00:00:49.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:57.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:36.000So, well, first, tell us, you kind of made headlines, I think it was two weeks ago, where you dared write a piece in the New York Times opinion section.
00:01:52.000The New York Times has made themselves the laughing stock.
00:01:55.000Although at root, this is not a laughing matter because it gets that fundamental principles about freedom of expression and inquiry and free debate in a democratic society.
00:02:04.000But if you and all your listeners recall, a couple weekends ago, the last weekend of May, peaceful protests had been hijacked by many rioters and looters, really anarchists and insurrectionists who were burning churches, defacing memorials to war dead, who are looting businesses by the thousands across the country.
00:02:24.000And I made the very simple point, first on television, that our police are the first line of defense against this kind of civil unrest.
00:02:33.000But if the police are outnumbered or if they need backup, or they have politicians, local elected politicians who won't allow them to do their job, then the military is there to provide that backup.
00:02:45.000First, the National Guard, and if necessary, the active duty forces under the Insurrection Act, a law that is over 200 years old and has been used repeatedly throughout our history by President Eisenhower to desegregate Little Rock Central in my state, or JFK to desegregate Ole Miss in the University of Alabama, or George Bush during the 1992 LA riots.
00:03:06.000So we actually contacted the New York Times a couple weeks ago about a different, related, but different op-ed, and the New York Times asked me to flesh out my argument about the use of federal troops to quell domestic unrest in their pages.
00:03:24.000I think it was on Wednesday, June 3rd.
00:03:26.000The title of it was sending to the troops.
00:03:28.000I would note the New York Times has publicly acknowledged that they chose that op-ed, which is a little further than what I called for in the op-ed itself, but they chose the title.
00:03:38.000And then they had a complete and utter revolt from a woke progressive mob of their young newsroom staffers who by the hundreds began on social media or internal Slack channels to denounce the decision to publish my op-ed.
00:03:53.000Now, here's where it gets really interesting.
00:03:55.000The editorial page editor and the publisher both defended the decision to publish my op-ed in public.
00:04:01.000But I guess it got a little too hot for them inside the newsroom because within a few hours they backpedaled and they apologized.
00:04:08.000They said they shouldn't have published it.
00:04:10.000They implied there were factual errors in it, even though to this day they have not pointed out any factual errors.
00:04:16.000They claimed that they were going to redress the situation and make changes to their editorial page processes.
00:04:21.000And even that my op-ed didn't meet their standards.
00:04:25.000Now, I would concede it didn't meet their standards.
00:04:27.000It far exceeded their standards because their standards are normally nothing but left-wing conventional wisdom.
00:04:33.000And ultimately, the publisher fired the editorial page editor, again, for publishing an opinion in their pages that he initially supported and which has the support of 58% of the American people.
00:04:45.000So again, as I said at the outset, the New York Times has kind of turned itself into a laughingstock over this matter, but this is not really a laughing matter because free inquiry, freedom of debate is so central to a self-governing democratic society.
00:05:02.000Well, and so now you could say, Senator, that you officially broke the New York Times, which is yeoman's work and a gift from God.
00:05:12.000I expose once and for all just how broken the New York Times is internally.
00:05:16.000And, you know, since then, Charlie, it seems like the New York Times now has an official policy that they have to write at least one article or op-ed a day about me because I notice they continue to write more and more every single day.
00:05:30.000But like I said, I think not just conservatives, but even kind of old school traditional liberals who disagree with a lot of my political views and your political views, but will defend our rights to express those views and advocate for them in the public square are deeply disappointed in what is one of the most elite, the most prestigious institutions of the left in our society.
00:05:57.000It's not healthy that you can't express an opinion that is grounded in law and grounded in history and has the support of the majority of the American people in one of our nation's flagship newspapers.
00:06:10.000And you continue to see that around the country now with the so-called cancel culture, whether it's taking Gone with the Wind off HBO or threatening to pull Paul Trove from television because it has a police dog on it.
00:06:25.000The spirit of a woke mob increasingly is demanding conformity, even uniformity, to progressive dogma that has spread from the social justice seminar on classrooms about which you've spoken so much and on which you've done such good work into the workplace and into the culture at large.
00:06:46.000And that is a real risk for robust debate about ideas that have always underpinned American democracy.
00:06:54.000And the interesting part of the New York Times, to close the point, is they actually invented the modern-day op-ed in 1970 as a reaction to Maoist groupthink that they thought was imbalanced in the conversation in the country.
00:07:09.000And they wanted contrarian ideas at the New York Times in 1970.
00:07:14.000And 50 years later, a senator from Arkansas exposes that they don't want that anymore.
00:07:19.000In fact, if you do not check all the boxes of the swarm of social justice activists, they will try to fire you.
00:07:29.000They will try to make your life miserable.
00:07:30.000But the more they attack you, Senator, the more means you're doing a great job.
00:07:34.000Yeah, and Charlotte, I mean, the point about Maoist thought, I think is very relevant here.
00:07:40.000I mean, the New York Times apparently had a virtual town hall with hundreds of its employees a couple days after my op-ed published.
00:07:49.000And it sounded like a struggle session from the Cultural Revolution in which the grown-ups, the authorities, the publisher and the editor, had to prostrate themselves in front of the children and seek absolution.
00:08:03.000And in the end, the publisher only got absolution by metaphorically exiling the editor out to the hinterland as they did in the Cultural Revolution.
00:08:14.000Again, it's this spirit of left-wing conformism that you saw in the Cultural Revolution brought first to the classroom in America and now increasingly exposed to the broader society.
00:08:28.000Yeah, and for people that don't know the Cultural Revolution, it was basically between 1966 and 1976, which was a huge socio-political movement in China that really created the Chinese Communist Party as we know it today, where they did massive book burnings and just abdicated so much authority to the most radical elements.
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00:10:33.000So, Senator, kind of on this theme of erasing history, you represent a wonderful state, the state of Arkansas, that has a, let's just say, a current conversation going right now on whether or not to remove statues and what the stance should be on whether or not we should have any sort of icons from the Civil War.
00:11:00.000My position is that we should not give an inch to the people that wish to revise our history and delete our history completely.
00:11:08.000And I say this, Senator, as someone who was raised in the suburbs of Chicago, who many ancestors, and many generations prior my family fought on the Union side of the Civil War, that does not, I think, in any way, my opinion, think we should completely remove it from our history.
00:11:24.000What is your position on this, Senator?
00:11:25.000Because it seems as if the more we give in to the left, the more they're willing to take.
00:11:31.000I'd be very interested in your take on this.
00:11:35.000Maybe it's time for the Democrats to grapple with their history of being the party of secession, slavery, and segregation.
00:11:41.000Let's remember, the Republican Party was founded In the 1850s, on the explicit anti-slavery principle.
00:11:50.000That's why Abraham Lincoln helped found the party.
00:11:56.000And ultimately, that's why he was willing to go to war to preserve the Union to ensure that slavery ultimately would reach its ultimate extinction, as he always put it.
00:12:07.000It was the Democrats who wanted to secede, wanted to defend slavery, and then reinforced segregation for decades after the Civil War.
00:12:16.000Look, every state has its own way of grappling with that history.
00:12:51.000And our state legislature decided, you know what, we'd rather make a change.
00:12:54.000We'd rather have something that reflects our more recent history.
00:12:57.000So they voted last year to replace those two statues with one of Daisy Bates, one of the Little Rock Nine, who helped desegregate Little Rock Central, and with Johnny Cash, an Arkansas native.
00:13:07.000And that was a decision made by our state.
00:13:16.000This is more like not the Cultural Revolution, Charlie, the kind of Jacobin mobs you saw in the reign of terror during the French Revolution with Democrats trying to compete for who's going to be the ropespeer.
00:13:28.000I mean, look at what's happened in our streets in the last week, Charlie.
00:13:32.000A statue of Matthias Baldwin was defaced in Philadelphia.
00:13:37.000Matthias Baldwin was a devoted, committed, passionate abolitionist for decades before the Civil War.
00:14:18.000Look in the United Kingdom where statues of Churchill have been defaced and Boris Johnson had to board up one statue of Churchill to prevent it from being further defaced or destroyed.
00:14:28.000I mean, it goes to show what happens, Charlie, when you have a bunch of students studying social justice and not history, because if they think Churchill's bad, what do they think about the other guy on the opposite side?
00:14:38.000Under no circumstances can we capitulate to these mobs that are not defacing, again, statues about which they know nothing and in many cases celebrate great and noble causes.
00:14:48.000I mean, look at all the statues of Christopher Columbus that have been defaced or destroyed in recent days all across the country.
00:14:55.000In many cases, these statues were paid for by immigrant American, or I'm sorry, by Italian American immigrant associations at the turn of the last centuries to celebrate their part in the great American story.
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00:15:57.000Yeah, and as you said it on your wonderful speech on the Senate floor, because you're one of the few people actually fighting, not willing to just run to the hills every time the New York Times calls you a mean name because you've grown used to that because they do that every day.
00:16:18.000One statue that has not been touched, Senator, is this massive statue of Vladimir Lenin in downtown Seattle.
00:16:25.000It seems like that statue they are perfectly fine with.
00:16:29.000Is it in Seattle or is it in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, the world's newest country?
00:16:34.000Yeah, well, I do want to ask you about that.
00:16:39.000And before I do, I just want to make a point.
00:16:41.000You serve the United States military, Senator, and thank you.
00:16:43.000And I look at this entire removal of statues, particularly in the American South, as a war on the South.
00:16:49.000If you look at the statistics of the U.S. military enlistment, the United States military is disproportionately populated with Southerners that step up to serve their country.
00:17:01.000Despite about 36% of the U.S. population coming from what would be called the South, about 44% of all military recruits come from the South.
00:17:09.000And I think it is Malibu and Manhattan's ivory tower way to kind of condescend down on the South.
00:17:16.000And I think it's so outrageous and it is anti-American and is wrong.
00:17:27.000Charlie, it's an example that I guess the Democrats are still the party of secession, 155 years on, since it's a bunch of far-left Democrats in Seattle that have declared an autonomous zone.
00:17:41.000It has often been portrayed over the last few days as a source of great comic relief of something to laugh about.
00:17:48.000Some of these videos you see online of them having debates about how they're going to govern themselves are pretty laughable.
00:17:53.000It's not really a laughing matter because just imagine being one of the innocent citizens who's caught inside that six or eight block area, who has an apartment there or needs to work there, and you're subject to the whims of this mob that has occupied part of downtown Seattle.
00:18:11.000And they're holding your livelihood and even your lives at risk.
00:18:14.000I think the mayor of Seattle and the governor of Washington have been totally feckless.
00:18:20.000At a minimum, they should shut off services to this area and ensure that they can not stay there in any kind of comfort or ease.
00:18:28.000So they should have shut off the water.
00:18:34.000I would say probably set up a perimeter around the so-called autonomous zone as well to ensure that people are not bringing them food and water and other essential supplies.
00:18:44.000Look, you can't set up what you consider to be some Marxist commune in the heart of a capitalist democratic country and then hope to be supplied by the democratic capitalist country.
00:18:56.000Obviously, once people have kind of burrowed in with barricades and defensive positions, you want to try to minimize the violence and minimize any potential bloodshed.
00:19:06.000But it shouldn't be something that we condone, and we should take every steps like turning off the central services and like stopping the resupply so the authorities can get control once again of their streets and innocent citizens, our fellow Americans who want nothing to do with this, can get their life back under control.
00:19:33.000It is a source of great comic relief, don't get me wrong.
00:19:36.000But it's not so funny for all those people, all those innocent Americans whose lives have been upended, whether they live in it or they used to traverse it or they're supposed to work there, their businesses have been destroyed.
00:19:48.000And that's why it's so disappointing to see the mayor of Seattle, the governor of Washington.
00:19:52.000I understand they're far left-wingers, but I assume they're not anarchists or not actually secessionists to allow this to continue for as long as it already has, when there's easy and relatively nonviolent ways to get them out as well, in terms of shutting down central services or setting up a broader perimeter to prevent resupply from going in.
00:20:15.000So, Senator, last time we sat down, you were, and I want to give our listeners, kind of fill them in on this, and they can go back in the archives and hear it for themselves.
00:20:23.000You're one of the few lawmakers that were warning about the severity of the virus, and you were one of the first people to call out China's role in it.
00:20:30.000In fact, I remember I tweeted in support of you in early February because you were calling out on how you were calling out the Chinese Communist Party and how they deceived the international community and how they were misleading investigators.
00:20:43.000And you've been totally vindicated and proven correct.
00:20:46.000Can you just give us a little China update?
00:20:49.000What are you hearing in the U.S. Senate?
00:20:50.000Are we going to have real accountability against the Chinese Communist Party?
00:20:55.000Because despite everything that's going on domestically, I want to make sure we do not keep our eye off the rising threat of China and also just what they did to our country and our civilization.
00:21:11.000And I can tell you that the opinion in the U.S. Senate, I think, increasingly reflects public opinion, is that China is responsible for this pandemic.
00:21:19.000China needs to be held accountable and that China is not a friend.
00:21:26.000And we need to treat China as an adversary.
00:21:29.000So the President and the administration have taken some good steps since we last talked, for instance, by prohibiting American technology going into foreign manufactured microchips that are destined for China.
00:21:40.000That has had the effect of perhaps stopping Huawei's expansion into Europe.
00:21:44.000I know the British Parliament, in front of which I testified a couple weeks ago, is now beginning to reconsider Boris Johnson's decision in January.
00:21:52.000We would welcome that development in Germany.
00:21:55.000They're not certain that they can move forward with Huawei technology either.
00:22:00.000We have our defense bill that just passed the Armed Service Committee last week.
00:22:04.000It'll be coming into the floor in the next few weeks.
00:22:06.000It has many provisions designed to check Chinese ambitions.
00:22:10.000For instance, I have legislation, or I have a measure in that bill that would make sure that our airmen and other service members are protected in countries that use Huawei or ZTE technology or other at-risk telecom vendors.
00:22:24.000On other initiatives, I'm working with Josh Hawley and Lindsey Graham to amend the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act to make sure that we hold accountable those Chinese officials that were responsible for this pandemic.
00:22:35.000We did something similar for the 9-11 victims.
00:22:38.000I'm also working with several senators on trying to reshore critical industries like pharmaceutical manufacturing or medical goods and medical supplies or semiconductor manufacturing through a mix of direct support for that effort and also tax incentives too and ultimately prohibitions on Chinese sourced products.
00:23:00.000So I do feel that we're moving in the right direction.
00:23:02.000A lot of these are steps we should have taken many years ago, but China's irresponsible and reckless behavior in unleashing this pandemic on the world when it could have been merely a local health challenge in Wuhan has opened a lot of eyes.
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00:24:30.000Well, in the couple minutes we have remaining, Senator, can you just kind of give us a little political update where you see things trending?
00:24:36.000A lot of conservatives feel like we're on defense right now.
00:24:39.000They're looking for people that have courage.
00:24:40.000You're one of those people, one of the few people that are actually fighting right now.
00:24:44.000Can you just give a status update to so many of our listeners, especially younger listeners, that just feel like we've been perpetually on defense for the last couple weeks and months?
00:24:53.000Yeah, well, I will say this: so, you know, when you're the incumbent, you're inherently defending your own turf, and we have a lot of incumbents up for re-election this year, most importantly, Donald Trump, but also many of the great senators that we elected in 2014 when we won back the majority from Harry Reid and the Democrats.
00:25:09.000So, in that regard, we're defending our terrain in places like Colorado and in Georgia and in Iowa and in Montana.
00:25:19.000So, one thing your listeners can do is certainly help out all those senators who have been very effective conservative leaders for the last five and a half years, like Joni Ernst and like Steve Daines, in addition to the president, of course.
00:25:32.000I believe as we move on from what is truly a once-in-a-century situation with this pandemic and then a terrible recession, and the economy gets opened up in more and more states, and we see the kind of great economic news that we saw a few days ago with the best jobs reports in the history of jobs reports going back almost 70 years, and we get into the later summer and fall, more Americans will concentrate on the choice between Donald Trump and the choice between Joe Biden.
00:26:01.000We had eight years of slow, sluggish economic performance under the Obama Biden administration.
00:26:09.000Donald Trump and a Republican Congress helped Americans create the strongest economy that we'd had in 50 years.
00:26:15.000Of course, we're in a recession due to a once-in-a-century pandemic, but we can rebuild it just as strong as we did before.
00:26:21.000Or you can take Joe Biden and you can have the kind of slow, sluggish economy that we had for eight years under Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
00:26:30.000I think that'll be a clear choice for Americans.
00:26:32.000I also think that the kind of lawlessness we see on the streets in Seattle or the rioting and looting that we saw a couple weeks ago that many Democrats celebrated or refused to even try to confront if they were in local office and had control of these cities is not going to redound to the Democrats' benefit.
00:26:52.000Americans understand and respect protesters and demonstrators.
00:26:58.000They have zero tolerance for rioters and looters, and they don't want weak politicians in charge at a time when there is domestic unrest.
00:27:05.000So I do believe that once we get further and further from the peak of the pandemic, that we will continue to see more and more people recognizing that we have a clear choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
00:27:19.000And in the end, Donald Trump's going to get reelected, and we will hold on to the Senate.
00:27:47.000And for the first 20 people that subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show, give us a five-star review screenshot and email us freedom at charliekirk.com.
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