00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:09.000All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:12.000I'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.
00:01:35.000I know a lot's happened since I've been gone.
00:01:38.000And 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.
00:01:51.000And I just, it's still really dramatic and difficult to talk about.
00:02:32.000We'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.
00:02:46.000And we're going from strength to strength in so many ways.
00:02:48.000So, you know, Mikey, from us to you, you're doing a phenomenal job, genuinely.
00:03:24.000We are unlikely to win, but we are going to try to win them.
00:03:27.000We talked with Cliff Maloney the other day.
00:03:28.000He said there were about, I think, 80,000 unreturned Republican male ballots in New Jersey.
00:03:34.000So, 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.
00:03:43.000The last day to early vote is tomorrow.
00:03:46.000So, 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.
00:04:25.000But 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.
00:04:34.000Independents are backing Chittarelli by plus nine.
00:04:41.000If you are asked, who do you support, they'll say it one way.
00:04:45.000But when voters are asked who do they think their neighbors are voting for, guess what?
00:04:50.000Chittarelli'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.
00:04:58.000But 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.
00:05:42.000They 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.
00:05:52.000Get rid of the filibuster and get rid of it now.
00:05:56.000Never have the Democrats fought so hard to do something because they knew the tremendous strength that terminating the filibuster would give them.
00:06:04.000They want to substantially expand, pack the U.S. Supreme Court, make Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico states.
00:06:45.000And 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.
00:06:55.000They should have done it the day Trump took office because you need to maximize what you get out of it.
00:07:01.000And 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.
00:07:17.000All these numbers of things you'd want to do.
00:07:19.000And 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.
00:07:29.000And 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.
00:07:39.000And I think that would be my concern and probably Charlie's concern if he was here to talk about it with us.
00:07:45.000Well, 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.
00:07:55.000Either 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.
00:08:09.000I think immigration is the first, second, and third, and fourth, and fifth most important issue in our country.
00:08:14.000I think it's all about the future of America.
00:08:16.000So if you're going to do it, you've got to have the guts to do that.
00:08:18.000I don't think it's worth blowing up the filibuster to, yeah, just turn snap benefits back on or get the government going.
00:08:25.000I mean, I think we are in a winning position when it comes to the government shutdown.
00:08:29.000We as the Republican Party, we have tried to open the government multiple, multiple times.
00:08:35.000The Democrats have blocked it time and again.
00:08:38.000They have even tried to pass a clean bill to turn snap benefits back on for people.
00:08:43.000So this is the newest flashpoint is the snap benefits.
00:08:49.000If 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.
00:08:58.000And that's two more Democrat senators.
00:09:02.000They will probably try and make Washington, D.C. a state.
00:09:05.000That's two more senators on top of that.
00:09:09.000So 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.
00:09:21.000Now, 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.
00:09:30.000Well, 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.
00:11:53.000And we're getting a lot of emails from different directions.
00:11:56.000And 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.
00:12:05.000But also, we have one saying when Dems take control, first thing on their list will be to end the filibuster.
00:12:25.000Maybe next time they will get rid of it.
00:12:27.000On 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.
00:13:06.000Yet there is this power it exerts as long as it exists.
00:13:10.000So you can't really get rid of it and then put it back because it could just be voted away again.
00:13:15.000What has kept it in place is the fact that it is in place.
00:13:19.000And 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.
00:13:27.000What really will justify you getting rid of it?
00:13:30.000And 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.
00:13:42.000Whereas 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.
00:13:52.000But the reason, that's why you want to do it at the start of your term, too.
00:13:55.000You do your most aggressive, most ambitious stuff right at the outset.
00:13:59.000Whereas 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.
00:14:05.000They won't want to do big, ambitious stuff during the midterm election year.
00:14:11.000Hey, everybody, Andrew Colvett, executive producer of The Charlie Kirk Show.
00:14:15.000Charlie understood that to lead, he needed to learn.
00:14:18.000Hillsdale College was ready to teach him.
00:14:20.000While 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.
00:14:30.000He talked about it the last time he spoke on his podcast with Hillsdale's president, Dr. Larry Arn.
00:14:34.000Hillsdale is the cutting edge, and I mean it.
00:14:38.000You are a force of nature, Charlie Kirk.
00:14:40.000One of these days, I'm going to give you an honorary degree.
00:14:42.000That would be the honor of my life, but I got a lot more learning yet to do.
00:14:46.000And I say this, the Hillsdale courses have changed my life.
00:14:48.000Through 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.
00:14:59.000Charlie's gone, but his spirit of hard work and lifelong learning carry on.
00:15:03.000Each of us can follow his example and pick up where he left off.
00:15:06.000So learn like Charlie did at CharlieForhillsdale.com.
00:16:17.000But the point is, the options at the disposal of the Democrats are far scarier than the options we have.
00:16:25.000Now, 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.
00:16:33.000I 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.
00:16:45.000If we got the GOP to a stronger position, then maybe I would consider it.
00:16:51.000But 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.
00:17:01.000There's zero reason to even consider that right now.
00:17:05.000My 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.
00:17:17.000They probably only do it partway through a term.
00:17:23.000Let them break it, and then hopefully the next time we're in power, we're able to have this day one post-filibuster agenda.
00:17:30.000But 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.
00:17:51.000If 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.
00:18:06.000And so we've gotten this imperial presidency, for example, because we need the executive branch to do everything.
00:18:13.000Like, 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.
00:18:21.000And 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.
00:18:34.000We can't reform immigration law because Congress can't pass anything.
00:18:37.000We can't change environmental laws that are clearly stale and need reform because you can't get these 60 vote thresholds on anything.
00:18:44.000And 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.
00:18:52.000And that's also why we have bad Republicans.
00:18:54.000We 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.
00:19:13.000I 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.
00:19:23.000And the balance of power with the executive branch has been thrown out of whack.
00:19:30.000And that feels like a lot of us don't have representation when the other party's in power.
00:19:34.000But 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.
00:19:49.000If we didn't have the 17th Amendment, guess how many Republicans we would have in the Senate?
00:20:29.000Without 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.
00:20:43.000A little JD Vance dust up about Usha, but we're going to start with the most important.
00:21:30.00085% of Americans think that political violence is getting worse in our country.
00:21:34.000When 85% of Americans agree on anything, I think you can acknowledge that it's happening.
00:21:40.000And 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.
00:22:01.000And so we need to figure out what's really going on here.
00:23:30.000And 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.
00:23:39.000And two, because their base supports it.
00:23:42.000And I can't come to any conclusion other than the Democrats in government are more or less fine with the political violence too.
00:23:50.000There's a clip here from Jennifer Welch, who I confess I had no idea who she was until about a week ago.
00:24:02.000And she apparently has amassed quite a following as a podcaster.
00:24:05.000She's a former Bravo reality star that became a podcaster.
00:24:10.000And 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.
00:25:02.000So 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?
00:25:15.000You 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.
00:25:32.000And I believe this is the poll you're looking at.
00:25:34.000And 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,
00:25:51.000that 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.
00:27:03.000So I suspect Jennifer Welch is probably right about this.
00:27:07.000I, like you, had never heard of her or never seen her face before, that viral clip.
00:27:11.000However, she's not just some fringe nobody.
00:27:14.000There are other interviews where she sat down with Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat leader in the House.
00:27:18.000In that interview, he lauds her, he praises her, and she says, oh, I've sat down with a bunch of your colleagues too.
00:27:24.000So, you know, this is not an aberration.
00:27:26.000I 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.
00:27:39.000What'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.
00:27:48.000That's using data sets that don't even count all the left-wing violence.
00:27:53.000Because 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.
00:28:01.000That doesn't count as left-wing political violence.
00:28:03.000They're not counting all sorts of attacks on ciphers, the Tesla dealerships.
00:28:08.000And then the incident that I was called to testify about was a campus event at University of Pittsburgh.
00:28:14.000Two Antifa operatives who are card-carrying members of Antifa show up, throw an explosive at cops, seriously injure a female police officer.
00:28:24.000These are people who were claimed by the Torch Antifa network, Torch Antifa, soliciting donations through a tax-exempt nonprofit organization for them.
00:28:32.000This is as clear ideological violence as you can possibly imagine.
00:28:37.000That incident was not counted as left-wing political violence.
00:28:39.000And 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.
00:28:49.000It 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.
00:29:00.000This is Lane Schoenberger, Chief Investment Officer and Founding Partner of YReFi.
00:29:05.000It has been an honor and a privilege to partner with Turning Point and for Charlie to endorse us.
00:29:10.000His endorsement means the world to us, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Turning Point for years to come.
00:29:16.000Now, here Charlie, in his own words, tell you about YReFi.
00:29:20.000I'm going to tell you guys about whyRefi.com.
00:30:54.000I actually hadn't even seen this headline until you just showed it to me.
00:30:57.000The 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.
00:31:10.000It shows you that something really horrific has happened in this country, as if the Rubicon has been crossed.
00:31:16.000I 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.
00:31:36.000It does feel like something just seismically has shifted in the political order.
00:31:40.000And it's a lot bigger than some one podcaster making nasty comments or, I don't know, one Democrat in Congress.
00:31:48.000It seems like this is a major shift of the whole left.
00:31:51.000Yeah, it feels like the whole tree has become rotten from the root.
00:31:56.000And it does feel like there is a seismic shift.
00:32:01.000It's an ideological, movement-wide shift.
00:32:04.000And you can see it about the way that they talk about President Trump or they talk about Charlie.
00:32:34.000When you say that there's an existential threat to the country, as he said about Trump, existential threats are a justification for assassination.
00:32:42.000I think they knew exactly what they were doing.
00:33:04.000He said, we shouldn't cast any aspersions.
00:33:07.000We shouldn't say that the violence comes from one side or the other.
00:33:10.000He then launched into a diatribe about how the violence really comes from the right.
00:33:14.000And then before I had a chance to respond to that, he left the room.
00:33:18.000And 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.
00:33:31.000But 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.
00:33:49.000Want to bring in Blake and Mikey in the studio for this conversation.
00:33:53.000This is really important stuff, actually, because it kind of went, I think night one, right after Ole Miss, nobody really talked about it, Michael.
00:34:02.000But 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.
00:34:12.000So let's play the clip from the Old Miss event, 286.
00:34:18.000Now, most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church.
00:34:20.000As 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?
00:34:32.000Yeah, 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.
00:34:41.000So I wanted to bring in Mike, obviously, Mikey is the son of a pastor.
00:34:50.000Is that rude to say that you hope your wife would eventually one day see the world and have faith like you do?
00:34:57.000Yeah, I just, I think it's crazy because Christianity has proven you live a happier life.
00:35:04.000Charlie used to talk about it as the missing piece for everybody.
00:35:07.000Once you found that missing piece, you lived the life that was there for you.
00:35:11.000And he would argue about the necessity of God over the existence of one.
00:35:15.000And 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?
00:36:32.000I would not have changed one syllable about any answer he gave.
00:36:36.000It was just a phenomenal showing on all of these different matters and some questions that were a little bit hostile.
00:36:42.000And 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.
00:36:54.000It's that they don't even seem to know what religion is.
00:36:57.000But JD, JD understands what religion is and he has a living faith.
00:37:01.000And so as we've all said here, he wants what he believes to be good for his wife.
00:37:09.000He recognizes that religion is not just like a taste.
00:37:11.000You know, you like chocolate and I like vanilla.
00:37:14.000He recognizes that religion is a habit of virtue that inclines the will to give to God what he deserves.
00:37:20.000It's not a question of like or dislike.
00:37:22.000It's a question of truth or falsehood.
00:37:24.000And so he's being very respectful to people of other faiths, including his wife, of course, but many other people too.
00:37:30.000He'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.
00:37:37.000And so because I love my wife, and by extension, by the way, because I love other people, I want to share that with you.
00:37:44.000You know, that is the great commission.
00:38:09.000Yeah, 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?
00:38:20.000Disagreements come to the front of the line.
00:38:22.000And I was like, yeah, yeah, that's it.
00:38:24.000And he goes, I'm going to do that tonight.
00:38:25.000And 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.
00:38:40.000I 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.
00:38:48.000And think how much better our politicians would be as a class if this was expected of all our senators and all our representatives.
00:38:56.000Make them be smart people who can answer hostile questions on, you know, on the fly.
00:39:01.000We'll get better politicians and that means better laws.
00:39:04.000Yeah, it really reminds me of Charlie.
00:39:06.000Like, I just, I see a little bit of Charlie in JD and how he does that.
00:39:11.000Michael Knowles, we thank you, my friend, for making the time.