In this episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, host Charlie talks with Rob Axon, the Chairman of the Utah Republican Party, about the efforts of Turning Point USA and their campaign to repeal Prop. 4 in Utah. The show is sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver company.
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 back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:30.000I want to just, you know, celebrate what I would say is a remarkable Herculean effort that was undertaken by you guys in Utah.
00:01:42.000Turning Point Action was honored to help and come alongside and give you guys a little shot in the arm.
00:01:47.000But all I saw for weeks was Utah cannot do this.
00:01:52.000They're not going to get the 200,000 signatures.
00:01:54.000And man, I was not feeling super optimistic, but why don't you give our audience an update on what Prop 4 is and what it took, what you guys have been embarking on the signature drive.
00:02:07.000Yeah, well, first and foremost, a huge shout out and thank you to so many partners across the country and most importantly here in Utah.
00:02:15.000And certainly couldn't do it without Turning Point Action and the help of all of you guys and really the movement that Charlie and so many people have built.
00:02:24.000It's alive and strong here in this country.
00:02:27.000It's certainly alive and strong here in Utah.
00:02:30.000So here's where we were in a nutshell.
00:02:32.000In 2018, Proposition 4 was put onto the ballot.
00:03:01.000I didn't like it, but at least it was constitutional.
00:03:04.000The problem is there's been a lawsuit and it led to a court decision here in Utah 18 months ago by our state Supreme Court that I believe they got wrong, where they gave preeminence to legislate initiative authority over that of our elected representatives, kind of defeating representative democracy.
00:03:22.000Issue two, we had a lower court judge who then, based off of that ruling, threw out our congressional maps and picked a map of her own choosing that came from a private group.
00:03:32.000One that did not go through the commission and more importantly, one that did not comply with Article 9 of Utah's state constitution that says the only body that can draft maps is the state legislature.
00:04:04.000So I lived in California for a while and I've seen a number of these signature drives to get propositions on the ballot.
00:04:13.000Usually you got to get a certain number past the finish line because especially in California, they're going to throw out like a third of your signatures or 20% of your signatures.
00:04:22.000But I want to underscore a point here.
00:05:16.000That's 8% of registered voters here in Utah.
00:05:19.000You then, as was mentioned, you need 8% of registered voters in at least 26 of 29 Senate districts.
00:05:25.000We went and engaged in every single Senate district.
00:05:28.000We went and engaged wherever and everywhere we could.
00:05:32.000And we did it in a consistent way, showcasing the importance of representative government, showcasing the importance of adhering to the Constitution and not stepping back from that obligation.
00:05:42.000The nice thing is we exceeded the numbers necessary by a large margin.
00:05:47.000We've turned in well over 200,000, by tens of thousands, more than 200,000 signatures.
00:05:52.000And so even with those that will be kicked out, I think we are in a phenomenal spot.
00:05:59.000We have this quirk in Utah's law where for the next number of weeks, so just about 45 days from the point that we've submitted it, actually a little bit longer.
00:06:09.000It's the point from when a person's signature is verified, they can have their name removed.
00:06:15.000The problem is the left is spending about $4 million now to come in and try to bully and shame and intimidate people to remove their names.
00:06:25.000The very people who claim that they want to listen to the people are the ones who are right now trying to intimidate and drive people from ever being heard.
00:06:45.000I mean, that's, that's a, so is there an action item that we can give our audience on what they should do or to counter it or just get the word out that people are trying to get, trying to intimidate signatories?
00:07:26.000Let the people of Utah decide this policy, which has been way too chaotic for the last six years, certainly has not been implemented in a way that respects the will of the people back in 2018.
00:07:38.000We're now giving it back to Utah's to decide.
00:07:40.000One other thing that would be a call to action that would be helpful is we are engaging in a messaging campaign to make sure that people realize that they're trying to be fooled by these outside groups.
00:07:51.000And so if any of your listeners are willing to donate, they can go to Utah's for Representative Government's website, which is ufrg.org, and you can donate there.
00:08:01.000And we'll use that to make sure to continue to fight for representative government.
00:08:05.000Yeah, and let's get that URL up on screen, guys, UFRG.
00:08:09.000And I just want to give a quick shout out to what I say.
00:09:18.000This was a chance where people came, rallied to our defense, to our support.
00:09:22.000It was a partnership all along the way.
00:09:24.000And I am grateful for every Utah who signed on to this, every Utah who supported and volunteered, and all of those partners outside of Utah.
00:09:31.000Now, to your question, our four congressional districts, these are districts that represent the will of the people.
00:09:40.000This new map that this judge picked put together and pretty much it's the most gerrymandered, manipulated map in Utah's history.
00:09:47.000She put most of the Democrats into one congressional district.
00:09:50.000And so you go from 13% of Utah's voters being Democrats to now one of our four congressional maps as proposed and to be implemented by this judge is a Kamala Harris plus 28.
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00:11:52.000We are now on to the fact that Jesse Jackson, the Rev. The Rev, the Reverend.
00:12:05.000Yeah, so it's a bit older, but it's worth commenting about because he does represent a, I guess you might say a transitional figure in American politics.
00:12:31.000One of the saddest things about him is he represents one of the most shameful elements of the Democratic Party, which is the way Christian leaders, self-identified Christian clergymen even, sold out on some of the most important issues.
00:12:43.000Because in the 1970s, after Roe versus Wade happened, he condemned it.
00:12:59.000And so people had actually advised his mom to abort him.
00:13:03.000And he's alive because his mom, well, he's now dead, but he lived a life because his mom did not abort him.
00:13:10.000And then by the 1980s, when he decided he was going to run for president in 1984, 1988, he changed his views to align with the Democrat Party platform, which is shameful, actually.
00:13:21.000It was a real tragedy, and other Democrats did the same thing.
00:13:24.000Mario Cuomo, that was the father of the other Cuomos that you're familiar with, he was a pro-life Democrat.
00:13:32.000He was a Catholic Democrat in the 60s, 70s.
00:13:34.000And then he also had national ambitions.
00:13:37.000He also swerved to the left on that, as did other Democrats.
00:13:40.000People may have forgotten, but in the 60s and 70s, it was actually, you might have called it a live issue which party might end up being the pro-life one because Catholics were heavily associated with the Democratic Party, and that was where the pro-life movement was.
00:13:55.000And it's just slowly they were all pushed out of the party, or they were pushed, in Jackson's case, to just change their views on that really critical issue.
00:14:03.000And I'm sad to say that that's one of his chief legacies was enabling that because he was, people, younger people won't realize this, but before Obama, he was probably the most famous black political figure in America, especially on the left.
00:14:17.000And I think if he'd remained firm on that issue, if he had said, we are going to be pro-life and we will not change on that, he could have really reshaped the trajectory of America in a powerfully pro-life Christian way.
00:14:29.000I don't know if you said this before, but he was sort of most famous for marching with Dr. Martin Luther King.
00:14:35.000He was present at his death, and he kind of assumed some of that mantle after King's blood on him famously afterwards.
00:14:45.000And so he used that to, understandably, claim a leadership role in the movement.
00:15:08.000We wanted to make sure because he had some viral moments.
00:15:10.000He would occasionally use interesting stuff.
00:15:12.000Another thing I should mention, by the way, he is the person who popularized African American as a term for black Americans instead of some other.
00:15:19.000Yeah, that was the most common term you heard, I would say, when I was growing up, early 2000s.
00:16:31.000President Trump helped him throughout the years.
00:16:33.000Said, the Reverend Jesse Jackson is dead at 84.
00:16:35.000I knew him well long before becoming president.
00:16:37.000He was a good man with lots of personality, grit, and street smarts.
00:16:40.000He was very gregarious, someone who truly loved people, despite the fact that I am falsely and consistently called a racist by the scoundrels and lunatics on the radical left, Democrats, all.
00:16:50.000It was always my pleasure to help Jesse along the way.
00:16:53.000I provided office space for him and his rainbow coalition for years in the Trump building at 40 Wall Street, responded to his request for help, getting criminal justice reform passed and signed when no other president would even try, single-handedly pushed and passed long-term funding for historically backed colleges and universities, which Jesse loved, but also which other president would not do, other presidents would not do, responded to Jesse's support for opportunity zones, and on and on he goes.
00:17:16.000So President Trump had a long-standing friendship with Jesse Jackson.
00:17:20.000I would say he was a man with a very mixed history, certainly some good with some bad.
00:17:28.000I would say he ended not as well, not as strong.
00:17:31.000I will say I think the period of his peak in American politics is a period where I think the sense was that race relations in America got better rather than worse.
00:18:20.000I would say I think what Charlie would flag the most of all is he really could have been a transformational figure if he'd held the line on the life issue.
00:18:29.000I think, and I think we should all feel sad that he didn't step up to that task.
00:18:35.000I think America would have had a very different 80s, 90s, 2000s.
00:18:39.000We might have, maybe Casey would have been what overturned it instead of Dobbs.
00:18:43.000We might have, frankly, we might have saved millions of lives if he'd been a little more courageous.
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00:20:23.000It had over a million, 1.2 million views.
00:20:25.000So, you were calling your shot in July, and then you went through this big, I guess, just a thread answering everybody's questions about the Epstein files.
00:20:37.000And in it, you say, you could throw it up, guys, and I'll read this a little bit and let you respond.
00:20:41.000Anyone who rapes kids deserves the death penalty.
00:20:52.000Epstein's Rolodex is already public, and the file is largely unreleasable for many reasons, including grand jury materials, court records under seal, child pornography, protection of victims.
00:21:02.000And then you say five, unsubstatuated, even double or triple hearsay, bogus claims.
00:21:07.000Mike, have you seen basically your tweet come true, or has the Transparency Act kind of overridden some of those initial concerns?
00:21:17.000Yeah, I mean, this Transparency Act by Tom Massey and Ro Hanna, whatever the hell his name is, it did not produce the result they thought it would produce because they're morons.
00:21:31.000And we see that they are grandstanders, and they're more concerned about getting clicks and raising money for their congressional campaigns than getting to the truth.
00:21:43.000I would just ask, where was Thomas Massey and Ro Hanna, whatever the hell his name is, where were they for the four years of Biden when Biden was in office?
00:22:00.000They also smeared four good men by saying that those men were implicated in this Epstein mess.
00:22:09.000And instead of acknowledging that they were wrong and apologizing to these four men who they smeared, they've doubled down and tripled down and they've even blamed the Justice Department for their own stupidity.
00:22:24.000So those two members of Congress can go to hell.
00:22:27.000Yeah, and it does strike me if you're if you're a Democrat or an Independent out there that's considered, you know, let's just say conservative.
00:22:34.000If you're a conservative out there considering voting Democrat next year because you don't like the way that the DOJ, Trump's DOJ, or Trump himself has handled the Epstein thing, you have to ask the question.
00:22:47.000They were in power for four years and they did nothing.
00:22:50.000They sat on this until they saw a political opportunity to weaponize it against President Trump because they saw that our people wanted the Epstein files to be more transparent, to be released.
00:23:03.000But your point is very well made that innocent people are getting smeared in this.
00:23:10.000There is, I mean, even Elvis Presley is in the Epstein files.
00:23:15.000But there does seem to be this lack of a smoking gun.
00:23:20.000We had Jay Beecher on, who's a reporter on this.
00:23:22.000He was talking about the fact that it was actually Virginia Guffery who was the one that popularized this idea of this large blackmail ring that he had lists full of people he had compromised on.
00:23:36.000And so I guess the question is, you're well connected to the DOJ.
00:23:40.000There are other co-conspirators named in some of the files like Les Wexner.
00:23:44.000Are you hearing that there are suits being, you know, cases being built against the co-conspirators that did sort of turned a blind eye that enabled him?
00:23:55.000As I've said, if you rape kids, you deserve the death penalty.
00:24:10.000We also have the federal rules of evidence.
00:24:13.000We also have the federal rules of criminal procedure.
00:24:17.000There is a reason that grand jury evidence is secret because it's not tested.
00:24:25.000It's not subject to cross-examination.
00:24:28.000And people can go in and it's one-sided and people can go in and say whatever the hell they want and they're not subject to confrontation, right?
00:24:35.000And so that's why this grand jury evidence is secret.
00:24:39.000You make it public through the federal rules of evidence and the federal rules of criminal procedure through a trial with the proper safeguards to make sure that the evidence is relevant and it's not unfairly prejudicial.
00:24:55.000You're not going to smear people like Thomas Massey did with those four guys and Rohana, his Democrat co-conspirator, did to those four guys who were innocent, right?
00:25:09.000That's the whole reason we have these procedures to protect victims, to protect witnesses, to protect those who are accused.
00:25:21.000We've had these in place for centuries, but we got rid of this because Thomas Massey decided he was going to pass legislation for the first time in his life, conveniently timed to think they're going to try to use it to screw over President Trump and it backfired and blew up in their faces.
00:25:41.000Yeah, it's, yeah, I've, Mike, I've been very, he's controlled.
00:25:50.000I've been skeptical about a lot of the Epstein stuff probably, you know, since this really started to whip up last summer.
00:25:55.000And I think it's very, it's worth emphasizing what you said, where, you know, if you want to bring criminal charges, you need actual alleged specific acts by specific people.
00:26:06.000And I do feel there's been this miasma around it where it's like, why isn't everyone being charged?
00:26:10.000Why aren't there arrests and convictions?
00:26:13.000But as you say, like, considering we have so many alleged victims of all of this, there's been a, strikes me as a huge shortage of anyone stepping up to specifically say, I had this specific crime done to me by this specific person.
00:26:28.000And if you don't have that, what exactly are you going to indict?
00:26:33.000Let me make this other point that I think is important.
00:26:36.000If you want to bring accountability for the lawfare against President Trump, his aides and his allies, then let's not demand that every good person in the Justice Department has to sit through months and months and months of document review on this Epstein BS, because that's what happens.
00:26:54.000The reason we're not seeing accountability on lawfare right now is because Thomas Massey and his Democrat buddies have all the Trump Justice Department people up to their eyeballs in Epstein document review for many months.
00:27:08.000So there are finite resources at the Justice Department, as there should be.
00:27:14.000And we had to focus on Thomas Massey's priorities, his political nonsense, rather than actually holding people accountable for their crimes.
00:27:24.000Yeah, that's a really interesting point, Mike.
00:27:26.000So you have been, you have become famous by being a bulldog.
00:27:35.000You are always on the front foot, on the balls of your feet, and you are moving forward, trying to go after the bad guys, guys on the left, get the right judges, right prosecutors in place.
00:27:46.000What are, yeah, I guess the question sort of, you could take it in either direction.
00:28:21.000She has bigger balls than all the Republican white male attorneys general before her combined.
00:28:28.000And people are constantly attacking her.
00:28:31.000And it seems to align with this Epstein, massey, weirdo crowd that they're constantly attacking her on this stuff.
00:28:39.000And it's distracting and it's diverting resources from the cases that actually matter.
00:28:45.000If Thomas Massey actually cared about Epstein and these victims, where the hell was he for four years of Biden?
00:28:52.000This is obviously a political game by him.
00:28:56.000He's teaming up with Democrats on this political game.
00:29:00.000All these Epstein freaks keep attacking Pam Bondi, who's doing a remarkable job given the terrible circumstances.
00:29:08.000And they want to make her job more difficult by diverting prosecutors and law enforcement agents to do this stupid Epstein review instead of actually going after crimes they can prosecute.
00:29:41.000You have Somali pirates stealing billions of dollars and sending it back to their warlords in Somalia to fight Americans in American interest.
00:29:51.000Of course they're going to get prosecuted.
00:29:53.000It takes time to gather the evidence and build these cases.
00:29:57.000Well, Mike, I'm going to have to just disagree with you that I think there is some more there with the Epstein stuff.
00:30:31.000If we didn't, do you think, do we really think if Democrats had evidence that Trump was implicated in the Epstein thing, do you think they would have sat on that for eight years when they made up charges against Trump for eight years?
00:32:27.000This is a history 123 class at Harvard.
00:32:31.000The course, and this is directly from the course description online.
00:32:35.000This course trains and support teams of undergraduates to contribute research and writing for asylum applicants represented by attorneys at Mabel Center for Immigration Justice.
00:32:46.000This course operates on four parallel tracks, blah, So this is a history department.
00:32:51.000This is a history class at one of the nation's supposed elite higher education institutions training young, susceptible, you know, vulnerable college undergrads on how to write asylum cases for illegal immigrants.
00:34:02.000Why is it as a country which is $35 trillion in debt, we continue to finance universities that hate us?
00:34:09.000And what good actually is Harvard University going to keep on doing with our taxpayer funding?
00:34:14.000The garbage and the nonsense that is being spewed out of Harvard, out of Princeton, out of Yale, out of Brown University, out of Cornell is noticeable and it's remarkable.
00:34:27.000It's really worth asking, has Harvard just become a Democrat think tank?
00:34:32.000And if they are, why are they a taxpayer-funded entity?
00:34:36.000I noticed he didn't mention Dartmouth, your Oma Motor.
00:34:38.000Yeah, you know, you would have some kindness there.
00:34:41.000But no, and it's like I want to flag that.
00:34:44.000I want to hit Berkeley, but I also am going to double back to Harvard, so make sure they do that.
00:34:47.000But there's a lot of classes like this.
00:34:49.000UC Berkeley is another distinguished school of higher learning.
00:34:53.000And this one's a public university, too, so we should note that.
00:34:57.000And this is a story that happened in late January, but it's worth highlighting.
00:35:01.000This is a headline on them.us, which is a great website name, I must say.
00:35:07.000Berkeley students make 300,000 Wikipedia edits to preserve queer history against Trump.
00:35:15.000And this is apparently a quite long ongoing thing, but a professor just drafted her students to write Sections on Wikipedia that include queer theory, but I have critical race theory.
00:35:30.000I have to ask this question because I've seen it repeated multiple times, right?
00:35:34.000You've got the Olympian that's talking about, oh, it's really hard for the LGBTQ community now that Trump's in office.
00:36:10.000Stop acting like you're being persecuted like Christians are being persecuted, actually.
00:36:15.000This is the most obscene thing to me ever.
00:36:18.000What are they preserving in the era of Trump?
00:36:20.000What queer Wikipedia articles need to be preserved because President Trump is coming after them?
00:36:26.000Yeah, it's a perceived victimhood garbage narrative that I completely and utterly reject.
00:36:32.000Professor Maria Rodriguez, as AOC might pronounce it, she's had her students create 300,000 edits, over 3,000 citations, and they've garnered over 96 million views.
00:36:42.000And I think if you've been to Wikipedia in recent history, you actually can kind of tell.
00:36:46.000Like, I've talked to a lot of people and they can tell.
00:36:59.000But I want to double back to Harvard on this specific point because another thing I saw today, we have to just be aware.
00:37:06.000Colleges are not, you know, we've talked about whether there's a vibe shift against woke and there's certain initial stuff.
00:37:12.000The Trump administration bullied Harvard and Columbia and a few of these other schools on a few things, but they're clearly not on our side at all.
00:37:20.000A lot of them are hoping they can wait it out.
00:37:22.000And there's been a lot of radicalization even over the past few months where they're getting whipped up again, just like they did in 2017, 2018, because of ICE activities.
00:37:32.000And we have to realize this is, frankly, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hold some of these universities to account.
00:37:38.000So, for example, Harvard is subject to the Supreme Court's ruling in Students for Fair Admission versus Harvard, which said, okay, you can't racially discriminate against Asians and white people any more than you can discriminate against other races.
00:37:50.000Well, since then, we have the numbers on Harvard's demographics, and the evidence suggests basically what they did is they stopped discriminating against Asians, but they still discriminate against whites.
00:37:59.000So if Harvard is going to be creating entire classes where your sole purpose is to undermine the nation's laws by feeding more illegal immigrants into this country and preventing their deportation, how about we take the DOJ and if we need to, hire more lawyers there?
00:38:13.000We should 100% do that and go look at Harvard and say, yeah, Harvard, you seem to still be discriminating against people.
00:38:19.000So, you know, your money is going to be subject to some retention here until we get this resolved.
00:38:24.000Yeah, well, and I think we should tax the endowments.
00:38:26.000If you have over, let's say, but we don't need to pass anything to investigate them or prosecute you.
00:38:31.000But if you have over like $10 billion in an endowment, you should just start taxing it.