carrier pigeons to get this stuff to him because they're so worried, and rightly so, that he'll be taken out.
00:23:04.000But this dynamic, Senator, there are hardliners, even on the right, if you will, the neocon faction, that before this has even been made public, they're already screaming, they're wailing.
00:23:16.000They want us to pursue regime change, they want us to re engage in kinetic warfare.
00:23:25.000If we can get the dust, if we can reopen the Strait of Hormuz, this is an absolute slam dunk for the American people.
00:23:30.000You're going to see gas prices fall below $3 a gallon heading into the midterm, sir.
00:23:36.000That to me is a huge, huge piece of this.
00:23:39.000What do you say to those hardline factions that want to see regime change?
00:23:43.000Look, we're going to get our mission accomplished.
00:23:45.000We're not going to go into an endless conflict.
00:23:46.000Our mission was to make certain that they don't have a nuclear weapon.
00:23:49.000If we accomplish that and we have the free flow of oil and the straight over moves, we're done.
00:23:54.000Now, the other piece that's extremely important is we're going to turn the Abraham Accords.
00:24:00.000I should say we, by the way, President Trump.
00:24:02.000Is going to turn the Abraham Accords into a security military cooperation that spans the entirety of the Mideast countries.
00:24:10.000And by the way, that may include Iran.
00:24:12.000I think some of these guys that have been knocking the deal, I think they live in a decade that's long past.
00:24:21.000We want peace and prosperity in the Middle East.
00:24:23.000We want to make certain that we pay attention to our own neighborhood, our own needs domestically, and not get entangled there forever on some sort of social experiment.
00:24:30.000We saw that within Iraq and Afghanistan, and President Trump's not going to do that.
00:24:34.000Yeah, and I think this is, you're making an extraordinarily important point here, Senator, because a lot of people, they do this to Trump, they do this to Charlie.
00:24:41.000They want President Trump to be the image in their head that he is, right?
00:24:46.000They sort of project onto him what they most like about, you know, his campaign or whatever.
00:24:52.000And they miss the fact that he's been calling for Iran not to have a nuclear weapon, you know, basically since the 80s.
00:24:58.000And, you know, and Charlie, they do the same thing with Charlie.
00:25:01.000I'm going to play this clip because Charlie understood the president, what makes him tick.
00:25:06.000His instincts politically are better than most, if not all.
00:25:09.000And this was just before Midnight Hammer, I believe, or it could have been right after.
00:25:14.000But this was Charlie on with Jesse Waters right in that moment and explaining President Trump's actual military philosophy.
00:26:00.000Sir, we can declare victory if we get that dust and the strait is open, even without regime change, even without, you know, sort of like, you know, settling.0.85
00:26:27.000And by the way, he's also, President Trump, able to envision a world in which Iran is part of a security and trade agreement in the Middle East.
00:26:37.000Some of these guys, again, they can't fathom that because they have a very black and white view of the world.
00:27:15.000Well, when this started, I think a good perspective to have, we've talked.
00:27:19.000Charlie didn't like the idea of regime change with Iran.
00:27:22.000He expressed a lot of worry about this.
00:27:25.000But we also thought the best outcome that we could have out of this is if President Trump is able to come home from negotiations and say, this was not another Middle East war.
00:27:35.000This was the last Middle East war that America has to face.
00:27:38.000Well, and listen, if you could deal with the nuclear problem, then that very well could be, right?0.88
00:27:42.000Because that's the overarching threat.
00:27:43.000The missiles, the munition base that they had been stockpiling.
00:27:50.000I think the point is, this would be historic.
00:27:56.000This is to be some sort of ground invasion, or we're going to restart kinetic activities instead of pursuing peace, I think is totally insane.
00:28:05.000The president's instincts here are absolutely spot on.
00:28:08.000He will be celebrated wildly by this show if he can achieve peace.
00:28:13.000And I know the same is true for you, Senator.
00:28:15.000We just have about 90 seconds left here, Senator.
00:28:18.000Yeah, my entire adult life, we've been.
00:31:17.000You got to give something to get something often.
00:31:20.000Otherwise, we're just going to be stuck in a situation where we're bombing in perpetuity.
00:31:25.000That's how we've gotten into other conflicts that we abhorred.0.69
00:31:29.000So, if you want an example, how did the Ukraine war explode with Russia?
00:31:33.000Well, one of the things was Russia was actually coming out and saying, we would like to negotiate on some of these points expansion of NATO, where you guys are putting missiles.
00:31:43.000We have a proposed framework deal that we could use as a starting point for negotiations.
00:31:47.000And our attitude was never, we basically refused to talk.
00:31:52.000We just said, here's what you're going to do and you're going to accept it.
00:31:56.000And then Russia decided to invade Ukraine, and we were suddenly just now we're on the hook.
00:32:00.000We're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a war that could have been avoided.
00:32:04.000And I think there's lessons in that.0.67
00:32:07.000If we had been willing to, if we'd treated Russia seriously, even if we said we don't like a lot of what you do, a lot of what you do is bad, but we don't want a giant war either, that all could have been avoided.0.95
00:32:18.000And I think similarly with Iran, we can concede this is a backwards regime.1.00
00:33:05.000They can intimidate, assault, murder their own people to the point where they're not willing to come out in the streets and overthrow them.
00:33:12.000And they can cause us a lot of problems in the straight.
00:33:16.000They can charge tolls, they can lay mines.
00:33:19.000They could essentially keep the world's energy supply hostage.
00:33:23.000Okay, so those are the dividing lines.
00:33:26.000If you are going to overthrow the regime, to Blake's point, you're committing to.
00:33:31.000Tens of thousands of U.S. troops being involved.
00:33:34.000You're committing to a ground force that will take out the regime.
00:33:37.000You're committing to funding and arming a lot of militants.
00:33:42.000You don't know what you're committing to because it's another open ended conflict.
00:33:46.000And if you had gone to people in 2002 and said, This is what your involvement in Afghanistan is going to entail when you send troops there.
00:33:54.000If you had gone to Bush in 2003 and said, This is what your commitment to Iraq is going to entail, would you take it?
00:34:00.000I think they would say no because they're.0.95
00:34:03.000It's very easy to tell people before you go in, this will be easy.
00:35:11.000We might sign this deal, and you get a little modicum of peace for a few weeks, a few months, and the people rise up and they take back their government.
00:35:22.000Beyond the nuclear weapon, which President Trump has made it his prerogative to make sure that they do not have a nuclear weapon, they do not have nuclear material, they are not enriching.
00:35:32.000If you can take that off the table and that straight can be open, this is a good deal.
00:35:38.000We should say our strategic objectives have been achieved and we are going home to focus domestically because our nation needs that type of investment.
00:35:48.000Our people need that type of creativity and focus.
00:35:51.000Here domestically, if we have any hope in the midterms of fighting off a historical trend where the incumbent power loses during the midterms, we need to be focused here.
00:36:03.000All right, affordability must be addressed, home ownership must be addressed, getting the next generation to believe in America must be addressed.
00:36:10.000These are the issues family formation, making it affordable for families, unleashing the prosperity of this country for the next generation.
00:36:18.000That's how you win long term, that's how you deliver long term gains politically.
00:36:40.000I think we're living out a lot of the warnings of people who said that we need to get out of the Middle East because it's a very thankless area.0.96
00:36:50.000It's a place where there's a lot of people invested in just endless conflict there.0.92
00:38:23.000People would ask Charlie, What is Strong Cell exactly?
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00:40:32.000This is the third in a trilogy of kids' books, which, you know, it's like, listen, we have these really prestigious academics on that have these really serious books.
00:40:43.000This to me is even more important because we got to teach the next generation about why they should love America, why they should have faith in America.
00:40:54.000Steve, why did you write this book and what's it about?
00:40:58.000So, my publisher came to me a few years ago and said, Hey, you know, after Russia's passing, you know, he had these Rush Revere books that were very successful.
00:41:07.000Would you be willing to step into that space?0.97
00:41:10.000And I'm like, Listen, man, I can't shake the dust off of Russia's sandals.0.99
00:41:14.000But then I got to thinking about it over the next day or two and I thought, Well, what if we did something even more unique?0.85
00:41:19.000What if we looked at America's Christian heritage for children?
00:42:00.000The American story, the 250th birthday of America, guys, it's an event 3,000 years in the making.
00:42:06.000Charlie used to point out Deuteronomy was quoted more than any other book by our founding fathers.
00:42:11.000And so we go into all of that from Moses at Mount Sinai through Christ through the Reformation and all of this history that eventually led to this place, this special place now we're fighting to preserve called America.
00:42:23.000Yeah, you know, and I'm looking at the book because you sent a little advanced copy to me, the PDF.
00:42:28.000So I'm looking at it right now, Steve, and the illustrations are great.
00:42:36.000And it really helps you make the through line very directly and very obviously for the mind of a child, explaining God's providential hand and how, like you said, this started 3,000 years ago.
00:42:48.000This started with God setting apart a people and a nation, how the pilgrims came to spread the gospel, really have a refuge here to freely express their Christian faith, and how that built the building blocks, the foundation of.
00:43:06.000The providential hand of God being so visible in our country.
00:43:12.000I can't wait to read it to my own kids.
00:43:13.000And I hope people at home understand the power of that, why that's so important.
00:43:18.000Because maybe, Steve, this can be a question for you explaining all that we're up against.
00:43:24.000You've got foreign influence campaigns, you've got a whole half of the country that seems to hate this place, it seems to hate what it's about, what it was founded upon, and it hates the men who founded it and the ideas that founded it.
00:43:43.000And we are at a generational knife's edge right now.
00:43:48.000And we are either going to pass these things on to the next generation or they're going to be lost in this next generation.
00:43:55.000And if you just look at our history, there are events that are just mathematically incalculable.0.66
00:44:00.000The odds that the Puritans would go here across the channel and land in a place where it just so happened that they run into a guy named Squanto.
00:44:11.000Who's an Indian who was taught the Bible by English speaking settlers over in the old land, the old country.
00:44:22.000And he just happens to be there within close proximity to Massachusetts Bay Colony, pardon me, to help them understand this new world they were in and the tribes and all the customs they were landing into.
00:44:36.000The odds of that are incalculable, guys.
00:44:39.000You see this all throughout our history.
00:44:43.000And it's why one of the terms our founders used the most was this term, providence, which literally just means supernatural acts of God that are otherwise inexplicable.
00:44:53.000And I'm just pulling some images here for the team so they can put them up here.
00:44:57.000I just love the way this thing is animated.
00:44:59.000And I mean, you know, and you give little Bible lessons here, which I love.
00:45:05.000You're talking about the founding of the country, something we actually talked about yesterday on our Memorial Day special a lot with the boys of 76 and 77.
00:45:16.000O'Donnell, a historian, great conversation we had with him.
00:46:14.000And one of the things that Ben Franklin says to the British ambassador, and it's funny, I thought that's a line right out of the children's book that I have coming out when I saw this about a month and a half ago.
00:46:24.000Is he says to the British ambassador in a scene, Well, they think now that they have God in their lives and we've had awakenings spiritually that they don't need a dreaded sovereign anymore.
00:46:36.000They think that Jesus is king, Christ is king, and they're fine just living individually with him in charge.
00:46:44.000And I sat up in my seat, guys, when I saw that in the theater, because again, that's right out of the page of my book that you just shared there, Andrew.
00:46:52.000And I think this is key to the understanding of how we came about as a people.
00:46:56.000This line's been attributed to many folks.
00:46:58.000I think it originated with William Penn, that if men were angels, they wouldn't need government.
00:47:42.000It's the old Chesterton line when government removes the god, the government becomes the god.
00:47:46.000Yeah, we see that completely on the progressive left.
00:47:50.000And we see it sometimes little elements of it on the right, Steve, which is why getting back to foundational principles is so important right now.
00:48:00.000I mean, there's a point to being pragmatic in politics.
00:48:03.000We can be over ideological, but if you don't have these basics and these understandings and you don't instill them in your children at a very young age, This country is going to be in a world of hurt.
00:48:15.000We will not pass this great blessing that is America on to the next generation.
00:48:22.000So, your book, I mean, really undergirding that, your entire premise for writing it is we lost a great man in Rush Limbaugh too soon, died of cancer, and it was heartbreaking.
00:48:54.000But you're one of those guys that is stepping into that and doing the piece that you can.
00:48:59.000And that's all we're trying to do here by keeping the Charlie Kirk show alive is doing our piece and doing what we can through Turning Point.
00:49:10.000And maybe reflect on that, just that dynamic.
00:49:12.000Because there is a lot of people that see what's happened, you know, see what happened in the movement, the fracturing, the fraying at the edges, this foreign influence, whatever it is.
00:49:22.000Why are you stepping into the void, Steve?
00:49:25.000I think that, number one, if your worldview begins with the assertion that God supernaturally intervened his hand into human history to raise his dead son to life and that the last enemy death has been conquered, then I don't think you're permitted a despair driven worldview.
00:50:14.000I mean, the story of the people that founded the country, the Puritans, who were they fleeing?
00:50:18.000They were not fleeting Islamic infiltration like we're seeing in the West.
00:50:22.000They weren't fleeing pagan communists, didn't even exist yet.
00:50:26.000Heck, during the post Reformation era, where Catholic monarchs would persecute Protestants and Protestant monarchs would persecute Catholics, they weren't even fleeing a Catholic monarch.
00:50:35.000They were fleeing a Protestant king who wanted to tell them what exactly they could and could not preach and what they could and could not say.
00:51:00.000I think I'm getting more offers and opportunities to do things because of the giant void that Charlie's murder left and others that I'm speaking to, too.
00:51:11.000And we're all saying the same things to each other.
00:51:13.000Like, there's like 15 of us that are getting asked to fill some of this space here.
00:51:22.000We've got to do all the other stuff we were doing.
00:51:24.000How did this guy go to do all this stuff that the 15 of us are now trying to all figure out amongst ourselves?
00:51:29.000But one of those things I just got invited to do.
00:51:32.000One of those things was to do a heritage tour with Speaker Mike Johnson last week in D.C.
00:51:39.000And I have to tell you, it's rare to say anything out of D.C. is inspiring, but going there and seeing a lot of this history, to be in that prayer room that is halfway between the offices of the majority leader and the speaker, to see these marble statues, to see these paintings, and I shared a lot of them with our audience today, it refilled my tank.
00:52:00.000It reminded me of what it is that we're really fighting for here.
00:52:03.000That this really is the last best hope this nation is, as far as we know anyway, the last best hope for this planet before Christ returns.
00:52:11.000And so I'm as fired up as I've been in a long time just by getting that personal reminder of the stakes here and why it is so volatile.
00:52:22.000It's because of what this country stands for and what happens to the rest of this planet if this country goes away.
00:52:30.000And, you know, and JD Vance said the same thing in the aftermath of.
00:52:34.000When we lost Charlie, it's like we all just have to do the little piece that we can because Charlie was a giant and he did so much and he was tireless.
00:52:43.000He just had this engine where he just wouldn't stop going.
00:52:46.000He was always trying to squeeze out 30 more minutes of his day, uh, squeeze out five percent more productivity again and again and again over years.
00:52:55.000And that's how you get a Charlie Kirk.
00:52:57.000It was so incredible to remark upon just because he even could fit in, he did even fit in the leisure.
00:53:03.000So he had his Sabbath that he would do on Saturdays.
00:53:06.000He still managed to watch the Cubs, watch the Ducks, and yet he's still off, maximizing his work time so effectively, always organizing something, always planning the next thing.
00:53:19.000He's just such a model of high effectiveness across one's life.
00:53:24.000And I think I'm glad we'll always have that.
00:55:16.000Charlie used to talk a lot about Angel Studios and what they were building.
00:55:20.000And as you know, I've been a longtime fan of it for the same reason.
00:55:23.000So I wanted to share some of my favorite films and shows on Angel, and I put them all into one easy to use watch list.
00:55:29.000This is content that's actually worth your time, not just noise or recycled talking points, but stories that go a level deeper and ask better questions.
00:55:37.000That's what stands out about Angel to me.
00:55:39.000They're willing to put out films and documentaries that don't just follow the usual script, especially when it comes to politics, culture, and the bigger conversations you and I should be having.
00:55:48.000So on my watch list, you'll find pics that lean into those topics, but there are also solid options for family or just something meaningful to watch at the end of a stressful day.
00:55:57.000If you want to check it out, go to angel.comslash Charlie and take a look at the watch list I put together.
00:56:05.000Our next guest, we're having on Noah Rothman.
00:56:08.000He's a senior writer at National Review and he's the author of Blood and Progress A History of Left Wing Violence in America.
00:56:17.000It's brand new and obviously on a topic you and I both care a great deal about.
00:56:36.000With Charlie, and in particular, something about it that should never be memory hold, and people are doing their best to do it, which is the wave of, I'll just say, insane lies afterwards, trying to spin what happened as an act of far right wing violence against Charlie.
00:56:55.000From Lawrence Tribe, a former professor at Harvard, tried to argue that it was right wing violence.
00:57:01.000Heather Cox Richardson, one of the most popular sub stackers, she just said, Oh, this is a, this is Groyper type violence that did this.
00:57:08.000When we saw very quickly that all of the evidence rests with this being left wing trans motivated violence.
00:57:15.000But as your book gets into Noah, this is part of a very long term pattern on the left that there's sort of been a, for lack of a better word, a conspiracy to suppress that this is going on.
00:57:29.000Yeah, I think a conspiracy is a great word for it.
00:57:31.000And it's not as though there's a coordinated effort here, it's an unspoken set of interests that end up making mainstream media professionals.
00:57:40.000And otherwise responsible communicators just subordinate everything they know about copycat violence, about responsible reporting, to an ideological motivated desire to convince the rest of the American people that the right, the American right, is uniquely violent and always responsible for big episodes of political violence in this country.
00:58:02.000We heard about it after the assassination of Brian Thompson, United Healthcare's CEO.
00:58:06.000We hear about it whenever there's an attack on a knife facility three times last year, including one that involves sophisticated ambush tactics.
00:58:13.000We hear about it after the president is almost assassinated.
00:58:17.000Eventually, you have to wonder if this line has any substance, any merit to it.
00:58:22.000And that's what I investigate in this book.
00:58:24.000Not only that, but Blood and Progress, a century of left wing violence in America, exposes the degree to which very recent scholarship has only begun to explore the waves of left wing political violence in this country in the 1920s, 1910s, 1970s, 1980s, and today.
00:58:41.000And you begin to see a lot of similarities across these.
00:58:45.000Violent movements where individuals who engage in perhaps deluded thinking, but deluded thinking that is encouraged by influential people in the orbit of very responsible institutional figures in this country that encourage this sort of thing and refuse to look it squarely in the face, telling themselves that, oh, we don't have a violence problem.
00:59:36.000Well, it's a refrain, and it's a refrain that serves not really to explore the issue, but to excuse ignoring it.
00:59:44.000Increasingly, I feel like that's the only logic associated with issuing that.
00:59:50.000That reflexive reaction whenever there's an episode of left wing violence in this country, obviously, conclusively demonstrated by investigators and law enforcement.
00:59:59.000And it's supported by some dubious statistical games that I think are being played with some of these databases that are used to justify this claim.
01:00:07.000The ADL, the Anti Defamation League, has one, the University of Cincinnati has another.
01:00:13.000And if you explore them, the statistical breakdowns of right wing violence include prison violence, gang violence, intra family violence, sometimes somebody who spray paints the side of a church, right wing violence.
01:00:24.000A homeless man who starts hurling racial slurs in a hotelier and attacks them, right wing violence.
01:00:29.000The data begins to look kind of corrupted the more you look into it.
01:00:32.000And then there's this report, authored for the Department of Homeland Security in 2021, that alleges that left wing violence is not well studied because there are intimidation campaigns marshaled against people who study it, reputational damage, the threat of physical harm for doing that kind of work, and as well the fact that people who are participants in these often violent left wing movements are themselves the authors.
01:00:59.000So it is a fatally subjective enterprise if it's not hopelessly corrupted.
01:01:03.000And by telling these stories, and I don't break it down into statistics, this book does not contend that right wing violence does not exist.
01:01:09.000That would be a child's argument, which I encounter all the time.
01:01:13.000But it does complicate the argument that is issued by the left and left wing institutions like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which maintains left wing violence is a quote unquote myth and confronts them with the fact that the evidence they're relying on to make that claim is deficient, if not corrupted.
01:01:29.000I hope that this book, Blood and Progress, A Century of Left Wing Violence in America, gets its hands into the right audiences.
01:01:35.000Because if anything, I just want them to confront the fact that they have been bandying about this notion, not in order to correct the record, but to avoid looking at the whole spectrum of political violence in this country.
01:01:48.000And until we get our hands around the whole problem, we're never going to solve it.
01:01:52.000So you mentioned that there's commonalities that there was left wing violence in the 10s and 20s, we saw another in the 60s and 70s.
01:02:00.000You could say we've seen another surge of it, certainly since about 2019, 2020 or so.
01:02:08.000You mentioned there's commonalities between them.
01:02:11.000What are the common threads of a surge of left wing violence?
01:02:15.000So if you go back to the 1910s, 1920s, which is where I start, the anarchist socialistic wave of terror bombings, which the recent scholarship into it, only in this century, all of the people who explore this phenomenon note that it's forgotten in much the same way that the nationalist movements that tried to assassinate. Harry Truman and shot up Congress in the 1950s were forgotten, or the Marxist terror cells of the 70s were forgotten.
01:02:40.000But across the spectrum, you see some similarities like what they used to call propaganda of the deed, which is today more likely to be referred to as direct action.
01:02:49.000These are spectacular attacks that are designed in the minds of their perpetrators to galvanize a broader audience and ignite broader violence that will beget the revolution.
01:02:58.000A lot of this is very revolutionary in nature and Marxian in nature.
01:03:03.000Small cell leaderless organizations, again, when that ICE terror cell attacks, including one that involved about 10 members using.
01:03:11.000Fireworks to lure out their targets and overlapping fields of fire.
01:03:14.000Again, very sophisticated attack on law enforcement.
01:03:18.000But you usually see attacks on law enforcement when these waves of left wing violence begin because they regard the state as much as an enemy and in league with the American right as they do the right wing adversaries who they typically organize against.
01:03:32.000And lastly, the intellectual notion that systemic oppression licenses extra legal violence.
01:03:38.000However, they define it, it is a sort of permission structure they give themselves.
01:03:42.000No, that reminds me when you say it like that of.
01:03:45.000You know, Hassan Piker, who went on with the New York Times and talking about social murder, right?
01:03:49.000That, you know, Brian Thompson was guilty of all this social murder, so he had it coming.
01:03:54.000And then you saw those nitwits outside of the Momdani press conference or whatever, where they, you know, I forget the two ladies' names, but they were, you know, media credentialed.
01:04:04.000And literally two weeks later, they're talking about social murder, social murder.
01:04:08.000All it is is this elaborate philosophy that they've baked up to justify murder, to justify violence, to justify extra.
01:04:16.000You know, sort of means, proactive means.
01:04:19.000You see this with the Antifa handbook, right?
01:04:21.000Dr. Antifa at Rutgers University, where the whole thing is a handbook of how do you preemptively attack people you politically disagree with.
01:04:27.000This is fundamental to their worldview.
01:04:30.000And it's meeting out real violence, real bloodshed in response to a highly theoretical, metaphorical violence that, again, that they talk themselves into.
01:04:39.000Those two ladies, three ladies, one of whom was less talkative than the others, were very illustrative of this phenomenon, right?
01:05:15.000So, in the leftist mind, they have to invent these causes and then mete out real vicious violence.
01:05:21.000In order to demonstrate to you that this, that the god can bleed, that we can destroy this wholly immoral system if we just all take a sledgehammer to its foundations, it's what they want.
01:06:20.000He was like, man, they're getting more radical.
01:06:22.000So you can see this 59.4% of those polled.
01:06:27.000Basically, say they're democratic socialists.
01:06:30.00021% say unsure, 12% say traditional liberal, and 6.2% just say we're socialists.
01:06:36.000So, the question then becomes as the Democrat Party becomes more radical, Noah, should we just sort of anticipate that they are comfortable with more and more violence?
01:06:46.000Because I don't want to over prescribe and say they're all comfortable with assassination.
01:06:50.000I know that's not true, but there's certainly some that are.
01:06:54.000And there's even more that are comfortable with overt acts of disruption, chaos, political violence, vandalism.
01:07:02.000That seems to be pretty darn mainstream on the left now.
01:07:07.000Like right now, if you took a snapshot of the Democrat Party or the progressive movement in the United States, how much violence are they comfortable with?
01:07:15.000Well, I go into the polling in the book, and it depends obviously on the survey and the sample and the time that the survey is taken.
01:07:23.000But there are trends that indicate that increasing numbers of Democrat affiliating voters in this country tell pollsters, not just to themselves, are willing to tell pollsters that they do support some level of violence in order to suppress speech they don't like, for example, or to beget.
01:07:40.000Positive social change as they see it.
01:07:42.000I think the vast majority of responsible Democrats do not support violence in the streets.
01:07:47.000That said, there is an element within the Democratic Party that is attracted to people power.
01:07:53.000When they see people on the street, mobs, vast numbers of protesters, they see in that a reflection of what they regard as romantic zeal, enthusiasm for their political project.
01:08:04.000And then they subordinate all they know, all their caution just goes out the window in order to embrace those groups and channel and harness that energy into what they've.
01:08:12.000Believed will be positive social change.
01:08:15.000So they did that with Occupy Wall Street.
01:08:17.000Even if you ask any member of Occupy Wall Street if they had any use for Democrats, they would tell you, throw them all into the East River.
01:08:25.000Even if they were engaged in lawless acts of violence, attacking federal facilities, attacking law enforcement, shielding perpetrators of violence and rape from law enforcement, all that was just pushed aside in order to try to harness this energy.
01:08:39.000They did the exact same thing 10 years later with the George Floyd protests.
01:08:44.000Seeing in that some measure of political enthusiasm that could get them over the hump, get them past the election with Trump, and to a certain extent succeeded, but also traded in a lot of responsible governance to ingratiate themselves with a movement that anybody should have known at the time was potentially violent and certainly not sympathetic to the broadest number of Americans.
01:09:06.000But they just have this attachment to the enthusiasm in the streets that can be harnessed and controlled by the worst demagogues in this country.
01:09:15.000They just subordinate everything they know.
01:09:16.000That sounds like they're just willing to sell their soul to the devil if they think they can win an election.
01:09:21.000And it's so infuriating, Noah, that I just think of the double thing that must go on where a lot of these people can hear a report on CNN or whatever they call MSNBC now or whatever that'll say, we've checked the numbers and political violence is overwhelmingly a right wing phenomenon.
01:09:39.000And yet at the same time, you know, I know, I think everybody knows, even members of the left will sometimes.
01:09:44.000Essentially, I gloat about this that it's never an event on a campus is never going to be canceled because of right wing violence, but it will because left wing violence they barricade the building, they set things on fire, they terrorize people, and as we know, they are capable of committing murder.
01:10:00.000Similarly, with after the George Floyd stuff, no one's ever worried an entire neighborhood is going to get torched by right wing violence, but it's happened with left wing violence.
01:10:10.000We've never had an urban takeover, we had a left wing radicals take over downtown Seattle for What, a month?
01:11:03.000There is no equivalent when it comes to the threat environment.
01:11:06.000The threat environment is so pronounced that proactive action, like shutting down events, has become common currency.
01:11:13.000And it's not something that has an equivalency on the right.
01:11:16.000But there is, you know, there's a taboo here that I can work with.
01:11:19.000When the left says, well, the right is uniquely violence, implicit in violent, implicit in that is the notion that political violence is bad, right?
01:11:27.000Because they wouldn't be accusing you of it if it was good.
01:11:30.000So there's an element there that reasonably understands that the American people writ large.
01:11:36.000Are not attracted to political violence, abhor political violence, regarded as a threat to the social fabric.
01:11:44.000I want to encourage that, but I want to encourage it by also taking a look at what right-wing violence looks like these days, the degree to which it mirrors some of the black block tactics that we see, again, nightly displayed in cities in which demonstrators, professional agitators, and organizers who dress in uniform somehow have respirators and gas masks delivered to them by shady actors, just Pop up out of nowhere and get unloaded out of a U-Haul.0.94
01:12:11.000This happens with disturbing frequency.0.65
01:12:14.000And by putting all these events together in this book, Blood and Progress, I hope that we can create a portrait that compels the American left to look at this phenomenon because it has been delineated in such a fashion.
01:12:26.000They get away with it by analyzing each event of left-wing political violence in isolation, never drawing the threads that any logical inference would allow them to draw, and then telling themselves that the right wing.
01:12:41.000Has a monopoly on political violence in this country.
01:12:43.000By establishing the timeline as I have, I hope, and with 80 pages of notes, I dare you, defy you to go check my work.
01:12:52.000I'm creating a roadmap here for individuals who want to confront the left with their tacit and complicit acceptance of a rising tide of political violence on their side, with everything they have allowed to flourish.
01:13:06.000When it's put all together like that, it's a pretty damning portrait, I think.
01:13:30.000And thank you for putting together the thesis statement that they're going to have to contend with now that the left is a movement very prone, especially in our moment and throughout history, to political violence.