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.
00:02:36.000It was the hapless engineer protagonist, as it was described, and a bunch of dysfunctional colleagues.
00:02:42.000And, you know, it was a cultural phenomenon.
00:02:44.000It became a cultural phenomenon that people would talk about at the workplace or at the water cooler or when they're getting coffee at work, you know, and that's why he ultimately created coffee with Scott Adams.
00:02:55.000It was originally called Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
00:02:57.000And it became a phenomenon that many people tuned into daily.
00:03:01.000And to just get a dose of his, you know, his contrarian thinking, he had a unique blend of insight, humor, wit, and an optimism.
00:03:13.000And he was one of the first people to sort of take President Trump seriously, one of the first mainstream people to take President Trump seriously.
00:03:23.000And he paid in his career for that as well.
00:03:26.000A lot of papers around the country ended up removing Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoon, from their papers.
00:03:32.000Yeah, and they, you know, and here's what they'll do, by the way, this is what they're going to do is the same thing that they did with Charlie, is they're going to cherry-pick a few things that Scott maybe said or take it out of context.
00:03:44.000They're going to like remove all the other context and say that Scott Adams was this bad person or whatever.
00:04:41.000So it was a phenomenon of the workplace that emerged in the 80s and 90s, probably in the 70s.
00:04:46.000And what people also probably don't know about Scott is he authored a bunch of best-selling books on persuasion, systems thinking, personal success.
00:06:49.000And what's most important, I think, as well is that Scott was wrestling with his own mortality towards the end.
00:06:55.000You know, C.S. Lewis would talk about how a soldier in a foxhole actually, you know, because he was reflecting on World War I.
00:07:03.000He was a veteran of World War I, and he was doing a lot of his writings and his thinking in World War II.
00:07:08.000And he said that it can be a blessing to be faced with your own mortality and to understand that as a soldier, you might die and to confront the Almighty and to make peace.
00:07:19.000And Scott was sort of that soldier on a field in a cultural sense, in a media sense, and he was staring down the sickness.
00:09:31.000He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing.
00:09:35.000About five in the afternoon, he went out and found still others standing around.
00:09:38.000He asked them, why have you been standing here all day doing nothing?
00:09:40.000Because no one has hired us, they answered.
00:09:42.000He said to them, you also go and work in my vineyard.
00:09:45.000When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going to the first.
00:09:53.000The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius.
00:09:57.000So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more, but each one of them also received a denarius.
00:10:03.000When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner.
00:10:06.000These who were hired last worked only one hour, they said, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of work for the heat of the day.
00:10:14.000But he answered to them, I am not being unfair to you, friend.
00:10:16.000Didn't you agree to work for a denarius?
00:12:09.000So Scott, yeah, Scott Adams, disgraced Dilbert creator, dies at 68.
00:12:14.000Dilbert was pulled from wide circulation after Adams' racist rant in 2023.
00:12:20.000It's such a garbage thing to do to somebody.
00:12:22.000And, you know, this is what they did with Charlie.
00:12:24.000It's the same exact playbook where, you know, they take something that Charlie said out of context about Black Pilot or Martin Luther King, and they strip it of all of the buildup, all of the context.
00:12:39.000And then they use it to smear somebody, even in death.
00:12:40.000You know, somebody retweeted my tweet on it on X and basically, or quote tweeted it and said, you know, you can tell a lot about the way somebody, you know, a group of people by who they lionize and who their heroes are.
00:12:53.000And I'm like, you can tell a lot about somebody that even in death, they refuse to be gracious and kind or at least neutral or just keep your mouth shut.
00:14:09.000Listen, I just want to remember that Scott took a great personal toll for this.
00:14:16.000And, you know, the way the verse ends with the parable of the workers in the vineyard is that, you know, the first will be last and the last will be first.
00:14:29.000And so Scott came to his faith at the end, almost as like Pascal's wager.
00:14:35.000And maybe, Blake, if you want to describe that for the audience who's going to be able to do that, and there's another clip where he's more forthright about it, even that, so Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician who laid out an argument that basically you should embrace theism, you should embrace Christianity because the rewards of eternal life are great.
00:14:52.000And if you're wrong, you're just worm food, so you lose nothing.
00:14:57.000Now, the funny thing is, is Pascal, a very logical man himself, did not convert for that reason.
00:15:01.000He had a religious experience one night, like just had a divine vision, and he was a super Christian after that.
00:15:05.000But it's an argument that has a lot of, it's debated a lot, certainly among computer programmer types who are not.
00:15:12.000Well, this is exactly what Scott Adams is.
00:16:08.000And, you know, I think it was Matt Walsh who said, you know, especially in the aftermath of Charlie's death, and he was reflecting on all the attacks against Charlie from the left or whatever.
00:16:18.000And he basically was just like, may we all experience, may our enemies rejoice when we die because that means we were truly effective.
00:16:26.000And the fact that they just like the pettiness of it, I think just makes this disgraced Dilbert creator.
00:16:32.000I think it makes them look disgraceful.
00:16:34.000The only party disgraced in this instance is people.
00:16:56.000The whole, you know, of X is mourning him.
00:16:58.000The vice president is sending out tweets.
00:17:01.000I feel we're actually underselling this just because it's been a long time.
00:17:04.000And what really made him super notable with our faction is in 2015, 2016, he was one of the first guys to really take Trump seriously as a political candidate who would lay out an argument, okay, what Trump is doing when he's on stage where it's unpredictable and silly and he's saying stuff that seems outlandish.
00:17:24.000He's actually doing something powerfully persuasive to people and he could win the election doing this.
00:17:30.000And he was just saying this back when everyone else on television was saying, oh, he's just a dumb clone.
00:17:47.000And there is kind of this cast of like OG MAGA originals, like the, you know, Mike Cernovich, the Jack Basovics, the Charlie Kirks, the Scott Adams, the people that saw early on.
00:17:57.000I don't even know that he was a Trump supporter.
00:17:59.000He was just actually willing to say, this guy is effective at what he does, and it's going to be persuasive to people.
00:18:05.000It was that master persuader line he used.
00:18:10.000And, you know, his wife read a statement this morning and they did a coffee with Scott Adams, you know, after his passing.
00:18:19.000We had heard that he went to hospice, but his wife confirmed that, you know, he was of sound mind and that, you know, that he did accept Jesus Christ.
00:18:28.000And so, you know, God bless Scott and thank you for your contribution.
00:18:33.000We honor you on this show because we honor brave men and women that stand up for what's right, that are the men in the arena, that do take the slings and arrows for the rest of us.
00:20:56.000You can also just go to charliekirk.com and link to it.
00:20:59.000But thecharlikirkshowstore.com, we have a new vintage collection of some of Charlie's original t-shirts that he had made when we started the show.
00:21:09.000And there's been a lot of people that email us and ask for all of this stuff.
00:21:13.000So I wanted to make sure I did that because they've been asking me for like three or four days and I keep forgetting.
00:21:18.000So Charlie Kirk Show store, the Charlie Kirk Show store, or just go to charliekirk.com and we have it on the main page.
00:23:12.000So, you know, Trump has this 25% tariff announcement for anybody doing business with Iran.
00:23:19.000Simultaneously, there is a SCOTUS ruling that we're eagerly awaiting probably tomorrow whether or not he's even lawfully legally able to do this.
00:23:29.000So, yeah, we're waiting, and it could come tomorrow.
00:23:32.000The Supreme Court never tells us in advance what decisions are going to announce.
00:23:37.000We think they want to get to this one pretty quickly.
00:23:40.000A lot of people thought it was going to be the end of last week or this, it could be on Wednesday or Thursday, or it could be anytime in the next couple of weeks.
00:23:52.000One of the things that Trump's recent tariff announcement does, though, is shows how important tariffs can be to foreign policy.
00:24:00.000And this is one of the arguments for why the president should be able to impose tariffs on countries, because it is really important to our attempt to try to contain Iran and to use the U.S.'s consumer market, which everybody in the world wants access to, to discipline the rest of the world.
00:24:25.000If you're going to do business with Iran, you're going to have to pay a lot higher tariff to sell your stuff into the U.S.
00:24:33.000I think that's, it actually really does strengthen his position that this is a core part of a president's ability to deal with the rest of the world, a core foreign policy power.
00:24:46.000Yeah, it strikes me, John, is this kind of like Trump's this maverick?
00:24:50.000He's creative with the way he approaches foreign policy and he implements these new techniques.
00:24:55.000They're not new, but certainly in modern American, especially presidential history, he's using them in ways others haven't really done before.
00:25:05.000And because he's been creative with how he's wielded tariffs, he's now getting punished for it.
00:25:11.000They're coming after him saying, well, now we want to take that away from you because you're doing it in a way that we hadn't thought about before.
00:25:34.000I don't think the Supreme Court is likely to order the U.S. government to pay back hundreds of billions in tariffs, which is one of the reasons.
00:25:43.000Look, I listened to the oral arguments.
00:25:47.000The justices were super skeptical about whether or not Trump really does have the statutory authority.
00:25:54.000Because as you point out, there's not a lot of precedent for this.
00:25:57.000The law that they're using, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, is people call it AIPA, has never been used to impose tariffs.
00:26:07.000Ironically, everybody agrees that the president could sanction a country.
00:26:13.000You could say you can't sell anything.
00:26:15.000But apparently their theory is that you can completely shut off a country from access to the U.S. market, but you can't charge a 10% tariff for them to be able to sell into the U.S. market.
00:26:27.000That seems wrong to me, but the Supreme Court was skeptical that Trump has this much authority.
00:26:32.000I don't think they rule that it all has to be paid back from the U.S. Treasury.
00:26:38.000I think what they're most likely to do is come to some sort of compromise where they say, yes, the president can impose some tariffs, but there's a, you know, they might make up a time limit.
00:26:54.000So that would mean we could keep all the tariffs we have, and it gives the Trump administration some time to, there's a lot of other statutes that allow the president to impose tariffs.
00:27:03.000So if these ones get struck down or get time limited, I think President Trump can come back with other ways of going of erecting tariffs.
00:27:13.000And frankly, I think the U.S. Senate and the House should, if the Supreme Court decides this, should actually just completely reverse it and say, no, we think the president does need this power.
00:27:24.000Yeah, but wasn't there, I mean, pushback even from the Republican side of the aisle.
00:27:29.000There was Rand Paul, I believe Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski.
00:27:33.000Question then becomes, you know, you've kind of got these, these tricky uh Republicans in the Senate that we're not.
00:27:41.000So we talk about this when we're, you know discussing, nuking the filibuster.
00:27:45.000For example, you've still got Least Murkowski, Susan Collins, Ram Paul and Mitch Mcconnell.
00:27:52.000So Jd Vance can cast a tiebreaking vote.
00:27:55.000You got to get one of those, those tricky senators on board.
00:27:58.000And then you got Tom Tillis, who knows what's happening with him right now.
00:28:01.000He's he's, he's causing a stink with the FED.
00:28:04.000So traditionally you had a lot of Democrats who would vote in favor of tariffs and supported tariffs.
00:28:11.000There may still be some hiding out there.
00:28:13.000The question is whether or not, like their Trump, derangement syndrome has overtaken what used to be their loyalty to the, you know, to American labor and to the working class.
00:28:25.000Maybe it has, and maybe they cannot, as a Democrat, bring themselves to vote for uh, a you know and a tariff authority for Trump.
00:28:55.000I forget now 4.9 number that we got uh, the revision for q3, and now you know, you've even got the Atlanta FED uh saying that we're expecting 5.3 percent gdp growth in q4.
00:29:07.000Potentially that's their estimate might be high whatever, but like the point is, it seems like the economic indicators are all going in the right direction right now.
00:29:14.000Part of the reason that is is because the doomsday errors about tariffs have been proven wrong again and again and again.
00:29:21.000Yeah no, absolutely been proven wrong.
00:29:45.000The Trump administration needs to get that news out there, but frankly, I think it's going to get out to the American people, because you just need to drive by a gas station and see that the Biden inflation crisis is in our rearview mirror.
00:30:06.000Every single dollar you spend is either supporting your values or working against them.
00:30:11.000In today's economy, where you spend your money, it really matters, and that's how we take back our country.
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00:32:22.000John, so this, you know, the chicken littles, the sky is falling, economist, they have been proven wrong, but they're still going after it.
00:32:31.000They keep saying there was reports this morning saying that, you know, his Fed approach is already being proven wrong.
00:32:40.000You know, so Judge Janine, I call her Judge Janine still.
00:32:43.000So she's got charges or she's indicting Jerome Powell, some of these corruption allegations about the federal building that he's been constructing for years.
00:32:54.000Just give us the lowdown here with Jerome Powell.
00:32:57.000So what happened is Jerome Powell did something unprecedented on Sunday night.
00:33:01.000He posted a video in which he said that he has received subpoenas from the Justice Department.
00:33:09.000And he went far beyond denying having done anything wrong with the renovation of what people are calling the Fed Mahal, this $2.5 billion renovation to their headquarters.
00:33:24.000And he went beyond denying misleading a Senate panel when he testified about it.
00:33:29.000He actually accused the Trump administration of using this inquiry into these matters into trying to subvert the independence of the Federal Reserve.
00:33:41.000And in fact, the president immediately said, no, that we're not doing that.
00:33:45.000Judge Janine, Janine Pirro, who is the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said that's not what's happening.
00:33:53.000What happened was we had a bunch of questions about the renovation.
00:33:56.000We tried to get the Fed to answer them.
00:33:58.000They wouldn't answer the questions, which is outrageous for any part of the government to not answer inquiries from the Department of Justice.
00:34:18.000And then you had, you know, the legacy media freak out, act like, you know, Donald, you know, again, sort of Trump derangement syndrome, assuming the worst possible interpretation of this, that Donald Trump was using the Justice Department to go after Powell to try to seize control of the Fed.
00:34:37.000And in fact, that's one of the reasons the markets have reacted to this so calmly, because people aren't seeing this as a power grab by Trump.
00:34:46.000They're seeing it as actually a very aggressive move by Powell.
00:34:51.000Look, Powell is out of office as chairman in May.
00:34:56.000Trump doesn't need to go after anybody.
00:35:13.000Trump is touring a Ford factory right now.
00:35:16.000He's kind of touting domestic manufacturing.
00:35:20.000So we hear this number a lot, John, about how many trillions of dollars of investment, foreign direct investment, businesses investing in the United States again.
00:35:29.000Scott Besson has said that 2025 was setting the table.
00:35:51.000In fact, if you look at the growth rate, we had 3.8, then 4.1 is 3.8 in the second term, in the second quarter, 4.1 in the second or the third.
00:36:04.000And now it looks like we may be growing.
00:36:06.000Again, the Atlanta Fed, as you mentioned, says above 5%.
00:36:10.000That seems probably an overestimation to me, but we're certainly growing at a very rapid rate.
00:37:09.000We'll see what happens with SCOTUS on the tariff rulings, but it's good to hear that President Trump and the Trump administration have other outs, other levers they can pull to kind of exert their tariff agenda because I think it's actually really important from a foreign policy, also a domestic policy standpoint.
00:37:24.000Thank you for adding a lot of light, a lot of clarity.