Sen. John Kennedy (D-LA) joins us to discuss the shooting at the U.S. Consulate in Toronto, Canada, and a crazy story about leftist training juries to let the criminals off the hook.
00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:09.000All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:45.000And then we have Professor Ray from Hillsdale College going to give us a whole history of Iran and that region, what this conflict really means for that.
00:01:56.000So lots of educating today, lots of explaining what's actually going on behind the headlines.
00:02:02.000Because listen, there's a lot of short-term push and pull you're going to feel.
00:02:15.000And there are some long-term impacts that are going to be felt.
00:02:18.000I mean, I kind of liken this to, you know, we live in historic times, Blake, where you could make the argument that Reagan in the 80s gave rise to Clinton's booming economy in the 90s, right?
00:02:29.000And so we are in that kind of an era where President Trump is doing a lot of hard things.
00:02:34.000You don't have to agree with everything.
00:02:35.000I'm not asking you to beat the drums of war.
00:02:39.000But when you think about the foundations in the Middle East, from an energy security standpoint, from a geopolitical standpoint, we are living in historic times, and we have to understand where these pieces will lead, where they are going to take us in the years ahead.
00:02:56.000So we're going to educate us, all of you, ourselves as well.
00:03:00.000But first, we've got to get to what happened.
00:03:01.000There was another shooting at an American consulate this time in Toronto.
00:03:11.000At this stage, I can confirm that the RCMP is working closely with the Toronto Police Service and our international partners who will assist us in a fulsome investigation into the shooting that took place overnight early this morning at the American consulate behind us.
00:03:28.000At this time, the INSET team has been engaged as this is a national security incident.
00:03:35.000And we are working with Toronto Police and others to understand the motivations of those involved.
00:03:42.000The Canadian Mountains like slamming the table.
00:04:06.000Obviously, over the weekend, we saw those two young men that were inspired by ISIS propaganda to go throw IEDs at a bunch of protesters in New York.
00:04:17.000And now we have a shooting at a U.S. consulate.
00:04:19.000There was obviously the Austin bar nightclub shooting where a number of people were shot, few were killed.
00:04:48.000You got approximately nothing, except now every time the Muslim community feels offended, you have to watch fellow Americans get shot up and bombs thrown at them.
00:06:45.000Look, everything they have is gone, including their leadership.
00:06:49.000In fact, there are two levels of leadership, and even actually, as it turns out, more than that, but two levels of leadership are gone.
00:06:56.000Most people have never even heard about the leaders that they're talking about.
00:07:00.000So it's obviously been very, very powerful, very effective.
00:07:05.000So, yeah, to Blake's point, I think, you know, we had Robert Barnes on yesterday, and he was basically suggesting the president could declare victory at any point he wanted at this time and use that as an off-ramp.
00:07:19.000It seems he could possibly even declare victory while still waging the conflict.
00:07:24.000I actually think there is a strategic brilliance to this, though, actually.
00:07:28.000I think the president understands that the Navy has been essentially degraded to the point that it's going to take them years, if not decades, to recreate.
00:07:38.000The military infrastructure, I think they've got about 20% of the rocket launchers, missile launchers remaining.
00:07:45.000I'm assuming those are going to be some of the cleanup work that's going on right now.
00:07:50.000The real question, though, is at what point, from a regime standpoint, is victory real?
00:08:49.000What if he says, I'm going to send suicide bombers everywhere that we can?
00:08:52.000I wonder there's a larger question about what it's going to take to get the population to take back their country, or do we even want that?
00:08:58.000And it seems that in recent days, last two days specifically, the admin has been signaling that that's not as huge of a concern as maybe we anticipated at the beginning.
00:09:09.000Remember, they've lost about 50 of their sort of political leaders, their top brass.
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00:12:13.000You know, there's so much to talk about.
00:12:15.000You are the senator of an oil state, a state that's a lot of its economy revolves around refineries and shipping, and there's a lot of news right now.
00:12:25.000So I wanted to get into that as a first step, and then we'll get into some of the DHS stuff.
00:12:38.000I don't want America to be the world's policeman.
00:12:44.000But on occasion, we have to intervene because one of the bad guys is trying to be the world's policeman.
00:12:56.000Here's what our intelligence showed: you would think after the curb stomping that America and Israel gave Iran back in June, that they would have learned their lesson.
00:13:11.000Our intelligence showed that Iran had restarted its nuclear weapons program.
00:13:21.000It was producing between 200 and 600 missiles a month.
00:13:30.000Its goal was to stockpile so many drones and so many ballistic and cruise missiles that it could threaten to destroy the entire Middle East if anybody interfered with their renewed efforts to get a nuclear weapon.
00:13:53.000That's not a world that's safe for America.
00:13:57.000The president, in my opinion, did not start a war.
00:16:16.000And I think you've done a very good job of that right now.
00:16:19.000Now, the question, though, is there's also a political calculus.
00:16:24.000And one of the things that I've been aware of is that this could be the absolute spot-on right decision from a national security perspective, but it could have political ramifications.
00:16:34.000I can tell you, Senator, that the Gen Zers that we're talking to on campus, our students, they're telling us that young people, they don't want this conflict.
00:16:45.000Even those that voted for President Trump do not want this conflict.
00:16:48.000What would your message be to Gen Zers watching and listening that are skeptical of any war?
00:16:55.000Well, look, those are fair questions that are being asked.
00:18:10.000Senator, so we've been told, We played the clip before you joined that, you know, this could be nearly complete and that it's going to be short.
00:18:18.000So now we're hearing the messaging kind of pivot.
00:18:21.000There's a little bit of a pivot in the messaging.
00:18:23.000What does success look like in this conflict if Khomeini's son is still the new supreme leader?
00:18:31.000Well, here's what success looks like to me, and I don't speak for him, but I think President Trump would agree.
00:18:40.000Success to me is Iran or the political theological leadership in Iran having four wheels down and their axle dragging.
00:19:10.000As much infrastructure as we can find for the Revolutionary Guard gone.
00:19:15.000And then the good people, and they are good people, of Iran who don't want these knobheads running their country any more than anybody else in the world does, will have an opportunity, perhaps, maybe, to choose their own government.
00:19:36.000Success to me looks like a few more weeks.
00:19:40.000I don't want to leave too soon just because of my Democratic colleagues are screaming like they're part of a prison riot.
00:19:49.000They're not going to support anything that President Trump does.
00:19:53.000But that's what success looks like to me.
00:19:55.000I guess a rational concern a lot of people have is if we if we even if we do all that destruction if we come out and the regime is still in place and still Despises us.
00:20:12.000Is this just a bigger version of what happened last summer where we go in and we break a lot of stuff, but the fundamental problem is still there and might even hate us a lot more?
00:20:22.000Well, I supported what we did last summer, and I support what we're doing now.
00:20:28.000I'm not going to repeat everything I just said.
00:20:31.000The question I think most fair-minded people have to ask themselves is: Is the world better off after we leave Iran this time, having done what I just said we were going to do, and we're doing it.
00:20:49.000And I think the answer, and are the Iranian people better off?
00:20:53.000Have we completely solved the problem?
00:20:56.000No, it's going to take regime change, but the people of Iran are going to have to determine that they want regime change.
00:21:04.000Look, the new supreme leader, just like the old supreme leader, they believe that their God tells them to kill everybody who doesn't agree with them.
00:21:18.000Not just Americans, not just Israelis, even their fellow Muslims.
00:21:26.000I don't think any fair-minded person believes that they are not trying to obtain a nuclear weapon.
00:21:32.000I don't think any fair-minded person believes that if they obtain a nuclear warhead and the missile technology to deliver it, they will use it.
00:21:41.000And once they get it, I don't think any fair-minded person believes that that will not lead to nuclear proliferation.
00:21:48.000Every country in the Middle East will obtain a nuclear weapon, so will Japan, so will South Korea, so will Australia, and then it's off to the races.
00:22:05.000I hope so, but I can't predict the future.
00:22:10.000I have to wait for it like everybody else.
00:22:13.000Let me say it again: I don't want America to be the world's policeman, but there are times that we have to intervene to keep the bad guys from being the world's policemen, and this is one of those times.
00:23:46.000We had conversations about making sure that we were telling people I'm asking you, sorry to interrupt, but the president approved ahead of time you spending $220 million running TV ads across the country in which you are featured prominently.
00:27:15.000Here's Jamie Raskin in the House, cut one.
00:27:17.000An investigation into the hundreds of millions of dollars that Secretary Noam channeled to various political friends and intimates of hers so that that money can be reclaimed for the American people.
00:27:32.000Hundreds of millions of dollars might be a joke to somebody in the Trump cabinet, but it's not a joke to the American people.
00:27:39.000And I've been hearing rumors, Senator, that they were going to use these for impeachment, maybe impeachment of Noam, maybe impeachment of President Trump.
00:27:46.000So you getting ahead of this did a great service to the country.
00:27:54.000And it's no disrespect for some of the achievements, but yeah, we'd have been hearing rumblings ourselves.
00:28:00.000And so I think you did a really great thing and it showed a lot of courage.
00:28:03.000So the question is, you had a hearing this morning where somebody was saying that the judges, the judicial activists that are fighting ICE and deportations are braver than our ICE agents.
00:28:16.000And you said that that guy triggered your gag reflex.
00:28:18.000I thought it was another brilliant line.
00:28:20.000Tell us what success looks like at DHS deportations.
00:28:24.000It's one of the central planks of the president's agenda.
00:28:35.000Our immigration laws are not some second-tier statutes that people can violate without consequence.
00:28:43.000We need to enforce our immigration laws.
00:28:46.000Number two, how you enforce them matters.
00:28:49.000They have to be enforced in accordance with due process, with equal protection, in accordance with the standards set forth for reasonable suspicion in the Supreme Court case of Terry v. Ohio.
00:29:03.000If you want to protest them, you have every right as an American.
00:29:09.000You do not have the right to protest violently.
00:29:15.000Violence undermines the morality of what you say your movement stands for.
00:30:21.000There is some rumors of what, if any, sort of deals could be made with these blue jurisdictions, the sanctuary cities and sanctuary states, to get them to cooperate.
00:30:31.000Some people have mentioned that we might have to offer up a pathway for DACA recipients or something, right?
00:30:41.000These are things that are going to grade against the base, the people in this audience.
00:30:45.000Do you feel like some sort of deal needs to be made in that way, or is that what they're going to demand?
00:30:51.000How can we get the Democrats to even fund DHS?
00:30:55.000There's a lot of questions here, but is there anything that you'd be willing?
00:30:59.000I know you're not the secretary, but is there anything that you'd be willing to offer up in exchange for getting them to cooperate with ICE detainers?
00:31:06.000I don't think there's anything we can offer up.
00:31:08.000I wouldn't support offering them up anything.
00:31:11.000Most of these people believe in open borders.
00:31:16.000They believe in, they are also the ones who told us to defund the police.
00:31:28.000That's ultimately what this is all about.
00:31:31.000You can't reason with people like that.
00:31:35.000If I were king for a day, I'm not, don't aspire to be.
00:31:39.000I would use every legal mechanism I could to withhold their money because what they're doing, refusing to enforce federal law, not changing it, they think they're smarter and more virtuous than the American people and can pick and choose among which of our laws they think are just or unjust.
00:32:34.000The Karen wing of the Democratic Party wants to defund ICE.
00:32:38.000And the Karen wing of the Democratic Party has told all the elected officials who happen to be Democrats that if they don't do their best to defund ICE, they, the Karen wing, will punish them the rest of their natural lives.
00:33:27.000The short way home here is reconciliation.
00:33:33.000If we do it through reconciliation, we only need 51 votes.
00:33:39.000Some of my colleagues say, Kennedy, you know, that's crazy.
00:33:44.000It'll never pass muster under the Budget Controlled Act, which is one of the parameters on your ability to do something through reconciliation.
00:33:53.000Look, I've seen things pass muster under reconciliation and what we call the birdbath that I never thought had a chance.
00:34:03.000And I've seen other things that I thought were slammed dunk get turned down.
00:34:09.000If I were king for a day, I'm not, but I would go hire the best legal minds I could find for us to craft a provision around the SAVE Act that would pass muster under the Budget Control Act and would survive a birdbath.
00:34:35.000I'm not criticizing anybody, but that's just the way I would do it.
00:34:40.000Senator John Kennedy, thank you so much, sir.
00:34:44.000And again, your book, I want to make sure I get the title because it is a good title.
00:34:48.000How to test negative for stupid and why Washington Never Will.
00:34:54.000God bless you again, sir, for your questioning, your honest questioning.
00:34:58.000I think you did the nation a tremendous service, and thank you for articulating the vision I think that you have that the president shares in Iran.
00:36:30.000Well, as I'm sure a lot of you already know and remember, today is six months since what happened to Charlie.
00:36:37.000And one of the concerns we all have is making sure that the man who killed him is convicted.
00:36:43.000And one thing we're all becoming much more aware of is the potential for our jury system to be a weak point in making sure that criminals are held to account for what they do.
00:36:53.000And so there was a piece yesterday in the Washington Free Beacon.
00:36:56.000They do a lot of great work about this fact that there is a left-wing group training activists on how to undermine the jury system.
00:37:06.000And so we have the reporter who wrote that piece, Thomas Kadanaci.
00:37:14.000So this group, Freedom Trainers, why don't you just tell us what they're doing, what they're telling people, and what the ramifications of this would be.
00:37:24.000Well, I really appreciate you having me on, first of all, to talk about this because I think it's such an important issue, and it's certainly something that's going under the radar.
00:37:32.000So, also, just at the forefront, I want to say this is something that I had to do multiple double takes on because I couldn't believe what I was coming across when I was researching this.
00:37:42.000Essentially, there's a group based in DC that it's focused on DC right now, but it could clearly be something that spreads across the country.
00:37:51.000But what we see is they're working in DC to undermine Trump DOJ prosecutions that are taking place in the DC attorney's office.
00:38:01.000And so, what the group does is essentially educate members of the jury or themselves try to infiltrate juries.
00:38:10.000And when on there, they vote, quote, in favor of their conscience, not in favor of the law.
00:38:17.000And obviously, this has a number of ramifications.
00:38:20.000One thing I just want to say also off the start is: you know, the DOJ itself is not really an agency that often comments on things like this.
00:38:31.000But I thought it was very telling that after we reached out, they did want to comment and they gave a pretty forceful response to our reporting here saying that they're aware and that they're, you know, anyone who engages in this type of activism should be held accountable.
00:38:47.000Is there a way to hold them accountable?
00:38:49.000Because I suppose what seems like a vulnerability here is, as they point out, it basically is legal to do this, to decide, you get on a jury and just decide, I'm not going to convict for any reason whatsoever.
00:39:02.000Now, as your piece points out, judges and lawyers will attempt to remove such people, but all their training materials here are basically how to sneak onto a jury so that you can rig the verdict, correct?
00:39:16.000And so, one thing I will note is in their training materials and in their webinars, which I attended, they say that there are sort of unambiguously legal maneuvers that you can take, such as, you know, quote, educating the public in the way that they're doing, handing out flyers near courthouses.
00:39:36.000That appears to be one of the main things they do.
00:39:38.000They camp outside of courthouses during jury selection and try to give pamphlets to prospective jurors.
00:39:45.000And those pamphlets, which I also obtained, will have all sorts of different legal rationales to try to help jurors vote again their conscience.
00:39:59.000But in addition to the unambiguously legal that they say, there are the quote legal but risky.
00:40:05.000This is where the DOJ could potentially step in.
00:40:08.000The legal but risky are things like discussing this process with jurors before deliberations begin.
00:40:16.000This is something that's almost certainly happening, but again, no one's been caught doing this, or publicly stating that you intend to nullify.
00:40:24.000That's something that they, again, they say is legal but risky.
00:40:27.000I highly doubt that people who want to thwart a DOJ prosecution are going to just come out and openly say it.
00:40:34.000But it's that first point discussing nullification with jurors, especially in the process of giving out one of these pamphlets and, you know, quote, educating that could be a potential hurdle for them in the future.
00:40:51.000It's like, you know, those jurists on the jurors rather on the OJ Simpson trial that were just like, some of them admitted afterwards that they knew he was guilty, but they just were, it was a get back for Rodney King.
00:41:06.000And it's, there's a lot of other cases.
00:41:09.000If, you know, every prosecutor in a big city has seen it happen where they'll have this.
00:41:13.000And it's a vulnerability because you need, you know, the Supreme Court actually confirmed in a case recently, you need unanimity of 12 jurors to convict in a criminal case.
00:41:23.000And you only need one holdout of those 12 to have a hung jury.
00:41:44.000And we're seeing this over and over with the grand juries.
00:41:47.000They're not indicting cases the federal government's bringing, but you only need one of these people in the Louis G. Mangioni case.
00:41:53.000You might only need one of these people in the Tyler Robinson case.
00:41:57.000And it's scary because it's giving people the opportunity.
00:41:59.000People who might have been activists before, it's giving them that sort of like quote unquote legal backing to go ahead and thwart an entire prosecution regardless of the evidence and regardless of the fact that this system, the justice system in the U.S., which we all love, is built on that idea of fairness.
00:42:20.000And so if people try to undermine that, that could undermine the American public's confidence in the system itself.
00:42:27.000I'll also just give you a few examples.
00:42:29.000There was the case in DC of the sandwich man who threw a subway sandwich at a National Guard member.
00:42:39.000And this group in their webinars really seems to suggest that this was a case of people who are on the jury who didn't really care about the evidence.
00:42:49.000They go through this in detail, asking the participants of their webinars about, if you were on the jury, what would your excuse be for voting against indictment in this case?
00:43:01.000And they all kind of list their examples.
00:43:03.000And then, you know, the trainer gets up there and says, well, you can really give whatever or no explanation for your vote.
00:43:10.000You can just simply vote against if you agree with the guy who assaulted the member of the National Guard.
00:43:18.000And I think that there's going to be multiple of these.
00:43:21.000They also cite the case of, you know, there was the case of six members of Congress who, you know, put out a video saying that members of the military should, in many cases, reject and turn down orders from Trump himself.
00:43:39.000And those six members of Congress were not indicted because a grand jury decided that there was not enough evidence in that case.
00:43:49.000So there are these examples and they're happening.
00:43:52.000And, you know, my personal fear when I see this stuff is that it will spread to the Tyler Robinson trial.
00:44:03.000It will spread to a number of other trials.
00:44:05.000You know, I'm actually an energy reporter.
00:44:07.000And one thing I've done is report on climate cases in which states and cities accuse the biggest oil companies of causing climate change.
00:44:18.000And these are cases where billions of dollars are at stake.
00:44:22.000So if you get one, you know, jury that with a couple of people on there who are activists and don't really care about the law, they could actually, with their vote, you know, really damage the economy by destroying the oil companies who are probably falsely being accused of causing weather events, you know, like hurricanes.
00:44:47.000And so I think there's really a large impact that this could have moving forward.
00:44:57.000They are very organized in being very evil.
00:45:01.000Yeah, they constantly open up new fronts in the assault on Western civilization.
00:45:07.000And I'll be frank, I think I don't want to softpedal this.
00:45:11.000This is one of the things that frightens me the most.
00:45:14.000I've been thinking about it, you know, coming up for a long time, that this is a weakness in our system because it is in the Constitution that you need a jury verdict to convict somebody of a crime.
00:45:25.000It is something that's been around in the Anglo-legal system for a very long time.
00:45:30.000And if you have, you know, complete polarization along political lines or along racial lines where you can't assemble 12 people to consistently convict someone on any crime that has racial valence or political valence, the country is going to fly apart.
00:45:48.000In, I believe, Ireland, under the British, there would be terrorist attacks on like British officials and like juries would just not convict.
00:45:56.000And so they basically had to revoke the right to a jury trial in Ireland to make sure they could convict people of crimes.
00:46:02.000In Britain right now, they're trying to revoke the right to a jury trial for any crime with a sentence of under three years.
00:46:09.000They're just the general decay of their system.
00:46:17.000And this is a right that has been so integral to American civilization, Western Anglo-civilization for so long.
00:46:24.000And now we're seeing it being used to further tear it down.
00:46:28.000Yeah, I think the left going back, I mean, it probably dates back further than that, but you see the rise of critical theory in the law schools going back to the 1980s.
00:46:38.000They've identified our judicial system and our criminal justice system as a point of weakness for a long time that they're looking to exploit.
00:46:46.000You know, it makes you think of the John Adams quote: you know, that our founding documents are only, you know, good for a moral and upright people, right?
00:46:57.000They're wholly inadequate for any other.
00:47:00.000So it makes you nervous when you see the degradation of our people that then filter into the system that we need to function correctly.
00:47:09.000We got to get ready for hour two here in Secretary Chris Wright, who's coming up next.
00:47:13.000But the floor is yours to wrap up this.
00:47:17.000Yeah, I'll just make three quick points here.
00:47:20.000Number one, this group, Freedom Trainers, is housed at a larger, pretty major nonprofit called Community Change.
00:47:28.000Community Change is funded by kind of all the usual suspects, Rockefeller's, the Arabella Network, Open Society, which is George Soros's network, and then Hans Jorguese's network as well, who's another foreign billionaire influencing American politics.
00:47:48.000Number two, they say they've already trained hundreds of thousands of people, which is a little alarming.
00:47:54.000And number three, I will say that one of the leaders of this group, someone named Maria Steven, she was on the Colbert show recently as a sort of what he described her as a non-resistance or a non-violence resistance scholar, whatever that means.
00:48:15.000And she talked about the dangers of ICE and how ICE officers can, again, reject orders from their higher ups in their course of doing business.
00:48:26.000So those are kind of three points I wanted to make to kind of show people how prevalent this is right now and how really we need to start becoming more aware of this.
00:49:14.000The online world moves fast and it's moving even faster these days.
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00:49:29.000On TikTok, teenagers have over 50 built-in protections right from when they join.
00:49:34.000Accounts for teens all start private by default, they're not open to the entire world.
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00:49:42.000Only their friends can comment on their videos.
00:49:44.000And that kind of approach matters because feeling confident and comfortable about these platforms your teenagers are on shouldn't mean digging through a bunch of menus and trying to set everything up yourself and worrying that you got it wrong.
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00:50:06.000All of this is to say, when safety comes first, discovery and creativity can follow without fear.
00:50:12.000Learn more by going to tick tock.com/slash guardiansguide.
00:51:35.000So we're going to have Secretary Wright.
00:51:37.000It looks like he's just getting seated.
00:51:39.000So they're going to give me the go-ahead in just a second there.
00:51:43.000But this is the big job right now for this administration.
00:51:49.000There's a whole bunch of education that needs to happen.
00:51:51.000And hopefully, Secretary Wright can walk us through how the price of oil then is translated, delayed, which a lot of people don't realize into the price of the pump.
00:52:02.000And what we can do to bring down those costs, what we can do to get the Strait of Hormuz, which is effectively blocked right now.
00:52:52.000So yeah, the Straits of Hormuz that most of the Middle Eastern crude flows through have been effectively closed since this conflict started.
00:53:04.000And of course, the biggest answer here is to end Iran's ability to attack United States bases, terrorize their neighbors, and threaten oil supplies that they've been doing for 47 years.
00:53:19.000So right now, you know, they are uncontrolled and they have so much armaments, they're able to scare shipping traffic off.
00:53:28.000But every day, every hour, we're degrading the Iranian nation's ability to terrorize their neighbors, threaten energy supplies, and kill American soldiers.
00:53:39.000This has been a 47-year-long conflict.
00:53:42.000They've always put a premium on, raised energy prices higher than they should be because Iran always had the risk of this sort of wanton projection of their power over this critical waterway.
00:53:55.000And so why they've retreated in the short run is the United States, in consultation with a bunch of other nations that are part of the International Energy Agency, have agreed or are in the process of working an agreement to release oil out of strategic petroleum reserves to replace a fair amount of the lost crude oil coming out of the straits.
00:54:21.000So that will keep global oil markets supplied going forward.
00:54:26.000There are oil stores around the world.
00:54:30.000We do have surplus oil production capacity in the world, but a lot comes out of the Strait of Hormuz.
00:54:36.000So the price and fear factor are raising prices because of the lack of flow of energy.
00:54:41.000But ultimately, we need to degrade Iran's military ability to do what they're doing today and what they've threatened to do and on and off done for 47 years.
00:54:52.000So with the solution, I've heard different ideas floated out, ensuring insurance for these tankers.
00:56:10.000But when we degrade them enough that it seems like a ship escort with the U.S. military is enough to ensure safe travel, that'll be a great day.
00:56:21.000But somehow we need to get that energy flow into the world again.
00:56:25.000And of course, the U.S. has a lot of levers to pull and are working this every day, every day.
00:56:30.000So, Secretary, there's a whole piece to this where I think the average American consumer is a little uneducated about the price fluctuations, right?
00:56:41.000So we've seen the price at the pump go up.
00:56:45.000And I noticed that it was up even further today, even though the price of Brent has come down.
00:56:50.000Can you just educate us on the time delay?
00:56:55.000Because, you know, the left will always say that the oil companies are conspiring against and using fear in the market to price gouge us and make a bunch of extra profits.
00:57:11.000You know, if you raise your gasoline prices up really fast before your cost of crude has gone up, your neighbor next door is going to eat your lunch by keeping his prices a little bit lower than your prices.
00:57:23.000And gasoline is separate than crude oil.
00:57:29.000Gasoline is traded all around the world.
00:57:31.000It's very tied to the price of crude, but there are times where gasoline prices trade with different time lags and sometimes even different directions than crude price.
00:57:43.000In the long run, they're very tied together, but they're separate markets.
00:57:46.000And the market for diesel is separate and the market for jet fuel is different as well.
00:57:52.000But Andrew, one key thing to think of here, we're going through a short-term dislocation and we are all feeling it.
00:57:59.000The president is keenly aware, I think as everyone knows, of gasoline prices and diesel prices and costs for American consumers.
00:58:08.000In fact, it may seem backwards right now, but this war is in large part because of the president's concern of energy prices for American consumers over the long run.
00:58:18.000Iran, who has been a threat to oil supplies, Iran who's driven the previous price spikes in the late 1970s, that was Iran that led to that huge price spike in the gas lines and all that.
00:58:33.000The president's seeing, boy, that same nation is arming itself massively with missiles so that they can make it so hard to attack them that no one will so they can finish building their nuclear weapons.
00:58:45.000Imagine a nation that's so trouble-oriented to have nuclear weapons and a massive weapons arsenal, they could dictate to the world the price of energy.
00:58:56.000And I think previous presidents were just kicking that can down the road.
00:58:59.000Well, it didn't blow up on my watch, and that's kind of a risky thing, and they've kicked that can down the road.
01:00:17.000And of course, a huge reduction in drug running.
01:00:20.000It was just at a summit of the Americas, and they said the murder rate has plummeted in Trinidad and Tobago because of the president's enforcement against running drugs on boats in the ocean there north of Venezuela.
01:00:36.000I mean, it seems like it could be the model in a place like Iran potentially if we get a leadership there that's also willing to cooperate.
01:00:44.000I'm skeptical that we're there yet, but obviously that's the hope that this would be the last time we'd have to deal with a bad actor that's sowing terrorism throughout the region.
01:00:54.000But I mean, could you, in theory, not see regime change and still get the ultimate result that we want, which is an end to the conflict, an end to the destruction, an end to the violence, and an end to the terrorism, and then a cooperative potential partner in that region.
01:01:11.000Let's talk about potential positive outcomes in Iran if you don't see regime change.
01:01:17.000Yes, look, of course, this operation was not premised on regime change.
01:01:22.000It was premised on they're building up such a daunting supply of missiles that is shielding a nuclear program.
01:01:31.000Whoever rules Iran cannot have an impenetrable mass of missiles with a nuclear weapons stockpile behind that.
01:01:40.000So if we get a better regime, that would be great.
01:01:43.000But as you said, we might get remnants of the existing regime, but they're so defanged in their ability to project power to support the terrorist proxy groups around the Middle East that they pivot their behavior.
01:01:57.000How are they going to stay in power in their country if they're poorer, if they're not as much of a military power?
01:02:04.000They better start to live a little better lives for their people.
01:02:07.000So we have to degrade their military capacity.
01:02:10.000That is the ultimate job of this mission.
01:02:13.000But achieving that mission may have positive spin-off effects as well.
01:02:17.000So we're told that China gets about 17% of its energy from Venezuela and Iran, right?
01:02:23.000They were getting cut rate prices, black market, sanctioned oil.
01:02:28.000Explain to the audience what this means from an energy standpoint for the CCP and Xi Jinping.
01:02:36.000What are the felt impacts here and what are the long-term impacts?
01:02:40.000Yeah, this is not good news for China.
01:02:42.000Certainly, China has three discount oil suppliers, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia.
01:02:50.000Venezuela is no longer a discount oil supplier to China.
01:02:54.000In fact, most of Venezuela oil flies to the United States because it's cheaper to transport it here.
01:03:05.000They've lost a client state in the Western Hemisphere, as has Russia, and as has Iran.
01:03:10.000So Venezuela is not just good for energy, it's good for geopolitics.
01:03:15.000So we're thrilled with that development.
01:03:18.000I'm sure China is very concerned about the same thing with Iran.
01:03:21.000They've been getting very discounted Iranian crude.
01:03:24.000And at the end of this, again, we don't know who's going to be leading Iran, but it will be a different Iran than going into this.
01:03:32.000And an Iran with massively shrunken military capabilities, massively shrunken ability to terrorize American soldiers in the region, their neighbors, and global oil supplies.
01:03:43.000So yeah, we're changing the calculus for China quite a bit with these two with these two changes in posture with these two nations.
01:04:48.000The second biggest importer of oil in the world after China is India.
01:04:52.000So India was going to shut down some of their refineries, slow their production of gasoline and diesel, which they sell into the global market.
01:04:59.000That pushes up prices for gasoline and diesel, even here in the United States.
01:05:04.000So we said, hey, we're not changing our policy towards Russia, but for 30 days, go ahead and buy that Russian crude that's floating offshore.
01:05:14.000Keep your refineries open, keep your energy production up, and absorb that oil.
01:05:18.000So it's basically trying to replace or bring forward some of these lost barrels that aren't coming out of the straits.
01:05:25.000It is not a change in our policy towards Russia.
01:05:27.000There's a lot of floating Iranian crude off the oceans as well.
01:05:32.000Now, of course, we have no change in policy for Iran as well.
01:05:35.000But if we're short oil and we have pragmatic solutions to bring oil to market, you know, we're looking at all of those things.
01:05:42.000That's about protecting American consumers.
01:06:07.000When will energy prices come back down?
01:06:10.000When will the price of gas come back down?
01:06:13.000What's your message to the American people?
01:06:15.000So American people is, you know, God bless the American troops.
01:06:20.000God bless President Trump's leadership.
01:06:23.000The military progress has been tremendous.
01:06:25.000We are massively degrading their ability, destroying their missile launchers, their missiles themselves, and their fabrication, their factories that build missiles, that build drones, that build all these weapons.
01:06:38.000We're just degrading their ability to rain terror on their own citizens, on the American soldiers, and on the nations in that region.
01:06:46.000And at the end of this, we want to remove Iran's ability, not just to threaten the military destruction they've done, but also their ability to threaten the flow of energy.
01:06:57.000Ultimately, President Trump is doing this to lower the long-term cost of energy because the biggest threat to the flow of energy around the world is Iran, and Iran is going to be defanged.
01:07:08.000So this is short-term pain, long-term gain.
01:07:12.000Secretary Chris Wright at the Department of Energy, I just want people to understand.
01:07:17.000He runs the Department of Energy, but he has more energy than just about anybody I've encountered in recent memory, besides maybe President Trump.
01:07:27.000President Trump might have more energy, but you are an active, creative, energetic force at the Department of Energy.
01:10:13.000And again, we're approaching this as an educational segment.
01:10:17.000We want people to understand Iran better.
01:10:18.000So what do people need to know about the people in the history of Iran better?
01:10:23.000Well, the first thing to understand is the Iranians are an ancient nation, very much aware of themselves as a nation.
01:10:34.000If you look at the Arab world, if you leave aside Egypt, none of the countries in the Arab world are really countries in the old-fashioned sense of the word.
01:10:45.000The Egyptians have always been on their own, and they have a very powerful understanding of who they are.
01:10:52.000The rest of the Arabs are part of Islam, and there's no Syria, there's no Iraq, that's a European creation.
01:13:34.000And he was able to succeed in this because after World War I, the allies that had won that war, the British, the French, the Italians, and so forth, the Greeks, wanted to split up Anatolia among them.
01:15:22.000They didn't have the advantages he had, and they ran into trouble both from the British and the Russians, as I explained, but also from the mullahs, who did not want Turkey to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century.
01:15:44.000So what happens in the 50s and 60s is that the younger of the two Shahs achieves some success by using the Americans to get the British out.
01:15:59.000And arrangements are worked out so that a great deal of the proceeds from the oil that came from Iran ended up in the hands of the government.
01:16:18.000They sent large numbers of Iranian students abroad to study.
01:16:24.000At the time of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, there were 50,000 Iranian students studying in the United States.
01:16:34.000And they were buying a great deal for Iran.
01:16:37.000There were 50,000 Americans living in Tehran, mostly businessmen, selling them weapons and everything you could imagine.
01:16:49.000This attempt to get them rapidly moving into the 20th century upset people.
01:16:55.000A lot of the students who went to the United States were radicalized and came back wanting to throw out the Shah.
01:17:04.000A fair number of them were communists.
01:17:07.000Then there were the rural people who were devout and the mullahs.
01:17:14.000One of the things that the younger Shah did was called the Green Revolution.
01:17:19.000He took land away from the great landowners, including the mullahs, and he distributed it among the peasants of Iran.
01:17:30.000So what builds up gradually is a kind of explosion.
01:17:37.000There are two parties to this explosion.
01:17:40.000On the one hand, there's the religious party led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was a man of cunning, ruthlessness, and eloquence.
01:17:53.000On the other hand, there was a mass of people with no particular direction and no particular leader.
01:18:01.000The people from the leading families in Tehran, the younger people, and the ones who had studied in the United States.
01:18:10.000The consequence is when the crisis came in 1979, Khomeini managed to fool the urban population, this modernizing population, into thinking that they could live with him perfectly well.
01:20:00.000Charlie believed in finding good people and connecting them with other good people that he cared about.
01:20:05.000When someone truly took care of him, Charlie would never hesitate to recommend them.
01:20:09.000Andrew Del Rey and Todd Avakin were two of those people.
01:20:12.000They personally helped Charlie and Erica with their mortgage needs, and Charlie trusted them completely.
01:20:16.000Whether it was a home buyer trying to qualify or someone needing to consolidate debt or see if they could get a lower rate in payments, these were the guys Charlie sent people to.
01:23:41.000You know, it's Erica said that if Charlie was given the choice to undo what happened and come back, he wouldn't, she thought, because of what was unleashed by it.
01:27:46.000We wanted to learn about the history of the region, but check it out because Hillsdale is one of these institutions that makes America so special.
01:27:54.000It preserves, it's like salt, that you preserve these great ideas for another generation.
01:28:01.000So check it out, Charlie for Hillsdale.
01:28:08.000I spent some years in Turkey, 84 to 86, and I went back there in 2002, met a group of Turkish journalists, one Iranian journalist, with them.
01:28:20.000And at that time, there were pro-American demonstrations at soccer games by just people doing it, chanting in favor of America.
01:28:31.000And I thought maybe this is the time the revolution is going to go under.
01:28:36.000And I asked the Iranian journalist, and he said, no, the people who handle security in Iran were graduate students in Eastern Europe in the communist period.