The Charlie Kirk Show - June 23, 2026


The Attack of Judge Sparkle + Debating the Iran Deal


Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 16 minutes

Words per minute

188.81

Word count

14,428

Sentence count

1,108


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
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.
00:00:14.000 If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're going to end up miserable.
00:00:19.000 But if the most important thing is doing good, you will end up purposeful.
00:00:24.000 College is a scam, everybody.
00:00:26.000 You've got to stop sending your kids to college.
00:00:27.000 You should get married as young as possible and have as many kids as possible.
00:00:31.000 Go start a Turning Point USA college chapter.
00:00:33.000 Go start a Turning Point USA High School chapter.
00:00:35.000 Go find out how your church can get involved.
00:00:37.000 Sign up and become an activist.
00:00:39.000 I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade.
00:00:41.000 Most important decision I ever made in my life.
00:00:43.000 And I encourage you to do the same.
00:00:45.000 Here I am.
00:00:46.000 Lord, use me.
00:00:48.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:49.000 Here we go.
00:00:56.000 Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
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00:01:13.000 That is NobleGoldInvestments.com.
00:01:14.000 All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:19.000 It is, what is today?
00:01:21.000 It's the 23rd, June 23rd, 2026.
00:01:24.000 We're here in Phoenix, Arizona at the YRefi Studios.
00:01:27.000 How are we doing, Blake?
00:01:28.000 We're doing lovely.
00:01:29.000 Great.
00:01:29.000 Great to hear.
00:01:30.000 Despite a lot of annoying things, which we're going to dive into.
00:01:32.000 Yeah.
00:01:33.000 Well, I mean, which bucket?
00:01:35.000 Which bucket of annoying things?
00:01:37.000 Oh, man.
00:01:37.000 Where do you want me to start?
00:01:38.000 I could start with Snap, I could start with the.
00:01:41.000 Left loving criminals.
00:01:42.000 Well, there was a great press conference that just aired, and we're going to get some clips to that at some point in this hour where RFK and some of the other members of the administration are staying on the fraud beat and they've got billions accounted for and over 455 potential indictments.
00:02:03.000 Maybe they are indictments.
00:02:05.000 We'll get you all caught up on that in just a second, but we want to talk about elections.
00:02:09.000 There's a lot of talk about how America does its elections.
00:02:14.000 Kamala Harris is coming out against the Electoral College.
00:02:17.000 Jamil Hill saying it's rooted in slavery.
00:02:19.000 These are lies.
00:02:20.000 They are stupid.
00:02:21.000 That's okay.
00:02:22.000 But it's also Democrat judges.
00:02:26.000 And they're blocking common sense reforms to make our elections more secure.
00:02:30.000 Now, our elections are basically a joke the way they are currently run.
00:02:35.000 It's based on the honor system.
00:02:37.000 In a country with millions and millions of immigrants, both illegal and illegal, that is a dumb thing to do.
00:02:43.000 Now, this most recent example comes from, and I'm not.
00:02:47.000 Making this name up.
00:02:48.000 District Judge Sparkle Sukhnanan.
00:02:52.000 Yes, Judge Sparkle.
00:02:55.000 Just how the founders envisioned it.
00:02:56.000 District Judge Sparkle Sukhnanan, in a plea of former President Joe Biden, said officials across numerous government agencies haphazardly, quote, combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable, end quote, in order to comply with President Trump's March executive order attempting to overhaul federal.
00:03:19.000 Elections.
00:03:20.000 So once again, we have a district judge appointed by a Democrat, in this case, Joe Biden, a foreigner, a foreigner, no less.
00:03:28.000 She's from Trinidad.
00:03:29.000 Judge Sparkle from Trinidad, a country known to be the most wonderful representative of democracy in the world.
00:03:39.000 So it's a, again, a Biden appointee.
00:03:42.000 She didn't fully strike down the order, but she issued a 75 page ruling that blocked and set aside Trump, the Trump administration's overhaul of the SAVE system, which is a systemic.
00:03:52.000 Alien verification for entitlement.
00:03:55.000 Yeah, so what it is is, first of all, a part of what's at the root of this is you need to be a citizen to vote.
00:04:01.000 And yet, bafflingly enough, we don't have a central database in the U.S. that just says, here is everyone who's a citizen of the United States.
00:04:09.000 You think we should?
00:04:10.000 And so the Trump administration has been trying to build this.
00:04:12.000 So, SAVE, that system originally existed to check if you're eligible for various federal benefits because if you're foreign born and all that, you shouldn't.
00:04:20.000 And they're trying to repurpose this so that they can detect likely ineligible people.
00:04:25.000 They don't just flag you and ping it and say, you have to take this person off the voter rolls.
00:04:28.000 They'd ping it and say, This person might not be a citizen because they're registering as not eligible for these programs.
00:04:34.000 And they've run millions of people through these, and I think they found about 20, 21,000 potential non citizens through this.
00:04:43.000 And some people are saying, well, I'm a citizen, and they caught me with this.
00:04:46.000 And so this judge is saying it's intruding on your privacy rights, on your privacy rights for the federal government to use your federal information, your social security number, your eligibility for federal programs.
00:04:59.000 It's illegal for the federal government to use that to check if you can be a voter.
00:05:02.000 It gets at the root of this insanity here.
00:05:05.000 We have this foreign judge Sparkle come in and say, Sukhnanan, say it violates the law, probably the Constitution, for the federal government to use your information that you use to interact with the government to see if you can vote for who runs the government and makes the government's laws.
00:05:23.000 And the deeper truth here, which we all love to highlight, is ultimately they will always find this excuse because the Democrats can't articulate a justified reason to.
00:05:34.000 Check whether someone's a citizen.
00:05:35.000 They want it to run on the honor system.
00:05:38.000 And they want it to run on the honor system to enable dishonorable behavior.
00:05:41.000 Because they have no honor, actually.
00:05:44.000 So let's just lay out the facts of what this March executive order that President Trump signed does.
00:05:52.000 So it creates state citizenship lists, directs the Department of Homeland Security, USCIS, and the Social Security Administration to compile and send each state a list of confirmed U.S. citizens.
00:06:04.000 All right.
00:06:05.000 Then it has restrictions on mail in and absentee ballot restrictions.
00:06:08.000 So it instructs the Postal Service, the USPS, to create a mail in and absentee participation list of verified eligible voters.
00:06:19.000 Okay.
00:06:21.000 That's it.
00:06:22.000 Now you might say, well, Andrew, the Constitution dictates that the states run their elections and how and the manner of which.
00:06:29.000 Well, yes, that's true.
00:06:30.000 But the federal government gets to dictate how the federal elections.
00:06:34.000 Are run.
00:06:35.000 So they are pushing back on this based on notions of federalism and separation of federal and state authority, but that's garbage, actually.
00:06:45.000 Now, on some level, you need the states to administer a federal election because we have a federal system, but the states answer to the federal government, all right?
00:06:52.000 It's the supremacy clause.
00:06:54.000 So I completely disagree with this.
00:06:56.000 And to Blake's point, they will always find a legal rationale to block it if they want to block it, not because the law instructs them to, but because they are fundamentally against this.
00:07:05.000 Now, consider the irony.
00:07:08.000 Of a foreigner telling Americans how to do their election.
00:07:13.000 A lot of that.
00:07:14.000 And that we can't enforce citizenship tests.
00:07:17.000 We had another foreign judge whose ruling was upheld yesterday that the Trump administration can't block SNAP benefits from being spent on junk food.
00:07:25.000 That was, I believe, a Korean board judge ruled on that one.
00:07:28.000 And that makes approximately zero sense.
00:07:30.000 Yeah, of course.
00:07:31.000 We elected our representatives, and they have made a decision about how to use SNAP benefits, and they should be.
00:07:39.000 Given that authority.
00:07:39.000 That's the way the system works.
00:07:41.000 We have a representative government.
00:07:42.000 And the deeper thing here is if they're not going to allow the federal government to check this, they're essentially saying states should have the exclusive authority to decide if someone's a citizen.
00:07:51.000 And one of the problems here is not just that Democrat run states don't want to check this, but they're willing to do more sinister behavior.
00:07:57.000 A lot of these states, they want to create a system, for example, where your driver's license can be a presumptive proof of citizenship.
00:08:05.000 And yet, blue states will just give a full driver's license to an illegal immigrant.
00:08:11.000 We're getting very close to the point where I think a sufficiently gutsy person could just go out and say, I am a citizen, and here's all the proof that I got this from the California state government.
00:08:21.000 And they basically just make themselves a citizen.
00:08:23.000 Without ever actually being naturalized.
00:08:25.000 Well, and here's where this ties into a current debate that's ongoing now that Kamala Harris, of all people, sparked by saying it's time to get rid of the Electoral College.
00:08:36.000 Now, we'll play the clip and we'll continue on explaining why this is a really terrible idea.
00:08:41.000 But here it is in her own words 39.
00:08:44.000 I think that there is some real shaking up that we have to do of the rules and the structure.
00:08:51.000 And is that get rid of the Electoral College?
00:08:55.000 I think we should, that should be a discussion that we should have.
00:08:59.000 I don't think we should eliminate that as a point of discussion for potential action.
00:09:08.000 She was like, that's such a misdirect.
00:09:10.000 I don't think we should eliminate that.
00:09:11.000 I was like, wait, is the clip wrong?
00:09:12.000 And then she goes, as a point of discussion after her brain cooked for a few more seconds.
00:09:18.000 She's a very articulate woman.
00:09:19.000 That's why she was the completely natural and organic choice for the party to run in 2024.
00:09:24.000 So, to Blake's point, you've got states like California that are.
00:09:28.000 Basically, going, hey, just trust us, bro.
00:09:31.000 These are all citizens.
00:09:32.000 And they want to get rid of the Electoral College, which actually limits the ability of that state to impact a national election.
00:09:39.000 Because if they all get equal votes and illegal aliens can vote just the same as a citizen, well, guess what?
00:09:45.000 California could swing the entire nation.
00:09:47.000 Thankfully, the Electoral College has it somewhat limited.
00:09:49.000 All right.
00:09:50.000 So we have outlined a foreign judge has blocked a common sense reform.
00:09:58.000 To running federal elections.
00:10:00.000 It's an EO that President Trump signed in March, and it creates a database of known citizens.
00:10:05.000 You would think a country, a first world country, would know who its citizens are.
00:10:10.000 But this foreign born judge, Judge Sparkle, has said, no, no, no, no, can't do that.
00:10:16.000 And so here we are.
00:10:17.000 Now, also running simultaneously is this debate that is happening on the left about abolishing the electoral college.
00:10:26.000 So, what is that debate, and where did it come from?
00:10:30.000 Well, Jamil Hill thinks it came from slavery, which is Insane.
00:10:34.000 Clip 28.
00:10:36.000 Anybody who studied any small bit of history knows the Electoral College is rooted in slavery.
00:10:40.000 That was the entire reason that it was invented, essentially.
00:10:44.000 And we should have gotten from up under it a long time ago.
00:10:48.000 And not just because you have two women quite capable who lose the election.
00:10:53.000 Well, two women quite capable.
00:10:56.000 I would say Hillary Clinton was at least formidable.
00:10:59.000 Like I could have seen her becoming a politician, even if she probably didn't marry Bill.
00:11:03.000 Kamala?
00:11:04.000 Not quite capable, not formidable.
00:11:07.000 I can explain Kamala Harris's rise really simple.
00:11:10.000 They thought she was the female Obama because she's mixed race and kind of, you know, from California.
00:11:15.000 Kamala Harris.
00:11:16.000 Kamala Harris was candidate by committee where they go, oh, what would the ideal presidential candidate be like?
00:11:16.000 That was it.
00:11:22.000 Well, she's like the AI candidate.
00:11:24.000 We want, yeah, AI generated candidates.
00:11:25.000 Problem is, she couldn't talk.
00:11:26.000 Big blue state, the right demographic boxes.
00:11:30.000 You know, we can make anyone a good candidate with enough money and effort and advisors.
00:11:34.000 Oops.
00:11:35.000 Oops, that didn't work out.
00:11:36.000 It didn't work.
00:11:36.000 So, this is garbage, though, from Jameel Hill.
00:11:39.000 Okay, there is a vague connection in the sense that the Electoral College, the allotment of electoral votes per state, is based on congressional representation.
00:11:50.000 And I guess she's going back to the three fifths compromise to do that.
00:11:53.000 That's not at all what it was.
00:11:55.000 This was a protection mechanism that spread power out across the country.
00:12:00.000 Remember, the Constitution spreads power out over time, over geography, and over different institutions within the government.
00:12:08.000 Okay.
00:12:09.000 Now, the states are protected, like the power of Iowa is protected against California because Iowa is its own state.
00:12:17.000 So it's a compact amongst the states.
00:12:18.000 Go ahead.
00:12:19.000 In fact, it specifically protects us from what the left has been doing.
00:12:24.000 In recent history, because the left has, first of all, they've imported a gigantic number of foreigners to prop up their populations, and they've made their states increasingly intolerable to any ordinary middle class person, which is why they leave.
00:12:38.000 New York.
00:12:39.000 Which is why the census is reflecting that and will continue to, that people are voting for free.
00:12:43.000 New York and California, they have high populations, but extremely heavily foreign populations.
00:12:48.000 Native born people keep moving out, and they just keep propping up their population with endless importation of more foreigners, more foreigners, more foreigners.
00:12:56.000 And so we're getting a situation where.
00:12:58.000 Their ratio of people who can vote to overall population is all askew.
00:13:03.000 They have a higher number of illegal immigrants, a higher number of non citizen legal immigrants there.
00:13:07.000 And they just have these states that are intolerable.
00:13:10.000 So they're basically one party states.
00:13:12.000 So we're getting these states.
00:13:13.000 California is going to have a 70 30 result in every election because they've made it intolerable to anyone in the middle.
00:13:20.000 New York is going to have these 70 30 elections 65 35.
00:13:24.000 Yeah, 65 35 elections.
00:13:25.000 And then what's basically saving the country is the broader base, all these other states where we're able to just have.
00:13:32.000 55 45 results all across the board, more spread out across the country.
00:13:37.000 And we're able to check.
00:13:38.000 They would love to get a raw popular vote where they say, we can run our sketchy election system.
00:13:44.000 We can extend the vote to 16 year olds or 14 year olds or 10 year olds.
00:13:47.000 It doesn't matter because none of our elections are competitive.
00:13:50.000 Ballot harvesting on all of them.
00:13:51.000 Ballot harvest everything.
00:13:52.000 Tell everybody who's interested.
00:13:54.000 Have every homeless person who is not even aware of what's going on vote.
00:13:57.000 Have every drug addict vote.
00:13:59.000 Have every person who's in a nursing home and with Alzheimer's and actually not aware of what's going on, have them vote.
00:14:04.000 Hoover it all up and it actually decides every national election.
00:14:07.000 That's what they want and that's what they'll get if they kill the electoral college.
00:14:11.000 Well, and so they want California, New York to determine, and Chicago to determine the national popular vote and choose the president.
00:14:11.000 Exactly.
00:14:22.000 The electoral college is a safeguard against the excesses of the left in those blue states.
00:14:28.000 And it's just interesting, right?
00:14:29.000 So the Supreme Court just ruled, this is breaking news, in a 6 3 decision, SCOTUS rules that DHS, Can strip green card holders and lawful permanent residents of their legal status if they leave the country and travel abroad while they are facing criminal charges, even if they are just pending and not convicted yet.
00:14:46.000 Liberals dissent.
00:14:47.000 So here's a great example of a good ruling, an obvious common sense ruling from a majority conservative Supreme Court.
00:14:56.000 Contrast that with Judge Sparkle.
00:14:58.000 So not only do they want to give non citizens the right to vote, they want to do it on the honor system.
00:15:03.000 Trust me, bro.
00:15:05.000 They don't want us to be able to verify their citizenship.
00:15:08.000 Then they want to pack the Supreme Court.
00:15:10.000 This is what Kamala Harris is calling for.
00:15:12.000 She's calling for a no bad ideas meeting.
00:15:15.000 Okay, let's just play this clip and remind you that she said this too.
00:15:19.000 Sop 40.
00:15:19.000 Say, look, this is a moment where there are no bad ideas.
00:15:23.000 A no bad idea brainstorm is what I'd like to call it.
00:15:27.000 And in that no bad ideas brainstorm, we talk about what we need to do and think about doing around the Electoral College.
00:15:36.000 We talk about the idea of Supreme Court reform, which includes expanding.
00:15:42.000 The Supreme Court.
00:15:43.000 Let's talk about statehood for Puerto Rico and DC.
00:15:47.000 These are the things I think that we've got to do.
00:15:50.000 We've got to neutralize these red states from cheating, including blue states expanding their maps.
00:15:58.000 And all of this, I think, is look, we got to fight fire with fire.
00:16:04.000 These folks are playing to win.
00:16:06.000 We got to play to win.
00:16:07.000 First of all, I think that's Kamala Accent Mark III, Mark IV, maybe.
00:16:11.000 It seems a little different.
00:16:13.000 Second, I mean, the crazy thing, I'm just checking the polling because I would have thought they always say the person who lost, they're the favorite for the next time around.
00:16:19.000 It takes a while to get it.
00:16:20.000 And I thought they'll move on from Kamala.
00:16:21.000 I'm checking the polls.
00:16:22.000 Kamala's having kind of an Indian summer of polling.
00:16:25.000 She was diving.
00:16:26.000 She was below Newsom.
00:16:27.000 She's rallying.
00:16:28.000 She's the number one person in the polls still.
00:16:30.000 Yeah, well, this is what she's done her whole career.
00:16:31.000 She puts her finger to the air and says, which way is the wind blowing?
00:16:34.000 I'm going to go that way.
00:16:36.000 But this is what we're talking about.
00:16:37.000 They want to reduce all the checks and balances against their cheating.
00:16:41.000 And then they have the gall to say that it's Red Stage cheating.
00:16:44.000 This is a bad ideas brainstorm, and that's the whole point.
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00:17:58.000 Without further ado, Senator Mike Lee, welcome back to the show, sir.
00:18:01.000 It's great to have you.
00:18:02.000 Thanks so much, Andrew.
00:18:03.000 Good to be with you.
00:18:04.000 It's great to be with you.
00:18:05.000 So, we started the whole show.
00:18:07.000 We talked about Judge Sparkle, you know, the district judge.
00:18:13.000 She's getting in the way of Trump's March executive order trying to ensure that only citizens are voting, creating this list.
00:18:19.000 And she says it violates federalism, I guess, statutes and privacy laws.
00:18:25.000 Okay, whatever.
00:18:26.000 Now you've got this Save Act.
00:18:29.000 That we have the Save America Act, that we have been pushing so hard, and it's been a whole buildup this show about why it is the critical piece of legislation for this country.
00:18:40.000 So let's just start there, Senator, because this debate has been going on so long.
00:18:43.000 I want people to remember how we got here.
00:18:45.000 Why is this so important, and why have you been like a dog with a bone?
00:18:49.000 Right.
00:18:49.000 We need the Save America Act for a few independent reasons.
00:18:53.000 First, because of the National Voter Registration Act 1993, known as the Motor Voter Law, and the way it was interpreted a couple decades after its enactment.
00:19:03.000 It's now far too easy for non-citizens to register to vote and subsequently to vote in federal elections, even though federal law prohibits it, because the Supreme Court wrongly but conclusively interpreted that statute as prohibiting the states from doing any citizenship verification when somebody registers to vote at a DMV, which is how most people register to vote these days.
00:19:24.000 So we need it for that reason.
00:19:25.000 We also accelerated the need for it with more and more states issuing driver's licenses to non-citizens and in many cases, even to known illegal aliens.
00:19:35.000 with the border being open for four years under President Biden, with the fact that we've got now 30 million plus non-citizens in the United States, and we've got threats to our election security all over the place.
00:19:47.000 As you noted, Judge Sparkle yesterday in that order, notice what she did.
00:19:53.000 She didn't just say, let's make sure that non-citizens aren't being removed.
00:19:56.000 She said, no, this whole database that's maintained in the Department of Homeland Security, known as the SAVE database, which can be used by the states to help clean out their voter registration files, to cross-check to see if they're citizens.
00:20:09.000 She ordered the whole thing shut down rather than just trying to make sure that there were safeguards in place to protect citizens from being removed.
00:20:18.000 So there's an all-out assault.
00:20:19.000 Meanwhile, the election system in place in California, as evidenced in the last couple of weeks by the L.A. mayor's election, California still hasn't certified its final outcome there.
00:20:31.000 There's very few people who I know who look at that and say that bodes well for election security in America.
00:20:38.000 We've got to get this done.
00:20:40.000 Meanwhile, I really appreciate President Trump's ongoing efforts.
00:20:43.000 To keep attention focused on the Save America Act because it would make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.
00:20:49.000 It would require proof of citizenship to register and photo ID to vote in federal elections.
00:20:54.000 These are common sense requirements that every other modern society has.
00:20:58.000 And in fact, many societies that we would regard as less modern.
00:21:02.000 My friend and colleague Bernie Sanders, a senator from Ohio, just got back from Columbia.
00:21:07.000 In Columbia, they had their elections over the weekend.
00:21:09.000 In Columbia, they have election security measures in place that really put ours to shame.
00:21:17.000 They make sure that everybody's got a voter ID, that they've got conclusive proof of citizenship.
00:21:21.000 They've really got clean elections.
00:21:24.000 And the great thing is, they knew within an hour of the polls closing who had won the election.
00:21:31.000 And they were also able to certify with a high degree of confidence that non citizens were not voting.
00:21:36.000 So I love all of that.
00:21:38.000 I think it's so important to just get back to the basics and the 101 here, why we're pushing this so hard.
00:21:44.000 And a big reason why is Joe Biden was president.
00:21:47.000 And just let in millions of these people.
00:21:49.000 And we're just supposed to trust me, bro.
00:21:51.000 Honor system.
00:21:52.000 Everything's going to be fine.
00:21:54.000 Well, if there's no voter fraud, why do you guys care?
00:21:54.000 There's no voter fraud.
00:21:57.000 Why are you trying to block this?
00:21:58.000 Now, here's the next piece in this saga.
00:21:58.000 All right.
00:22:01.000 So there's a piece here.
00:22:03.000 It looks like Punchbowl.
00:22:05.000 You know, there's going to be a president is going to be at this meeting, a steering meeting in the Senate tomorrow, meeting with GOP senators.
00:22:12.000 And he's going to be pushing this issue.
00:22:15.000 You and he are aligned on this issue.
00:22:17.000 What can we expect to happen tomorrow?
00:22:19.000 Ultimately, that's up to my colleagues.
00:22:22.000 But what I hope comes out of it, and the case I continue to make, is that we need to do this.
00:22:28.000 We need to do everything we possibly can to try to get this passed.
00:22:32.000 You know, as part of a late-night voterama about two weeks ago, we put the Save America Act onto that bill as an amendment.
00:22:42.000 It got 50 Republican votes.
00:22:44.000 We had 51 before Senator Tillis changed his vote.
00:22:46.000 But regardless, even with 50, that means that JD Vance, as vice president of the United States, could supply a tie-breaking vote in a simple majority passage scenario.
00:22:56.000 But meanwhile, we're stuck with Democrats refusing to give us the votes for cloture.
00:23:01.000 That takes 60 votes to get to cloture, simple majority passage, but 60 votes to force debate to a close.
00:23:07.000 And that leaves us with two options if we want to pursue this, which I think we should.
00:23:11.000 The first option would be to nuke the filibuster, which involves changing the Senate precedent so that we could immediately pass it by a simple majority.
00:23:19.000 It does not appear that we've got support for that, even though I would support that option.
00:23:23.000 But the other one would be to keep the Save America Act on the floor, keep debating it, and promise to stay on it until it passes, taking away Democrats' weekends and long scheduled recesses until enough of them are willing to negotiate.
00:23:38.000 That's how filibusters used to be broken in the past, separate and apart from the cloture process, which used to be rare.
00:23:45.000 And it's also how the Civil Rights Act got passed.
00:23:47.000 We can do it again, especially whereas here we've got a bill that's a lot more popular with the American people than it is among Democrats in Congress, the only group of people.
00:23:57.000 For whom this is controversial.
00:23:59.000 Yeah.
00:23:59.000 Well, listen, I mean, I love both these options.
00:24:02.000 And there's, we're told that it can't pass the reconciliation process because it's not budget related.
00:24:07.000 That, I mean, that's very in the weeds for the average voter out there.
00:24:12.000 But okay, let's assume it can't pass the birdbath.
00:24:14.000 Okay.
00:24:16.000 The question then becomes this issue with Thune.
00:24:20.000 I'm seeing in Punchbowl, you quote tweeted it.
00:24:23.000 He's saying, I hope that people on that issue speak up, Thune told us, read the Filibuster Save Act, because I'm not saying anything that isn't a view that would.
00:24:30.000 Wouldn't be shared or articulated by a lot of my colleagues.
00:24:33.000 It's always helpful if others speak up and it's not just me.
00:24:36.000 I think what a lot of Americans want, and I actually do believe that Thune, if he had the votes, he would do what he had to do because he knows the pressures on him.
00:24:46.000 He knows the pressures on the president.
00:24:47.000 But I think what the American people want, Senator, is we want to know who's who.
00:24:52.000 Who are the other senators that are fighting us on this?
00:24:55.000 And is there going to be an opportunity?
00:24:58.000 You know, President Trump has threatened to name names.
00:25:00.000 Are we going to find out?
00:25:02.000 In any of these different processes that are about to play out, that they put their name on this.
00:25:07.000 Because I think that's important.
00:25:08.000 The voters want to know who's blocking this.
00:25:10.000 I would imagine that those who speak out one way or another on this tomorrow, in that meeting with President Trump and Senate Republicans, will self identify.
00:25:10.000 Yeah.
00:25:19.000 That's often how it ends up working.
00:25:22.000 But look, regardless of who speaks in which direction, I do think it's important to recognize a couple of things.
00:25:28.000 First of all, as you point out, it's not an easy situation.
00:25:31.000 I grasp the fact that we don't have 60 votes, I fully get that.
00:25:35.000 I also get that in many circumstances, that signals that it's not something that we're likely to get passed.
00:25:42.000 This is a rather unique opportunity, though, where number one, our election security requires us to take aggressive action.
00:25:49.000 Number two, we've got a bill that is really popular among Americans.
00:25:53.000 Like three out of four American voters, Democrats and Republicans combined, support measures like this one, and they want that done.
00:26:02.000 Number three, it gets more popular over time, more popular as it's debated, especially because the Democrats Arguments against it don't land.
00:26:11.000 I have yet to hear a legitimate argument against them.
00:26:13.000 They're so empty.
00:26:15.000 And so I'm not purporting to claim that this would be easy.
00:26:20.000 I'm not purporting even to claim that I know exactly how this would turn out.
00:26:24.000 What I am saying is, in this rare moment, I think it would benefit all of us, particularly Senate Republicans, to stand up for the American people and to use some unconventional tactics to try to get this passed.
00:26:40.000 Sometimes this is what you have to do.
00:26:43.000 In order to continue the fight on something rather than just taking a knee and saying, well, we don't have 60 votes now, so let's not even try.
00:26:51.000 It's a very different thing for people to say, I'm filibustering it, as in I would vote against cloture.
00:26:56.000 It's very different for them to do just that than it is to say, okay, I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is.
00:27:02.000 I'm willing to go back to the Senate floor day after day and continue making arguments against a bill that the overwhelming majority of Americans along.
00:27:13.000 Political lines across this great country support this.
00:27:17.000 Those are very different things.
00:27:19.000 And I think we could all benefit from that robust debate, which also has some potential for resulting in passage, just as it did in the case of the Civil Rights Act.
00:27:28.000 We're at the end of that long process.
00:27:30.000 It took weeks, but they started realizing this wasn't going to go away.
00:27:34.000 You had a Senate Majority Leader in Senator Mike Mansfield at the time who said, we're going to keep debating this until it passes, and it worked.
00:27:41.000 They were 30 votes shy of cloture, Andrew, when they took that up, when they came over from the House.
00:27:48.000 And they closed that gap.
00:27:49.000 It took weeks, but they did close it.
00:27:51.000 I'm not saying I know exactly how this would turn out, but it could turn out that way, and we really should try.
00:27:56.000 Well, and I think everybody has your back, Senator.
00:27:59.000 I don't know anybody, I haven't talked to anybody who's like in real America who's like, Senator Lee is out over his skis here.
00:28:08.000 We all want what you want, and you are our voice right now.
00:28:13.000 So thank you for continuing to beat this drum.
00:28:15.000 And I just want to, you know, we played a clip of Kamala Harris talking about no bad ideas, brainstorm in the previous segment, and they are talking about.
00:28:24.000 Abolishing the electoral college.
00:28:25.000 They're talking about adding Puerto Rico in DC estates.
00:28:28.000 They're talking about packing the Supreme Court.
00:28:31.000 So I don't know what Senate Republicans are waiting for here because if they get power, they're going to absolutely destroy so many of the safeguards that have protected Americans like you and I. They're going to get rid of them.
00:28:44.000 We know that because they've told us where they're going to go.
00:28:47.000 They will nuke the filibuster.
00:28:49.000 They will blow up the Supreme Court by packing it.
00:28:52.000 They will.
00:28:54.000 Add states that they know believe will be consistently democratic, and they'll make a bunch of other changes because what they want to do, they want to form an institutional party, one that can be in power without interruption for decades.
00:29:09.000 We can't let that happen.
00:29:10.000 Passing the Save America Act is part of that.
00:29:12.000 Absolutely.
00:29:13.000 It's a huge, huge piece of that.
00:29:15.000 Thank you for fighting for it.
00:29:16.000 Thank you for being our voice, Senator Mike Lee.
00:29:18.000 Great state of Utah.
00:29:19.000 Thank you.
00:29:22.000 Alliance Defending Freedom knows that freedom belongs to those who fight for it.
00:29:26.000 Americans have carried that legacy for 250 years, and now we must do so again.
00:29:32.000 Censorship is rising, threatening your free speech in every sphere, from classrooms to counselors' offices and even online.
00:29:39.000 Unborn babies are dying as abortion drugs continue flooding states nationwide.
00:29:43.000 Parents are being cut out of kids' critical decisions for their lives.
00:29:47.000 Your best gift by June 30th will help defend courageous Americans like Frank Konepa, a counselor facing nearly $90,000 in fines just for sharing his Catholic faith.
00:29:59.000 Rosalie Markozic, a young woman whose former boyfriend coerced her to take male order abortion drugs, killing her unborn baby, and Dan and Jennifer Mead, parents whose 13 year old daughter was socially transitioned in secret at school.
00:30:13.000 Every dollar you give today will be doubled by a $1 million matching grant, only while funds last.
00:30:19.000 So go to joinadf.comslash Charlie.
00:30:22.000 That's joinadf for Alliance Defending Freedom.
00:30:25.000 joinadf.comslash Charlie or text Charlie to 838 48.
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00:30:44.000 Blake, tell us about the New York Times and Father's Day.
00:30:47.000 We're a day late on this, but we wanted to hit it.
00:30:50.000 We wanted to hit it because Sunday, of course, was Father's Day.
00:30:54.000 America's Fathers, there, as we actually talked with Alex Berenson while you were out, fatherhood's under attack, it's undermined, it's not appreciated.
00:31:03.000 And the New York Times decided they should show appreciation for Father's Day.
00:31:07.000 So they published a comic guest essay by Zach Elams.
00:31:12.000 To my daughter, my gender was never complicated.
00:31:17.000 And it is a comic by a trans parent.
00:31:21.000 So, actually, it seems the child's mother.
00:31:24.000 I've been living as a trans man since I was 18 years old, I guess.
00:31:27.000 I don't know if they're the biological mother or not.
00:31:30.000 When my wife and I had Elliot, I had to learn how to be a trans dad.
00:31:34.000 I'm not sure who the real dad is versus the fake dad, but how do you grow a mustache if you were a lady?
00:31:41.000 I wasn't out to everyone as trans, but with Elliot, I had to learn how to talk about it.
00:31:45.000 And it goes on for this whole comic about.
00:31:47.000 Being a dad, but not a dad, it's a mom.
00:31:50.000 And that's the New York Times big piece for Father's Day.
00:31:54.000 Yeah, I mean, you can't make it up that the New York Times would choose a tranny to be the representative on Father's Day.
00:32:01.000 Literally.
00:32:02.000 That's what it's come to.
00:32:04.000 And meanwhile, you had Alex Berenson on about his new book on fatherhood.
00:32:08.000 And, you know, I actually think, I don't know if you guys talked about this, but Alex has told me that Charlie helped inspire the fact that he was writing that.
00:32:17.000 But it's crazy.
00:32:18.000 So I'm looking at his, so the New York Times opinion.
00:32:22.000 Has had four recent pieces about fatherhood.
00:32:25.000 This is not a joke, by the way.
00:32:27.000 They've had four pieces about fatherhood and masculinity with six authors three women, a trans man, and two childless men.
00:32:37.000 Really?
00:32:38.000 On fatherhood.
00:32:38.000 So this is straight from Alex Berenson.
00:32:41.000 Let me tell you that again because this is not a joke.
00:32:44.000 Four recent pieces about fatherhood with six authors because some of them had two authors.
00:32:51.000 Three women, a trans man.
00:32:55.000 And two childless men.
00:32:56.000 Not one father.
00:32:59.000 The New York Times couldn't find one father to opine on fatherhood and masculinity.
00:33:06.000 And there you go.
00:33:08.000 All the problems in the liberal elite establishment, why they have such contempt for masculinity, why they hated UFC 250 at the White House, why they can't stand warrior culture, why they were trying to transition the freaking military and the LGBTQI and gay poem reading and all of that stuff.
00:33:27.000 This is why.
00:33:28.000 Because ultimately, they have contempt for strength, for strong men.
00:33:33.000 This is why they call us toxic.
00:33:34.000 This is why they call us, this is why they paint us as villains in the culture.
00:33:39.000 This is why popular media went from seeing stand up dads that were strong and stable and wise, transitioning that to comic dads like Homer Simpson.
00:33:49.000 This is it.
00:33:50.000 It's a long purge of that which makes the country actually strong.
00:33:55.000 And that's what we're rejecting.
00:33:56.000 And this New York Times, I mean, they just walked right into it.
00:34:00.000 I just genuinely cannot believe.
00:34:03.000 That they couldn't find one actual father to write about fatherhood.
00:34:06.000 I can believe it.
00:34:07.000 I think that's, well.
00:34:10.000 They didn't mean to do this.
00:34:11.000 Well, first of all, they probably have to be like, well, so we need to find someone who's a dad.
00:34:15.000 So we can't find anyone at the New York Times.
00:34:17.000 No, I joke.
00:34:18.000 It's a big organization.
00:34:20.000 But what it really is, is the New York Times.
00:34:24.000 When I talk about the New York Times to people, it's not that the New York Times publishes lies.
00:34:27.000 We'll talk about the media and they publish untrue things or whatever.
00:34:30.000 The New York Times is much more subtle.
00:34:32.000 The New York Times, their power derives from being the organization that.
00:34:37.000 If your establishment in America, especially if you're kind of the left establishment, you decide what everyone is talking about.
00:34:43.000 You decide what people are thinking about.
00:34:46.000 And the New York Times does this.
00:34:47.000 They run their articles on being a trans dad, they run their articles on polyamory.
00:34:52.000 One of the most sinister things the New York Times does is they're running this endless, low key pressure campaign to undermine conventional, functional marriages and families.
00:35:05.000 And I think it's the most sinister thing they've done.
00:35:08.000 And they've done it for years at this point.
00:35:09.000 They were writing about.
00:35:10.000 Why polyamory is the future of relationships a decade ago.
00:35:13.000 And that's messed up a lot of people who read this and they get a worm in their brain and think that this is normal.
00:35:19.000 And they've done it with the trans thing as well.
00:35:20.000 Well, I think this is why what Charlie was doing was so important.
00:35:25.000 It's why what we do at Turning Point is so important because there is a whole part of the country that has been left out of this conversation, completely sidelined by elite institutions like the New York Times.
00:35:36.000 And that's why we have to keep pushing back at it.
00:35:37.000 And that's why you have to keep being audacious and bold, confronting it because they hate strong men.
00:35:44.000 They hate strong men because ultimately they know that that is what's going to defeat them.
00:35:48.000 This is why young men swung so powerfully in Trump's direction in 2024.
00:35:54.000 They know that they can't win men.
00:35:55.000 Who do they have for men?
00:35:57.000 They got James Talrico.
00:35:58.000 Yep.
00:35:59.000 The Tofu Man.
00:36:00.000 They've got Tofu Talrico.
00:36:01.000 That's their vision of a modern, strong beta male.
00:36:05.000 That's what they want.
00:36:06.000 They want every man in America to be James Talrico.
00:36:09.000 Or in Maine, like a former, I don't know what he is exactly, but he's got like the.
00:36:17.000 They use masculinity as a mask.
00:36:22.000 So, you know, this guy, Platner in Maine, he's got like a mustache, it looks like a walrus.
00:36:27.000 And that's like all it takes to be, oh, look, he's a strong man.
00:36:29.000 And he's a weirdo.
00:36:31.000 He's got his weird Nazi tattoos.
00:36:32.000 He's got his weird relationship history.
00:36:35.000 He's a bit of a con man.
00:36:35.000 He's a liar, but it's also, they're trying to get a guy who can pass as a normal American man, and they inevitably end up with these weird freaks.
00:36:42.000 Yeah, well, and this is what they did with Tim Waltz.
00:36:44.000 Tim Waltz in Minnesota, they had him, you know, I guess shooting a shotgun, loading it wrong, shooting it wrong, and, you know, cosplaying as some like Hicklib.
00:36:56.000 It didn't work, and it's not going to work because ultimately, and this is what's really funny about it.
00:37:01.000 I think the New York Times did this accidentally.
00:37:04.000 I don't think there was like some committee where they were like, we are going to only do this.
00:37:07.000 What it does is it reveals the bias of the editors, that they can't even help themselves, that this is so ingrained deeply within the editorial discretion of the New York Times staff that they just accidentally did this, and it's obscene, and it's Comical, but it's true.
00:37:24.000 Hey everyone, I'm genuinely excited to share something that has made a significant difference in my own life.
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00:37:41.000 He would talk about it on the show and even travel the country with it, which is what I do.
00:37:46.000 So for me, Strong Cell helps keep my mind sharp and focused.
00:37:49.000 It provides clean, natural energy without jitters, weird spikes, or afternoon crashes.
00:37:54.000 I genuinely feel like a younger version of myself, like high school version energy.
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00:38:01.000 People would ask Charlie, what is Strong Cell exactly?
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00:39:41.000 We have Ben Leo.
00:39:42.000 He's the chief U.S. correspondent at GB News and host of The Late Show Live on GB News.
00:39:49.000 So he has become a bit of a UK expert for us because he is British, of course.
00:39:55.000 But Charlie also loved having him on.
00:39:56.000 So he's a great guest.
00:39:57.000 Ben, welcome back to the show.
00:39:59.000 Good to see you, my friend.
00:40:00.000 You are in Boston.
00:40:02.000 Am I right?
00:40:03.000 Yes, I'm in Boston.
00:40:04.000 Good to see you and the viewers and listeners.
00:40:04.000 Hello, boys.
00:40:06.000 England are playing Ghana in the World Cup.
00:40:08.000 So I'm doing my patriotic juicy and reporting.
00:40:11.000 On all things football or soccer, as you guys call it from Boston.
00:40:15.000 Ben, you know that the English team is just going to end up disappointing you and breaking your hearts again, right?
00:40:19.000 I mean, you see where this is going.
00:40:21.000 It's coming home.
00:40:22.000 60 years of hurt.
00:40:23.000 It's coming to an end.
00:40:25.000 I'll tell you now, we played very well in the first match.
00:40:27.000 By the way, you guys are playing awesome as well.
00:40:28.000 Two really good wins under your belt.
00:40:30.000 So maybe we'll see you in the final.
00:40:32.000 I heard that there is a potential.
00:40:34.000 You probably know more than this.
00:40:34.000 I don't know.
00:40:35.000 I heard this in passing that we could end up playing the Brits, well, the English, On July 4th in Philadelphia.
00:40:44.000 I am told that is a realistic time.
00:40:46.000 It's not anymore.
00:40:47.000 It's not anymore.
00:40:47.000 Oh, it's not.
00:40:48.000 We could play in Philadelphia on July 4th.
00:40:50.000 I don't think we can play England with the way things have shaken out.
00:40:52.000 That would have just been too, too beautiful.
00:40:54.000 Thank you.
00:40:55.000 But you guys could play Iran, actually, which would be very funny.
00:40:59.000 That would be explosive, to say the least.
00:41:01.000 It would be explosive.
00:41:02.000 It would be.
00:41:03.000 They have to come up.
00:41:04.000 They have to stay in Mexico, by the way.
00:41:06.000 The rules that we've put.
00:41:07.000 They can only come up the day before the match, and then they have to go straight back.
00:41:10.000 Wow.
00:41:11.000 So.
00:41:11.000 They were complaining about it.
00:41:12.000 They were saying, Why can't we just stay in California and rest?
00:41:15.000 And the State Department saying that you guys are going.
00:41:17.000 Did you know, by the way, the IRGC, they tried to import two or three IRGC members with the soccer team.
00:41:24.000 And that's why their visas.
00:41:26.000 All the leftist media were saying, Oh my God, isn't it so abhorrent that they're banning Iranian football staff?
00:41:31.000 But the fact of the matter is, there were two or three IRGC members.
00:41:34.000 Mike, well, of course.
00:41:35.000 I mean, naturally.
00:41:37.000 Can't trust the Iranians.
00:41:38.000 I mean, that's for the second half of this hour.
00:41:40.000 We're going to have a debate about the MOU.
00:41:43.000 Uh, with somebody who does not support it, and I support it.
00:41:45.000 So, anyways, Ben, that's not why we have you on.
00:41:48.000 We have you on to talk about Keir Starmer, who has stepped down.
00:41:54.000 He announced his resignation, he hasn't stepped down yet, I guess, because he's going to remain on as a caretaker prime minister.
00:42:00.000 What forced this?
00:42:02.000 What caused this?
00:42:02.000 He got emotional in his press conference announcing it.
00:42:06.000 Tell us all about it, please.
00:42:07.000 Yeah, do you know what?
00:42:08.000 He got more emotional, he showed more humanity and emotion in his woe is me resignation speech on the steps of Downing Street than he did.
00:42:16.000 Over the past two years of his premiership, this is a guy who is authoritarian, he's robotic, and it's testament to the fact that when he was a young, uh, sort of university student, he was the editor of a Marxist magazine at uni, and then he went for some reason, mysteriously, he's never explained why, to visit a Soviet training camp in Czechoslovakia.
00:42:36.000 So, look, he is definitely of a Marxist persuasion.
00:42:39.000 But the problem with Keir Starmer is that he is a man with no ideology, really, no agenda, no intent, he doesn't really believe in anything.
00:42:48.000 His government was Basically, founded on the concept of U-turns.
00:42:52.000 He did something like 24 different U-turns over the course of two years.
00:42:56.000 For example, amongst the litany of people he's thrown under the bus during his premiership, farmers.
00:43:01.000 He tried to introduce an inheritance tax on farm estates over a certain limit.
00:43:08.000 Farmers, already as they are in the United States, struggling to make ends meet, there was a massive U turn on that.
00:43:13.000 They tried to throw pensioners under the bus by taking away some of their pension credit and welfare benefits, all sorts of things.
00:43:19.000 But he's also a man who actually is quite chilling in a way because he cared more about the international order and his human rights mates on the world stage.
00:43:28.000 Than he did about Great Britain and the British people.
00:43:31.000 And he doesn't actually care about the British people.
00:43:33.000 But more importantly, he doesn't understand the British people.
00:43:37.000 For example, he wanted away the Chagos Islands, Diego Garcia, where we share the joint UK US military base.
00:43:44.000 He wanted to give away the Chagos Islands because an international court with no jurisdiction, chaired by a bunch of Chinese judges, said that we should do so.
00:43:51.000 So he was giving it away to Chinese ally Mauritius.
00:43:53.000 I won't bore you with the details.
00:43:54.000 Giving it away to Chinese ally Mauritius and charging British taxpayers about 40 billion quid for the process.
00:44:00.000 Let me just remind you this is sovereign.
00:44:02.000 British territory.
00:44:03.000 That's one example of how he doesn't care about the country, doesn't understand the nation.
00:44:07.000 And also the Muslim rape gangs, a massive, massive scandal here in the United Kingdom, worse, arguably, in terms of victims and just the horrors of it than the Epstein scandal.
00:44:18.000 He called anybody who wanted an inquiry into Pakistani Muslim rape gangs far right.
00:44:23.000 He thinks that we're just some sort of far right racists who want to demonize Pakistani Muslims.
00:44:28.000 Well, no, the truth of the matter is there is an over representation of Pakistani Muslim rapists.
00:44:32.000 Who have been abusing young working class British white girls for decades and decades.
00:44:36.000 So that's just two examples.
00:44:38.000 And thank God he's gone.
00:44:39.000 The question is now, boys, is his replacement, which looks like maybe Andy Burnham, who is already having tweets on earth from 2021, 2022, slagging off President Trump.
00:44:50.000 He'll probably be his replacement.
00:44:52.000 And he is arguably even more left than Keir Starmer.
00:44:56.000 Andy Burnham.
00:44:57.000 And his wife is getting a lot of press as well.
00:44:57.000 Yeah.
00:45:01.000 She looks like a bit of a Bond villain.
00:45:03.000 She's the director or some other position for.
00:45:06.000 Octopus energy definitely sounds sinister, but then so, bigger picture, I think this is what your sixth prime minister in seven years, or maybe it's seven and six, whatever it is.
00:45:16.000 Britain's had a lot of instability since the Brexit vote, they keep churning through prime ministers who lose popularity very rapidly or never really possess it at all.
00:45:27.000 Can you speak to what's driving this crisis of the British political system?
00:45:31.000 And we keep hoping they can turn it around.
00:45:33.000 Are we getting closer to that?
00:45:35.000 And what, in your view, needs to be done to create that turnabout to get a prime minister?
00:45:40.000 Who can win a second election?
00:45:41.000 Yeah, sadly, it's going to be seven prime ministers when Burnham takes control.
00:45:45.000 If he does, he will.
00:45:47.000 Seven prime ministers in 10 years.
00:45:49.000 And how can you expect to get anything done when you're changing prime ministers, administrations, ideologies so much?
00:45:55.000 You should be building things with a 10 year vision for two terms.
00:45:58.000 You can't get anything done seven in 10 years.
00:46:01.000 And the problem is the electorate, our politicians have forgotten who they serve.
00:46:08.000 They think they are now better than the ordinary people, the plebs, you and I back home.
00:46:12.000 They embark on mad policies such as net zero.
00:46:16.000 President Trump talks about it a lot.
00:46:17.000 He says the problem with the United Kingdom is immigration.
00:46:19.000 We've got open borders.
00:46:20.000 We've got a bunch of third world sub Saharans flooding the English Channel and roaming the streets of Britain.
00:46:25.000 And most of them, well, not most of them, a good proportion of them committing crimes against the British natives.
00:46:30.000 And then also this obsession with what we call net zero, which is we are pledging to eliminate fossil fuels by 2030.
00:46:39.000 So despite having an abundance of oil under the North Sea, liquid oil under our feet, Natural gas, we can also frack for shale gas in the UK.
00:46:49.000 We've got an abundance of energy, but we choose to deliberately harm ourselves, harm our energy prospects.
00:46:54.000 And then what we do is go and import it from other nations.
00:46:57.000 Our energy bills are some of the highest in the world.
00:46:59.000 I pay something like 400 pounds a month for my energy bill back home.
00:47:02.000 And when I spoke to President Trump in the open office a few months ago, when I had the pleasure of meeting him, he said, What do you like most about America, about DC?
00:47:10.000 I said, Mr. President, your energy bills.
00:47:12.000 I'm paying like, I don't know, 20 bucks a month or something.
00:47:15.000 And he was surprised.
00:47:17.000 So energy is the big one.
00:47:18.000 Immigration is probably the priority.
00:47:21.000 And that's what the Brexit vote was all about.
00:47:22.000 By the way, it's the 10 year anniversary of the Brexit vote today.
00:47:26.000 We voted to leave the European Union.
00:47:27.000 And the number one issue for that was migration.
00:47:29.000 We wanted to close our borders.
00:47:32.000 And all politicians have done, prime ministers after prime ministers, is continue flooding our country with illegal and legal migration.
00:47:39.000 They've not listened.
00:47:40.000 I argue they've done it on purpose.
00:47:41.000 Yeah, I mean, we have the same problem here.
00:47:43.000 I mean, listen, President Trump's done a great job on the border, handling illegal immigration, certainly.
00:47:49.000 We want more deportations, but we still have 1.2 million green cards issued a year in the United States.
00:47:56.000 So when we talk about this, it has to be both legal and legal.
00:48:00.000 And illegal immigration conversation.
00:48:03.000 So, all right, breaking news just really quick.
00:48:06.000 The D.C. Court of Appeals has just ruled in President Trump's favor, in the Edmonds' favor.
00:48:11.000 The appeal court cleared the way for the Trump administration to expand a fast track deportation process that would allow for the expedited removal of migrants who are living far from the border.
00:48:21.000 Now, this has been used for decades, apparently, at the border, but then President Trump expanded it to cover the entire United States in the interior.
00:48:30.000 Back in August of 2025, a judge blocked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's move to expand who qualifies for expedited removal.
00:48:40.000 And that has just been overturned.
00:48:41.000 So President Trump can now expand expedited removal for non citizens apprehended anywhere in the U.S. who could not show that they had been in the country for two years.
00:48:52.000 That sounds splendid.
00:48:53.000 That sounds great.
00:48:54.000 There's so many of these.
00:48:54.000 I'm into it.
00:48:55.000 We like to flag it because so many people complain about the big headline, which, again, I would remind you, is often just chosen by the New York Times.
00:49:03.000 To push a preferred narrative, and that's what everyone talks about because the New York Times is talking about it.
00:49:08.000 But going on constantly, there's, yeah, sometimes the federal judge is saying, can't spend SNAP this way, can't use your database this way.
00:49:16.000 But sometimes that federal judge is, you can deport these people faster.
00:49:19.000 These people you've been trying to get rid of for ages, you can finally send them back.
00:49:23.000 Deportations have gone from 500 a day to 1,000 a day to 2,000 a day.
00:49:27.000 It keeps going up.
00:49:28.000 There's all these little things happening that are white pills.
00:49:31.000 This is why we're not doomers.
00:49:32.000 And it's often not the stuff, and it's often done without getting a lot of attention.
00:49:37.000 Ben Leo joins us from GB News, chief U.S. correspondent, but he is a proud Brit supporting their soccer team, football team, however you want to say it.
00:49:46.000 Now, Ben, we have a picture.
00:49:47.000 Yeah, there it is.
00:49:48.000 There it is.
00:49:49.000 We have a picture of the incoming new, potentially, we think, the new prime minister right there, just with a little hair dye added on one.
00:50:01.000 I can't tell the difference, Ben, but that's maybe you can't.
00:50:04.000 He's on.
00:50:06.000 Yeah, who is that on the left?
00:50:08.000 It looks like Andy Burnham.
00:50:11.000 The team thinks that Rosie O'Donnell and Andy Burnham share a striking resemblance.
00:50:16.000 It's a sister from another Mr. Rosie O'Donnell.
00:50:19.000 She's a resident of the UK now.
00:50:20.000 We just figured maybe this is what's really going on here.
00:50:24.000 The Cotswolds, which is a really probably the most untouched part of the UK because there's no migrants there.
00:50:29.000 Who would have thought?
00:50:30.000 The likes of Ellen DeGeneres are there as well.
00:50:32.000 Tom Cruise is.
00:50:34.000 So, all you, most of the lefty Americans are flooding the English Cotswolds.
00:50:38.000 And isn't it actually a great point?
00:50:40.000 Isn't that ironic and hypocritical that they flood to the one part of England which is untouched by migrants, by societal decay?
00:50:48.000 Of course, because it's beautiful.
00:50:50.000 They're not sort of setting up camp in central London or Birmingham.
00:50:53.000 Well, this is exactly right.
00:50:55.000 I mean, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama have a nice, quaint estate in Martha's Vineyard, one of the widest places in the country, which I just always have found ironic.
00:51:05.000 Yeah, I mean, so, but listen, let's get into this.
00:51:07.000 So I feel like we're on this countdown watch for Nigel and restore or reform, rather, and then you got the restore conversation happening.
00:51:15.000 But there was an election last week.
00:51:18.000 It didn't go so great.
00:51:19.000 Tell us about that and what the takeaways from that election were.
00:51:23.000 Well, so let me just give you some context about the political scene as a wider picture first.
00:51:28.000 So, the UK, Reform UK, which is headed by Nigel Farage, President Trump's good friend from yesteryear, they are leading all polls by some margin.
00:51:35.000 They're on about 30 to 35%, depending on the poll, and that's for the last year and a half.
00:51:41.000 So, they are leading every poll going.
00:51:42.000 However, there was what you call a special election in the UK last week near Manchester.
00:51:47.000 We call it a by election.
00:51:48.000 And Andy Burnham, who wasn't an MP, a member of Parliament at the time, he was the mayor of Manchester.
00:51:54.000 He ran in that special election to become an MP with the intent of kicking out Keir Starmer, the current Prime Minister, because he would have triggered a leadership contest.
00:52:04.000 Keir Starmer, in his indignity, did another U turn.
00:52:08.000 And despite saying previously he'd contest the leadership contest, saying, I'm not going anywhere, he U turned again like a flip flop and said, Okay, I'm just going to resign.
00:52:15.000 He packed it in.
00:52:16.000 He saw the writing on the wall.
00:52:17.000 So in that special election, Burnham was standing for Labour, Reform UK, which is Nigel Farage's party.
00:52:22.000 They also stood.
00:52:23.000 So really, there were other parties running, but it was Reform UK.
00:52:26.000 Nigel's party against Labour.
00:52:29.000 And Labour won because it's a very specific area of Manchester.
00:52:33.000 Andy Burnham was the mayor of Manchester.
00:52:35.000 He's loved by all the locals.
00:52:36.000 He's called the so called King of the North.
00:52:38.000 That's his nickname, the North of England.
00:52:40.000 So, yes, it wasn't an awful result for reform.
00:52:44.000 They got 15,000 votes compared to Labour's, Andy Burnham's 25,000.
00:52:48.000 But it really, you would have argued it would have been or should have been a lot closer.
00:52:52.000 But you can't really apply a special election as you would in the US to the wider United States.
00:52:57.000 It was a bad result, I guess.
00:52:58.000 For reform.
00:52:59.000 Nigel Farage said he was disappointed.
00:53:01.000 Labour won it, but reform are still leading all the nationwide polls.
00:53:05.000 Well, that's good.
00:53:06.000 We do have an image of the YouGov Westminster voting intention, Reform UK at 25%.
00:53:12.000 Conservative.
00:53:13.000 See, that's interesting.
00:53:15.000 Conservative 20.
00:53:17.000 I mean, I'm assuming that's Tory, right?
00:53:19.000 Is this poll accurate?
00:53:20.000 It says it's from the 21st, 22nd of June.
00:53:24.000 I don't.
00:53:26.000 That doesn't look right to me.
00:53:27.000 Tories, if there was a general election held tomorrow, which party would you vote for?
00:53:30.000 Labour.
00:53:31.000 Well, I mean, the Tories.
00:53:32.000 That's a pretty amazing comeback for the Conservatives, if that is true.
00:53:36.000 That doesn't look right.
00:53:37.000 Maybe that's, I don't know, maybe that's just sort of lumped in all the Conservative parties in one.
00:53:42.000 All right, so here's the question it's the million dollar question always when it comes to the UK.
00:53:47.000 When do we get an actual election to replace Labour as the ruling party?
00:53:54.000 So there are rumours that Andy Burnham, when he becomes Prime Minister in maybe three to four weeks, he could call a snap election.
00:54:01.000 So the political thinking there is, Well, look, I just absolutely smashed it in Makerfield.
00:54:06.000 We dealt with reform, we blew them out of the water.
00:54:08.000 Let's call a snap election and reset the term clock.
00:54:12.000 And I'll have a mandate to govern without any criticism.
00:54:15.000 Everybody's saying it's only democratic if you call a snap election.
00:54:18.000 Reform UK wants a snap election.
00:54:19.000 They're ready to go, they're ready to fight for number 10.
00:54:22.000 However, I don't think there will be.
00:54:25.000 I think Andy Burnham probably realizes that Makerfield, the special election we had, isn't representative of the wider country.
00:54:31.000 So I think he'll hang on for the next three years.
00:54:35.000 In his premiership in number 10 as Prime Minister.
00:54:37.000 So the election will come in August 2029.
00:54:41.000 So, really, I hope you feel for us, Brits.
00:54:44.000 We have another three odd years or so of lunacy, of open borders, of pandering to migrants, of migrants killing and raping native Brits, of high energy bills, of cost of living spiraling out of control, of being labeled far right racist Nazis.
00:55:01.000 I think it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
00:55:03.000 But do you know what?
00:55:04.000 I think sometimes that needs to happen.
00:55:06.000 I think you need a mass awakening in order for people, maybe normies, as we call them, who don't really follow the news or follow politics, to really step up and say, hang on a minute, something doesn't feel quite right.
00:55:17.000 About the UK anymore.
00:55:18.000 This isn't the great Britain I grew up with.
00:55:20.000 So maybe I think it needs to get worse, unfortunately, before it gets better.
00:55:22.000 So three years.
00:55:24.000 Is there anything that could cause this to happen sooner than three years?
00:55:27.000 Because three years, a lot can happen in three years.
00:55:29.000 We certainly saw that with Biden on our end.
00:55:32.000 Is there anything that could make it happen faster?
00:55:34.000 Only if Andy Burnham calls a snap election or his party turns against him with a vote of no confidence, which is going to be extremely rare.
00:55:40.000 He's just come into the job.
00:55:41.000 So no, it's down to Andy Burnham.
00:55:43.000 If he's got the balls for it, he'll call a snap election.
00:55:44.000 I don't think he will.
00:55:45.000 Ben Leo, GB News.
00:55:47.000 English football fan and hooligan, enjoy yourself out there.
00:55:51.000 Stay safe, Ben.
00:55:51.000 We'll talk to you soon.
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00:56:56.000 We have a great guest in store for you right now.
00:56:58.000 That's David Hersani.
00:56:59.000 He's the senior writer at the Washington Examiner and co host of You're Wrong with Molly Hemingway, who's one of our all time favorites.
00:57:07.000 David, welcome to the show.
00:57:08.000 Thanks for having me.
00:57:09.000 Appreciate it.
00:57:10.000 Yeah.
00:57:10.000 So to catch our audience up, yesterday we had Steve Dace on.
00:57:15.000 I had tweeted out basically a question, you know, for those who are not supportive of the MOU, what are the alternatives, you know?
00:57:23.000 And you were one of the people that responded back.
00:57:26.000 I. Brought it up on air with Steve Dace, and he was very complimentary of you.
00:57:30.000 I'm assuming you're a great guy if Molly Hemingway is hanging out with you all the time.
00:57:34.000 We haven't had a chance to meet, but you disagreed.
00:57:37.000 You said that was a false choice that I was presenting.
00:57:40.000 It was too binary between either the MOU or boots on the ground and regime change.
00:57:46.000 There you have your tweet there.
00:57:48.000 You said these aren't the choices, not even close.
00:57:50.000 But even if we wanted to disengage from the war, we could leave it status quo ante, which would be better than a deal not only enriching and propping up the regime, but restraining Israel and Gulf states from fighting.
00:58:00.000 So, I am supportive of pursuing peace with this MOU, and I'm supportive of Vice President JD Vance.
00:58:06.000 You have a different take.
00:58:06.000 What is it?
00:58:07.000 Well, I wouldn't be tweeting like that if I knew it would be shown on a show like this.
00:58:12.000 I have to be a little more careful what I say out there.
00:58:16.000 Well, yeah, I think that is a false binary choice.
00:58:20.000 There are an array of ways and an array of deals that could be, for instance, made other than what we've done, which I think, frankly, listen, maybe tomorrow goes in a different direction, but right now I think it's trending in the direction of being worse.
00:58:33.000 Than the Obama deal in many ways.
00:58:36.000 And for instance, we could pick up and leave and strike a very narrow deal just on the straight rather than giving them, you know, full access to all their oil money, opening up funding for them, you know, in other ways and dealing with Pakistan and the Qataris.
00:58:56.000 It just seems like it's far too much for a nation that won the military part of this war.
00:59:02.000 Of course, we all want peace.
00:59:04.000 Do we want to go back?
00:59:05.000 I, you know, I think that's the question we should ask.
00:59:07.000 And Donald Trump launched this war.
00:59:11.000 Once we do that, we don't want to undermine our deterrence.
00:59:15.000 We don't want to undermine the future for the nation and our military.
00:59:21.000 I mean, it's clear to me that we could have made a better deal here.
00:59:25.000 I think that's the first way to look at it.
00:59:28.000 So you say we clearly could make a better deal.
00:59:31.000 I suppose the natural question is why don't we have that deal right now?
00:59:35.000 And what are the immediate obstacles to getting it?
00:59:37.000 Is it that we Just need to resume strikes and we would be able to get it.
00:59:42.000 How do you see it playing out?
00:59:43.000 I mean, I think that the Iranians are in terrible economic shape and clearly they were in trouble.
00:59:50.000 I just want to also mention I mean, oil prices have been going down for the last three weeks.
00:59:54.000 I'm not going to pretend here that there isn't a price to war and that there isn't a domestic political price to war.
00:59:59.000 That's clear that there is.
01:00:00.000 And it's clear that there is very little support generally for this war.
01:00:06.000 But OPEC nations were increasing their output, other nations were making it up.
01:00:10.000 There are, I think, a lot of Technologies and ideas in place to try to make the Strait of Hormuz less important as far as oil goes.
01:00:21.000 So rather than having this, I don't know how long was this kind of ceasefire before the ceasefire going on?
01:00:27.000 It's been going on for months.
01:00:28.000 We could have been hitting Revolutionary Guard installations.
01:00:32.000 We could have been hitting more of their politicians.
01:00:34.000 I mean, we're at war and we want to win that war.
01:00:37.000 No one wins at war, but you know what I mean.
01:00:38.000 So we should have been doing that.
01:00:40.000 How does a deal look like?
01:00:43.000 I'm not sure, but I guess it looks like.
01:00:45.000 Not releasing funding to Iran, which is fungible dollars, no matter how you track it or don't track it, that lets them continue to arm proxies, for instance.
01:00:56.000 I mean, Donald Trump made three demands when this war started, and I don't think maybe one of them is met.
01:01:02.000 We're not getting their enriched uranium.
01:01:04.000 We're not doing anything about their ballistic missile program.
01:01:07.000 So, why are we there?
01:01:09.000 It would have been better never to go.
01:01:10.000 We're in a worse place now than we were before.
01:01:13.000 Well, I don't necessarily disagree with that last statement that you just made.
01:01:17.000 Blake and I, I think, share the skepticism of going in to begin with.
01:01:22.000 But I think what my point here is that the main objective was always nuclear for President Trump.
01:01:29.000 If you play the clips back from decades, it's nuclear, right?
01:01:33.000 If you go back far enough, he was embarrassed by the hostage crisis in 79 and he thought that we should smack him around and show him who's boss.
01:01:39.000 I get that.
01:01:41.000 But the main real goal was nuclear.
01:01:43.000 If you could get regime change, if the regime fell, you know, the Israelis wanted that.
01:01:47.000 They pitched Trump on that.
01:01:48.000 Marco Rubio apparently in the situation room.
01:01:51.000 Said, I think that Intel is bunk, but if you want goals number one and number two, which is basically beat back their military and get the nuclear, then you should go in.
01:02:03.000 All right.
01:02:03.000 So, and that's kind of where I net out on this is that President Trump has been consistent.
01:02:08.000 A lot of people in the Trump coalition, the anti interventionist crowd, which I tend towards much more so than foreign adventurism, they are wrong that Trump has not been consistent on this issue.
01:02:19.000 He's been very consistent about getting the nuclear.
01:02:22.000 So, if you get the nuclear, And the strait is back opened, and we have damaged significantly the ballistic missile program.
01:02:29.000 Then, what else, what other outcomes do we want?
01:02:32.000 And people keep comparing this to the JCPOA.
01:02:34.000 You made that comment yourself.
01:02:35.000 My contention to that is that because President Trump has used force, because the force is a credible threat against the Iranian regime, this deal is fundamentally different.
01:02:45.000 That the leverage that we have on them is fundamentally different than what Obama and Kerry and Hillary Clinton applied in the JCPOA because the Iranians read them like a book.
01:02:55.000 They knew that they didn't want to strike, they knew that it was sort of a weak, limp wristed threat against them.
01:03:02.000 And so they would tell the inspectors, you know, they would give them three weeks' heads up that we're going to come in, and then they'd move things.
01:03:08.000 They would play games with the inspection regime.
01:03:12.000 So to me, this is fundamentally different, and the Iranians are compelled to play ball.
01:03:17.000 Why do you think that they're not going to do that to the inspectors now?
01:03:22.000 I just want to quickly say that the uranium, we're not getting it.
01:03:26.000 We're helping them get it, and then we're diluting it, which is a completely reversible process.
01:03:30.000 It doesn't make any sense to me that if we're going to go help them get it, that we can't just take it.
01:03:34.000 Why can't we just take it?
01:03:37.000 Is that completely off the board?
01:03:39.000 I mean, why can't we just take it?
01:03:42.000 I want to push on that a bit.
01:03:43.000 The reason we can't just take it is if we would have to go in and do it, that would mean boots on the ground.
01:03:48.000 And I guess the bigger picture here that I think we have to confront is I don't think there's any popular enthusiasm in the United States for U.S. boots on the ground in Iran.
01:03:59.000 And setting aside the whatever the geopolitical stakes are, I think we all have to confront we have a domestic political movement, and I think it would be suicidal for us to launch a bigger war in Iran at this point.
01:04:13.000 Are you incorporating that into your analysis or are you focusing strictly on the military angle or do you think there's a political winner here to continue the war in a longer term way?
01:04:23.000 I just want to say I'm not saying that we should put boots on the ground to get the uranium.
01:04:27.000 I'm saying in the deal itself, in the framework of the deal, we're helping them from what I've seen in reporting, and it could be changed or it could be wrong, is that we're going to help them get this uranium and then help them dilute it.
01:04:39.000 By we, I mean the West in some way.
01:04:41.000 I don't mean that we should drop boots on the ground in any sort of way.
01:04:45.000 No, no, that's okay.
01:04:47.000 I probably wasn't clear enough.
01:04:49.000 I don't think there's political will for that at all.
01:04:51.000 That's why I don't think this is a good, you know, I don't think that binary choice is real.
01:04:55.000 A regime change, I think people are jumping the gun.
01:04:58.000 Like, I don't know that there'll be regime change now.
01:05:01.000 Obviously, the regime's going to be strengthened with what's happening.
01:05:07.000 But I think in the long term, you've hurt them in a way that maybe there is a chance for regime change.
01:05:11.000 I don't know what the Israelis told, you know, I don't know what the Israelis told the president or not.
01:05:17.000 But in the long term, the Iranian regime was in trouble already.
01:05:20.000 So now it's a weekend.
01:05:22.000 And I also want to give Donald Trump credit for what we did do.
01:05:25.000 And he should make this case to the American people.
01:05:27.000 We did set their nuclear program back at the very least.
01:05:30.000 We did destroy their military in the short term.
01:05:34.000 And we did take out a whole strata of their leadership.
01:05:36.000 That's not nothing.
01:05:37.000 It was an incredibly impressive military campaign.
01:05:40.000 What I'm saying is that we haven't taken that victory.
01:05:44.000 We're not acting like we won.
01:05:45.000 I mean, if we dropped someone in who knew nothing about geopolitics into what happened the other day, You know, in Switzerland with Pakistan and the Qataris and the Iranians making a deal, you wouldn't know, would you even know who won that war?
01:06:02.000 I don't know.
01:06:03.000 Is that too tough for me to say?
01:06:05.000 I feel like.
01:06:06.000 I think that's the basic gist of the pushback that I'm getting is that we could have got better terms.
01:06:12.000 President Trump has made the point that when you freeze assets, we have the dollar, right, as the dominant currency in the country or in the world.
01:06:19.000 It's being challenged, of course, by BRICS nations.
01:06:21.000 If you don't unfreeze assets, then you're essentially stealing money.
01:06:25.000 Eventually, you have to play ball and unfreeze those assets.
01:06:28.000 Now, their negotiations are ongoing about how best to unfreeze those assets.
01:06:33.000 And admittedly, there's a disagreement currently.
01:06:36.000 President Trump is saying they're going to buy U.S. produce with that and feed the Iranian people.
01:06:40.000 We're going to make sure that it's not used to fund terror proxies.
01:06:45.000 Admittedly, I'm skeptical about the ability to do that.
01:06:48.000 And money is fungible.
01:06:49.000 Money is fungible.
01:06:50.000 But that is one of the ideas that's on the table.
01:06:52.000 But ultimately, you can't just steal people's assets, right?
01:06:56.000 They're frozen, they're kept in a different account.
01:06:59.000 So the question is what better terms are you looking for?
01:07:03.000 Well, let me just say this.
01:07:05.000 The idea if the Iranians wanted to be a rich country, they could be.
01:07:08.000 They're oil rich.
01:07:09.000 They should be a really successful economic nation.
01:07:12.000 They choose not to be because they're run by an Islamic fundamentalist cult, basically.
01:07:19.000 So if they wanted to be rich, they could be.
01:07:21.000 They have no real geopolitical reason to be at war with us, to be at war with Israel, to be at war with anyone other than Sunni Arabs, actually, even theologically.
01:07:30.000 It makes no real sense.
01:07:31.000 So they could be rich.
01:07:34.000 And the sanction regime has been there for a long time.
01:07:36.000 It could continue.
01:07:38.000 We have sanctions on Cuba for a very long time, I don't know, 50 years or more.
01:07:42.000 So it's not as if we couldn't do that if we wanted to.
01:07:46.000 But if you're saying, hey, it's better to try to pursue, or Donald Trump's saying it's better to pursue peace, let's see if we can help them or at least allow them to economically thrive and they'll be more peaceful, I'd be incredibly skeptical about that.
01:08:01.000 So when in the framework we give them Lebanon, we essentially allow them to dictate what's happening in a country that Where there's a militia that they have that is not the army of that nation, and we allow them to use it as a lever.
01:08:15.000 So, whenever they feel like they can attack Israel and get more, extract more stuff.
01:08:20.000 So, here's I want to show you this.
01:08:21.000 I think this is a really fascinating poll here.
01:08:24.000 Okay.
01:08:24.000 So, CBS did a poll the conflict with Iran, what should the U.S. do now?
01:08:29.000 78% said end the conflict now.
01:08:32.000 Only 22% said continue the conflict until Iran gives up more.
01:08:38.000 Then this other part of the poll was very interesting too.
01:08:40.000 Has the U.S. permanently stopped Iran's nuclear program?
01:08:43.000 31% said yes, done.
01:08:45.000 69% said no, not done.
01:08:47.000 So that's 47% of people say we are not getting rid of their nuclear deal, but they also want to.
01:08:54.000 But they still want us out of there.
01:08:55.000 And so this is my underlying point here, David, is sometimes, you know, yes, militarily we had all this leverage, we destroyed them, we were absolutely victorious, but politically this has always been kind of a dog.
01:09:08.000 It's always not been that popular.
01:09:10.000 And I can tell you with Turning Point students, It's extremely unpopular.
01:09:14.000 So, the point is, I think some of what's happening here is just a manifestation of a political reality domestically here at home that we do have a compelling interest in getting peace and peace sooner.
01:09:25.000 If we can achieve the objectives of dealing with the nuclear and getting that straight backed open for energy prices, which does have a political downstream effect, then there is a compelling interest to get this deal done, do it in good faith.
01:09:38.000 And the other point I would make is because you brought up the Qataris and the Pakistanis, I mean, they've been the mediators because at first we weren't sure who to even.
01:09:47.000 Connect with, who to communicate with.
01:09:49.000 We're gaining an understanding of who the leadership structure is and what they believe in Iran, but the command and control has been completely wiped out in some ways.
01:09:56.000 So the point is, Trump is going for a regional deal, right?
01:10:00.000 He believes that countries that do business together are less prone to go to war with each other.
01:10:06.000 And that is part of the incentive structure here.
01:10:08.000 It's a carrot and a stick approach.
01:10:09.000 But I would say the president has been very consistent.
01:10:12.000 He has maintained that he can just start dropping bombs on their heads again if they renege and they back out on this deal.
01:10:18.000 And the credible use of force remains.
01:10:20.000 They know he means it.
01:10:22.000 It's disconcerting how often I find myself in the 22% in these polls these days, I have to say.
01:10:27.000 But of course, it's not popular.
01:10:30.000 I agree.
01:10:31.000 I think this was a political decision.
01:10:33.000 I think it was taking too long, and the president sees the midterms coming, and he made a political decision.
01:10:37.000 I will say, though, I do think that this is already baked into polls for him.
01:10:41.000 He's the one who went there, and if I forgot what the number was, a number of people don't believe it achieved its goals.
01:10:48.000 I don't think that's helpful for him, even if we come back and strike some kind of deal.
01:10:53.000 As for the dealing itself, you mentioned a regional deal where people, Have economies that rely on each other.
01:11:01.000 Yeah, I love that idea.
01:11:04.000 The problem is that if you have the Pakistanis at the table and you don't have the Israelis or even the Lebanese or even the Saudis, I think that's a problem.
01:11:12.000 You're not having true representation of the conflict itself or what happened or what needs to happen moving forward.
01:11:20.000 So it seems to me like it wreaks a little bit of desperation on our part, which we didn't really need to do.
01:11:25.000 I guess when I really just boil it down, my argument is we could have done better on, you know.
01:11:30.000 At this deal.
01:11:31.000 I guess every sports fan thinks that when there's a trade or whatever, but I mean, I feel like we've given them a lot.
01:11:36.000 Well, so here's what I would push back on that with JD Vance, the president, the whole team have been very clear that this is a milestone approach, right?
01:11:46.000 They have to do X, Y, and Z in good faith, has to be verified for any of these sanctions reliefs or the assets to get unfrozen.
01:11:56.000 So they have to display good faith actions for any of that to happen.
01:12:00.000 And if they roll back on it, if they renege on the deal, then we go back to square one.
01:12:05.000 So, but I would say, do you think that that's happened?
01:12:08.000 I mean, think about the oil waiver.
01:12:10.000 We're still in the, in what sense, I guess?
01:12:13.000 Well, they waived the oil, they waived the oil for, you know, allowing them to trade at will, which will go to the CHICOMs mostly for 60 days.
01:12:21.000 And there was no, no, nothing really connected to that as far as improving behavior.
01:12:27.000 Even the Obama deal, they had them sign the waiver.
01:12:29.000 They only released the waivers once the deal was signed and all the, you know, I's had been dotted and so on.
01:12:34.000 Well, this MOU was signed.
01:12:36.000 This MOU was signed.
01:12:37.000 No, no, not the MOU.
01:12:38.000 Yeah.
01:12:39.000 Yeah, I know.
01:12:39.000 But it's a good faith effort.
01:12:42.000 Listen, the particulars here and there, I might agree with you directionally.
01:12:47.000 But to be clear, this is an MOU that establishes a good faith 60 day debate.
01:12:53.000 I don't think, or negotiation.
01:12:55.000 I don't think that we know all the details of how it's going to be debated yet.
01:12:58.000 I mean, I've talked to some people who think that the toll, the Iranians have been approved to apply a toll in the Strait of Hormuz.
01:13:05.000 I can't gather that from anything.
01:13:07.000 But by the way, did you know that?
01:13:09.000 You know, shipping containers that go through the Panama Canal often are charged about between $150,000 and $400,000.
01:13:16.000 So sometimes there are costs of doing business.
01:13:18.000 I don't know what's going to ultimately happen.
01:13:20.000 Oman and Qatar are saying that maybe they will charge fees just because it costs them something to monitor and keep the strait open.
01:13:27.000 I don't know exactly how everything's going to pan out, but the president has been very clear that he doesn't want to have any tolls, especially from the Iranians in the strait.
01:13:34.000 I'm just, I'm trying to find out what, if I'm putting a straw man argument out there, which, You essentially said, in not so many words, you did it nicely.
01:13:43.000 But the point is, what is the alternative besides $5 gas and a dismal political reality for conservatives here at home?
01:13:51.000 And I will tell you, we had upholster Rich Barris on yesterday.
01:13:54.000 He said he's already seeing a bit of a bounce back in some of the polling.
01:13:56.000 He's live polling it right now.
01:13:58.000 So I don't necessarily buy that it's baked into the cake, at least not completely for the midterms.
01:14:03.000 Well, I guess we have, you know, directionally speaking, we're in, yeah, I just think it's more important to finish the job there and in the way that the president promised when we first started.
01:14:13.000 We, we, I know that he's a mercurial guy and he says a lot of things and we just kind of brush it off.
01:14:20.000 But he did make very specific promises about what we were doing.
01:14:23.000 And if we don't do those things, I'm not a pollster, but I speak to a bunch of conservatives, more like on the boomer side probably of the equation.
01:14:31.000 And they're pretty unhappy.
01:14:34.000 It feels like we went there and we kind of lost in a way, or we didn't gain anything, or we're in a worse place.
01:14:40.000 And I think that matters as well for perception's sake.
01:14:44.000 And as far as tolls go, listen, I didn't even mention that because I don't know.
01:14:47.000 The Iranians say things, we say things, and the Iranians can't be trusted.
01:14:51.000 But when we talk about the sanction waivers, that did happen.
01:14:55.000 So I know that the Iranians are saved by that money.
01:14:59.000 It's like $10 billion for 60 days of oil trade.
01:15:03.000 And I think that's a mistake until we get verifiable concessions from them, which we didn't do.
01:15:10.000 I don't want to have boots on the ground.
01:15:12.000 I don't think that's a realistic thing.
01:15:14.000 I don't think anyone wants that.
01:15:17.000 That's why I would have called it a straw man, because I don't think that's the argument.
01:15:20.000 The argument is there's an array of other Possible outcomes here in the sense of negotiating.
01:15:26.000 Why haven't we explored those?
01:15:29.000 But if you're saying for politics we have to end it, then we need to end it.
01:15:33.000 Yeah.
01:15:33.000 I mean, if that's what he wants.
01:15:34.000 I don't want to say, David, but maybe we have to confront if we don't have the political will for boots on the ground.
01:15:40.000 We fired, I think, four years of Tomahawk missiles in the roughly month where this was an intense hot war.
01:15:47.000 We might have to confront.
01:15:48.000 There's just limits to what we can actually do in the Middle East, and that's uncomfortable.
01:15:52.000 Especially after Afghanistan, after Iraq.
01:15:55.000 Yeah, I mean, that's my argument.
01:15:56.000 That's a fair argument.
01:15:58.000 Yep.
01:15:59.000 We'll say that again.
01:15:59.000 I'm just saying that's a fair argument.
01:16:01.000 If that's the argument, I accept that.
01:16:02.000 But to say that we couldn't do other things is a little, you know, I can't accept that.
01:16:07.000 David, it's been a fascinating conversation.
01:16:10.000 I appreciate you taking me up on the invitation to come on.
01:16:13.000 It's been great to talk with you.
01:16:15.000 Thank you so much.
01:16:16.000 Nice meeting you guys.
01:16:16.000 Thank you.
01:16:21.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.