The Charlie Kirk Show - April 12, 2024


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Episode Stats


Length

33 minutes

Words per minute

172.0676

Word count

5,770

Sentence count

366

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The Fourth Amendment has been abrogated by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who voted in a tie-breaking vote to allow the FBI to collect data without a warrant. What does this mean for the future of the Fourth Amendment?

Transcript

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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 More fi's updates with Congressman Warren Davidson and the machine that Democrats have on the ground.
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00:00:17.000 And Ben Whitegarten walks us through it.
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00:00:46.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:46.000 Here we go.
00:00:47.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:49.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
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00:01:46.000 I just want to say this: Speaker Johnson was the tie-breaking vote to basically say that the founding fathers were wrong.
00:01:53.000 I hate to be that cruel, but that's just the way it is.
00:01:56.000 It was the tie-breaking vote to say that we're in a new era.
00:01:59.000 The Fourth Amendment shall not apply.
00:02:01.000 Donald Trump was supposed to do some press conference with Speaker Johnson today.
00:02:05.000 He should cancel on that.
00:02:06.000 He should say, I'm not getting near you.
00:02:08.000 Not after this.
00:02:10.000 That's my strong advice.
00:02:12.000 Okay, joining us now is Congressman Warren Davidson, who's on the subcommittee of weaponization of the federal government.
00:02:20.000 Congressman, I'm told you're fired up.
00:02:22.000 I'm certainly fired up here.
00:02:23.000 I'm trying to stay.
00:02:25.000 I'm not calm.
00:02:25.000 I'm trying to stay, let's say, centered because I don't want to allow my emotions to get ahead of me.
00:02:31.000 But there are three words out there that our audience is demanding, and it's motion to vacate.
00:02:35.000 I don't want to get there immediately.
00:02:36.000 But Congressman Davidson, what happened today?
00:02:39.000 Look, freedom surrendered is rarely reclaimed.
00:02:42.000 We had a chance today to claw back the right to privacies as it's been infringed.
00:02:47.000 The Fourth Amendment's supposed to guard that. 0.97
00:02:49.000 You know, there is a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and there's a reason there's not a domestic surveillance act.
00:02:55.000 It's the Fourth Amendment.
00:02:56.000 You're supposed to have to get a warrant or a subpoena if you want to go after an American's private data.
00:03:02.000 And unfortunately, that's being abridged.
00:03:05.000 And today, we had a chance in the House to vote to require a warrant.
00:03:10.000 And unfortunately, 86 Republicans and 84 Democrats voted, frankly, to ignore the Constitution and say, no, no, we know better than the Founding Fathers.
00:03:22.000 We know better than Benjamin Franklin.
00:03:25.000 We're going to take the other side of Franklin's deal and we're going to take security and give up liberty.
00:03:30.000 And, you know, what a sad day for our country.
00:03:34.000 So help me understand this.
00:03:36.000 Why is the Speaker of the House parachuting in when it's a tie vote to basically say that the founding fathers were wrong, that James Madison and John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is invalid?
00:03:48.000 The Fourth Amendment, quote, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue.
00:03:57.000 But upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing this place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
00:04:05.000 Congressman, I mean, why does the Speaker and House leadership, including Elise Stefanik and Steve Scalise and the people that are supposed to lead our conference, why are they so adamant to make sure the FBI has huge powers and they don't believe in the Fourth Amendment?
00:04:23.000 I'm not tracking with their belief.
00:04:25.000 Well, you know, Charlie, it wasn't discovered until COVID that the Constitution has an asterisk by it.
00:04:32.000 And when you find the encrypted asterisk, it says does not apply if you're scared.
00:04:40.000 Basically, that's it.
00:04:42.000 They were scared and they were scared by the intelligence committee that this is all going to be your fault.
00:04:47.000 We know they're abusing the civil liberties of American citizens.
00:04:50.000 We know they're trampling on your rights as citizens of this great country.
00:04:56.000 So that's not really your fault.
00:04:58.000 So if you can make a little bit of a difference, then okay, you can go back and be the hero and say you tried to fix something.
00:05:03.000 But if there is a terrorist attack and you change anything that's fundamental, it's all going to be your fault, Speaker.
00:05:10.000 And that's how they scared Mike Johnson.
00:05:13.000 Okay, is it time to vacate the chair?
00:05:15.000 Well, we'll see what happens.
00:05:17.000 You know, next week, I think we're going pretty benign.
00:05:19.000 We're going to defend the freedom to own the right kinds of appliances.
00:05:23.000 But we are also going to have an effort to stop a really bad abuse that's kind of across the board, not just with FISA.
00:05:31.000 The government is buying data that would otherwise require a warrant or a subpoena.
00:05:36.000 So instead of even getting a search warrant, in lots of cases where they're required to get a search warrant, not even including FISA, they're just going to data brokers and buying up data.
00:05:46.000 And if they find voids in that data, they're paying third parties to begin collecting the data that they want to fill in the voids.
00:05:53.000 And they're doing that in really sweeping ways in some cases or in very targeted ways in other cases.
00:06:00.000 And the Fourth Amendment's Not for Sale is a bill that passed the House Judiciary Committee last summer, 36 to 1.
00:06:07.000 Mike Johnson voted for it when he was a member of the committee.
00:06:12.000 But unfortunately, it had been stripped from the FISA plan.
00:06:16.000 So both getting a warrant and not bypassing it with the data broker loophole were part of the base text of the judiciary bill.
00:06:26.000 They were both stripped out.
00:06:27.000 They were both supposed to be offered as an amendment.
00:06:30.000 And unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment's Not for Sale was stripped out.
00:06:33.000 And I think that's because they believed that it will pass when given a vote.
00:06:38.000 So we'll see next week whether we can at least stop that abuse of the Fourth Amendment. 0.93
00:06:43.000 So Congressman, first of all, thank you for your leadership on this.
00:06:45.000 I'm incensed right now and infuriated.
00:06:47.000 So the audience is just saying, you know, if there's ever a time to vacate the chair, it's over the Constitution.
00:06:52.000 I'm not, I need to center myself before I come to such conclusions of this.
00:06:56.000 So I see it both ways.
00:06:57.000 But I'm certainly very upset.
00:06:59.000 So let me just say, Speaker Johnson said rather pompously yesterday, members should go down to the SCIF and see for themselves.
00:07:08.000 Have you been down to the SCIF?
00:07:10.000 What is he talking about here?
00:07:12.000 He basically made it sound like if you knew what I knew, there's no way you could possibly get in the way of the FBI needing a warrant and we should just hand this over.
00:07:22.000 What is your response to that?
00:07:24.000 Yeah, so I didn't go to the SCIF this week.
00:07:26.000 I've been to the SCIF for years now.
00:07:28.000 So I've been in Congress since 2016.
00:07:31.000 I came in after Speaker Boehner resigned and took office that summer.
00:07:35.000 I've been working to, frankly, claw back the abuse of the Patriot Act.
00:07:39.000 You know, post 9-11, they voted to enact the Patriot Act, which really expanded FISA pretty badly and then layered in all these expiration dates so that the whole thing doesn't ever expire.
00:07:51.000 It's just little sections so you can get at it one section at a time.
00:07:56.000 And so I've looked at it in depth over the years.
00:07:59.000 And I can tell you, Christopher Wray has explained how querying is not searching.
00:08:04.000 And this is really basic. 0.82
00:08:06.000 So they say, oh, we've already lawfully collected this data under a search for the foreigners.
00:08:14.000 So then it's fine if we search it for Americans because it's not really a search.
00:08:20.000 It's a query.
00:08:21.000 And when you go to that query bar, if you type in the name of an American citizen, you're supposed to have to get a warrant.
00:08:28.000 And that's the real distinction.
00:08:29.000 If you want to search for, you know, Muhammad, whomever from Mazari-Sharif, Afghanistan, known terrorist, and you happen to notice an American, I mean, that's kind of like plain view doctrine.
00:08:43.000 But if you go to the database and you're not searching for Mohamed, whomever from Mazari-Sharif, you're searching for Mohammed Jones from Westchester, Ohio, then you should have to get a warrant.
00:08:55.000 And yes, terrorists are bad people and there could be some domestic ones, but so are pedophiles.
00:09:00.000 And so when you're going after somebody and it's an emergency situation, the warrant doesn't apply.
00:09:05.000 There's a waiver for that.
00:09:06.000 So every scenario that they throw up is always this hypothetical emergency, exigent circumstance.
00:09:12.000 But that's exempted with the warrant requirement, just like it is for pure domestic, you know, law enforcement, hot pursuit kinds of cases.
00:09:23.000 The Fourth Amendment does have an exception for exigent circumstances.
00:09:28.000 What is the time horizon now that FISA has is going to pass the House, essentially?
00:09:32.000 What kind of powers are we giving the FBI?
00:09:34.000 Is it two or five years?
00:09:35.000 I've heard conflicting reports.
00:09:36.000 Well, it was a two-year reauthorization.
00:09:38.000 So the people that took down the rule earlier this week, frankly, trying to get this two-year horizon, trying to get the Fourth Amendment's not for sale included as an amendment, we didn't get that.
00:09:50.000 They did at least get it down to two years.
00:09:52.000 So hopefully when President Trump is in office again, we don't have to wait two years, but they can't go past that two years.
00:10:01.000 At that two-year mark, then there'll be another deadline.
00:10:03.000 That seems to be what motivates Congress.
00:10:06.000 And we'll hopefully reclaim the freedom that's been surrendered today.
00:10:09.000 And boy, we lost a lot of ground.
00:10:11.000 Some of these Intel amendments that passed make FISA far worse than it was before this debate today.
00:10:17.000 I want to zero in on something you said, which is how the Intel agencies operate.
00:10:22.000 They operate like a mob, like the mafia.
00:10:24.000 It's very opaque.
00:10:25.000 It's hard to get clear answers.
00:10:27.000 And they violate the law and they violate protocol 278,000 times, 278,000 times.
00:10:35.000 And we just hand them on a silver ply.
00:10:37.000 They're like, yeah, please spy me harder.
00:10:41.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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00:11:44.000 So Congressman, help me understand.
00:11:47.000 You said that the Intel agencies got to Speaker Johnson.
00:11:50.000 What do you mean by that exactly?
00:11:52.000 What was their potential threats, intimidation?
00:11:56.000 I mean, just help me understand, because it certainly can't be on the merits of the case.
00:12:00.000 The FBI lies to us.
00:12:01.000 They spy on us.
00:12:03.000 They hate our value system.
00:12:04.000 What do you mean by how they got to Speaker Johnson?
00:12:07.000 Well, look, obviously, the speaker gets extra information more than, frankly, even anyone in the Intel committee in theory.
00:12:17.000 But you see, the Intel agencies, they will hold some information.
00:12:20.000 They've held some information so classified that they refused. to share it even with the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Speaker McCarthy at the time, or Senate leader Chuck Schumer.
00:12:34.000 Now, that's not what our Constitution says.
00:12:36.000 We have a separation of powers, not like these unelected bureaucrats who've risen through the ranks, some of whom great Americans want to love our country and keep it safe.
00:12:45.000 It doesn't say you can trust them, but you can't trust the elected leadership of the country.
00:12:50.000 And I get that, okay, maybe by the time you get to George Santos and Ilan Omar to pick on two people, Santos, I guess, isn't here anymore.
00:12:58.000 You say, all right, maybe we shouldn't share everything.
00:13:01.000 So regular members don't get all of the same information that the intelligence committee members get.
00:13:06.000 And so they share certain extra things.
00:13:08.000 And so they have these briefings and they try to say, see, because reasons, it's really important.
00:13:14.000 But what they don't share is actually a case that would have actually not been able to be stopped if they had to get a warrant or because it was an emergency that there would have been an exception to the warrant.
00:13:26.000 So the warrant requirement was here.
00:13:28.000 Chairman Jordan and Ranking Member Nadler, who virtually never agree, Jerry Nadler and Jim Jordan agree, you should have to get a warrant.
00:13:35.000 They sent to the intelligence community and say, could you give us a single example where you stopped something bad that you would not have been able to stop with our warrant requirement?
00:13:45.000 They don't have an example.
00:13:47.000 So I just want to repeat that.
00:13:48.000 So when you challenge the Intel agencies, because they actually, of course, they lie.
00:13:54.000 They said in an op-ed that all these instances of kidnappings and foreign interventions, they wouldn't have been possible if we had to go get a warrant.
00:14:02.000 But when you actually ask them with precision as a lawmaker, they can't give you an example.
00:14:07.000 Yeah, that's right.
00:14:07.000 So Chairman Jordan, the chairman of judiciary and Jerry Nadler, the ranking member, sent an inquiry into the intelligence community saying, please give us an example that would not have been able to be stopped if you had to get a warrant.
00:14:22.000 And the specific version that we're saying that has an exemption in case of an emergency.
00:14:27.000 If there's something time sensitive and urgent, you can waive the warrant requirement.
00:14:32.000 Show us an example where you wouldn't have been able to stop this horrible act under the warrant requirement that we're proposing.
00:14:41.000 And they had no example to present to them.
00:14:44.000 And yet we have the speaker that goes and votes against amendments.
00:14:49.000 So let me just understand at a fundamental level deeper here.
00:14:54.000 What amendments have, was there any alterations, any changes to FISA that were meaningful?
00:14:59.000 Or is it basically just a blanket renewal with window dressing?
00:15:02.000 Oh, no, there were changes and they were all bad.
00:15:05.000 So Mike Turner led an amendment that expands surveillance to all Wi-Fi hotspots.
00:15:11.000 So all your wireless Wi-Fi hotspot communications will be now swept up.
00:15:17.000 And, you know, good.
00:15:18.000 I hope they catch some bad guys with that.
00:15:20.000 But the problem is you're collecting a lot of American citizens' data.
00:15:24.000 And, you know, the check on that is if you want to, again, you want to search for the American citizen, then if you get a warrant, then there's at least some limitation on what you can do with that American data.
00:15:35.000 There's not a minimization effort here.
00:15:37.000 There's actually a maximization effort underway, and that was Turner's.
00:15:42.000 The other one that's huge is Dan Crenshaw had an amendment that says anything involving the war on drugs, essentially, you can sweep up that communication too.
00:15:51.000 And, you know, it's basically like a war on drugs exemption to the Fourth Amendment. 0.85
00:15:55.000 And look, pedophiles are bad too.
00:15:57.000 Why wouldn't we waive the Fourth Amendment to go after pedophiles? 0.98
00:16:00.000 You know, so we've had a horrible fitino crisis.
00:16:03.000 It is killing Americans, and we should stop the cartels.
00:16:07.000 I have a bill called the Stop the Cartels Act that would escalate collection on the cartels to the same way we targeted ISIS or Al-Qaeda as enemies of our country.
00:16:15.000 But you don't sweep up American citizens' data in that.
00:16:18.000 And then the last one that was a big expansion was Mike Waltz had an amendment that is intended, I think, to go only after people coming into the country illegally. 0.92
00:16:27.000 That's already permissible.
00:16:29.000 So you could say it really doesn't expand anything, but there is some concern that the language is so expansive that literally everyone coming into the country, including U.S. citizens returning home, could be vulnerable to swept up communication.
00:16:42.000 So that's the concern about the Waltz amendment.
00:16:44.000 But if it's as benign as he claims it is, then it really didn't change anything.
00:16:48.000 So instead of fixing it, House Republicans made it worse.
00:16:51.000 Warren Davidson, thank you so much.
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00:17:25.000 Portions of the Charlie Kirk Show are brought to you in part by the Stanley M. Herzog Foundation.
00:17:29.000 That is Herzogfoundation.com.
00:17:34.000 Joining us now is Ben Whitegarten.
00:17:36.000 He has a story out that's very important about how our taxpayer dollars are subsidizing the Democrats boot on the ground operation.
00:17:45.000 So our taxpayer dollars are helping fund the Democrats GOTV operation.
00:17:51.000 Ben, welcome to the program.
00:17:52.000 Tell us about it.
00:17:53.000 Charlie, thanks for having me.
00:17:55.000 And yes, this is a really remarkable story about the processes and how the processes and rules are being exploited in the run-up to the 2024 election to likely try to effectuate the same thing that we saw in 2020, infamously described in that Molly Ball expose about that election as a shadow campaign to quote unquote fortify it.
00:18:20.000 And what we see in 2024 is an expansion of, if not an improvement upon, those efforts in three different ways that I identify in this piece.
00:18:30.000 One of them has been dubbed Biden Bucks.
00:18:33.000 And this is an executive order which notably was executed in March of 2021 with Democrats recognizing maybe they wouldn't be able to push federal legislation that would effectively federalize election processes in the face of Republican opposition.
00:18:51.000 And what this order did was it called on every single federal agency, over 600 offices, to develop these strategic plans to register and mobilize voters with a particular focus on underrepresented or purportedly marginalized populations,
00:19:12.000 something that had never been done before at the federal level, something which may well flout not just federalist principles, but the Constitution, since electioneering and election rules and processes really reside with the states.
00:19:26.000 And then, of course, prohibitions on electioneering among federal officials.
00:19:31.000 But what this said is that every single office ought to be engaged in registering and mobilizing voters.
00:19:37.000 And not only that, but they ought to partner with so-called nonpartisan third party organizations to drive out the vote.
00:19:47.000 And the administration has hidden the strategic plans, made it very difficult for anyone to obtain them except through litigating over FOIA requests.
00:19:56.000 But what we have seen, based upon information that has come out, is that the administration is trying to use everything from naturalization ceremonies to food stamp delivery to using federal work study funds to pay students to engage and get out the vote efforts.
00:20:15.000 And in almost every single instance, it appears that overwhelmingly, the government agencies themselves are communicating with likely Democrat voters based upon the demographics that interact with federal agencies.
00:20:29.000 So you have these myriad touch points of federal agencies under the command of the Joe Biden administration trying to drive out voters in 2024.
00:20:38.000 And the groups that were behind this effort, by the way, should be noting, the leader of the architect of it was DeMos, a progressive think tank.
00:20:47.000 And if you look at the groups who have been putting out these progress reports on how the administration is doing in implementing the executive order, it's virtually all left-wing, progressive nonprofits.
00:20:57.000 And they claim that if fully implemented, the order will generate 3.5 million new or updated voter registrations every single year.
00:21:06.000 So you can imagine how potentially decisive that would be when you're talking about a presidential election, for example, that's likely going to hinge on thousands of votes in a few states.
00:21:17.000 So that's just effort number one.
00:21:19.000 And we can move on to two and three if you like, or we can keep talking about Biden bucks, either way.
00:21:23.000 Yeah, please keep going.
00:21:24.000 Ben, please keep going.
00:21:26.000 So after Biden bucks, we've got the exploitation of charitable organizations.
00:21:31.000 And these 501c3s are barred from engaging in electioneering political activity, but they are allowed to engage in voter registration drives.
00:21:42.000 And so Democrats have devised a sort of ingenious plan to use these so-called charitable organizations led generally by progressives, funded at infinite levels by private donors on a tax-deductible basis.
00:21:59.000 So without the limits that you would have in normal campaign finance context, and then also unlock potentially hundreds of millions or billions of dollars from private foundations that would also be barred from engaging in political activity.
00:22:12.000 And they flood hundreds of millions of dollars annually into these 501c3s to drive voter registration and mobilization, like the administration.
00:22:20.000 Why is it putatively nonpartisan, but actually partisan, despite the fact that they don't say they're supporting Democrat candidates or Democrat causes?
00:22:29.000 The explicit purpose of these voter registration and mobilization drives is to target, again, quote unquote, underrepresented voters, single women, minorities, et cetera, and specifically in swing states and Democrat super PACs, one of which, mind the gap, is sort of a moneyball style, analytics-focused, powerful and influential Democrat super PAC.
00:22:52.000 It says that contributing to these quote-unquote nonpartisan nonprofits gives by far the highest return on investment For Democrat voters and is most essential, the best way you could spend your money to win in presidential elections.
00:23:06.000 So, you get these tax-exempt organizations, individuals can contribute without limit, and you unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in funds previously locked from engaging in political causes from these charitable foundations.
00:23:17.000 And then, last but not least, there's Zuckerbucks 2.0.
00:23:20.000 And despite the fact that two dozen states have put in restrictions on private financing of public election offices to likely drive out the mail-in ballot vote, for example, in blue jurisdictions, as we saw back in 2020,
00:23:35.000 there's still an $80 million effort being undertaken over five years, largely in the states that have not put up these Zuckerbucks restrictions, to once again have these left-leaning nonprofits be the recipients of and coordinate with election offices, likely in key jurisdictions, to try and drive out the votes.
00:23:55.000 So, these are three massive, comprehensive efforts that, again, in a hugely tight election, likely to be decided in a few states by thousands of votes, could prove decisive.
00:24:06.000 And there's not a comparable counterweight, anything remotely resembling it on the Republican side.
00:24:13.000 So, let's get into the text.
00:24:14.000 So, how much taxpayer money is being thrown towards a Biden get out the vote strategy?
00:24:20.000 Do you have a ballpark number?
00:24:22.000 Well, we know that there have been roughly $500 million annually going towards just these 501c3s, some percentage of which, and it's usually at least going back to 2020 and the 2022 cycles, you're talking in the tens of millions of dollars just to the 501c3s, and then you get that tax-exempt, tax-deductible benefit to it if you are the donor.
00:24:46.000 This is part of a really $1.3 billion annual effort for Democrats to fund 501c4s and other organizations that's really without compare on the Republican side.
00:24:57.000 But in terms of the federal government, it's anyone's guess the total value in terms of man hours or dollars being put forth to execute and implement this executive order.
00:25:08.000 But obviously, you're talking the full weight of every single federal agency.
00:25:12.000 And the Office of Personnel Management has also passed rules essentially giving federal officers time off to be able to engage in these activities as well.
00:25:22.000 So, we don't even have a ballpark estimate for it, but you can imagine the full weight of the federal government.
00:25:27.000 That's without compare.
00:25:29.000 And obviously, there's no way that Republicans could have a counterpart to it because Republicans don't control the executive branch of government. 0.83
00:25:35.000 So, I want to just reiterate: the 501c3s are prohibited from engaging in electioneering.
00:25:43.000 We know that very well.
00:25:44.000 We have a C3 and a C4 at Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action, and we're very clear about it.
00:25:49.000 But the C3s are so cavalier, they take this donor money and they basically make the pitch, like, yeah, we're supposed to be nonpartisan, but give us the money and it's going to help Democrats anyway.
00:26:00.000 There has to be something there, and you said there's nothing comparable on the right. 0.88
00:26:04.000 At the entire conservative ecosystem, can you point to any organizations or groups outside of what we're trying to do at Turning Point that are trying to fix this problem at the size or scale that the Democrats have?
00:26:14.000 I couldn't find in my analysis anything remotely comparable.
00:26:18.000 People who study the activities of these sorts of groups have estimated that maybe there's 1% of funding on the right comparable to what we see on the left with these 501c3s.
00:26:30.000 And look, the tactic is shrewd.
00:26:33.000 It's the same tactic that we see in terms of trying to get around restrictions on affirmative action by proxy, where you don't say we're targeting Democrat voters.
00:26:42.000 We say we're targeting underrepresented or marginalized communities, communities that don't vote at the percentages they should vote.
00:26:50.000 And that's a clever way who disproportionately vote Democrat when they are registered. 0.95
00:26:55.000 And that's a clever way of getting around the restrictions.
00:26:57.000 And what I found in doing my reporting in this story was there's an assumption on the part of the right that Republicans would get taken to the woodshed by the IRS were they to engage in anything remotely resembling what the Democrats are engaged in because there's a chill in the air that goes back to the Tea Party's targeting under the Obama administration.
00:27:20.000 Now, maybe that's a cop-out.
00:27:22.000 Maybe it is that Republicans simply have not developed the reflexes and the tools on the ground or the focus to try to build anything comparable to Democrats.
00:27:31.000 Maybe if there was a similar mousetrap to what Democrats have devised, Democrats would already be far ahead.
00:27:36.000 And I think it's worth noting that that Molly Ball piece, it made it seem as if this dominant Democrat electioneering effort came out of nowhere.
00:27:44.000 But in the piece, one of those interviewed who plays an essential role leading one of these organizations that's dominated in terms of registering mail-in voters, he basically said that what happened in 2020 was the culmination of multiple decades.
00:27:59.000 So if you're talking about hundreds of millions or billions of dollars over multiple decades, of course, Democrats will have perfected that effort.
00:28:07.000 And obviously, there's been nothing remotely resembling that kind of push on the right.
00:28:11.000 It's such an important topic.
00:28:12.000 I hope everyone understands this could determine November.
00:28:15.000 And if in November we get some bad news, oh, Joe Biden wins, we have 1% of the infrastructure on the ground that the Democrats have.
00:28:23.000 1%.
00:28:24.000 And it's a permanent multi-billion dollar infrastructure.
00:28:29.000 So, Ben, we're trying our best at turning point, hiring hundreds of full-time people, building infrastructure.
00:28:33.000 It's kind of what we're known for.
00:28:35.000 But, Ben, why is it the conservative side is so bad at this?
00:28:37.000 Is it simply a money problem or is it an attitude problem?
00:28:40.000 I mean, I could walk down Washington, D.C. and point to dozens of worthless conservative think tanks that have hundreds of millions of dollars in endowments and they sit around and write white papers that no one reads and employ scholars that have no influence.
00:28:54.000 But hey, at least they get lunch catered to them every single day.
00:28:58.000 And literally one of them has a kitchen, a full-time service kitchen where, you know what I'm talking about, where they get nice meals every day.
00:29:06.000 Why is that conservatives spend money to build these massive do-nothing DC think tanks that circulate white papers while Democrats are really invested in using 501c3 money to build a mass leviathan?
00:29:19.000 What's going on?
00:29:20.000 Well, I think this points in part to a needed cultural shift, which may happen on the right as a consequence of the populist nationalist uprising that has shaken the party.
00:29:32.000 But obviously, there's still a fight between the holdouts, the establishment, and the new blood that's been injected.
00:29:38.000 But I also think that there is a cultural difference between the way Democrats and Republicans approach politics.
00:29:45.000 And this goes beyond my reportage and my assessment in this piece.
00:29:50.000 But what the left sought to do was use analytics, and this is dating back to the Obama years and pre-Obama years.
00:29:58.000 Use analytics and amass information to try and figure out how to best drive out the voters they need to win wherever they need to win, and then to use that power to drive home their agenda.
00:30:11.000 And obviously, that's the point of political parties.
00:30:14.000 But you do wonder sometimes on the Republican side, is that the goal among the majority of the GOP?
00:30:20.000 Is it to win and then wield power to reward your friends and punish your political opposition?
00:30:28.000 And not in a gratuitous way, but to deliver W's for your team and that you ran on for your constituents.
00:30:34.000 And on the right, I think it's very clear there does not seem to be the equivalent sort of cutthroat, serious, shrewd, cunning effort.
00:30:44.000 And I mean that in a not pejorative way that you have on the Democrat side.
00:30:48.000 And I'll even analogize this or sort of illustrating this.
00:30:51.000 I sat in in person in one of the hearings in the House Oversight Committee on the Biden family where Tony Bobolinski was testifying.
00:31:00.000 And if you saw in real life the Democrats up close, the Congressman Goldmans of the world and others and Raskin, they were at the throats of anyone and everyone on the Republican side.
00:31:12.000 They wanted to not only destroy and discredit, but embarrass and pain the Republican witnesses.
00:31:21.000 They would do anything to win.
00:31:22.000 No tactic would be too low.
00:31:24.000 The condescension was off the charts.
00:31:27.000 The anger and the arrogance, you could see it.
00:31:29.000 They were dripping with it.
00:31:31.000 But they are zealots for their cause at the end of the day.
00:31:34.000 And on the Republican side, you have to ask, what percentage are similarly, and again, I'm not talking a lot from a tactics perspective, but similarly serious and so devoted to beating the other side that they'll take the shrewdest possible measures necessary to win.
00:31:52.000 And part of that, you could say, well, maybe, look, Republicans, we have real diversity of ideas on our side, but diversity is not your strength necessarily when you're up against a machine where everyone toes the line and moves in lockstep, even if they have their own differences internally.
00:32:07.000 So I think part of it is a cultural or generational issue.
00:32:11.000 Part of it is you have incumbent consultant class, think tank class.
00:32:17.000 And like any bureaucracy, it's very tough to shake it out of its stupor or to make a change to it.
00:32:23.000 But part of it also, and this is my observation, my individual observation, is that Democrats want to win and they want to wield power.
00:32:30.000 And when they get that power, they use it to the nth degree to drive home in their agenda.
00:32:34.000 And if they fail, minimally they move the Overton window.
00:32:37.000 And you have to ask among a large percentage of elected Republicans and many in the Republican establishment and beyond, are they similarly dedicated and do they understand what's at stake?
00:32:50.000 And those may sound like rhetorical questions, but I think they're open questions that deserve answers as well.
00:32:56.000 Yeah, well, no, our side does not want to win and we're not playing to win.
00:33:00.000 We just hope that a victory will just fall from the sky.
00:33:03.000 And Democrats are really interested in the infrastructure and the ballot chasing voter registration.
00:33:07.000 And we are not.
00:33:09.000 And maybe we'll win, maybe not.
00:33:11.000 But the Democrats are certainly playing to win and we're playing to lose comfortably.
00:33:15.000 Ben, thank you so much.
00:33:16.000 Thanks for having me, Charlie.
00:33:20.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:33:21.000 Email us as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.
00:33:24.000 Thanks so much for listening and God bless.
00:33:28.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.