The Charlie Kirk Show - Pete Hegseth vs. The Democrats, Again

00:00:03.000 My name is Charlie Kirk.

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00:01:09.000 All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:11.000 It is Tuesday, December 2nd.

00:01:14.000 Joined here in studio by Blake Neff.

00:01:17.000 I am Andrew Colvett, executive producer of this show.

00:01:20.000 Lots of news this morning.

00:01:22.000 There was a big Pentagon briefing, which I think made more news because of who was covering it.

00:01:27.000 Our friend Jack Pesobic was in the room, James O'Keefe, many others, because of the new media, I guess, guidelines where the legacy media self-deported themselves from the Pentagon.

00:01:40.000 So there was a briefing this morning.

00:01:42.000 Jack Pesobic notably asked if they were considering a court-martial for Senator Mark Kelly.

00:01:48.000 The answer was everything is on the table.

00:01:51.000 And that is sort of linked to some of the main coverage that we're going to get into here this morning.

00:01:56.000 There is news that there is a, well, it's about 10 days old.

00:02:01.000 USS Ford has been in the waters in the Caribbean outside of Venezuela.

00:02:05.000 There is concern, I think, in Maduro's inner circle that the U.S. is about to potentially oust him from power within Venezuela.

00:02:14.000 Meanwhile, you have the Venezuelan cartel, narco-trafficking boats, that have caused a huge controversy, namely with Pete Hegseth.

00:02:22.000 It seems as if, Blake, that there is a growing, I would say op, but they are coordinating their efforts, Democrats are, to hopefully get rid of Pete Hegseth in their hope, not my hope, to get rid of Pete Hegseth.

00:02:35.000 I think that effort will fail.

00:02:37.000 But describe this dynamic of what's going on right now with Pete Hegseth.

00:02:41.000 Well, what's interesting is, so we discussed this yesterday.

00:02:44.000 What happened is there in September, this was reported by the Washington Post, that in September, they've been doing these strikes on drug boats coming from Latin America towards the United States.

00:02:56.000 I should say, alleged gunboats or drug boats.

00:02:58.000 And that in September, they identified one of these.

00:03:01.000 They told Hegseth about it because he's the one who has to approve strikes. 0.68

00:03:05.000 And that, according to the Washington Post, he not merely approved a strike, but said basically kill them all in some way.

00:03:12.000 And so they struck the boat, it sinks and breaks apart, but when they're observing it afterwards, they see that some people on the boat are alive and clinging to wreckage, and rather than leave them there or rescue them and arrest them or whatever you would do, they drop another strike on them.

00:03:27.000 Yeah, and we have image 208 here.

00:03:29.000 This is from the New York Times.

00:03:30.000 So that original story, the double-tap story that they're alleging is a war crime, was reported by the Washington Post.

00:03:37.000 Now, the New York Times has issued a follow-up reporting that reads, that basically is a giant rebuttal to it.

00:03:45.000 New York Times says, according to five U.S. officials who spoke separately and on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters that are under investigation, Mr. Hegseth, head of the September 2 attack, ordered a strike that would kill the people on the boat and destroy the vessel and its purported cargo of drugs.

00:04:02.000 But each official said Mr. Hegseth's directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile turned out not to fully accomplish all of those things.

00:04:12.000 And the officials said his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast.

00:04:19.000 Admiral Bradley, the other character in this saga, ordered the initial missile strike and then several follow-up strikes that killed the initial survivors and sank the disabled boat.

00:04:28.000 As that operation unfolded, they said Mr. Hegseth did not give any further orders to him.

00:04:34.000 So this is a direct rebuttal to the original story, which suggested that Pete Hegseth was sort of in the room pulling the levers, ordering the strikes, a follow-up double tap, as you call it, to kill survivors.

00:04:47.000 Now, the New York Times is saying there was an initial directive that it should be a lethal strike, and then Admiral Bradley was the one who was actually directing those.

00:04:56.000 Now, Pete Hegseth has come out and said Admiral Bradley has 100% of his support, that he stands by him, that America's lucky to have somebody of his stature and ability in the position that he's in.

00:05:08.000 But this is all part of a broader effort by Democrats to now go after.

00:05:13.000 So what's interesting here is what some have speculated on, and I don't know if we'll learn more about this, but what's really crazy is this all happened just in the days after we had that very strange video they drop where they're sort of implying you might get illegal orders, not saying anything in particular.

00:05:30.000 And they're very evasive when they're confronted about it.

00:05:33.000 They are going on TV and saying, you know, I don't know of any specific illegal orders, but we're just, you know, hypothetically, if hypothetically anything were to occur.

00:05:42.000 And they're taking that pose, and suddenly this drops.

00:05:45.000 And these people in this U.S. senators are not, and lawmakers are not unaware of what is going on.

00:05:50.000 They have contacts with reporters, especially friendly reporters.

00:05:54.000 And one of them, Slotkin, like a CIA veteran and such.

00:05:58.000 And so they, it seems very possible they may have known this story was coming.

00:06:05.000 And they were essentially, it was all a process to seed this story to talk about, oh, illegal orders, you know, possibly.

00:06:14.000 And then bam, here's this Washington post story saying there's illegal orders.

00:06:18.000 And now they've got their preferred framing.

00:06:21.000 And, you know, you could say this is an attempt to bring down Hegseth, but it's much more than that.

00:06:26.000 It's an attempt to bring down the administration because they don't want Hegseth's scalp here and just, oh, you slot in a new guy.

00:06:33.000 What they want, they actually want that whole defy orders thing. 1.00

00:06:36.000 They want to delegitimize and break down the apparatus of government for this administration.

00:06:41.000 Because if they can't, you know, if the National Guard just starts defying the president, you're at a constitutional crisis point where the administration can crumble.

00:06:51.000 Well, and it's important to know.

00:06:53.000 First of all, I completely agree.

00:06:54.000 I believe this was coordinated.

00:06:56.000 This is an orchestrated op, and it's a PR op.

00:07:00.000 It's also deadly serious because we'll play this clip in just a bit.

00:07:05.000 But, you know, Senator Eric Schmidt is basically saying that this has all the Hallmarks of a color revolution of seeding the ground for that.

00:07:12.000 And then what was interesting as this story has played out is I kept expecting because they got caught with egg on their face.

00:07:19.000 They've admitted that they're not alleging anything has been illegal thus far necessarily, but then they will allude to these drug boat strikes, right?

00:07:27.000 So then I kept watching and expecting them to fall back and say, well, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

00:07:32.000 And Mark Kelly and Slotkin and some of the others have gone on a full tour of PR.

00:07:38.000 I mean, they're hitting CNN, MSNBC, writing op-eds, doing social media videos.

00:07:42.000 And that was, I think, the tell is that they keep diving in, drilling the story deeper and deeper and deeper.

00:07:47.000 And then you have Mark Kelly yesterday, who gives a whole press conference, which was just wild.

00:07:53.000 He alleges that Trump was trying, his threatened to kill him.

00:07:57.000 But then when pressed, he was forced to admit that, you know, he wasn't actually speaking about any specific thing.

00:08:02.000 192.

00:08:04.000 Based on who this president is and who this Secretary of Defense is, is, and specifically, things that the president has said in the past and things he was talking about doing in the future.

00:08:18.000 So we were looking forward to try to head something off at the path that could have been really, really bad.

00:08:27.000 So it wasn't about this specific thing.

00:08:30.000 It wasn't about this specific thing.

00:08:32.000 And I just want to make one other point really clear.

00:08:34.000 And I tweeted about this yesterday.

00:08:36.000 No one threatened to kill Senator Mark Kelly.

00:08:40.000 Telling the military to refuse orders is the controversy.

00:08:45.000 They started it.

00:08:46.000 Mark Kelly and Elisa Slotkin and all these, they were the ones that started it with their insane video.

00:08:51.000 What the president was doing was simply pointing out the seriousness of seditious behavior.

00:08:57.000 He was pointing to the fact that, yeah, if you are guilty of these things, one of the punishments is the death penalty.

00:09:05.000 That's just a fact.

00:09:06.000 And the White House even later confirmed that President Trump was not calling for him to be killed.

00:09:12.000 He was pointing out that this was a serious offense.

00:09:14.000 Mark Kelly has spent years in uniform.

00:09:16.000 He knows full well that calling mass refusal of military orders is illegal.

00:09:22.000 It reminds me of the start of the first Trump administration, where it would be something and they would just, there was like, you know, the Trump administration, like when Flynn was, you know, possibly talks to the Russian ambassador.

00:09:33.000 And they're like, oh, well, he maybe implied a diplomatic concession here.

00:09:37.000 My gosh, the Logan Act.

00:09:39.000 The Logan Act.

00:09:40.000 That carries infinity years in prison in the maximum penalty.

00:09:43.000 No, exactly.

00:09:44.000 The press does this all the time.

00:09:45.000 Someone gets charged with something with a maximum of 800 years.

00:09:49.000 Yeah, and then they get like an administrative slap on the wrist or something.

00:09:52.000 But this is what drives me nuts: he is playing the victim.

00:09:58.000 And why?

00:09:59.000 Simply because the chain of command is being reasserted by those who are actually in charge, those who actually have power, namely Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, and the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief.

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00:11:38.000 I know I already brought up the New York Times once today, and I'm loath to do it a second time, but they do have a new article out saying, and it's titled Rotating Beds and Cell Phones, Maduro's Plan to Outlast Trump.

00:11:50.000 President Trump's threat of military action has confronted President Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela with the gravest challenge of his crisis-ridden reign yet.

00:11:59.000 And so basically, the story goes on to report that he's upped his personal security with a bunch of Cuban guns for hire, that his personal security has been ramped up, but he's trying to save face in public by acting like everything's fine.

00:12:14.000 He's doing TikTok videos of him crashing a wedding and dancing with people and all kinds of stuff.

00:12:19.000 So he's trying to put on a strong and a brave face.

00:12:22.000 However, behind the scenes, he's terrified that President Trump is about to oust him from power, which brings up a whole larger conversation, geopolitical in nature, about should we be meddling in Venezuela at all?

00:12:38.000 I certainly don't think Charlie would be enthusiastic.

00:12:41.000 I don't think so either.

00:12:42.000 I think we've been through this pattern.

00:12:46.000 I will admit, I suspect toppling Venezuela would be not as bad as toppling Libya or Afghanistan. 0.85

00:12:56.000 Latin Americans don't have quite the same history as Middle Easterners of doing insane terrorism, suicide terrorism, you know, for the nihilistic love of it. 1.00

00:13:06.000 They don't have radical Islam.

00:13:08.000 All of those are in play.

00:13:09.000 There's more of a legit opposition movement in Venezuela.

00:13:12.000 All of those things I think would make it easier and less damaging.

00:13:15.000 But I think at the same time, we've just seen this bill of goods before of it'll be really easy, in and out, in and out in five minutes.

00:13:22.000 It'll be really cheap, really easy.

00:13:24.000 And how often has that really played out?

00:13:27.000 Even in wars we've won, it hasn't necessarily played out the way we expected.

00:13:31.000 Yeah, well, and you've got to imagine that they have, there's been behind the scenes discussions.

00:13:37.000 We know for a fact that President Trump and Nicholas Maduro have spoken, Maduro being the dictator of Venezuela.

00:13:45.000 And the interesting part here is you've got Maria Karina Machado, who's the opposition leader. 0.97

00:13:50.000 Now, remember when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, she dedicated it to President Trump.

00:13:56.000 She certainly knows how to make a sell. 1.00

00:13:58.000 Yeah, so you have to imagine that there was optics involved there.

00:14:02.000 There was a strategy involved from her perspective.

00:14:04.000 Now, a lot of international watchdogs suggest that she actually won the election and that Nicholas Maduro stole it, which does seem to be true.

00:14:13.000 And so you do kind of wonder, are there underlying realities on the ground in Venezuela that would sort of seem to your point that would seem to suggest that if Maduro was taken out of power, that there would be a nucleus of power and influence within that country that could assume power in a more constructive way.

00:14:32.000 Now, here's the thing.

00:14:34.000 I mean, I totally agree with you.

00:14:35.000 I think Charlie would be against this because, listen, we have domestic issues that we need to address head on.

00:14:42.000 Now, here's the argument for this.

00:14:45.000 Now, I think that the admin is playing a little bit of 3D chess.

00:14:49.000 I do.

00:14:49.000 And I don't mean to, I know that we use that expression and it's cliche, but I do think that under the President Trump's administration, we have seen a reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, right?

00:15:00.000 This Western Hemisphere-centric foreign policy where, hey, we're going to take back control of the Panama Canal.

00:15:07.000 We're going to strike key alliances with people like Bukele in El Salvador.

00:15:13.000 We're going to reassert dominance within South America, right? 0.98

00:15:18.000 And our Malay friendship that we've struck up, the leader of Argentina.

00:15:25.000 So you do sort of see the makings of this.

00:15:27.000 Now, the other piece I will say is that Venezuela and Cuba work hand in hand.

00:15:31.000 You see this, the fact that Cuban guards are now part of the private security detail for Nicolas Maduro.

00:15:37.000 You see it with the sharing of intelligence.

00:15:39.000 Now, people don't know this, but the Cuban intelligence is one of the most formidable in the world. 0.98

00:15:44.000 Basically, they have no exports.

00:15:46.000 They have no goods besides, you know, cigars.

00:15:48.000 They used to keep sugar.

00:15:49.000 A crazy thing, something like 20% of Cuba's population has apparently left since about 2019.

00:15:54.000 Really?

00:15:55.000 It's a really messed up country, more so than people realize.

00:15:58.000 I think you're right.

00:15:59.000 But one of their exports that they sell to places like Venezuela is intelligence.

00:16:04.000 So they've infiltrated in a lot of places within the lower 48.

00:16:09.000 They know stuff that Venezuela wants to pay for, right?

00:16:11.000 And other places.

00:16:12.000 So that's another piece, a dynamic here: that if you do topple Venezuela, if you do, if you Maduro and you put in this Maria Carina Machado, you get two regime changes.

00:16:22.000 You get two regime changes, which probably will not blow up in our faces at all because we've learned our lesson.

00:16:28.000 I just, I actually kind of don't think that that's what they're going for.

00:16:31.000 I think President Trump is trying to do the carrot and the stick.

00:16:35.000 He's saber-rattling to get Nicholas Maduro to leave on his own.

00:16:38.000 I liked the idea of just give him $500 million and he can go live wherever.

00:16:43.000 And what stinks is we'd have more credibility on that if we'd stuck to our guns with Gaddafi instead. 0.75

00:16:50.000 There is a trustworthy actress in the past.

00:16:50.000 Yeah.

00:16:53.000 There's a reason not to trust our foreign policy promises.

00:16:59.000 Right now, in war-torn Ukraine, elderly Jews like Maria face a brutal winter and a constant search for food.

00:17:06.000 Maria is 85 years old and lives alone.

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00:17:15.000 Maria still lives in her childhood home.

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00:17:21.000 Today, like yesterday, Maria barely has enough food to survive. 1.00

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00:18:01.000 Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles Show.

00:18:03.000 Welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show, my friend.

00:18:05.000 Good to see you.

00:18:06.000 What's going on, man?

00:18:06.000 Good to be here.

00:18:07.000 I'm not going to ask you about Catholicism.

00:18:10.000 I think we should.

00:18:12.000 We should have a rate the Pope after six months.

00:18:14.000 Oh, wait, you never asked me about it on text.

00:18:17.000 You ever want to talk about it?

00:18:17.000 That's all I want to talk about.

00:18:19.000 No, we can.

00:18:19.000 Okay, Blake's going to ask you to grade the Pope in just a few minutes here after his first visit.

00:18:24.000 I was carrying baseball bats on planes.

00:18:26.000 There was an iceball fan.

00:18:28.000 There was an iceball fiasco.

00:18:30.000 Yes.

00:18:31.000 Okay, so this is actually where we're going to start.

00:18:33.000 I want you to sort of make sense of our political moment that we find ourselves in.

00:18:37.000 There is all this consternation about Venezuela, about Pete Hegseth, and, you know, were these war crimes?

00:18:43.000 Was there a double tap?

00:18:44.000 The New York Times seems to suggest it's not.

00:18:47.000 It does have this feeling of a messaging op.

00:18:52.000 Sort of, they roll out this suspicious video, the seditious six, as they're being labeled.

00:18:58.000 And then all of a sudden, we get this whole inquiry into the Venezuelan cartel narco-trafficking strikes.

00:19:06.000 What do you make of this moment?

00:19:08.000 Why are they so fixated on Pete Hegseth?

00:19:11.000 They've been going after Pete Hegseth since before the guy was confirmed.

00:19:15.000 I mean, let's not forget this.

00:19:16.000 You know, a lot of us know Pete, not just people who are friends with Pete, but who have watched Pete every morning on Fox News.

00:19:22.000 And, you know, he's been a public figure for a long time.

00:19:24.000 And more than any other member of this cabinet, the Democrats seemed absolutely devoted to torpedoing him before he came in as Secretary of War.

00:19:35.000 And so to me, if I didn't know anything else about Venezuela, Iran, anything about the military, if all I knew is that this guy was the chief target in the cabinet for the Democrats, I would be defending him wholeheartedly.

00:19:48.000 Now, on top of that, you've had a very, very effective military strategy under Trump.

00:19:53.000 Recruitment way up, getting a lot of the woke out in terms of the policy of the military itself.

00:19:58.000 Then obviously very, very successful military operations in the Middle East.

00:20:01.000 Now we're looking at operations in Latin America.

00:20:04.000 So I think he's doing a very good job generally.

00:20:06.000 But I just take it simply on a rule of thumb.

00:20:09.000 If he's the guy they want to take out, he's probably the guy I'm going to be defending.

00:20:13.000 Yeah, that's exactly been my posture as well.

00:20:15.000 It's like we must be over the mark here with Secretary Hegseth because they want to get him out so badly.

00:20:21.000 But this is part of this larger, there's two, basically, at this point, we diverge in a wood, right?

00:20:27.000 There's two main through lines, narratives that are going on right now.

00:20:30.000 There is this, we had the National Guard attack, the ambush by an Afghan refugee, and that brings up this whole foreign policy conversation in and of itself.

00:20:39.000 But then, meanwhile, there's all this intrigue around Venezuela.

00:20:42.000 Are we going to strike?

00:20:43.000 Are we going to, you know, we're moving carriers into the region?

00:20:46.000 And MAGA and the base typically has been postured in a way that says we don't want to get involved in any more foreign entanglements.

00:20:54.000 We don't want blood and death overseas.

00:20:57.000 We want to focus domestically.

00:20:58.000 What would you like to see play out in the next days and weeks ahead when it comes to Venezuela specifically?

00:21:06.000 And then we'll get into our own immigration debate that we're also having.

00:21:10.000 Yeah, I love the way you put it, Andrew, because it's kind of a confounding issue for MAGA.

00:21:14.000 If the question were about some never-ending regime change war in the Middle East or Africa or something, I think MAGA would be unified, say, we don't want that at all.

00:21:24.000 However, this is a little different because this is much closer to home.

00:21:28.000 The Monroe Doctrine, which says America runs the Western Hemisphere, has been our official policy since 1823.

00:21:35.000 This involves a direct threat to Americans, which is all the drugs that are coming largely from Venezuela and specifically to foreign terrorist organizations that are associated with the regime, kills over 75,000 Americans a year.

00:21:47.000 It also involves hard resources.

00:21:49.000 One of the funniest things about President Trump's foreign policy is how open he is.

00:21:53.000 He says, you know, we didn't go to war for oil in Iraq, but we at least should have gotten the oil.

00:21:57.000 You know, natural resources really do matter.

00:21:59.000 And, you know, this is our hemisphere.

00:22:00.000 So I think it's a little dicier on what Americans are thinking about it.

00:22:05.000 Look, the ideal scenario is you completely destroy the narco-terrorists. 1.00

00:22:09.000 You wage a real war on drugs, meaning you blow up all the guys who are smuggling the drugs in and killing American kids.

00:22:15.000 You take a hostile dictator who is partnering up with a lot of our enemies and you replace him with someone who's maybe a little friendlier to us.

00:22:23.000 And maybe that also helps the energy market too.

00:22:26.000 That's what everyone wants in the ideal.

00:22:28.000 The question is, can they pull this kind of thing off?

00:22:32.000 I think they're going to get a lot more grace from the base in terms of actions in Latin America.

00:22:37.000 The only question is, does the military, CIA, whatever, the U.S. government, do we have a serious plan in place to replace Maduro if they actually want regime change?

00:22:47.000 Because there's two views of the CIA.

00:22:49.000 One is James Bond, Jason Bourne.

00:22:51.000 You know, they control everything.

00:22:52.000 They're super efficient.

00:22:53.000 The other one is burn after reading.

00:22:55.000 Everything the CIA tries to do turns to ash and gets worse.

00:22:59.000 And those are, that's the debate right now.

00:23:01.000 What is really going on here?

00:23:03.000 All I will say on this is I favor a much more restrained foreign policy that is much closer to home, that involves much more direct American interests.

00:23:11.000 All I will say with Trump is he has the most effective foreign policy of my lifetime, probably including George H.W. Bush.

00:23:18.000 And so I'm willing to give the guy a little bit more grace here because he just hasn't bungled it all up like Clinton did, like George W. Bush did, and certainly like Obama and Biden did.

00:23:28.000 What strikes me as another factor in this is: well, we've had a lot of people come from Venezuela.

00:23:34.000 That drove a lot of the migration pressure in all the way back to Obama's administration into the first Trump, into Biden.

00:23:41.000 And I think defenders of this would justify this, that if we topple this regime, it actually might help our migration issue.

00:23:47.000 A lot of Venezuelans might go home, if you're correct, and it took down Cuba as well.

00:23:52.000 Some Cubans might go home, although Cubans have mostly integrated great.

00:23:56.000 But I feel like a lot of our other interventions have done the exact opposite.

00:24:00.000 20 years in Afghanistan, we have to fight them over there so we don't fight them over here. 1.00

00:24:04.000 And in fact, we are fighting them two blocks from the White House now.

00:24:07.000 And it strikes me as a reasonable worry.

00:24:11.000 Does another intervention in Latin America somehow have this side effect where we just have illegal immigrants massing at the border again?

00:24:18.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that's the key worry that I have, actually.

00:24:24.000 Are we going to spark another humanitarian disaster where we see massive flows of migrants from South America and Cuba specifically?

00:24:30.000 A lot of people look at Cuba and Venezuela together.

00:24:33.000 There's a New York Times story this morning, Michael, that suggests that Maduro now has augmented his private security detail with a bunch of Cubans, Cuban soldiers that have come in.

00:24:43.000 Perhaps because he doesn't trust his own Venezuelans to have his back. 0.95

00:24:47.000 But there is a very direct connection between Venezuela and Cuba.

00:24:51.000 They are basically conjoined at the hip here.

00:24:55.000 And so the question is: would we get a mass exodus of people from this region?

00:24:59.000 I tend to not think so.

00:25:01.000 I do tend to think that a lot of that migration has already happened.

00:25:04.000 And we also have President Trump in office who's going to block a lot of it.

00:25:08.000 If we had a Democrat in the White House, we would see a lot more of that. 0.92

00:25:12.000 The question is, does it meet the standard that Knowles is talking about of the Monroe Doctrine?

00:25:17.000 Is it close enough to home?

00:25:18.000 Will the base react to it?

00:25:19.000 Will they reject it?

00:25:20.000 That's, I think, namely, we have a political.

00:25:22.000 I'll remind you: the Monroe Doctrine was not just we dominate every country in the Western Hemisphere.

00:25:26.000 It was keeping foreigners, Europeans at the time, and I imagine you could count Chinese today, and Russia, of course, out of the hemisphere, not influencing it.

00:25:37.000 Yeah, well, you saw this in Panama, right?

00:25:39.000 The Panama Canal.

00:25:40.000 President Trump goes in and reasserts U.S. dominance over the canal, which was being taken over by China, actually.

00:25:46.000 And so we were getting treated very poorly in the canal.

00:25:49.000 So let's switch our attention here, Michael.

00:25:52.000 We're kind of doing hopscotch here on topics.

00:25:55.000 But the other main story is the president and now Christy Noam, Pam Bondi, coming down hard on third world migration. 0.64

00:26:04.000 Now, I made a prediction that this was going to be President Trump's most popular policy plank yet.

00:26:11.000 And I mean, including the wall, including the southern border.

00:26:14.000 And we had Rich Barris on yesterday, who seems he's doing polling on this.

00:26:18.000 And the initial results seem to indicate that this is, in fact, very, very appealing with the base.

00:26:23.000 So you've got these confluence of two different stories.

00:26:26.000 Foreign policy, which is always a snake pit full of vipers, full of surprises, full of backlash for the president and the administration.

00:26:34.000 And you've got his hardline immigration stance.

00:26:36.000 Can these two coexist?

00:26:37.000 Will the base be able to make sense of it?

00:26:40.000 Yeah, I think so.

00:26:41.000 Obviously, it's going to be very popular because this issue has two things that really combine to make a great winning political issue.

00:26:51.000 It's something that everyone agrees on and something that everyone feels like they can't say.

00:26:57.000 So everyone thinks on immigration that you have to be for all of it or against all of it or make no distinctions whatsoever. 0.93

00:27:04.000 And obviously that's ridiculous.

00:27:05.000 You mentioned the Cubans earlier. 0.96

00:27:07.000 Cubans tend to assimilate.

00:27:10.000 They're quite patriotic.

00:27:11.000 They play baseball.

00:27:12.000 They vote Republican.

00:27:13.000 You know, when we're talking about Latin American immigration, the Cubans, they're all right. 0.99

00:27:17.000 I like the Cubans, okay? 0.99

00:27:19.000 Other immigrant groups, less so.

00:27:22.000 In America, we used to severely restrict immigration, and we would have some immigration from, I don't know, say England.

00:27:28.000 Then we started taking German migrants in the 19th century.

00:27:31.000 And, you know, it was a little harder to assimilate German migrants, but it was okay. 1.00

00:27:35.000 Then we took some of the swarthy Italians from North Africa, basically. 0.95

00:27:40.000 Basically worked out other than the Pelosis of the world, but it was a little harder still to assimilate them. 0.89

00:27:46.000 Now you look at third world immigration, post-1965, heart seller, and you have to ask yourself, what do Somalis add to America? 1.00

00:27:56.000 And that's the naughty question that nobody wants to ask.

00:27:59.000 But it's a very serious question because the point of immigration is to make our country better.

00:28:04.000 And if people are unassimilable, radically different cultures, different religions, different habits, different everything, I think we have the right to say no thanks.

00:28:14.000 You know, we have an obligation to our own citizens.

00:28:17.000 Everyone knows this.

00:28:18.000 Everyone feels like they can't say it.

00:28:20.000 And so if Trump is the one who's going to finally articulate it, it's going to be a winner.

00:28:24.000 Yeah, I think you're right.

00:28:25.000 I think that point you made about it's the thing that we all feel and think and see, but we're not allowed to say it out loud.

00:28:31.000 I mean, we say it out loud on this show all the time, and you probably do as well, Mark.

00:28:34.000 But like for normie Americans, this is sort of like, you know, it's uncouth.

00:28:39.000 It's not polite to say these things out loud, but we have to get courage.

00:28:43.000 We have to get a backbone, start standing up for what we all know to be true.

00:28:47.000 We want to live in an America that feels like America again, that feels like the country that we grew up in.

00:28:53.000 And it simply more and more does not.

00:28:56.000 And there's a reason for that.

00:28:57.000 It's because we have had a completely catastrophic immigration platform for years. 1.00

00:29:04.000 Thanksgiving holds so many memories.

00:29:07.000 And I'm sure it's the same for you.

00:29:09.000 Right now, there's a girl finding out she's pregnant. 1.00

00:29:11.000 In the next couple of weeks, she's going to make a decision.

00:29:14.000 And whatever decision she makes will become her memory of this Thanksgiving for the rest of her life.

00:29:19.000 What will she be thankful for a year from now?

00:29:22.000 She'll be thankful that you introduced her to her baby by providing a free ultrasound. 0.92

00:29:22.000 You. 0.92

00:29:27.000 And she'll be thankful that she chose life as she prepares for her baby's first Thanksgiving.

00:29:33.000 Take a stand for life by providing an ultrasound with pre-born. 0.60

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00:29:56.000 Call 833-850-2229 or click on the pre-born banner at charliekirk.com today.

00:30:06.000 Michael Knowles is with us, who is, I believe you hail from the state of Tennessee, Michael, now these days.

00:30:14.000 I would be remiss if I didn't mention Tennessee 7th, the special election today, which is Matt Van Epps, the Republican, running against Afton Ben, who's basically a raging communist, feminist, like unhinged lady, actually, it seems like.

00:30:31.000 So get out and vote.

00:30:32.000 If you find yourselves in Michael Knowles' area of the world, please, please, please vote.

00:30:37.000 I don't know if you want to add anything to that, Knowles, but the floor is yours.

00:30:41.000 I do.

00:30:42.000 One, to reiterate, you got to go out and vote.

00:30:44.000 This woman has her ads blasted everywhere. 1.00

00:30:47.000 She's run a pretty good campaign. 1.00

00:30:48.000 She is cartoonishly on a platform of hating Nashville and the people in it and like everything that makes America great.

00:30:57.000 And she might win.

00:30:58.000 It is a complete deadheat race right now.

00:31:01.000 The margin of error is four points and it's a two-point race.

00:31:03.000 This should not be a two-point race.

00:31:05.000 If things go south here, not only will it be bad for this district around Nashville, this could mean a bloodbath in the midterms.

00:31:13.000 Go out there, vote, vote early, vote often.

00:31:16.000 You know what to do.

00:31:17.000 You know what to do.

00:31:18.000 Get out there and vote.

00:31:19.000 Help save the Republic.

00:31:21.000 Blake, you're Catholic.

00:31:23.000 Michael's Catholic.

00:31:25.000 I'm not.

00:31:26.000 I'm going to let you guys take this one.

00:31:27.000 Yeah, I guess I was thinking we were...

00:31:30.000 We thought it's been about six months since we got Pope Leo, the first American Pope.

00:31:34.000 And I feel overall, we don't hear as much about that as I would have initially thought.

00:31:40.000 I would have thought that there would be a lot more attention on him.

00:31:43.000 And yet, it seems, if anything, he's less famous than Pope Francis, even in the United States.

00:31:48.000 He has popped up a few times.

00:31:50.000 He's been, he's certainly said stuff we find annoying on some of the migration, immigration issues.

00:31:57.000 He's occasionally had some friction with Vice President Vance, of course, since the Vice President is Catholic as well.

00:32:04.000 But yeah, I guess I would throw that to you, Michael.

00:32:07.000 How do you evaluate the Pope at about six months?

00:32:09.000 And what's his relationship with American Catholics who are mostly on the right politically on immigration and a lot of issues?

00:32:16.000 I was thrilled when I heard the name that he picked.

00:32:19.000 He picked Leo.

00:32:20.000 I was pulling for Leo.

00:32:21.000 I actually predicted it right before they picked it.

00:32:23.000 And I didn't know anything about the guy, but I really liked the name.

00:32:25.000 I thought it was a good sign, Pope Leo XIII, Pope Leo the Great.

00:32:28.000 This is good stuff.

00:32:29.000 And I think he's lived up to a lot of our hopes.

00:32:33.000 Obviously, there's always something to complain about.

00:32:34.000 I love the traditional Latin Mass.

00:32:36.000 I wish the bishops would stop suppressing the Latin Mass.

00:32:39.000 You know, I hope that happens.

00:32:41.000 But compared to the last pontificate, I think a lot of people are breathing not just a sigh of relief, but a sigh of joy.

00:32:49.000 And then I don't know if you guys caught it.

00:32:51.000 You know, over just a few days ago, the Pope was in Constantinople leading the Eastern Orthodox in the Our Father in Latin, praying for full communion for all baptized Christians, wanting to heal the East and the West, bring everybody back together.

00:33:07.000 He toured a mosque, refused to pray in the mosque, unlike some other popes.

00:33:12.000 John Paul II was completely vindicated.

00:33:15.000 I think John Paul II even prayed in a mosque.

00:33:17.000 He was the first one to do so.

00:33:18.000 And that's weird.

00:33:19.000 I have to imagine Francis probably would have also prayed in.

00:33:21.000 I think they were in the Blue Mosque in. 0.98

00:33:24.000 What's the deal with this ice ball?

00:33:26.000 What was this about?

00:33:27.000 The ice ball.

00:33:28.000 You know, people made a big deal about it.

00:33:30.000 I agree.

00:33:31.000 You know, it's kind of silly for people to focus on climate change or whatever.

00:33:35.000 Now, I will point out, there's nothing unusual about a priest blessing water.

00:33:39.000 You know, we call it holy water.

00:33:41.000 But I think also what happens here.

00:33:44.000 You know, a lot of these events were booked before Pope Francis died.

00:33:49.000 I don't know whether that was true of the global warming thing, but a lot of them are.

00:33:52.000 There was even a papal encyclical that's come out because Francis had started it and then he died and Leo finished it.

00:34:00.000 So some of this stuff is a little bit of a holdover from the Francis pontificate.

00:34:05.000 And obviously, there are plenty of things to rankle American political conservatives in some of the ways that the Pope has spoken about immigration.

00:34:11.000 But I'll also point out the Pope came out and he said, on immigration, nations are allowed to have borders.

00:34:17.000 No one says that nations can't decide who comes in and out.

00:34:19.000 You just got to be nice to people, basically.

00:34:21.000 And so I think for people who want to have a problem, including especially traditional conservative American Catholics, they're always going to find something to have a problem with.

00:34:31.000 But broadly speaking, I think that the Pope Leo respecters, defenders, hopers have been quite vindicated so far, which is good because Pope Leo could be Pope for like 20 years.

00:34:45.000 Blake, are you satisfied with that answer?

00:34:48.000 We'll see.

00:34:49.000 We'll see.

00:34:50.000 It's very interesting because I got so used to, especially with Francis or Benedict, you'd always have that translation barrier where the Pope would say something and you'd have to say, oh, well, the Pope, you know, he really meant this and it didn't translate great.

00:35:03.000 And now we just have a Pope who is a native English speaker and just commenting in English on things.

00:35:08.000 And we actually still get that, or they still say, oh, well, the Pope actually, if you know the historical context behind it.

00:35:13.000 I take a very ecumenical view of these things, as you know, Michael.

00:35:17.000 As a cradle Catholic who ended up finding faith in college through a Protestant tradition, I love all Christians.

00:35:24.000 I'm pro-Christian, pro-Catholic, and I want the Catholic Church to be healthy and vibrant.

00:35:28.000 So God bless you, Michael Knowles.

00:35:30.000 Andrew, I don't know if I ever told you this.

00:35:31.000 It was some Protestants who helped bring me back, too.

00:35:34.000 We'll see what happens.

00:35:35.000 See you next time, guys.

00:35:40.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - December 02, 2025

Pete Hegseth vs. The Democrats, Again

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