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.
00:01:22.000There was a big Pentagon briefing, which I think made more news because of who was covering it.
00:01:27.000Our 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.
00:01:42.000Jack Pesobic notably asked if they were considering a court-martial for Senator Mark Kelly.
00:01:48.000The answer was everything is on the table.
00:01:51.000And that is sort of linked to some of the main coverage that we're going to get into here this morning.
00:01:56.000There is news that there is a, well, it's about 10 days old.
00:02:01.000USS Ford has been in the waters in the Caribbean outside of Venezuela.
00:02:05.000There is concern, I think, in Maduro's inner circle that the U.S. is about to potentially oust him from power within Venezuela.
00:02:14.000Meanwhile, you have the Venezuelan cartel, narco-trafficking boats, that have caused a huge controversy, namely with Pete Hegseth.
00:02:22.000It 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.
00:02:37.000But describe this dynamic of what's going on right now with Pete Hegseth.
00:02:41.000Well, what's interesting is, so we discussed this yesterday.
00:02:44.000What 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.
00:02:56.000I should say, alleged gunboats or drug boats.
00:02:58.000And that in September, they identified one of these.
00:03:01.000They told Hegseth about it because he's the one who has to approve strikes.
00:03:05.000And that, according to the Washington Post, he not merely approved a strike, but said basically kill them all in some way.
00:03:12.000And 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.
00:03:30.000So that original story, the double-tap story that they're alleging is a war crime, was reported by the Washington Post.
00:03:37.000Now, the New York Times has issued a follow-up reporting that reads, that basically is a giant rebuttal to it.
00:03:45.000New 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.
00:04:02.000But 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.
00:04:12.000And 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.
00:04:19.000Admiral 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.
00:04:28.000As that operation unfolded, they said Mr. Hegseth did not give any further orders to him.
00:04:34.000So 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.
00:04:47.000Now, 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.
00:04:56.000Now, 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.
00:05:08.000But this is all part of a broader effort by Democrats to now go after.
00:05:13.000So 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.
00:05:30.000And they're very evasive when they're confronted about it.
00:05:33.000They 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.
00:05:42.000And they're taking that pose, and suddenly this drops.
00:05:45.000And these people in this U.S. senators are not, and lawmakers are not unaware of what is going on.
00:05:50.000They have contacts with reporters, especially friendly reporters.
00:05:54.000And one of them, Slotkin, like a CIA veteran and such.
00:05:58.000And so they, it seems very possible they may have known this story was coming.
00:06:05.000And they were essentially, it was all a process to seed this story to talk about, oh, illegal orders, you know, possibly.
00:06:14.000And then bam, here's this Washington post story saying there's illegal orders.
00:06:18.000And now they've got their preferred framing.
00:06:21.000And, you know, you could say this is an attempt to bring down Hegseth, but it's much more than that.
00:06:26.000It'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.
00:06:33.000What they want, they actually want that whole defy orders thing.
00:06:36.000They want to delegitimize and break down the apparatus of government for this administration.
00:06:41.000Because 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.
00:06:56.000This is an orchestrated op, and it's a PR op.
00:07:00.000It's also deadly serious because we'll play this clip in just a bit.
00:07:05.000But, you know, Senator Eric Schmidt is basically saying that this has all the Hallmarks of a color revolution of seeding the ground for that.
00:07:12.000And then what was interesting as this story has played out is I kept expecting because they got caught with egg on their face.
00:07:19.000They'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?
00:07:27.000So then I kept watching and expecting them to fall back and say, well, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
00:07:32.000And Mark Kelly and Slotkin and some of the others have gone on a full tour of PR.
00:07:38.000I mean, they're hitting CNN, MSNBC, writing op-eds, doing social media videos.
00:07:42.000And that was, I think, the tell is that they keep diving in, drilling the story deeper and deeper and deeper.
00:07:47.000And then you have Mark Kelly yesterday, who gives a whole press conference, which was just wild.
00:07:53.000He alleges that Trump was trying, his threatened to kill him.
00:07:57.000But then when pressed, he was forced to admit that, you know, he wasn't actually speaking about any specific thing.
00:08:04.000Based 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.
00:08:18.000So we were looking forward to try to head something off at the path that could have been really, really bad.
00:08:27.000So it wasn't about this specific thing.
00:09:06.000And the White House even later confirmed that President Trump was not calling for him to be killed.
00:09:12.000He was pointing out that this was a serious offense.
00:09:14.000Mark Kelly has spent years in uniform.
00:09:16.000He knows full well that calling mass refusal of military orders is illegal.
00:09:22.000It 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.
00:09:33.000And they're like, oh, well, he maybe implied a diplomatic concession here.
00:09:59.000Simply 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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00:11:38.000I 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.
00:11:50.000President Trump's threat of military action has confronted President Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela with the gravest challenge of his crisis-ridden reign yet.
00:11:59.000And 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.
00:12:14.000He's doing TikTok videos of him crashing a wedding and dancing with people and all kinds of stuff.
00:12:19.000So he's trying to put on a strong and a brave face.
00:12:22.000However, 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?
00:12:38.000I certainly don't think Charlie would be enthusiastic.
00:12:42.000I think we've been through this pattern.
00:12:46.000I will admit, I suspect toppling Venezuela would be not as bad as toppling Libya or Afghanistan.
00:12:56.000Latin 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.
00:13:24.000And how often has that really played out?
00:13:27.000Even in wars we've won, it hasn't necessarily played out the way we expected.
00:13:31.000Yeah, well, and you've got to imagine that they have, there's been behind the scenes discussions.
00:13:37.000We know for a fact that President Trump and Nicholas Maduro have spoken, Maduro being the dictator of Venezuela.
00:13:45.000And the interesting part here is you've got Maria Karina Machado, who's the opposition leader.
00:13:50.000Now, remember when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, she dedicated it to President Trump.
00:13:56.000She certainly knows how to make a sell.
00:13:58.000Yeah, so you have to imagine that there was optics involved there.
00:14:02.000There was a strategy involved from her perspective.
00:14:04.000Now, a lot of international watchdogs suggest that she actually won the election and that Nicholas Maduro stole it, which does seem to be true.
00:14:13.000And 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.
00:14:49.000And 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?
00:15:00.000This Western Hemisphere-centric foreign policy where, hey, we're going to take back control of the Panama Canal.
00:15:07.000We're going to strike key alliances with people like Bukele in El Salvador.
00:15:13.000We're going to reassert dominance within South America, right?
00:15:18.000And our Malay friendship that we've struck up, the leader of Argentina.
00:15:25.000So you do sort of see the makings of this.
00:15:27.000Now, the other piece I will say is that Venezuela and Cuba work hand in hand.
00:15:31.000You see this, the fact that Cuban guards are now part of the private security detail for Nicolas Maduro.
00:15:37.000You see it with the sharing of intelligence.
00:15:39.000Now, people don't know this, but the Cuban intelligence is one of the most formidable in the world.
00:16:12.000So 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.
00:16:22.000You get two regime changes, which probably will not blow up in our faces at all because we've learned our lesson.
00:16:28.000I just, I actually kind of don't think that that's what they're going for.
00:16:31.000I think President Trump is trying to do the carrot and the stick.
00:16:35.000He's saber-rattling to get Nicholas Maduro to leave on his own.
00:16:38.000I liked the idea of just give him $500 million and he can go live wherever.
00:16:43.000And what stinks is we'd have more credibility on that if we'd stuck to our guns with Gaddafi instead.
00:16:50.000There is a trustworthy actress in the past.
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00:19:16.000You 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.
00:19:22.000And, you know, he's been a public figure for a long time.
00:19:24.000And more than any other member of this cabinet, the Democrats seemed absolutely devoted to torpedoing him before he came in as Secretary of War.
00:19:35.000And 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.
00:19:48.000Now, on top of that, you've had a very, very effective military strategy under Trump.
00:19:53.000Recruitment way up, getting a lot of the woke out in terms of the policy of the military itself.
00:19:58.000Then obviously very, very successful military operations in the Middle East.
00:20:01.000Now we're looking at operations in Latin America.
00:20:04.000So I think he's doing a very good job generally.
00:20:06.000But I just take it simply on a rule of thumb.
00:20:09.000If he's the guy they want to take out, he's probably the guy I'm going to be defending.
00:20:13.000Yeah, that's exactly been my posture as well.
00:20:15.000It's like we must be over the mark here with Secretary Hegseth because they want to get him out so badly.
00:20:21.000But this is part of this larger, there's two, basically, at this point, we diverge in a wood, right?
00:20:27.000There's two main through lines, narratives that are going on right now.
00:20:30.000There 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.
00:20:39.000But then, meanwhile, there's all this intrigue around Venezuela.
00:20:58.000What would you like to see play out in the next days and weeks ahead when it comes to Venezuela specifically?
00:21:06.000And then we'll get into our own immigration debate that we're also having.
00:21:10.000Yeah, I love the way you put it, Andrew, because it's kind of a confounding issue for MAGA.
00:21:14.000If 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.
00:21:24.000However, this is a little different because this is much closer to home.
00:21:28.000The Monroe Doctrine, which says America runs the Western Hemisphere, has been our official policy since 1823.
00:21:35.000This 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.
00:21:49.000One of the funniest things about President Trump's foreign policy is how open he is.
00:21:53.000He says, you know, we didn't go to war for oil in Iraq, but we at least should have gotten the oil.
00:21:57.000You know, natural resources really do matter.
00:21:59.000And, you know, this is our hemisphere.
00:22:00.000So I think it's a little dicier on what Americans are thinking about it.
00:22:05.000Look, the ideal scenario is you completely destroy the narco-terrorists.
00:22:09.000You wage a real war on drugs, meaning you blow up all the guys who are smuggling the drugs in and killing American kids.
00:22:15.000You 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.
00:22:23.000And maybe that also helps the energy market too.
00:22:26.000That's what everyone wants in the ideal.
00:22:28.000The question is, can they pull this kind of thing off?
00:22:32.000I think they're going to get a lot more grace from the base in terms of actions in Latin America.
00:22:37.000The 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?
00:23:03.000All 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.
00:23:11.000All I will say with Trump is he has the most effective foreign policy of my lifetime, probably including George H.W. Bush.
00:23:18.000And 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.
00:23:28.000What strikes me as another factor in this is: well, we've had a lot of people come from Venezuela.
00:23:34.000That drove a lot of the migration pressure in all the way back to Obama's administration into the first Trump, into Biden.
00:23:41.000And I think defenders of this would justify this, that if we topple this regime, it actually might help our migration issue.
00:23:47.000A lot of Venezuelans might go home, if you're correct, and it took down Cuba as well.
00:23:52.000Some Cubans might go home, although Cubans have mostly integrated great.
00:23:56.000But I feel like a lot of our other interventions have done the exact opposite.
00:24:00.00020 years in Afghanistan, we have to fight them over there so we don't fight them over here.
00:24:04.000And in fact, we are fighting them two blocks from the White House now.
00:24:07.000And it strikes me as a reasonable worry.
00:24:11.000Does another intervention in Latin America somehow have this side effect where we just have illegal immigrants massing at the border again?
00:24:18.000Yeah, I mean, I think that's the key worry that I have, actually.
00:24:24.000Are we going to spark another humanitarian disaster where we see massive flows of migrants from South America and Cuba specifically?
00:24:30.000A lot of people look at Cuba and Venezuela together.
00:24:33.000There'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.
00:24:43.000Perhaps because he doesn't trust his own Venezuelans to have his back.
00:24:47.000But there is a very direct connection between Venezuela and Cuba.
00:24:51.000They are basically conjoined at the hip here.
00:24:55.000And so the question is: would we get a mass exodus of people from this region?
00:25:20.000That's, I think, namely, we have a political.
00:25:22.000I'll remind you: the Monroe Doctrine was not just we dominate every country in the Western Hemisphere.
00:25:26.000It 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.
00:25:37.000Yeah, well, you saw this in Panama, right?
00:27:22.000In America, we used to severely restrict immigration, and we would have some immigration from, I don't know, say England.
00:27:28.000Then we started taking German migrants in the 19th century.
00:27:31.000And, you know, it was a little harder to assimilate German migrants, but it was okay.
00:27:35.000Then we took some of the swarthy Italians from North Africa, basically.
00:27:40.000Basically worked out other than the Pelosis of the world, but it was a little harder still to assimilate them.
00:27:46.000Now you look at third world immigration, post-1965, heart seller, and you have to ask yourself, what do Somalis add to America?
00:27:56.000And that's the naughty question that nobody wants to ask.
00:27:59.000But it's a very serious question because the point of immigration is to make our country better.
00:28:04.000And if people are unassimilable, radically different cultures, different religions, different habits, different everything, I think we have the right to say no thanks.
00:28:14.000You know, we have an obligation to our own citizens.
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00:30:06.000Michael Knowles is with us, who is, I believe you hail from the state of Tennessee, Michael, now these days.
00:30:14.000I 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.
00:32:41.000But compared to the last pontificate, I think a lot of people are breathing not just a sigh of relief, but a sigh of joy.
00:32:49.000And then I don't know if you guys caught it.
00:32:51.000You 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.
00:33:07.000He toured a mosque, refused to pray in the mosque, unlike some other popes.
00:33:12.000John Paul II was completely vindicated.
00:33:15.000I think John Paul II even prayed in a mosque.
00:33:44.000You know, a lot of these events were booked before Pope Francis died.
00:33:49.000I don't know whether that was true of the global warming thing, but a lot of them are.
00:33:52.000There was even a papal encyclical that's come out because Francis had started it and then he died and Leo finished it.
00:34:00.000So some of this stuff is a little bit of a holdover from the Francis pontificate.
00:34:05.000And obviously, there are plenty of things to rankle American political conservatives in some of the ways that the Pope has spoken about immigration.
00:34:11.000But I'll also point out the Pope came out and he said, on immigration, nations are allowed to have borders.
00:34:17.000No one says that nations can't decide who comes in and out.
00:34:19.000You just got to be nice to people, basically.
00:34:21.000And 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.
00:34:31.000But 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.
00:34:45.000Blake, are you satisfied with that answer?
00:34:50.000It'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.
00:35:03.000And now we just have a Pope who is a native English speaker and just commenting in English on things.
00:35:08.000And we actually still get that, or they still say, oh, well, the Pope actually, if you know the historical context behind it.
00:35:13.000I take a very ecumenical view of these things, as you know, Michael.
00:35:17.000As a cradle Catholic who ended up finding faith in college through a Protestant tradition, I love all Christians.
00:35:24.000I'm pro-Christian, pro-Catholic, and I want the Catholic Church to be healthy and vibrant.