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, February 19th, 2026.
00:01:13.000Blake, I woke up this morning and I was like, woohoo!
00:01:44.000And unfortunately, it has nothing to do with anything, you know, of sex trafficking of minors or any of the innuendo or the salacious stuff.
00:01:54.000It looks like Prince Andrew was arrested for forwarding documents, this according to the BBC, in 2010 related to his work as, I guess, let's see here.
00:02:10.000Yeah, as a British trade envoy, but they have a specific title for him: UK Special Representative for International Trade and Investment.
00:02:18.000So it looks like in 2010, he sent over documents to, he forwarded them over to Jeffrey Epstein.
00:02:27.000Documents that he obtained in his official duties as a trade envoy that included some investment opportunities in gold and uranium, and that's what they got him on.
00:02:42.000Now, it's very, it feels a lot like the famous Al Capone thing where he was involved in murders and bootlegging and every manner of crime, extortion, racketeering, and they got him because he didn't pay income tax on his illegal gains.
00:02:57.000And there's a lot of allegations against.
00:03:01.000Prince Andrew of various levels of salaciousness, and he's been arrested for forwarding the email that is linked in the New York Times.
00:03:10.000This is literally the text of the email that is linked in the New York Times.
00:03:14.000It is just a forward of an email he received from his assistant, Amit Patel.
00:03:19.000Sir, please find attached the visit reports for Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen in relation to your recent visit to Southeast Asia.
00:03:46.000It's essentially insider trading at this point.
00:03:48.000If you get advanced intel on official head of state visits or heads of state, but official government agencies in this case, visiting foreign countries, getting intel on possible investments.
00:04:03.000King Charles, so the brother of Prince Andrew, has released a statement.
00:04:07.000He says, I have learned with the deepest concern the news about Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, which is a very interesting title, and there is a backstory to why he's not called Prince Andrew or His Royal Highness.
00:04:21.000But he calls him Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, and suspicion of misconduct in public office.
00:04:26.000What now follows is the full, fair, and proper process by which this issue is investigated in the appropriate manner and by the appropriate authorities.
00:04:34.000In this, as I have said before, they have our full and wholehearted support.
00:05:45.000You will get a headline that has nothing to do with the body of the article, but they learned through actual cause and effect, watching what you will click on, what gets the most clickbait.
00:05:57.000That is the whole game over Daily Mail.
00:06:00.000What headline can get you to click on it?
00:06:11.000So now you've got Thomas Massey, you've got Marjorie Taylor Greene, and a lot of others out on social media saying, well, they got Prince Andrew.
00:06:27.000The assumption is the same assumption I made this morning that they were going to get that Andrew got arrested on pedophilia, on sex trafficking minors, something like this.
00:07:40.000She's the one, Virginia Guffrey, for our audience's sake, is alleged to have been the one that created this aura, this narrative about her list.
00:08:12.000And so they are bringing this case because of big allegations.
00:08:17.000But I think it's worth remembering what the origin of this is.
00:08:20.000And then we go back to what the president himself said last summer.
00:08:23.000A lot of people are going to be getting tarred and hit for things that are running ahead of what the facts are or where there's nothing proven.
00:08:32.000And we're kind of seeing this here where they're just, they're howling, Where are the arrests?
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00:10:31.000Everybody jumps on Trump because, you know, there has been no arrest over here.
00:10:37.000But what's interesting and different, I would say, about the Prince Andrew situation is two thoughts I want you to keep in your head at the same time.
00:10:44.000We have to be sophisticated consumers of information.
00:10:49.000First thought none of this would happen if Pam Bondi had not released these documents in the first place.
00:11:57.000We call him that out of sort of a vestige of the royal past.
00:12:01.000But in 2022, in January, Queen Elizabeth II stripped him of the use of his style, His Royal Highness.
00:12:09.000HRH in any official capacity, all of his military titles and royal patronages were returned to the Queen, effectively removed from him.
00:12:18.000This included honorary military appointments such as Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, other UK titles like Honorary Air Commodore of the Royal Air Force, various overseas honorary Colonel and Chief roles, royal patronages, his charity affiliations.
00:12:32.000And then in 2025, so just last year, his brother, King Charles, removed the title Prince.
00:12:40.000And that included Duke of York, Earl of Iverness, and Baron Kelly Lay.
00:12:47.000So all of these have been removed from him.
00:13:29.000It would be very unfortunate if one of the world's oldest monarchies and one of its last really big monarchies were to fall over something like this, which it very much might.
00:14:20.000I think it's easy for us to dump on it.
00:14:22.000I mean, we're America, we're a republic, we don't have kings, we shouldn't have kings.
00:14:25.000But as conservatives, we do respect and honor traditions, old things.
00:14:30.000We realize they have value that's not always obvious.
00:14:33.000And I think there is a real value in the fact that there has been a king or queen of England in London for over a thousand years, that they are the descendants of those people who were there during the Blitz, who were there when Napoleon might have invaded, who were there when the Armada was sailing for England.
00:15:24.000And again, I would mention the name Reed Hoffman.
00:15:27.000You've seen this just this morning that Bill Gates has dropped out of a speaking engagement due to increased scrutiny over the Epstein files.
00:15:33.000Kathy Rumler has stepped down at Goldman Sachs.
00:15:38.000Because of her connections to Jeffrey Epstein.
00:15:41.000It was worth mentioning that she was Obama's longest serving White House counsel.
00:15:45.000So the DOJ's release of these documents, obviously spurned on by Ro Khanna and Thomas Massey, who have attempted to weaponize the release of these documents for their own political ends.
00:15:59.000It remains unclear what their ultimate intentions are here.
00:16:03.000But the whole point is that there is a very large faction of people that want to use these documents to get Trump.
00:16:47.000But it's not, frankly, it's not illegal to lie about who you're friends with.
00:16:50.000It's illegal to lie under oath to law enforcement, but we don't know if he did.
00:16:54.000So we should remember that for a lot of people, this has become a political cause out of proportion to what is actually proven, what is actually provable.
00:17:05.000And yeah, more might be coming, but we should remember that there is a lot of, we've been through a few rounds of lawfare in our time.
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00:18:53.000And I guess, you know, a lot of families are out there, a lot of families are linking hands outside of the courthouse, and they are alleging that social media.
00:19:02.000Is destroying their lives, getting them addicted, that it's engineered to be addictive and that it's causing suicidal ideation, it's causing depression, and that they say that it has been intentionally designed this way.
00:19:48.000And the big winner at the end of the day, if that happens, is going to be legacy media.
00:19:53.000So, you always have to look at who stands to benefit from this framing of social media as a health hazard.
00:19:59.000It's other information services, especially the media companies that have been displaced by social media.
00:20:05.000Now, social media addictiveness is a real problem, and there are major concerns, genuine concerns about the effect on children.
00:20:13.000But when you have to pay attention to who's latching onto this cause, it's often progressive governments like the UK that are committed to online censorship, not because they care about children.
00:20:25.000The UK government is embroiled in a scandal right now because one of their top appointees, Peter Mandelson, the former US ambassador, was connected to Jeffrey Epstein.
00:20:37.000But what they see in this agenda, in this narrative about addictiveness and the harm that social media can cause to children, a potential Trojan horse for what they actually want, which is political censorship, which is punishing social media companies that don't.
00:20:56.000Ban who they don't like, that don't ban their political opponents.
00:21:02.000If you look around the world, governments are latching onto any excuse they can find.
00:21:06.000The EU is launching a probe into X over allegations about grok being used to generate deepfakes.
00:21:21.000Because that's where all their political opponents are, that's where their narratives are being challenged.
00:21:25.000So when we think about the addictiveness issue, we have to think not just about the issue itself, but who's championing the cause.
00:21:31.000And what the second order effects are going to be of designating social media a public health hazard.
00:21:37.000It will make it much easier to regulate and much easier to regulate those algorithms that the establishment are really quite afraid of because those algorithms are how citizen journalists can challenge mainstream media narratives.
00:21:51.000It's very clear the British government, the German government, the French government want excuses to ban X, to find X, and presumably other social media outlets that they are out of their control.
00:22:03.000I think it's also clearly the case that a lot of these apps are designed to be addictive in a way that clearly is damaging young children's health.
00:22:13.000I think the rise of Facebook, Instagram, and other social media is clearly correlated with young, especially teenage women's mental well being, going off a cliff.
00:22:24.000We can see that with the rise of the smartphone.
00:22:26.000And it strikes me that there must be some things that could be legally relevant here that don't put you in danger of widespread censorship.
00:22:34.000I think one of the most obvious is just.
00:22:36.000Doom scrolling, the infinite scroll that a lot of these apps use, that clearly seems to be linked to addictive behavior.
00:22:42.000And I don't see how banning that would immediately imperil speech.
00:22:46.000And I just go back to you're almost certainly familiar with this the famous Sean Parker comment all the way back in 2017, where he basically just got on a stage and said, We engineered the app to give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because if someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and it would get you in a feedback loop and you would be hooked on it.
00:23:13.000Yeah, let's go ahead and play that Sean Parker clip.
00:23:16.000You know, if the thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them to really understand it, that thought process was all about how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible.
00:23:35.000And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.
00:23:45.000And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you.
00:23:51.000It's a social validation feedback loop that it's like a, I mean, it's exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.
00:24:06.000And I just, I think that we, you know, the inventors, creators, you know, and it's me, it's Mark, it's the, you know, Kevin Sisterman, Instagram, it's all of these people, understood this consciously.
00:24:27.000I mean, that's very chilling actually to watch that they intentionally engineered their platforms.
00:24:32.000To your point, they have a financial incentive to do so, Alan, to make their products as addictive as possible, to get you to spend as much time on those apps as possible.
00:25:06.000Well, I would always want to look at who's in charge of the regulations and who's in charge of the guardrails rather than what they necessarily are.
00:25:15.000I think conservatives really have to get involved and take charge of the child safety agenda, much like Adam Kandayev did when he was campaigning for age verification laws.
00:25:24.000He's now in the Trump administration at NTIA.
00:25:27.000Because the problem is when you let progressives Take on the child safety agenda, they're just going to use it as a smokescreen for political censorship.
00:25:38.000And it's a genuinely difficult issue because social media apps are addictive and they're particularly addictive for kids when their brains are still developing.
00:25:48.000But you look at what foreign governments are doing, like the UK, France, Spain, many other countries, they're simultaneously trying to ban social media for kids, just a blanket ban, while also trying to lower the voting age to 16.
00:26:01.000So, what they want really, and you see the end goal here.
00:26:05.000They want a voting demographic that's empowered to vote, but also doesn't have access to the social media platforms where mainstream pro government narratives might be challenged, where they might encounter information that the government and their allied NGOs and civil society organizations and mainstream media don't want to see.
00:26:28.000So, when we're trying to protect kids from addictive social media, we also have to think about how can we make sure they still have access to that independent media ecosystem that exists on social media.
00:26:40.000And that governments around the world are working so hard to just completely shut down.
00:26:45.000Because the same technology that makes social media addictive, that causes engagement, is the same technology that allows citizen journalists to go viral.
00:26:55.000That is the technology that governments around the world are so afraid of.
00:26:59.000The same technology that allows a random person to make a post, get millions of views, and share information that the media doesn't want to be shared, that NGOs don't want to see shared, that governments don't want to see shared.
00:27:12.000So that's the balance you have to strike, and it's a very difficult balance to strike.
00:27:17.000We have to be constantly aware of these organizations that have an agenda that they're not telling you about when they talk about addictiveness.
00:27:26.000And particularly, I want to say this the left thinks drag queen story hour is appropriate for children.
00:27:35.000They think gay pride parades are appropriate for children.
00:27:37.000They think gender reassignment surgery is appropriate for children.
00:27:41.000So we should not take any concerns coming from left wing progressives.
00:27:46.000About the dangers of social media to children and child welfare, seriously.
00:27:50.000They don't really care about that issue.
00:28:00.000I will say, if you look at what they auto feed to children on YouTube, if you make a new child's account, you definitely start worrying about more, possibly some need for regulation.
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00:29:13.000We wanted to get to the latest on Iran.
00:29:16.000President Trump is saying that he is going to make up his mind a final decision about a strike on Iran within the next 10 days.
00:29:23.000But we are told that he has yet to make his final decision.
00:29:27.000JD Vance is simultaneously warning Iran, saying this is deadly serious and they better come to the table.
00:29:36.000So, this is ongoing conversations that are happening in Iran.
00:29:40.000Meanwhile, President Trump is saying that he has yet to make up his mind.
00:29:44.000This all echoes very clearly what we saw.
00:29:46.000In the 12 day war, where Trump said, I'm going to make up my mind in the next two weeks.
00:29:50.000I feel when I saw that headline, I'll decide within the next 10 days, my immediate thought was, he has already decided, frankly, because that's what he did last time.
00:29:58.000And there's this element, you're going to decide within the next 10 days.
00:30:02.000Well, okay, you reach day 10, and you kind of know if he's decided by then, if he hasn't struck a deal, and then you kind of regress back from there.
00:30:10.000It's such a strange thing to announce.
00:31:37.000Let's separate fact from fiction here.
00:31:38.000We know that there has been a very serious and significant buildup in recent days of military assets in the region.
00:31:45.000This would include air and naval assets in the Middle East.
00:31:49.000But insider sources in the White House have told multiple outlets that Trump is privately argued both for and against military action.
00:31:59.000And he's polling advisors and allies on what the best course of action is.
00:32:03.000Now, here's the insider scoop there are significant voices within the White House that are against military action, they're against foreign intervention, they stand firmly on the America First side, saying, We don't want to invade Iran, we do not want a kinetic military strike in Iran.
00:32:21.000There are other voices that are very, very much chomping at the bit to do so.
00:32:26.000They see this as the one opportunity with the uprising, the organic uprising of protesters in the streets, to take out the mullahs, as Sean Hannity would say.
00:33:20.000But what we have seen a pattern from the president is in comparison to prior administrations, he is very resistant to scope creep.
00:33:28.000He's very resistant to open ended missions.
00:33:31.000And so I think the president would be wise enough to say we don't want a bunch of troops occupying Iran, we don't want troops helicoptering into.
00:33:40.000Trump is not going to telegraph his moves, though.
00:33:43.000What we can tell you is that based on the assets that have been moved into the region, it does not look like a ground force is part of the equation right now.
00:34:26.000That is where it becomes a stickier question.
00:34:29.000How many, how much resources are we willing to invest in toppling a government on the far side of the world?
00:34:34.000And politically, if we do it, even if it's successful, will they make the case that this is a good use of America's time, that it's justified?
00:34:43.000I feel, even in comparison to last summer, that might be the biggest challenge for the administration.
00:34:47.000If we were to go to war with Iran tonight, I think most Americans would be asking what had prompted it.
00:35:38.000Is it just because Lindsey Graham, Lady Graham, is, you know, Working his magic, his charms in the ear of the president, or what is the deeper incentive?
00:35:48.000Now, the deeper incentive, President Trump will say, is to ensure that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon.
00:35:53.000Well, then, if that is your incentive, then what's going on with the B2 strikes that happened last summer?
00:35:59.000Were those effective or were those not effective?