The Charlie Kirk Show - Should Donald Trump Destroy the Filibuster?

00:00:03.000 My name is Charlie Kirk.

00:00:05.000 I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic.

00:00:11.000 My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth.

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00:00:41.000 Most important decision I ever made in my life.

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00:00:48.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:49.000 Here we go.

00:00:56.000 The 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.

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

00:01:11.000 Andrew Colbert here.

00:01:12.000 I'm a little bit remote today, but I am joined, of course, by Blake Neff, our not-so-secret weapon, and Mikey McCoy in the studio holding it down.

00:01:23.000 Hello, gentlemen.

00:01:24.000 Welcome, welcome.

00:01:25.000 How we doing?

00:01:26.000 Hey, Andrew.

00:01:28.000 How we doing?

00:01:29.000 Hey, Mikey, it's good to see you again, man.

00:01:31.000 Yeah, thank you, guys.

00:01:33.000 It's nice to be back.

00:01:35.000 I know a lot's happened since I've been gone.

00:01:38.000 And so I'll just say what happened in Utah was the worst day of my life and following the worst seven weeks of my life, of our life, Blake and Andrew.

00:01:51.000 And I just, it's still really dramatic and difficult to talk about.

00:01:57.000 I haven't really been able to.

00:02:00.000 And so I just wanted to thank you and Blake.

00:02:04.000 I wanted to thank you.

00:02:05.000 Of course, man.

00:02:05.000 Thank you.

00:02:07.000 Well, you're doing great, Mikey.

00:02:09.000 Blake, you're doing great.

00:02:10.000 Everybody's doing great.

00:02:11.000 I want to say that our team is doing heroically, actually.

00:02:14.000 When you see what we accomplished this week in Old Miss in Oxford, Mississippi.

00:02:21.000 And then, by the way, guys, we had our first, the kickoff of our high school tour, which is our Club America tour.

00:02:27.000 We had over 500 students come out for that in Nevada.

00:02:30.000 I'm just really proud of the team.

00:02:32.000 We're doing heroic work, and this has been honestly a tremendous, tremendous week that it just shows the spirit that Charlie implanted into so many of the people that run Turning Point and that are still part of Turning Point.

00:02:46.000 And we're going from strength to strength in so many ways.

00:02:48.000 So, you know, Mikey, from us to you, you're doing a phenomenal job, genuinely.

00:02:54.000 Thank you.

00:02:56.000 Yeah, man.

00:02:58.000 So, Blake, why don't you kick things off and just set the table on this filibuster discussion that's happening right now?

00:03:06.000 So, last night, Trump sent a shot across the bow.

00:03:10.000 Yes, so we'll get into that.

00:03:12.000 First, very quickly, I do want to flog something because Charlie would be angry at us if we didn't.

00:03:17.000 There are elections next Tuesday in New Jersey and in Virginia.

00:03:21.000 They are tough races.

00:03:22.000 They are races, to be honest.

00:03:24.000 We are unlikely to win, but we are going to try to win them.

00:03:27.000 We talked with Cliff Maloney the other day.

00:03:28.000 He said there were about, I think, 80,000 unreturned Republican male ballots in New Jersey.

00:03:34.000 So, if you're one of those people in New Jersey who has one of those ballots and hasn't returned it, shut off this show, fill it out, and turn it in right now in Virginia.

00:03:43.000 The last day to early vote is tomorrow.

00:03:46.000 So, if you're in Virginia and you're allowed to early vote and you haven't yet, shut off this show, go to your county courthouse or wherever you're allowed to early vote and do it now.

00:03:56.000 Thank you very much.

00:03:57.000 We're going to flog that next Monday, and we'll be broadcasting the election results on Tuesday.

00:04:03.000 All right.

00:04:04.000 Thank you for your attention to this matter.

00:04:05.000 Well, hey, I just want to throw this up, Blake.

00:04:08.000 Throw the 329. 0.96

00:04:10.000 This is the recent polling.

00:04:11.000 We got Cheryl is up by one point according to the latest polls. 1.00

00:04:18.000 This is from Emerson College.

00:04:20.000 And Jack Chitterelli, so it's 49 to 48.

00:04:23.000 We got about 3% undecided.

00:04:25.000 But remember, there's two little pieces of information I want you guys to hold deep in your hearts as you go out there and you seize the momentum.

00:04:34.000 Independents are backing Chittarelli by plus nine.

00:04:39.000 And here's another one.

00:04:41.000 If you are asked, who do you support, they'll say it one way.

00:04:45.000 But when voters are asked who do they think their neighbors are voting for, guess what?

00:04:50.000 Chittarelli's up by six, which is a very interesting way to poll this because sometimes people will say, oh, of course I'm going Democrat to upholster.

00:04:58.000 But when they ask who do you think your friends and your families and your coworkers, your neighbors are voting for, to see Chitterelli up six is a very, very promising sign.

00:05:07.000 So keep the faith in New Jersey.

00:05:09.000 So anyway, the filibuster thing.

00:05:09.000 All right.

00:05:11.000 So this just came up last night and this morning.

00:05:15.000 It's flaring up.

00:05:16.000 It's coming thanks to President Trump.

00:05:18.000 We have the ongoing government shutdown.

00:05:20.000 It's still going, and we're possibly hitting a crisis point tomorrow because SNAP benefits are set to expire.

00:05:27.000 Lots of stuff to be said about that.

00:05:29.000 But President Trump's response.

00:05:31.000 So last night on Truth Social, he said this.

00:05:34.000 He had a pretty long post.

00:05:35.000 I'm not going to read the whole thing.

00:05:36.000 But he was saying, you know, Democrats have gone off the deep end.

00:05:41.000 They have Trump derangement syndrome.

00:05:42.000 They have trillions of dollars, blah, And then he says, it is time, now time for Republicans to play their Trump card, all caps, and go for what is called the nuclear option.

00:05:52.000 Get rid of the filibuster and get rid of it now.

00:05:56.000 Never have the Democrats fought so hard to do something because they knew the tremendous strength that terminating the filibuster would give them.

00:06:04.000 They want to substantially expand, pack the U.S. Supreme Court, make Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico states.

00:06:10.000 Goes on and on.

00:06:11.000 It's actually quite the long thing.

00:06:12.000 And then he doubled down on that this morning.

00:06:16.000 He made a post that said, because of the fact the Democrats have gone stone cold crazy, the choice is clear.

00:06:24.000 Initiate the nuclear option, get rid of the filibuster, and make America great again.

00:06:32.000 Now, I would guess the Senate is probably unlikely to go for that, but Trump has a lot of power to pressure people.

00:06:40.000 And I think it's an interesting debate.

00:06:42.000 We were talking about this.

00:06:43.000 You know, should it be gone for?

00:06:45.000 And my impulse and what I would tell Charlie when we would discuss this is if you're going to get rid of the filibuster, you've got to do it basically as a day one thing.

00:06:55.000 They should have done it the day Trump took office because you need to maximize what you get out of it.

00:07:01.000 And then you go in because there's all these things we want to do that we can't do because you need 60 votes to do it.

00:07:06.000 Change our immigration laws. 0.91

00:07:07.000 Change environmental laws so it's easier to build things in America.

00:07:12.000 You know, change our budgeting process.

00:07:14.000 Do maybe entitlement reforms.

00:07:17.000 All these numbers of things you'd want to do.

00:07:19.000 And it would be a huge misfire, I think, if we were to get rid of the filibuster, get rid of the 60-vote barrier, and all we get out of it is we end a shutdown and we resume SNAP benefits.

00:07:29.000 And then if Democrats take office after 2028, God forbid, but it's a possibility, then they come in and they're getting that day one no filibuster thing where they get to run wild.

00:07:39.000 And I think that would be my concern and probably Charlie's concern if he was here to talk about it with us.

00:07:44.000 How about you guys?

00:07:45.000 Well, I feel like I feel a bit conflicted because I think the one main thing that would be worth ending the filibuster for is immigration reform.

00:07:55.000 Either an immigration moratorium or at least a dramatic reduction and a replacing of our current model with something that was more merit-based and more interested in what does America get out of it. 0.71

00:08:09.000 I think immigration is the first, second, and third, and fourth, and fifth most important issue in our country.

00:08:14.000 I think it's all about the future of America.

00:08:16.000 So if you're going to do it, you've got to have the guts to do that.

00:08:18.000 I don't think it's worth blowing up the filibuster to, yeah, just turn snap benefits back on or get the government going.

00:08:25.000 I mean, I think we are in a winning position when it comes to the government shutdown.

00:08:29.000 We as the Republican Party, we have tried to open the government multiple, multiple times.

00:08:35.000 The Democrats have blocked it time and again.

00:08:38.000 They have even tried to pass a clean bill to turn snap benefits back on for people.

00:08:43.000 So this is the newest flashpoint is the snap benefits.

00:08:48.000 But here's the deal.

00:08:49.000 If we do this, there will come a time, and we've just got to be perfectly honest about it, where they will make Puerto Rico a state.

00:08:58.000 And that's two more Democrat senators. 0.91

00:09:02.000 They will probably try and make Washington, D.C. a state.

00:09:05.000 That's two more senators on top of that. 0.99

00:09:09.000 So you could be staring down the barrel of a situation where if you take this away, then we might ever have a majority in the U.S. Senate again.

00:09:20.000 I mean, we could.

00:09:21.000 Now, JD Vance said at our turning point event at Old Miss, like, we shouldn't be afraid to do stuff just because we know that the Democrat Party is going to do it.

00:09:30.000 Well, this is one instance that at least in the previous iteration, we had Kirsten Sinema and we had Joe Manchin that blocked the nuclear option from being on the table for the Democrats, and that probably saved the Republic.

00:09:44.000 So I feel very, very conflicted.

00:09:45.000 Obviously, it's tempting to do.

00:09:47.000 Anytime a party's in power, it's tempting to do.

00:09:49.000 But I think we have to be very, very cautious about doing this.

00:09:53.000 And we've seen that Mike Johnson has come out against blowing up the filibuster.

00:09:57.000 So I don't know if you have final thoughts there, Blake, but it's a hornet's nest.

00:10:03.000 That's for sure.

00:10:04.000 You always just, anytime, there's a lot of things Republicans have wanted to do.

00:10:08.000 And anytime you're going to do something politically, you have to think what will happen next.

00:10:13.000 You always want to think the medium-term consequences of what you will do.

00:10:17.000 And this is one of the biggest ones of all where you have to think that out.

00:10:21.000 So be careful what you wish for, is what we would say.

00:10:25.000 This is Speaker Johnson coming out against President Trump's tweets.

00:10:33.000 Let's call them truths in anger.

00:10:36.000 And it's 31 days into a government shutdown.

00:10:36.000 Totally understandable.

00:10:39.000 The Democrats have not shown any desire to negotiate in good faith.

00:10:43.000 So we understand where it's coming from.

00:10:44.000 Play cut 330.

00:10:46.000 What you're seeing is an expression of the president's anger at the situation.

00:10:51.000 He is as angry as I am and the American people are about this madness.

00:10:56.000 Do your basic job.

00:10:57.000 I'm going to say this again.

00:10:58.000 We have put zero, zero Republican policy priorities on the CR.

00:11:04.000 It is Biden-level policies and spending.

00:11:06.000 They have no excuse at all not to support it.

00:11:10.000 They have no excuse to put all this pain on the American people, except that for what we've just articulated and repeated here every day.

00:11:17.000 All right, so Blake, this is obviously Speaker Johnson trying to do a little damage control.

00:11:23.000 But I think Trump is dead serious.

00:11:25.000 I think he's fed up.

00:11:26.000 He's thrown his hands up in the air and he wants to do this.

00:11:29.000 He is.

00:11:30.000 But I think you think about how Trump likes to approach things.

00:11:33.000 Trump generally is a guy who's very much what is immediately in front of me.

00:11:37.000 He's a guy who wants wins.

00:11:40.000 He's, you don't want to say, he's a guy who's looking directly in front of him.

00:11:45.000 And so he's thinking, I have a problem now.

00:11:47.000 What could resolve that problem now?

00:11:49.000 And people say, like, oh, well, the filibuster keeps us from doing this.

00:11:51.000 And he'd say, let's get rid of it.

00:11:53.000 And we're getting a lot of emails from different directions.

00:11:56.000 And I want to flag, one person said, for example, we got an email from Greg here who says, nuke the filibuster, fix everything, then put it back.

00:12:05.000 But also, we have one saying when Dems take control, first thing on their list will be to end the filibuster.

00:12:10.000 So why don't we just do it?

00:12:12.000 So a few thoughts there.

00:12:13.000 First of all, Democrats had power under Biden, and they did not manage to get rid of the filibuster.

00:12:19.000 They had...

00:12:20.000 Joe Manchin didn't want to vote to do it.

00:12:22.000 Kirsten Sinema didn't want to vote to do it. 0.53

00:12:23.000 Now, both of those people are gone.

00:12:24.000 So that would be an argument.

00:12:25.000 Maybe next time they will get rid of it.

00:12:27.000 On the other hand, you might also see next time there could be a different Democrat who decides they enjoy the power from being the most right-wing Democrat.

00:12:37.000 That gave them a lot of influence.

00:12:38.000 That gave them a lot of play in Washington.

00:12:40.000 There's always the temptation to be that.

00:12:42.000 So it's always been harder to kill the filibuster than people expect.

00:12:45.000 I've been around for 20 years.

00:12:47.000 People have been telling me the Democrats will nuke the filibuster the next time they're in power, and they haven't done it yet.

00:12:52.000 So there's that factor.

00:12:54.000 The other thing about, you know, that get rid of it and put it back.

00:12:56.000 And we're looking at, this is the power of norms.

00:12:58.000 This is the power of tradition.

00:13:00.000 The truth is, once the filibuster is destroyed, it will be gone.

00:13:04.000 That's the way of it.

00:13:06.000 Yet there is this power it exerts as long as it exists.

00:13:10.000 So you can't really get rid of it and then put it back because it could just be voted away again.

00:13:15.000 What has kept it in place is the fact that it is in place.

00:13:19.000 And so if you're going to approach the matter of getting rid of the filibuster, of making it a 50-vote thing instead of a 60-vote thing, you do have to think about the timing of it.

00:13:27.000 What really will justify you getting rid of it?

00:13:30.000 And I'd say the only, in my opinion, strong argument in favor of this is at least if you're doing this, you're probably, to bring back SNAP, you're probably doing it for something that most Americans generally approve of.

00:13:42.000 Whereas if you're nuking the filibuster to push a very strong right-wing priority that maybe isn't polling 80-20, that could produce some political blowback.

00:13:52.000 But the reason, that's why you want to do it at the start of your term, too.

00:13:55.000 You do your most aggressive, most ambitious stuff right at the outset.

00:13:59.000 Whereas if we're getting rid of it now, we're unlikely to pass any of those big immigration reform things we want to do because they'll be all nervous.

00:14:05.000 They won't want to do big, ambitious stuff during the midterm election year.

00:14:11.000 Hey, everybody, Andrew Colvett, executive producer of The Charlie Kirk Show.

00:14:15.000 Charlie understood that to lead, he needed to learn.

00:14:18.000 Hillsdale College was ready to teach him.

00:14:20.000 While busy running his company, teaching America's youth, and raising a beautiful family, Charlie still found time to complete 31 Hillsdale College free online courses.

00:14:30.000 He talked about it the last time he spoke on his podcast with Hillsdale's president, Dr. Larry Arn.

00:14:34.000 Hillsdale is the cutting edge, and I mean it.

00:14:36.000 It is America's greatest college.

00:14:38.000 You are a force of nature, Charlie Kirk.

00:14:40.000 One of these days, I'm going to give you an honorary degree.

00:14:42.000 That would be the honor of my life, but I got a lot more learning yet to do.

00:14:46.000 And I say this, the Hillsdale courses have changed my life.

00:14:48.000 Through Hillsdale College's free online courses, Charlie studied the Bible, the classics, the American founding, and through his relentless pursuit of truth, became not only a great American, but a good man.

00:14:59.000 Charlie's gone, but his spirit of hard work and lifelong learning carry on.

00:15:03.000 Each of us can follow his example and pick up where he left off.

00:15:06.000 So learn like Charlie did at CharlieForhillsdale.com.

00:15:09.000 That's CharlieForhillsdale.com.

00:15:14.000 Well, here's what I would say.

00:15:15.000 Trump is not going to have the votes to get rid of the filibuster, right?

00:15:19.000 I mean, let's just be honest.

00:15:21.000 We've got four Republicans that have just gone against him on tariffs, right?

00:15:25.000 It's going to die in the House.

00:15:27.000 It's dead in the water anyways.

00:15:28.000 But you're not going to get the filibuster nuked anyways.

00:15:32.000 The question I have is more of a theoretical question.

00:15:35.000 Would we be better off without the filibuster?

00:15:39.000 Both ways.

00:15:40.000 Here's my thought.

00:15:41.000 The Democrats have more lasting change that they can accomplish with Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. becoming states.

00:15:48.000 You can't undo that if that happens.

00:15:51.000 You can't roll those things back, really.

00:15:53.000 I mean, you could probably, but it's highly unlikely.

00:15:56.000 I'd give it a 0.001% chance that once you create two states, you could undo the creation of states.

00:16:01.000 I don't know what the legalities of that are.

00:16:03.000 Those are two lasting, permanent changes that they could affect within the body politics.

00:16:09.000 So the question is, do we have similarly worthwhile changes that we could affect?

00:16:13.000 Could we create East Washington, East Oregon?

00:16:16.000 I don't know.

00:16:17.000 But the point is, the options at the disposal of the Democrats are far scarier than the options we have.

00:16:25.000 Now, I do believe that immigration, it would be such a huge, huge change to the country, but I'm still not convinced that we have the votes for that. 1.00

00:16:33.000 I guarantee you, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Rand Paul, these guys would still try and block a really robust immigration reform policy, even if we nuke the filibuster.

00:16:43.000 I think here's my basic point, Blake.

00:16:45.000 If we got the GOP to a stronger position, then maybe I would consider it.

00:16:51.000 But we do not have a strong enough GOP or anywhere close to a strong enough GOP to even begin entertaining nuking the filibuster, and we should keep our hands clean.

00:17:01.000 There's zero reason to even consider that right now.

00:17:04.000 That's my bias.

00:17:05.000 My bias remains the Democrats are likely to eventually get rid of it, but let them be the ones who smash that Pandora's box because then they're the ones who have the disadvantage of they probably don't do it as their day one thing.

00:17:17.000 They probably only do it partway through a term.

00:17:20.000 They do something extreme with it.

00:17:21.000 It creates political blowback.

00:17:23.000 Let them break it, and then hopefully the next time we're in power, we're able to have this day one post-filibuster agenda.

00:17:30.000 But I did want to highlight sort of the big picture issue that's happened, which is because of the filibuster existing the way it has, and it's gotten more and more intense over the decades, it's sort of, it's messed up American politics because American politics is not supposed to have a 60-vote supermajority threshold to pass any legislation out of Congress.

00:17:51.000 If you read the Federalist Papers, Madison says Congress is supposed to be the most powerful branch of government because they write the laws, they allocate the funding, and that's kind of gone away because the Senate is permanently paralyzed.

00:18:06.000 And so we've gotten this imperial presidency, for example, because we need the executive branch to do everything.

00:18:13.000 Like, for example, why, you know, we've talked about why the Civil Rights Act went so haywire and led to all this bureaucracy and HR hellscape.

00:18:21.000 And it's because the executive branch is issuing regulatory guidances and, you know, interpretations of the law that Congress can never really check because Congress hardly passes any laws at all.

00:18:33.000 Or we're paralyzed.

00:18:34.000 We can't reform immigration law because Congress can't pass anything.

00:18:37.000 We can't change environmental laws that are clearly stale and need reform because you can't get these 60 vote thresholds on anything.

00:18:44.000 And it's led to this thing where we have this sort of fake rubber stamp Congress that can't do anything, that can't assert itself on anything.

00:18:52.000 And that's also why we have bad Republicans. 0.83

00:18:54.000 We have all these bad Republicans who aren't, who can't be held to account for being frauds on immigration and all this other stuff because, well, can't pass this.

00:19:02.000 We don't have 60 votes to do it.

00:19:04.000 If it's 50 votes, you can actually really, really put a Republican's feet to the fire when they are not passing something that you need.

00:19:12.000 So get this, Blake.

00:19:13.000 I actually love where your head's at because it does create a paralysis within the legislative body that has stripped it of its constitutionally designed power.

00:19:23.000 And the balance of power with the executive branch has been thrown out of whack.

00:19:26.000 So what do we get?

00:19:27.000 We got a lot of EOs.

00:19:28.000 We get a lot of rule by fiat.

00:19:30.000 And that feels like a lot of us don't have representation when the other party's in power.

00:19:34.000 But get this, without the 17th Amendment, because remember, the 17th Amendment made it so that Republican, or that senators in each state are elected by popular vote as opposed to selected by the state representatives.

00:19:49.000 If we didn't have the 17th Amendment, guess how many Republicans we would have in the Senate? 1.00

00:19:57.000 Do you have an approximate guess?

00:19:59.000 I mean, people do this, but it would change everything about American politics.

00:20:03.000 But we would have more.

00:20:03.000 That is true.

00:20:05.000 We would have 70 right now.

00:20:08.000 70.

00:20:10.000 Man, that would have been so.

00:20:11.000 60 fateful R states for two senators each.

00:20:14.000 That'd be 68 for that.

00:20:16.000 And then two states was split.

00:20:18.000 We'd be at 70 Republican senators.

00:20:20.000 So whoever drafted the 17th Amendment, Democrats should be thanking their lucky stars that that happened. 0.68

00:20:26.000 Just absolutely insane.

00:20:29.000 All right.

00:20:29.000 Without further ado, I'm so excited to bring in Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles show, and just all around good, good American, good Catholic American, because that seems to be, I want to actually get into that with you, Michael.

00:20:43.000 A little JD Vance dust up about Usha, but we're going to start with the most important.

00:20:48.000 Tell us what you did this week.

00:20:50.000 You went before the U.S. Senate.

00:20:52.000 It was a subcommittee hearing on the rise of political violence.

00:20:56.000 It was hosted and chaired by Senator Eric Schmidt from the great state of Missouri.

00:21:01.000 Tell us what that was all about, Michael.

00:21:03.000 It was a really important hearing.

00:21:05.000 I was honored to be invited and to go testify.

00:21:08.000 Chairman Schmidt called it at as timely a moment as you could imagine.

00:21:12.000 He opened it, by the way, with a beautiful tribute to Charlie.

00:21:16.000 And if people haven't gone to see the testimony, just even that opening, I think was really beautiful.

00:21:22.000 And that was obviously the cause of the testimony, because there's been a lot of political violence and it has been increasing.

00:21:28.000 There was a Pew Poll just came out.

00:21:30.000 85% of Americans think that political violence is getting worse in our country.

00:21:34.000 When 85% of Americans agree on anything, I think you can acknowledge that it's happening.

00:21:40.000 And so he said, all right, obviously, this is a long-standing problem that has reached this horrific, tragic climax in Charlie's assassination and in the reaction to Charlie's assassination and the minimizing and the excusing and the justifying and even the celebrating at all levels of the American left.

00:22:01.000 And so we need to figure out what's really going on here.

00:22:04.000 So I felt it was important to go.

00:22:06.000 The Democrats called their own minority witnesses.

00:22:09.000 What was really disappointing is that half the Democrats on the panel didn't even show up. 0.83

00:22:17.000 The ones who did show up asked, I thought, ridiculous questions.

00:22:21.000 You know, they would just bring up January 6th or whatever.

00:22:24.000 They wouldn't even let us answer on the points of January 6th, I think, because they know the answers would be devastating to them.

00:22:32.000 And then there was one moment in particular that I thought was really crazy because one of the guys on this subcommittee is Corey Booker.

00:22:38.000 And Corey Booker has endorsed Jay Jones for Attorney General of Virginia. 0.80

00:22:43.000 Jay Jones, who has called for Republicans to be killed.

00:22:47.000 And he's clarified he wasn't joking about that.

00:22:50.000 So Corey Booker shows up late.

00:22:52.000 He uses up all his time just bloviating, saying it's really a both sides issue, but actually secretly, it's entirely a right-wing issue.

00:22:59.000 And anyway, we need to be more careful about our words.

00:23:02.000 We need to take back our words when we say things we shouldn't have said.

00:23:05.000 We need to be introspective.

00:23:07.000 The questioning then goes to Senator Blackburn on the other side of the room.

00:23:10.000 I'm listening to her and I say, okay, well, that's a good question, but I want to get back to something Senator Booker said.

00:23:14.000 You know, if he's really serious about this, it seems like he's setting the stage to withdraw his endorsement from Jay Jones.

00:23:20.000 He should do that now.

00:23:21.000 I turn.

00:23:22.000 Booker left the room.

00:23:23.000 There's a Corey Booker shaped hole in the wall.

00:23:25.000 The whole thing on the Democrat side was completely disingenuous.

00:23:29.000 It was crocodile tears.

00:23:30.000 And the conclusion that I have to reach from that is the Democrats don't want to talk about political violence because one, it's coming from the left, even the Atlantic magazine admits it.

00:23:39.000 And two, because their base supports it.

00:23:42.000 And I can't come to any conclusion other than the Democrats in government are more or less fine with the political violence too.

00:23:49.000 Well, I fear you're right, Michael.

00:23:50.000 There's a clip here from Jennifer Welch, who I confess I had no idea who she was until about a week ago.

00:24:02.000 And she apparently has amassed quite a following as a podcaster.

00:24:05.000 She's a former Bravo reality star that became a podcaster.

00:24:10.000 And she says some pretty troubling things that lead me to believe that your conclusions reached after the subcommittee hearing are sadly more likely than not true.

00:24:20.000 PlayCut 283.

00:24:22.000 So listen up, Democratic establishment.

00:24:25.000 You can either jump on board with this or we're coming after you in the same way that we come after MACA.

00:24:32.000 Period.

00:24:32.000 They're that are beholden to the same corporations that Donald Trump, that helped Donald Trump get elected.

00:24:40.000 Kudos to Bernie, to AOC, to Zoron.

00:24:43.000 And that woman out in somewhere middle America saying, Charlie Kirk, he was a racist. 0.99

00:24:50.000 He was a piece of. 0.94

00:24:52.000 There are so many more of us than there are of them.

00:24:55.000 And these Democrats that continue to play patty cake with corporations, nobody wants that.

00:25:01.000 Nobody wants you.

00:25:02.000 So Michael, is she right that the Democrat base does not want to moderate, that they do not want to confront the demons in their own closet and their own activist militant base?

00:25:15.000 You know the polls as well as I. After Charlie's assassination, YouGov conducted surveys showed that people who identify as very liberal are eight times as likely as people who are very conservative to justify political violence.

00:25:27.000 Let's throw that image up. 0.88

00:25:28.000 This is 31, image 31, please.

00:25:32.000 And I believe this is the poll you're looking at.

00:25:34.000 And that crazy, we've shown it a number of times on this show, Michael, but this is to me the scariest graph that exists in American politics today, where you have 18 to 39-year-old self-described progressives with that wild standout node,

00:25:51.000 that blue left dot on the screen, where you and you contrast that with the same age group among conservatives, and they are among the most, if not the most peaceful of all the cohorts on this survey.

00:26:06.000 Well, this is what's really scary.

00:26:07.000 This is kind of like the second part.

00:26:09.000 So if you just look at all age groups, very liberal, eight times as likely to justify political violence as very conservative.

00:26:16.000 Then you zoom in on what you're showing and it breaks it down by young people, middle-aged people, older people.

00:26:21.000 And if you look at the older people, the liberals and the conservatives, basically about the same.

00:26:26.000 Liberals are a little more likely to support political violence, but it's almost the same.

00:26:30.000 Moderates, the least likely of all. 0.99

00:26:32.000 When you zoom back to the younger groups, something changes.

00:26:37.000 First of all, the moderates and the conservatives flip.

00:26:40.000 The young conservatives are much less likely than the young moderates to support political violence.

00:26:46.000 They're the least likely of that age group.

00:26:48.000 Then it's moderates, and then the young liberals spike in their support up to 26% for political violence.

00:26:55.000 So not only is this today a major problem on the left, it's getting worse because you're looking at the young people. 0.99

00:27:02.000 It's a crystal ball for the future.

00:27:03.000 So I suspect Jennifer Welch is probably right about this.

00:27:07.000 I, like you, had never heard of her or never seen her face before, that viral clip.

00:27:11.000 However, she's not just some fringe nobody.

00:27:14.000 There are other interviews where she sat down with Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat leader in the House.

00:27:18.000 In that interview, he lauds her, he praises her, and she says, oh, I've sat down with a bunch of your colleagues too.

00:27:24.000 So, you know, this is not an aberration.

00:27:26.000 I think every single data point we see, the public opinion polls, the statements of the prominent liberals, all the way down to what we were discussing at the Senate testimony, which is the actual cases of political violence, they're coming from the left.

00:27:39.000 What's so amazing about those data now is that even the Atlantic has to admit, okay, political violence is primarily a left-wing problem, not a right-wing problem today.

00:27:48.000 That's using data sets that don't even count all the left-wing violence.

00:27:53.000 Because if you look at all of these data sets and even the federal numbers, they're not counting the BLM riots that left dozens of people dead and billion dollars in property damage.

00:28:01.000 That doesn't count as left-wing political violence.

00:28:03.000 They're not counting all sorts of attacks on ciphers, the Tesla dealerships.

00:28:08.000 And then the incident that I was called to testify about was a campus event at University of Pittsburgh.

00:28:14.000 Two Antifa operatives who are card-carrying members of Antifa show up, throw an explosive at cops, seriously injure a female police officer.

00:28:24.000 These are people who were claimed by the Torch Antifa network, Torch Antifa, soliciting donations through a tax-exempt nonprofit organization for them.

00:28:32.000 This is as clear ideological violence as you can possibly imagine.

00:28:37.000 That incident was not counted as left-wing political violence.

00:28:39.000 And so the only conclusion you can reach is that the left doesn't commit a lot of political violence when you don't count the political violence the left commits.

00:28:47.000 Interesting.

00:28:48.000 Interesting how that works.

00:28:49.000 It just seems like, you know, the go-to grab bag option of the American left in 2025 is to just simply, you know, rig the results in your favor.

00:29:00.000 This is Lane Schoenberger, Chief Investment Officer and Founding Partner of YReFi.

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00:30:09.000 Michael, you can't argue with this.

00:30:11.000 I believe this is the article you're talking about.

00:30:14.000 Throw up 337.

00:30:15.000 Top Trump officials are moving onto military bases.

00:30:20.000 Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Christy Noam, and others have taken over homes that until recently housed senior military officials.

00:30:28.000 So this is straight from the Atlantic.

00:30:31.000 And it is no longer safe for members of the Trump administration to live out in the general public.

00:30:38.000 They have to be housed in secure military bases for their own safety and for their family's safety.

00:30:44.000 This is what it's come to.

00:30:45.000 What's crazy, that's actually not even the article I was referencing.

00:30:49.000 There's another article that says left-wing terrorism is on the rise.

00:30:53.000 That's the headline.

00:30:54.000 I actually hadn't even seen this headline until you just showed it to me.

00:30:57.000 The fact that we have civilians, we have people just working in our government, ordinary political order, who now have to move to secure locations for military leaders.

00:31:10.000 It shows you that something really horrific has happened in this country, as if the Rubicon has been crossed.

00:31:16.000 I suspect that happened when the Democrats started prosecuting Trump, you know, the chief political opponent and the predecessor, when they started raiding his home, when they started going after all of their enemies and even justifying his assassination, which nearly happened in Butler, nearly happened again, actually, later on.

00:31:36.000 It does feel like something just seismically has shifted in the political order.

00:31:40.000 And it's a lot bigger than some one podcaster making nasty comments or, I don't know, one Democrat in Congress.

00:31:48.000 It seems like this is a major shift of the whole left.

00:31:51.000 Yeah, it feels like the whole tree has become rotten from the root.

00:31:56.000 And it does feel like there is a seismic shift.

00:32:01.000 It's an ideological, movement-wide shift.

00:32:04.000 And you can see it about the way that they talk about President Trump or they talk about Charlie. 1.00

00:32:08.000 Nazi, fascist, bigot, racist, homophobe, xenophobe. 0.99

00:32:13.000 All of this language that has basically said this movement is a bunch of Nazis. 0.98

00:32:17.000 And what did we have to do with Hitler?

00:32:19.000 We had to eventually, you know, take him out, right?

00:32:22.000 And I think that's becoming more widely and widely accepted within the left-wing political movement.

00:32:28.000 Michael Knowles.

00:32:30.000 Just listen to Joe Biden.

00:32:31.000 Get it from the horse's mouth.

00:32:32.000 Is it the horse's mouth?

00:32:33.000 Some part of the horse.

00:32:34.000 When you say that there's an existential threat to the country, as he said about Trump, existential threats are a justification for assassination.

00:32:42.000 I think they knew exactly what they were doing.

00:32:44.000 Yeah, I'm concerned you're right, Michael.

00:32:46.000 And I want to give Michael his due.

00:32:49.000 He got a great moment, 264.

00:32:51.000 Play it.

00:32:52.000 Democrats have lied about the statistics on political violence.

00:32:55.000 They've covered them up.

00:32:56.000 They've shed what I think we have to reasonably conclude are crocodile tears, and they want to pretend that nothing's happened.

00:33:02.000 Senator Booker came in.

00:33:04.000 He said, we shouldn't cast any aspersions.

00:33:07.000 We shouldn't say that the violence comes from one side or the other.

00:33:10.000 He then launched into a diatribe about how the violence really comes from the right.

00:33:14.000 And then before I had a chance to respond to that, he left the room.

00:33:18.000 And I think it's particularly rich and hypocritical coming from someone like Senator Booker because Senator Booker continues to endorse a man who would be a top law enforcement official in the state who has called for the murder of Republicans and our children.

00:33:31.000 But to your point, Martha, you know, looking at Ole Miss tonight, looking at this amazing show of unity from the vice president and from Erica Kirk, and looking at all of the students who are going to come out and support a healthy exchange and a good future for our country, they give me a lot more hope than the Democrats on Capitol Hill do.

00:33:48.000 Well said, Michael Knowles.

00:33:49.000 Want to bring in Blake and Mikey in the studio for this conversation.

00:33:53.000 This is really important stuff, actually, because it kind of went, I think night one, right after Ole Miss, nobody really talked about it, Michael.

00:34:02.000 But then the day after, the day after people are talking about that, they think JD was so rude to his wife, Usha, and that he can't, they can't believe that he would want his wife to become a Christian.

00:34:12.000 So let's play the clip from the Old Miss event, 286.

00:34:17.000 Play it.

00:34:18.000 Now, most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church.

00:34:20.000 As I've told her, and I've said publicly, and I'll say now in front of 10,000 of my closest friends, do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church?

00:34:32.000 Yeah, I honestly, I do wish that because I believe in the Christian gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.

00:34:41.000 So I wanted to bring in Mike, obviously, Mikey is the son of a pastor.

00:34:46.000 Blake is a Catholic.

00:34:47.000 You're a Catholic.

00:34:49.000 We're all Christians here.

00:34:50.000 Is that rude to say that you hope your wife would eventually one day see the world and have faith like you do?

00:34:57.000 Yeah, I just, I think it's crazy because Christianity has proven you live a happier life.

00:35:04.000 Charlie used to talk about it as the missing piece for everybody.

00:35:07.000 Once you found that missing piece, you lived the life that was there for you.

00:35:11.000 And he would argue about the necessity of God over the existence of one.

00:35:15.000 And so no more than you would wish someone who's an alcoholic to no longer be an alcoholic, would you wish for them to find Christianity, the missing piece that would bring them peace and happiness?

00:35:26.000 Yeah, it's, I don't know.

00:35:28.000 I basically have nothing to add over what Mikey said there.

00:35:31.000 It's very bizarre to say, I guess, like JD Vance wants what he thinks is best for his spouse, whom he loves.

00:35:40.000 And, you know, someone has to come in and do that.

00:35:44.000 This has become quite a controversy online.

00:35:46.000 I was looking, so JD is reacting to a clip from A-C-Y-N. 0.60

00:35:52.000 I never know how to say that, guys.

00:35:53.000 It's Twitter handler, but a lefty on Twitter on X. 0.99

00:35:56.000 And that thing has 10 million views.

00:35:59.000 Like, it's a lot of engagement.

00:36:01.000 Michael, is this just much ado about nothing?

00:36:04.000 I mean, this is the...

00:36:06.000 No, it's better than that.

00:36:07.000 Go ahead.

00:36:09.000 It's much ado about something.

00:36:10.000 It's just something good.

00:36:11.000 I mean, I think we need to state it out the gate.

00:36:15.000 What JD and Erica did was magnificent.

00:36:18.000 The fact that Erica has the strength to do this is just superhuman, first of all. 0.91

00:36:23.000 And then what the vice president did in the Q ⁇ A was magnificent.

00:36:27.000 I know we're all admirers of the vice president here.

00:36:29.000 He was pitch perfect.

00:36:32.000 I would not have changed one syllable about any answer he gave.

00:36:36.000 It was just a phenomenal showing on all of these different matters and some questions that were a little bit hostile.

00:36:42.000 And on this, I think you've seen the poison of secularism and atheism in our culture setting in in people's reactions because it's not that they disagree with the vice president on religion.

00:36:54.000 It's that they don't even seem to know what religion is.

00:36:57.000 But JD, JD understands what religion is and he has a living faith.

00:37:01.000 And so as we've all said here, he wants what he believes to be good for his wife.

00:37:09.000 He recognizes that religion is not just like a taste.

00:37:11.000 You know, you like chocolate and I like vanilla.

00:37:14.000 He recognizes that religion is a habit of virtue that inclines the will to give to God what he deserves.

00:37:20.000 It's not a question of like or dislike.

00:37:22.000 It's a question of truth or falsehood.

00:37:24.000 And so he's being very respectful to people of other faiths, including his wife, of course, but many other people too.

00:37:30.000 He's just saying, look, I have this view of religious truth, and I think that truth and goodness and beauty and all these things go together.

00:37:37.000 And so because I love my wife, and by extension, by the way, because I love other people, I want to share that with you.

00:37:44.000 You know, that is the great commission.

00:37:46.000 That is the gospel.

00:37:48.000 That's like the whole point, guys.

00:37:50.000 And the fact that people would attack him for it is one thing.

00:37:53.000 The fact that they don't even understand what he's saying is so damning about our culture and how we think about the deepest questions.

00:38:02.000 I think that's exactly right.

00:38:03.000 Blake and Mikey, take us home at the end of this hour one with Michael Knowles.

00:38:07.000 The floor is your guys.

00:38:08.000 You have to say that.

00:38:09.000 Yeah, the other thing that I love too, not just the religious aspect of JD's speech, but also he's backstage and he just goes, what was the thing that Charlie used to always say?

00:38:20.000 Disagreements come to the front of the line.

00:38:22.000 And I was like, yeah, yeah, that's it.

00:38:24.000 And he goes, I'm going to do that tonight.

00:38:25.000 And I just keep telling everybody, you can't even find a senator, a congressman, or any person on the right who's a public speaker that would welcome disagreements to the front of the line, let alone the vice president of the United States who has much to lose.

00:38:40.000 I hope it spreads because we've seen how much better JD has gotten from just being in the arena all the time, whether it's on the Sunday shows or doing something like this.

00:38:48.000 And think how much better our politicians would be as a class if this was expected of all our senators and all our representatives.

00:38:56.000 Make them be smart people who can answer hostile questions on, you know, on the fly.

00:39:01.000 We'll get better politicians and that means better laws.

00:39:04.000 Yeah, it really reminds me of Charlie.

00:39:06.000 Like, I just, I see a little bit of Charlie in JD and how he does that.

00:39:11.000 Michael Knowles, we thank you, my friend, for making the time.

00:39:13.000 Appreciate you.

00:39:14.000 Good to be with you guys.

00:39:15.000 Thanks.

00:39:20.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - October 31, 2025

Should Donald Trump Destroy the Filibuster?

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