The Charlie Kirk Show - Marijuana and Mass Psychosis—A Contrarian Take with Alex Berenson

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:01.000 Today in the Charlie Kirk Show, is weed good for you?

00:00:04.000 A contrarian take on marijuana with Alex Berenson, author of Tell Your Children, and then Charlie Hurt, not Charlie Kirk, Charlie Hurt, great American.

00:00:14.000 We have a good conversation about what's happening in our country.

00:00:17.000 Really fun, long overdue.

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00:00:36.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:37.000 Here we go.

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

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

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00:00:50.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:51.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:00:53.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

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00:01:23.000 With us right now is Alex Berenson, who deserves a lot of credit for his research throughout the entire pandemic and kind of being a contrarian data-focused voice, which I think he deserves just our praise because it came at great cost for him personally and professionally.

00:01:40.000 Alex, welcome back to the program.

00:01:42.000 Charlie, thanks for having me.

00:01:43.000 Alex, I want to talk to you about a different book, though, than your commentary on COVID.

00:01:48.000 And it's just interesting because our audience has mixed views on this.

00:01:51.000 My view is pretty well known.

00:01:53.000 I'm not a fan of marijuana or weed.

00:01:55.000 I think that there's an untold story around the consumption of marijuana that isn't always highlighted in the media.

00:02:02.000 You wrote a book called Tell Your Children, The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence.

00:02:08.000 Tell us about the arguments you make in the book.

00:02:10.000 Tell us why you wrote the book.

00:02:12.000 And did you come into like beginning with any sort of opinion before you went on your research journey?

00:02:17.000 Sure.

00:02:18.000 So Tell Your Children came out in 2019, about three and a half years ago now, almost.

00:02:23.000 And I wrote it over the previous couple of years.

00:02:27.000 My wife is a psychiatrist, a forensic psychiatrist, actually.

00:02:31.000 So that means she deals with the criminally mentally ill mainly.

00:02:35.000 And she had seen a lot of patients who had committed crimes under the influence of cannabis and sometimes other drugs too, and sometimes alcohol.

00:02:47.000 But cannabis really was the thread that was common in all of these.

00:02:52.000 So she encouraged me to look at this connection.

00:02:56.000 And, you know, I'd been a reporter for the New York Times for 10 years and I'd covered mainly the pharmaceutical industry, but I really didn't have much of a view about cannabis legalization.

00:03:07.000 I'd used a handful of times in my life, but it was not a drug that I'd used a lot or cared particularly about either way.

00:03:15.000 And what I found was that she was right.

00:03:18.000 Of course, she was right.

00:03:19.000 She treated these people and knew what she was looking for and knew what had happened.

00:03:25.000 But there's a huge body, a huge and growing body of scientific research that cannabis really is dangerous to a lot of people's mental health.

00:03:34.000 That, you know, it's not just that it can sap your motivation or make you sort of fat and lazy, these sort of these tropes about stress.

00:03:44.000 It's that if you use too much, especially at a young age, if you start at a young age, if you start in your teens, you're early to mid-teens, and you use heavily, and it is addictive.

00:03:55.000 So people will, you know, a lot of people wind up using more than they think they're going to use.

00:04:00.000 You can have psychotic episodes.

00:04:03.000 And you can sometimes, some people, probably people with a genetic predisposition, although it's not always clear, may develop permanent psychosis, a permanent psychotic condition known as schizophrenia after using cannabis.

00:04:16.000 And this is, you know, this is very hotly debated outside the scientific community, but I would say it's not that heavily debated inside the scientific community.

00:04:27.000 I would say the main debate inside the scientific community is not whether or not this happens, but how frequently it happens and whether or not, you know, there's a genetic predisposition causing it to happen.

00:04:39.000 So yeah, just really quick, just, you know, I'm a layman when it comes to marijuana.

00:04:43.000 I've never used it, so my knowledge is very limited.

00:04:45.000 I do know that it kind of goes all across the map, though.

00:04:48.000 I know people that use marijuana and they get super anxious when they use it and people that have a totally different experience.

00:04:53.000 Why is that?

00:04:54.000 I mean, that is a very complex drug.

00:04:57.000 It's much more complex than alcohol.

00:04:59.000 Yes.

00:05:01.000 And like a lot of drugs, and also it's changed a lot.

00:05:04.000 And this is something that's gotten a lot of attention in the last several years that I try to highlight in the book that I think people are finally waking up to.

00:05:12.000 It really is not the same product it was 20 years ago or even 10 years ago.

00:05:17.000 What's happened is that with legalization, the people who promoted legalization always said, oh, this is going to help make a broad variety of product available to people.

00:05:28.000 There's going to be low strength cannabis, medium strength, high strength.

00:05:31.000 And that's really based on the amount of THC that is in the cannabis.

00:05:34.000 It turns out that was wrong.

00:05:36.000 It turns out that most people who use a regularly want very high strength cannabis.

00:05:41.000 Or they want to just smoke or vape pure THC, or they want edibles, which are, you know, which are basically pure THC in some kind of cooked form.

00:05:51.000 And so that's what the industry's provided.

00:05:53.000 You know, we're very good in this country at giving people what they want.

00:05:56.000 And what they want is really strong cannabis.

00:05:59.000 And unfortunately, although as you would expect, the stronger the drug, the more likely you are to have severe side effects.

00:06:06.000 And so that's been another change.

00:06:08.000 We've gone from people who don't use, or I think people, you know, I'm in my 40s, people my age or older have a vision of this drug as, oh, you know what?

00:06:16.000 Like it's a little spliff that gets passed around at parties. 0.92

00:06:19.000 Or, you know, maybe there's a bong that I smoked once in college at a party or something like that.

00:06:24.000 That's not what this is now.

00:06:25.000 This is something that this, this, this relatively small group, although it's millions and millions of people, are waking up and using day after day after day.

00:06:34.000 And they are going, I mean, they are going through life basically high on, you know, on THC for in some cases, essentially their whole lives.

00:06:43.000 And that has had really harmful effects on a lot of them.

00:06:48.000 So let me ask you, there's some people that say, but there's potential medical benefits or natural benefits.

00:06:54.000 Where do you fall down?

00:06:56.000 Where do you fall in that argument?

00:06:57.000 Because that seems to be like a primary kind of point of persuasion for a lot of the marijuana advocates.

00:07:03.000 So I go into this and tell your children quite a bit.

00:07:05.000 This was a brilliant strategy by the industry.

00:07:08.000 If the industry and drug legalizers had said, hey, this is just another recreational intoxicant.

00:07:08.000 Okay.

00:07:13.000 It's like alcohol and we should legalize it on that basis.

00:07:17.000 They wouldn't have gotten very far.

00:07:19.000 What they did was they said, oh, you know, it can cure cancer.

00:07:23.000 And, you know, if you're wasting away from HIV or AIDS, it can help you.

00:07:28.000 And, you know, if you have all sorts of colitis, it's great for that.

00:07:31.000 They made a bunch of like really insane medical claims.

00:07:31.000 They said it.

00:07:34.000 I mean, the claims basically are that this thing cures everything.

00:07:38.000 And basically, unfortunately, when cannabis and THC and the chemicals in cannabis are tested rigorously, most of the time they don't work to cure anything.

00:07:50.000 My surprise, actually my greatest surprise about this is they don't really even they don't really even work on pain.

00:07:56.000 And you would think that because the drug gets you high, it would work very well on pain, but because it enhances sensation, that's actually probably not something you want to do when you're in pain.

00:08:06.000 So marijuana is not a very good medicine for almost any of the conditions it's touted for.

00:08:11.000 There's a couple minor exceptions um and, by the way, it's not really a good anti-anxiety drug uh, for most people, because The unfortunate thing about anti-anxiety drugs, and this is true of benzodiazepine, it's true.

00:08:23.000 I mean, drugs like Xanax or Valium, people who use them and then try to stop using them often have very bad rebound anxiety.

00:08:30.000 And that can happen with cannabis too.

00:08:32.000 So you use, you feel better, but then you stop and you get even more anxious than you were before.

00:08:38.000 So as a medicine, cannabis is essentially useless for most for most conditions.

00:08:45.000 As a political stance, though, this was brilliant.

00:08:48.000 And so that got that built up this sort of for-profit industry in places like California.

00:08:54.000 And then they started agitating and saying, you know what?

00:08:58.000 It's silly to make people go get a medical marijuana card when we know most of these people are just using to get high.

00:09:03.000 Anyway, let's legalize.

00:09:05.000 And that became a winning argument.

00:09:07.000 There's so many questions I have.

00:09:09.000 We have about a minute remaining.

00:09:10.000 What is the data showing us from states that are legalizing?

00:09:13.000 Are younger and younger children using it?

00:09:15.000 Are we seeing other disturbing like hospitalization trends or self-harm trends?

00:09:20.000 I know we can't do the correlation thing, but to the best that we can.

00:09:23.000 There's some of that.

00:09:24.000 I mean, you know, there's some evidence.

00:09:27.000 What there really is evidence of is heavy use in those states.

00:09:31.000 And I mean, we haven't talked about the crime issue at all, but one of the promises made was, oh, if we legalize the cannabis, then police officers won't have to worry about users and they'll be able to focus on serious crime and we'll see a decrease in violent crime.

00:09:46.000 Well, as you know, in the United States, there's been a terrible increase in violent crime and murder in the last couple of years.

00:09:51.000 And in many of the cities that were early legalization, it's actually been even worse.

00:09:56.000 And that's an even harder correlation to make.

00:09:58.000 And we'd have to have a whole nother segment about it.

00:10:01.000 But because psychosis and severe mental illness are major drivers of violent crime, there's a real case to be made that some of this increase is being driven by legalization.

00:10:18.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

00:10:20.000 Look, we may have been able to stop the Ministry of Truth, but we know they'll be back with something else.

00:10:26.000 We are facing the biggest threat to your constitutional rights in our lifetime.

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00:11:22.000 Alex, can you tell us a little about the crime issue?

00:11:25.000 You kind of mentioned that briefly.

00:11:26.000 Sure.

00:11:27.000 So the issue about marijuana and crime is, I would say, even more controversial than the issue around marijuana and psychosis because people, you know, marijuana supporters are always saying, oh, it just makes people mellow.

00:11:39.000 And the only thing that I've ever murdered is a bag of Doritos.

00:11:43.000 You hear all this stuff.

00:11:44.000 And again, marijuana is much more complicated than alcohol.

00:11:49.000 You know, alcohol affects most people in more or less the same way.

00:11:52.000 It disinhibits people.

00:11:53.000 And so, you know, you bars get loud, and sometimes, you know, and sometimes what might have been a verbal argument turns into a fight.

00:12:00.000 What might have been a fight turns into an aggravated assault.

00:12:03.000 It's it sort of takes things up a notch.

00:12:05.000 Marijuana can cannabis can make people very relaxed and mellow, but it can also make them agitated and paranoid.

00:12:12.000 And when people get paranoid, really paranoid, and certainly when they're psychotic, they can lash out and they do so in ways that are very unpredictable.

00:12:21.000 So, so psychosis and schizophrenia are connected with a lot of violent crime.

00:12:29.000 The best estimates are that, you know, anywhere between if you're a person with schizophrenia and your illness is uncontrolled, you have between a five and 20 times, five and 20 times increased risk for severe violence, for committing severe violence.

00:12:46.000 And so, so, given that, it is, and given that we know that cannabis can produce this paranoid and sometimes psychotic reaction in people, there's there's reason to believe, and it's supported in data, that cannabis can drive violent crime.

00:13:05.000 Um, and so, and you see it, I mean, I mentioned it and tell your children, I mentioned many, many cases where we, you know, where that where there's a apparently a clear causal link, but more than that, you're seeing it in sort of national and state level data that the legalization of cannabis has certainly not been linked with a decrease in violent crime, it's been the opposite.

00:13:27.000 And look, violent crime is a very complicated phenomenon, it's multifactorial.

00:13:32.000 Um, you know, people on the left will say, Oh, it's just guns, people on the right say, No, it's just you know that the police have been undercut.

00:13:39.000 You know, it's it's a whole bunch of factors.

00:13:41.000 And I'm certainly not saying that cannabis legalization is the only factor or even the primary factor.

00:13:46.000 But what I am saying is that when you look at specific cases and at broader trends, you can see a connection here.

00:13:54.000 So, shifting gears really quick, tell us about your lawsuit with Twitter.

00:13:57.000 Sure.

00:13:58.000 So, so by the way, one great thing about tell your children is that the book is three and a half years old and it's sort of just come back to life.

00:14:05.000 So, when you write some stuff that's true and nonfiction, it can come back.

00:14:10.000 And that is actually giving me a really good feeling about pandemia, which is my book about what we did with COVID the last couple of years and what we should have done and the mistakes that we made, and the fact that we shouldn't have locked down or shut schools.

00:14:23.000 So, as you know, I've been a contrarian about the vaccines, just like I've been a contrarian about cannabis.

00:14:29.000 And I've argued that we don't have great evidence that the vaccines are working very well.

00:14:33.000 That's certainly infection and transmission, they don't reduce at all.

00:14:37.000 It looks like they may even increase your susceptibility to being infected.

00:14:42.000 Okay, all of that led me or led Twitter to kick me off last August.

00:14:48.000 I sued Twitter in December, and in April, April of this year, I got the very good news that my lawsuit had survived the motion to dismiss.

00:14:56.000 And this was a Clinton judge who said, You know what?

00:15:00.000 This guy's got a case, I'm going to let it go forward.

00:15:02.000 So, right now, I, and this is a public, uh, you know, this has been reported.

00:15:07.000 I'm negotiating with Twitter about a settlement that, you know, and I can't talk about what the terms might be, but I'm also proceeding with this lawsuit.

00:15:16.000 And one of the things that the lawsuit is going to allow me to do is see whether or not there were communications from the federal government and from drug companies and everybody else to Twitter about me.

00:15:27.000 Wow.

00:15:27.000 So, when we have these debates about Section 230 and people say, oh, you know, these companies, these social media companies, whether it's Twitter or Facebook or anybody else, are just acting as censors for the federal government.

00:15:39.000 Well, I've got a way to see that now.

00:15:41.000 And it's going to happen very rapidly.

00:15:43.000 It's going to happen before Elon Musk could possibly take over Twitter, even before, you know, even assuming the deal goes through.

00:15:50.000 So I'm in this, like, I'm in a unique position, and I am aggressively raising money for this.

00:15:55.000 I have a GoFundMe that's got my name on it, and it's called Fight Social Media Censorship.

00:16:01.000 And you can read about what I'm doing on my sub stack, which is unreported truths, is what it's called, unreported truths at Substack, because Substack does allow free speech from both the right and the left.

00:16:13.000 But that's, you know, that's where I am.

00:16:15.000 I'm very, you know, excited is the wrong word, but as somebody who's, you know, who's been a reporter for a long time, I'm pleased to have the opportunity to, you know, to get a look under the potential censorship that the government may have driven in my case.

00:16:30.000 I don't know.

00:16:31.000 I'll find out and I'm going to move forward.

00:16:33.000 I think it's there.

00:16:34.000 Thank you so much.

00:16:35.000 Book is tell your children and pandemia and support his substack, which will lead you to his lawsuit.

00:16:40.000 You're a great American, Alex.

00:16:41.000 Thank you so much.

00:16:42.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:16:46.000 A war is being waged on reality, everybody, and the left is leading the charge.

00:16:50.000 Their radical gender ideology has seeped into children's classrooms, into medical terminology, and into our everyday life. 0.99

00:16:55.000 It's producing a generation of psychological infants and confused young people.

00:16:58.000 Not only that, but this radical ideology is trying to erase the people who brought us all into the world, women. 0.90

00:17:04.000 Now, Matt Walsh of the great Daily Wire is taking matters into his own hands.

00:17:08.000 He recently embarked on a journey around the world to ask one simple question: What is a woman?

00:17:12.000 And you'd be surprised not only how few are capable of answering, but also how many have a completely twisted idea of what a woman is. 0.86

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00:17:20.000 The documentary, they don't want you to see what is a woman. 1.00

00:17:22.000 You can check it out today at dailywire.com/slash Charlie.

00:17:25.000 Radical gender ideology has a not-so-secret agenda, and this film exposes it all. 0.98

00:17:30.000 Check out what is a woman at dailywire.com/slash Charlie. 1.00

00:17:34.000 That is dailywire.com/slash Charlie.

00:17:39.000 With us is Charlie Hurt, the smart and great American.

00:17:42.000 Charlie, welcome to the program.

00:17:44.000 Thanks for having me.

00:17:45.000 But it's so funny.

00:17:46.000 I get it too.

00:17:47.000 And when I hear your name, I'm like, what?

00:17:49.000 What's going on here?

00:17:50.000 But then the worst for me, and this isn't a problem for you because I'm not a step up from you.

00:17:57.000 But when I get introduced as Charlie Kirk, I'm like, wait, wait, wait a minute.

00:18:00.000 I'm not that smart. 0.98

00:18:02.000 I'm actually the dumb version of Charlie Kirk. 0.93

00:18:04.000 So this is going to be like this interview is going to be really disappointing if you're expecting Charlie Kirk and you get Charlie Hurt. 0.66

00:18:11.000 I don't know about that. 0.99

00:18:12.000 You know, dumb people, even dumb people need representation, a voice in Washington. 0.99

00:18:17.000 And that's what I'm here for. 1.00

00:18:18.000 Very funny.

00:18:19.000 So, Charlie, there's a lot of different stories that we can unpack.

00:18:22.000 You know, I just want to kind of ask you a broader question.

00:18:24.000 Where do you think we are, you know, politically?

00:18:27.000 I did a whole kind of monologue, I guess you could say, a thesis, trying to basically making the argument that we're in this final phase, that conservatives were not falling for the bait from the left anymore.

00:18:38.000 We don't care what names they call us.

00:18:40.000 And basically, the left, in a kind of last move of desperation, they become just basically enamored with brute force, punishing and politicizing, you know, the criminal justice system against their political opponents.

00:18:52.000 Where do you think we are just from a 35,000-foot view?

00:18:56.000 Wow.

00:18:57.000 I think that you, I think we're actually on the exact same spot on this.

00:19:04.000 I think we are emerging into sort of this like post-leftist world.

00:19:10.000 And I hate to, I almost hate saying this publicly because I don't, I hate, I don't want to sound pollyannish.

00:19:18.000 And I'm not trying to sound hopeful, but I can't help but be hopeful because you captured perfectly.

00:19:28.000 I think that all of their ideas have run their course.

00:19:33.000 And sadly, it's taken us not Destroying education, destroying the treatment of lots of people that the left claims to care about, whom they do not care about, for them to kind of run out of excuses.

00:19:50.000 And every time something big comes up and they come up with a new grand idea, whether it's global warming or racism or guns, every single one of those issues, if you think about it, if you look at it the right way, none of them are solutions.

00:20:06.000 They're all excuses and distractions from their miserable failure on everything they've ever promised, whether it's ending poverty or whatever it is that they claim to care about and claim to want to have a solution to, but they don't.

00:20:28.000 The only thing they have, the only solution they have is a solution for giving themselves more power and more money taken from you.

00:20:38.000 And I think you're exactly right.

00:20:39.000 I really do think we've reached the end of it. 0.99

00:20:41.000 And I give President Trump so much credit for this because I think, and the question that we always have is: well, I wish he wouldn't tweet, or I wish he wasn't such a jerk. 0.99

00:20:54.000 I don't know that we get to the spot without him being in jerk. 0.99

00:20:58.000 And you're right. 0.81

00:20:59.000 Tell us why, because some of our audience will disagree.

00:21:02.000 Tell us why you think that's the case.

00:21:05.000 Because our reflexive reaction to any problem, whether it's a school shoot, whatever, is to assume that the people we're arguing with are operating from a place of good faith and that they want to accomplish the same thing we do, like the humanist thing to do, right?

00:21:26.000 And if you start, you've lost the fight, if you're dealing with these people, you lost the fight the minute you make that assumption.

00:21:34.000 And that's just what decent people do.

00:21:36.000 And let's be clear: our side is filled with decent people.

00:21:40.000 And so we make that mistake.

00:21:42.000 The other side is not filled with decent people.

00:21:45.000 There are a lot of decent people that fall for it.

00:21:50.000 But the people that are guiding the sort of thinking on the left, these are not opportunities to fix problems.

00:21:57.000 These are opportunities to seize more control.

00:22:00.000 And so you have to be a single-minded a-hole like Trump to sit here and stand up for that stuff and to fight it.

00:22:10.000 And from the beginning, say, no, you're not being an honest broker on this.

00:22:14.000 You're actually trying to do something.

00:22:16.000 You're either trying to distract or you're trying to gather, you know, figure out some way to exploit the strategy for your own personal gain.

00:22:25.000 And that's not the way this is going to work.

00:22:28.000 The way this is going to work is to have actual common sense, thoughtful, intelligent approaches to things that actually, you know, forever mindful of our constitutional rights and how not to make the quote-unquote solution even worse than the problem that you're supposed to, you know, that we want to solve and that our opponents don't even want to solve.

00:22:57.000 That's so well said.

00:22:58.000 And so we're kind of in this final moment.

00:23:01.000 You've been in the conservative movement for quite a while, longer than I have.

00:23:04.000 Are you starting to see a difference in how conservatives, especially kind of those conservatives that could go either way, either be with the base on certain issues or be with kind of the chamber and the moderates?

00:23:16.000 Are you starting to see kind of a turning moment where the kind of attacks from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the kind of weaponizing of name-calling matters less?

00:23:27.000 Are you starting to see a sea change in that regard?

00:23:31.000 I think so.

00:23:32.000 And it's not just weaponizing, you know, it's weaponizing basic known facts.

00:23:38.000 And the perfect example is this idea.

00:23:42.000 And even you and I have fallen for it.

00:23:44.000 We get into these arguments with people about whether there are two genders or 18 genders, right?

00:23:51.000 And the mere fact that we're having that discussion means that we're not having a serious rational discussion about anything. 1.00

00:23:59.000 We're just, and also, by the way, we look ridiculous engaging in a, you know, mud-smearing fight with an idiot. 1.00

00:24:12.000 I mean, no one comes out of that looking intelligent. 1.00

00:24:16.000 And if that's what happens, then they win, because then they go to the next thing.

00:24:20.000 And I do think that it's so, and some, and part of the reason that they do that, of course, is so that rational, common sense, good-meaning Americans tune out.

00:24:33.000 And they just, they assume that political discussions are about whether or not there are eight genders.

00:24:39.000 I mean, you know, the University of Virginia, one of the most prestigious medical universities in the world on the planet, teaches that there are eight genders, offers you eight genders when you enroll.

00:24:53.000 This is what we're up against.

00:24:55.000 And that kind of thing, when people think that that's what political discussions are about, then good people walk away from that and they say, you know, I got to teach my kid how to play baseball.

00:25:09.000 So this is, I'm just going to leave this alone. 1.00

00:25:13.000 I'm going to leave this for the morons to discuss. 0.98

00:25:16.000 And then, of course, you and I are left, you know, doing our best to sort of have to sort through the argument because, yeah. 1.00

00:25:25.000 And unfortunately, we look like idiots because we're like, because if there is any bigger moron than somebody who thinks there are eight genders, it's the person trying to correct that idiot, you know? 1.00

00:25:39.000 It's like arguing with, whatever. 1.00

00:25:41.000 But anyway, so, but I do, I really do, I do think that that stuff is wearing through.

00:25:47.000 And, you know, obviously what we saw with the recall of Chesapeake in San Francisco, and even bigger than that, of course, in a lot of ways, was the recall of those school board members there.

00:26:04.000 And honestly, I think if Glenn Young were on the ballot today as opposed to six months ago, it was shocking to me that Terry McAuliffe got 48% of the vote in Virginia in my home state.

00:26:18.000 It's just appalling.

00:26:19.000 I don't understand it.

00:26:20.000 Just like it's shocking that millions of people did vote for Joe Biden.

00:26:24.000 But I think that if you were to have that election again today, I think that Young probably would have won by a whole lot more. 0.96

00:26:34.000 And once people start realizing, yeah, it really is as ridiculous as you think it is.

00:26:41.000 What they're doing really is as appalling as you think it is, then that accrues so that in a year from now, Glenn Young will have like 70%, you know, 60% approval rating in Virginia.

00:26:56.000 I really do believe that that's kind of, that's how this works.

00:26:59.000 It has to, or else the entire civilization falls apart, right?

00:27:02.000 I mean, these, and this is something you've written about before.

00:27:05.000 It really is kind of the tyranny of these fringe academic theories, kind of the ideologues.

00:27:10.000 And that's what you saw in San Francisco.

00:27:12.000 I mean, you could not have a more ideologically pure, and I put that in air quotes, than Boudin, right?

00:27:18.000 Abolish the police, don't have any sort of law enforcement whatsoever.

00:27:23.000 But it's kind of, we have to eventually come down to those pesky shackles of reality, don't we?

00:27:27.000 And isn't that kind of our great hope?

00:27:29.000 Yes.

00:27:30.000 And I'm so glad you used the word tyranny because the word tyranny is exactly, it's precisely the word that our founders would have used to describe exactly this.

00:27:41.000 Tyranny for them, yeah, they were concerned about tyranny of the government and tyranny of leaders.

00:27:48.000 They were concerned about that.

00:27:49.000 But they were also, when they talked about tyranny, they talked about tyranny, the minority within the government.

00:27:55.000 But they also were talking about tyranny of a thug walking down the street willing to take your life, a citizen's life, for no reason or for his own selfish reasons.

00:28:08.000 To them, that was tyranny as well.

00:28:10.000 And the reason that they were so adamant about us being self-governed and having, say, for example, gun rights, as well as everything else, free speech rights and religious rights and all this kind of stuff, is that we ourselves are responsible for protecting ourselves against the tyranny of a thug walking down the street wanting to hurt us, our families, or our neighbors.

00:28:35.000 And we were able to, we have the right to stand up and stop that, which of course we didn't see in Uvalde, which is one of the unending tragedies of that situation.

00:28:49.000 Look, the world situation is getting worse every single day.

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00:30:15.000 So Charlie, you know, as I travel the country and I talk to people, people are much more concerned about the open border, the destruction of their history and their culture, the fact they can't afford gas than kind of some of these debates happening in DC.

00:30:29.000 And I'm not trying to minimize any of the suffering of the families, obviously, neither Buffalo or Uvalde, but it feels to be a very DC-centric conversation.

00:30:38.000 Would you agree with that?

00:30:40.000 Yeah.

00:30:41.000 And, you know, again, you know, going back to what we were just talking about a minute ago, about how we approach these things from sort of a standpoint of decency and it automatically, you know, because we don't, we're horrified by what we saw.

00:31:01.000 And so you start from the standpoint of, oh my goodness, is there something I could have done?

00:31:06.000 Is there something I could have done?

00:31:07.000 It's just like anytime you read a bad story in the newspaper about something, a car accident, anything that happens, you say, is there something I could have done?

00:31:14.000 There's something we could have done to prevent that.

00:31:16.000 And you can't, it's a basic human emotion of decent people.

00:31:21.000 But the real people who are denigrating and belittling the pain of the families in Uvalde and Buffalo are the politicians who look at that and say, oh, well, I could have fixed this if we had done this, if you just let me do this.

00:31:37.000 No, no, that wouldn't have fixed it.

00:31:38.000 That wouldn't have prevented it. 1.00

00:31:40.000 You're a liar. 1.00

00:31:41.000 You lied. 1.00

00:31:42.000 And you're exploiting these children to advance your own twisted political agenda that doesn't fix the problem.

00:31:51.000 It doesn't do anything but help you and serve you.

00:31:55.000 They're the people that are being, that should be on the defensive.

00:31:58.000 They're not, of course, because they have no decency to them.

00:32:04.000 And no one ever calls them.

00:32:05.000 Yeah, and let me just...

00:32:06.000 Yeah, let me just interject really quick, though, Charlie.

00:32:08.000 This is very difficult for some conservatives, especially conservatives that have been around for 30 or 40 years, to agree with that we're not dealing with decent people.

00:32:17.000 I think there is a desire, or at least kind of a willingness is the wrong word, but they cannot get over the hump of being like, are we really dealing with the indecent?

00:32:28.000 How do you respond to that?

00:32:30.000 I mean, look what, again, let's go back to Donald Trump.

00:32:35.000 Look what they did for six years to Donald Trump.

00:32:39.000 And whether you like Donald Trump or not, or and whether you think he fed into it and made things worse, they really did spy on his campaign.

00:32:49.000 They really did use a whole of government approach to weaponize a Democratic campaign against him, both inside and outside of the government, to make up stories.

00:32:59.000 And they use the entire media to spin lies and tell fantastical lies and weave these completely unbelievably ridiculous conspiracy theories against him, all for their own political benefit.

00:33:15.000 But if you take all that apart and you go down to the basic sort of the platform of what the guy stood for and what he wants to do, the America First agenda, there's nothing controversial about it. 0.99

00:33:27.000 The reason the left, the reason Washington despised Donald Trump is not because he was radical, and it wasn't even because he was a bombastic jerk. 0.93

00:33:37.000 The reason they opposed him is because when you take all that away, his policies were so mainstream, he terrified them. 0.98

00:33:46.000 He terrified the left.

00:33:48.000 That's the same thing.

00:33:50.000 Sadly, he terrified a lot of Republicans in Washington who had their little feistoms built around lobbyists and staffers and all that kind of stuff.

00:34:00.000 And he was, and his simple approach, simple, practical, common sense approach, pro-America approach to every problem threatened them. 1.00

00:34:10.000 And that's why, did the guy have to be a jerk? 0.99

00:34:12.000 I don't know how, I don't know any other way. 0.99

00:34:15.000 You can't deal with people like this nicely.

00:34:18.000 You don't hire a perfume salesman to do plumbing work when your toilet is plugged up. 0.97

00:34:24.000 No, or better.

00:34:25.000 Hire a plumber.

00:34:27.000 I called him in my RNC speech, you might remember, the bodyguard of Western civilization.

00:34:32.000 The bodyguard?

00:34:33.000 Yes, exactly.

00:34:35.000 It's a perfect description.

00:34:36.000 You do not hire a nice, courtly person in French cuffs and a dandy, you know, straw boater hat to do what needs to be done around here.

00:34:48.000 You don't hire a nice, sweet child to be your bodyguard. 0.99

00:34:55.000 Unfortunately, you got to hire a big, hairy, ugly, nasty, gross guy. 1.00

00:34:58.000 Tattooed guyguard. 0.98

00:35:00.000 Who might have served in a couple theaters of Iraq and knows how to do what's necessary?

00:35:05.000 And that's what we hired.

00:35:06.000 Yes, exactly.

00:35:07.000 Charlie Hurt, you got fired up.

00:35:09.000 I love it.

00:35:09.000 We'll have you back on soon.

00:35:10.000 Great to see you, Charlie.

00:35:11.000 Thanks, buddy.

00:35:12.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

00:35:14.000 Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:35:16.000 Thank you so much for listening.

00:35:18.000 God bless.

00:35:20.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - June 09, 2022

Marijuana and Mass Psychosis—A Contrarian Take with Alex Berenson

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