Join us at the Student Action Summit in Tampa, FL where we will discuss the fallout from the Israel-Iran war and President Trump's pursuit of peace with Iran. We will hear from Elizabeth McDonough, the Parliamentarian, and Josh Hammer, the Chief of Staff to the Speaker of the Senate.
00:00:59.000We have Pete Hegseth coming, Christine Noam, Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly, Donald Trump Jr., Steve Bannon, Greg Gutfeld, Laura Ingram, Ross Ulbricht, Byron Donalds, Tom Homan, Ben Carson, Brett Cooper, Michael Knowles, Brandon Tatum, Benny Johnson, Jack Pesobic, Riley Gaines, James O'Keefe, and more.
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00:02:08.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:02:45.000There is a major story that is bubbling up, and I've had my eyes on this for the last couple of weeks, and I've been waiting for a time to explain it.
00:02:52.000Now, a lot of people are getting fired up online about this, and it is the anger is partially justified, but not totally.
00:02:59.000And we need to kind of just take a step back and make sure that we do not get too intense too early in a way that might not actually be rooted in facts or substance.
00:03:18.000So as you know, President Trump's big, beautiful bill is working its way through Congress.
00:03:23.000This very difficult process of getting people like Susan Collins and Don Bacon and getting all the moderate Republicans to agree on spending cuts and border security and just all the different elements of this process have been exhausting.
00:03:42.000We're finally getting to a place of completion where we have to find out whether or not the components of the bill are allowed to remain.
00:03:53.000So remember, this is a reconciliation bill.
00:03:56.000So when a bill is a reconciliation bill, it has a very precise technical meaning.
00:04:04.000It literally means that you are reconciling the budgets of two different fiscal years.
00:04:11.000And so a reconciliation bill, because you are reconciling two different budgets from two different years, does not require 60 votes.
00:04:21.000Said more bluntly, you can bypass the filibuster.
00:04:25.000The filibuster, of course, requires 60 votes to then get to quorum and then get to a vote on the specific piece of legislation.
00:04:34.000So for example, if they wanted to go pass a bill right now, Congress, on something that was non-reconciliation, it would require 60 votes.
00:04:44.000Now, all of this is just Senate rules.
00:04:45.000They could change the rules at any time.
00:04:47.000The Senate was intended to actually become a majoritarian body.
00:04:52.000Thomas Jefferson actually always wanted it to be a majoritarian body.
00:04:56.000On the other side, though, the fact that we had the filibuster stopped a lot of the totally insane stuff that Joe Biden wanted to do during his administration.
00:05:05.000And so we shouldn't be too quick to throw out the filibuster.
00:05:08.000So in front of us now is an opportunity to pass President Trump's hallmark agenda bill, the big beautiful bill.
00:05:15.000Border funding, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, Trump tax cuts, drill, baby, drill.
00:05:20.000All of this has to fit as a budgetary financial reconciliation provision.
00:05:30.000So certain things in the bill that might not be germane to budgetary measures will be thrown out of the bill because then it does not pass the filibuster reconciliation test.
00:05:52.000But here's where things get a little murky and they get awfully confusing and where people are getting fired up, partially, rightfully so, which is that, well, who decides?
00:06:29.0002009, actually, the Affordable Care Act, when Obama wanted to pass Obamacare.
00:06:36.000A lesser appreciated memory was when Obama wanted to pass this monstrosity of a health care bill and he needed 60 votes.
00:06:44.000And he had 60 votes until the lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, died.
00:06:50.000There was a special election in Massachusetts on the sole reason as a referendum.
00:06:56.000And Massachusetts elected a Republican senator by the name of Scott Brown to actually reject the 60-vote threshold.
00:07:04.000We in kind of conservative folklore forget this moment.
00:07:07.000I was at freshman and high school, and I remember it intimately, where Obamacare was put on a referendum, and Scott Brown became a U.S. senator from Massachusetts as a Republican, and Ted Kennedy passed away.
00:07:29.000So basically then, Obama had to change some of the wording because 60 went down to 59 because he did not have the votes to be able to pass the filibuster.
00:07:40.000And by the way, there were a lot of what they call blue dog Democrats that basically offered themselves as sacrificial lambs.
00:08:11.000Well, it is a singular person that holds all the cards.
00:08:15.000It's a singular person that decides whether something is in the bill or something is not in the bill.
00:08:20.000She is becoming the most powerful person in Washington, D.C., and her name is Elizabeth McDonough.
00:08:28.000Now, Elizabeth McDonough, to her credit, was actually very helpful under Joe Biden.
00:08:32.000Elizabeth McDonough removed a lot of the total and complete insanity that people like AOC and Elizabeth Warren wanted to fit into reconciliation bills.
00:08:42.000However, Elizabeth McDonough right now, she holds almost all the cards, sort of.
00:08:49.000So she holds the cards because Jon Thune has given her the cards.
00:08:52.000And Jon Thune wants to allow this process to play out.
00:08:56.000And the reason why this is bubbling up to a fever pitch, and trust me, I get it.
00:09:00.000But it's my job to tell you when to get angry and also to explain things away and say, let's hold some of our fire to see if we can't figure this out.
00:09:08.000And one of the reasons why people are losing it this morning is that she removed a provision from the Big Beautiful Bill that would have saved us hundreds of billions of dollars saying illegals cannot get Medicaid.
00:10:08.000And people in that whole kind of community are saying, just allow this to play out a little bit because it's the Democrats that are actually leaking while they're going back and forth with Ms. McDonough.
00:10:19.000This is an ongoing process where they say, okay, can we word it this way?
00:11:07.000If she continues her nonsense and it just gets out of control, Jon Thune can remove her.
00:11:12.000And you could get a new parliamentarian, but then she becomes a martyr and you might get an even worse one in return.
00:11:17.000All that to say, she's incredibly powerful.
00:11:19.000We don't know how it's going to turn out.
00:11:22.000In fact, the future of our agenda might be with her.
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00:12:28.000So the parliamentarian has a lot of power right now.
00:12:32.000But just remember, back when this was under Joe Biden, in March of 2021, 24 Democrat members of Congress wrote a letter to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris requesting that Harris overrule the Senate parliamentarian, raising the national minimum wage.
00:12:44.000Ultimately, Harris ruled in accordance with the parliamentarian and removed the provision.
00:12:49.000So J.D. Vance can overturn it once it gets to the floor, but this really is a Jon Thune thing, and Jon Thune's got to work through this.
00:13:12.000That is 100% a budgetary measure without question.
00:13:16.000And that would save us hundreds of billions of dollars.
00:13:18.000If you can't get no Medicaid funding for illegals, figure out how to word it in a way that can pass the parliamentarian threshold.
00:13:28.000But let's be honest, this is way too much power for one person in D.C. This is structurally a problem.
00:13:34.000And if you were to fire the parliamentarian, the question is who do you replace it with?
00:13:38.000And understand, that would send shockwaves throughout the Senate.
00:13:41.000I know a lot of us in the grassroots have very little respect for this stuff, but the senators there, they think the Senate is like this wonderful thing and it's very regal and great.
00:13:53.000And they look at the upper chamber as being the thoughtful and philosophical chamber that really deep thinking happens.
00:14:06.000But look, we shouldn't put that off the table if it gets to it.
00:14:08.000If Elizabeth McDonough gets in the way of President Trump's agenda, then we can change the rules.
00:14:13.000There are many measures that we can get to at this point.
00:14:17.000My biggest, my biggest concern is why is this even program have one person that's able to get in the way of what we obviously want to do and what we should be able to do?
00:14:43.000So the office of the parliamentarian does have, of course, constitutional roots.
00:14:48.000Article 1, Section 5 says each House may determine the rules of its proceedings.
00:14:52.000The office of the parliamentarian were created in the House in 1927 and in the Senate in 1935.
00:14:58.000The parliamentarian answers questions from the presiding officer about the wording of motions and about precedents related to motions or actions.
00:15:06.000The current parliamentarian, as mentioned, is Elizabeth McDonough.
00:15:10.000Harry Reid put her there, which should make us have a little bit of pause.
00:15:14.000And by then, Senate Majority Leader, opponent by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
00:15:18.000The budget reconciliation process is only supposed to include provisions that, according to the Congressional Research Service, quote, would change laws related to direct spending, revenue, or the debt limit.
00:15:29.000So spending, revenue, or debt limit, no Medicaid for illegals is absolutely spending or revenue.
00:15:37.000Now, she's an officer appointed by the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, and they're generally preserved across parties to maintain harmony in the Senate, but they have been removed before.
00:15:48.000And so we should not dismiss that as something.
00:15:50.000If she keeps on acting in a way where there is no negotiation, then we got to get rid of her.
00:15:56.000Robert Dove was a parliamentarian picked by Republicans and got fired when Democrats took over and then came back when Republicans took power again, but then got fired by Republican Trent Lott.
00:16:07.000So these kind of fights have happened.
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00:19:07.000And this is just from one of our top supporters at Turning Point.
00:19:10.000You would say, they say, Charlie, if this continues, we're going to go out of business with this.
00:19:14.000This is the little nonsense of the U.S. Senate.
00:19:16.000Buried on page 306 in the Senate finance text of the One Big Bitty Future Bills, a carve-out for big multinationals to pocket taxpayer dollars for their Chinese suppliers by grandfathering existing contracts.
00:19:27.000Big auto companies, General Motors in particular, is Pushing for this.
00:19:30.000This provision will send hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer dollars to companies affiliated with the CCP, literally, through 2030, at the expense of American manufacturers that were just getting a break from their anti-competitive behavior thanks to President Trump's America First trade policy.
00:19:44.000This is literally being pushed by GM, Biden's BFF, Mary Barra, and her buddies at the Chinese battery company.
00:19:52.000And by the way, I know the Republican senators that are carrying the water on this.
00:20:14.000Inform our audience of the unbelievable journey you had to go through because of the Iranian missile attacks.
00:20:19.000Yeah, Charlie, I think last time I checked in with you, it was less than 24 hours after the IDF operations inside Iran began.
00:20:25.000We were over in Israel at that time, and it was a Friday afternoon.
00:20:29.000The Jewish Sabbath was about to come in over in Israel.
00:20:31.000And we kind of just, everyone knew that the Iranians were going to start their missile launches during the Jewish Sabbath.
00:20:36.000Sure enough, that's exactly what happened.
00:20:38.000I literally had to interrupt my Shabbat to Friday evening prayers to take my wife and daughter to run down to the bombshell after this happened on and off over the next few days.
00:20:48.000And Charlie, you know, this has kind of evaded American media.
00:20:50.000So the media is properly covering all of the astonishing tactical operational success that the IDF and Mossad had, especially in those first few hours of the war inside Iran.
00:21:00.000But unfortunately, the Israeli air defense was letting too many missiles through.
00:21:04.000To be clear, they were intercepting most of them, but too many were getting through.
00:21:07.000And after a few days, it did start to get a little dicey.
00:21:10.000And there was a neighboring town near where we were staying that the Israeli media tragically was reporting that two people who even went to the bomb shelter, they actually died from a direct ballistic missile blast.
00:21:21.000Because Charlie, let's understand here that these bomb shelters over there, they're built primarily with these Hamas rockets and mortars in mind, not necessarily these 2,000-mile hypersonic ballistic missiles.
00:21:31.000So I decided that I basically had to get the heck out of here.
00:21:37.000I came across a program that our governor, Ron DeSantis, had Florida team up with, a rescue evacuation organization called Gray Bull Rescue.
00:21:44.000I was put in touch with a state sender from Florida, a wonderful man named Jay Collins.
00:21:48.000And he was our point of contact to basically get us home.
00:21:51.000So it was a three and a half day journey.
00:22:59.000So, you know, the crazy thing, Charlie, so our daughter, her name is Esther.
00:23:03.000I actually dedicated my book, Israel and Civilization, to my daughter Esther.
00:23:06.000Anyone who knows anything about the book of Esther in the Bible knows that it is a story that takes place in Persia, in ancient Iran and Persia.
00:23:13.000So it was actually literally on our daughter's six-month birthday on June 13, 2025, that the Persians started launching rockets at us.
00:23:21.000It kind of had almost like a biblical kind of divine element to it as well.
00:23:33.000We're staying in a house that had a spare bedroom on the basement level next to the bomb shelter.
00:23:37.000So we actually slept in this room adjacent to the bomb shelter so that when the sirens and the phone goes off at three in the morning there, you can literally just drop everything you're doing and rush next door.
00:23:46.000I mean, 90 seconds, two minutes to just drop whatever you're doing, put on your glasses if you wear contacts like me and just get to the bomb shelter ASAP.
00:23:53.000But we got lucky insofar as I think it was easier to have a six-month-old Charlie than if we had like a five or six year old.
00:24:00.000And sure enough, there actually were some families on our evacuation mission.
00:24:03.000There were 300 of us who got on those buses towards the Jordanian border on the first state of Florida evacuation mission.
00:24:10.000There are these two wonderful, beautiful families from Texas, Christian families there who were visiting the Christian holy sites in Israel.
00:24:16.000And these two families had these beautiful children, you know, three, four, five, six, seven.
00:24:20.000And I watched the parents just trying to keep these kids entertained, like literally entertained on the bus to the hotel, the airport, to this.
00:24:26.000And I kind of said to my wife, you know, like we have a six-month-old and that's not easy there, but it could also be a lot tougher as well.
00:24:33.000Oh, I mean, I mean, I have a near three-year-old.
00:24:35.000I can't imagine what like a full, all your energy would just be on making sure your two or three-year-old is entertained.
00:24:45.000So, Josh, praise the Lord that you're okay and your family's okay.
00:24:49.000So, now that the war is over, just kind of give us your take on what President Trump was able to accomplish, what this means for the Western world.
00:25:01.000And if you would have told most people two weeks ago, Iran would have no nuclear weapon, there would be no U.S. troops killed, there'd be no U.S. troops on the ground, there would be no permanent war, there would be no even talks of war in Congress, and that we kind of are moving on in a new cycle.
00:25:16.000I mean, that would be an incomprehensible accomplishment.
00:25:19.000I just want everyone to look at this from a two-week window.
00:25:21.000Two weeks ago was when Israel launched the first strikes against Iran, two weeks ago.
00:25:26.000And now it's kind of a memory and it's being forgotten.
00:25:49.000But for my entire adult lifetime, my entire adult lifetime, the Iranian nuclear program has been one of those thorny, recurring, ongoing debates.
00:25:57.000It's been this hovering sort of Damocles Over the Middle East, over the United States, over Western civilization.
00:26:10.000Is there going to be a forever war, regime change war?
00:26:12.000Are we just going to let it sit and let them get nuclear?
00:26:14.000It's been in the debate for literally as long as I've been following politics.
00:26:17.000Donald Trump, in roughly 37 hours, from those B-2s taken off of Missouri, going to Iran, dropping the 14 bunker busters, those Tomahawk missiles from the nuclear submarine, and then returning home, in 37 hours, without a single shot being fired on a B-2, he has single-handedly changed the face of the region and arguably the world.
00:26:37.000He has neutralized the single current deadliest threat, not just the people of the Middle East, but potentially to the people of Europe, because Iran has ballistic missiles that can go a thousand miles as well.
00:26:48.000And they've been working very hard on ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles as well, that God forbid could potentially reach the Americas, the Western hemisphere.
00:26:55.000They're not there yet, but they've certainly been working on it there.
00:26:57.000And in one fell swoop, in one fell swoop, Donald Trump has done more to bring peace, stability, and security to the Middle East and to the United States.
00:27:06.000Charlie, let's not forget the raison d'être, the entire purpose of the current regime in Iran is to eliminate what they refer to as the little said in Israel and the big Sayyid in the United States.
00:27:17.000People can say, oh, why do they hate us?
00:27:43.000This regime has a ton of American blood on its hands.
00:27:45.000If you can accomplish at an infinitesimally low cost to deprive this genocidal, maniacal, anti-American regime of the world's deadliest weapons, why in the world would you not do that?
00:27:57.000So praise be to God that Donald Trump did what he did.
00:28:00.000It is a fantastic demonstration of American military prowess.
00:28:04.000And most importantly, Charlie, it's also the Trump doctrine at work.
00:28:07.000The Trump doctrine is neither neoconservative nor isolationist.
00:28:11.000He is a nationalist realist Jacksonian is a term that gets battered out sometimes.
00:28:15.000He is someone who is not looking to start wars, and this was not looking to start a war.
00:28:20.000It actually was looking to try to end a war, to end the Iranian regime's four and a half decade-long war through the regime directly and their various proxies against America and America's allies.
00:28:30.000It is a fantastic, unbelievable, historical display of statesmanship.
00:28:34.000And I am proud that I voted for this man, frankly, in Don J. Trump.
00:29:02.000It is a hubristic and arrogant act for a liberal Western society to try to dictate to a foreign nation who they should or should not have ruled them.
00:29:11.000Now, having said that, Charlie, we should not hesitate to say that the current Iranian regime is evil.
00:29:15.000Again, they chant death to America on a daily basis.
00:29:18.000But the proper solution is for the Persian people, who are very smart, educated, historical people going back millennia, to ultimately one day, God willing, take matters into their own hands.
00:30:54.000I have not been able to say that it's literally been obliterated.
00:30:57.000What I can tell you is this, that this leaker is full of, you know what?
00:31:00.000This leaker is 1,000% full of crap there.
00:31:03.000This has all the markings of a Natasha Bertrand operation.
00:31:06.000That is the name of the reporter at Politico who was reporting about this leaker.
00:31:09.000If that name sounds familiar, that's because it should.
00:31:12.000She was the reporter back in 2020 who was first seeking to dismiss the New York Post's bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story as so-called Russian disinformation with Brennan and Clapper and that whole terrible list of 51 deep state spooks.
00:31:24.000So we should be very skeptical for that reason.
00:31:27.000Charlie, the other reason that I think I feel very, very confident in saying that whether it's literal obliteration or setback years and years there, the other reason I'm very confident is because that's what the Israelis are saying too.
00:31:38.000And a lot of people say, oh, you know, the U.S. should not trust what Israel says.
00:31:41.000Every country should do its own assessment.
00:31:43.000But in this particular situation, in this particular situation, I think Israel's word is actually very important because the Iranian nuclear program is literally an existential threat to them.
00:31:52.000So the fact that Israel agreed to this Trump-imposed ceasefire, ASAP, it's pretty much no questions asked.
00:31:58.000That means that they are very satisfied that this existential threat hovering over them on a daily basis has been severely neutralized, if not quite gotten rid of in its entirety.
00:32:07.000So I feel very good about the currency of the program.
00:32:09.000Obviously, we will learn more in the days to come, but this has all the hallmarks of an anti-Trump deep state intelligence community leak.
00:32:15.000Yes, I mean, and to your point, I mean, if Israel felt that they were threatened so much by the Iranian nuclear program, they were willing to launch preemptive strikes.
00:32:24.000And then now they're saying that that threat is taken out, well, then that's actually probably the best verification because they Obviously, have the most interest and most invested in the lethality and the seriousness of the Iranian nuclear program.
00:32:39.000Josh, final thought here: there's new polling to suggest that young people's view of Israel has gone down in the last couple of weeks, last couple of months.
00:32:48.000There's a lot of work to do to try to educate the next generation about the pro-Israel cause.
00:32:57.000And what do you think can be done in the coming months or years to at least get young people to understand that Israel is a country surrounded by barbarians and a death cult, and that it's a much more complicated, nuanced position?
00:33:13.000Charlie, my best guess as to why the Israel position is currently becoming a little more unpopular with certain younger, especially Gen Z types above all, is that especially for those who grew up in a post-9-11 milieu, and to be clear, I was only 12 years old when 9-11 happened, I think that there is this conflation between U.S. support for Israel and the forever wars that constituted the failed regime change wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:33:36.000But this is a flawed line of analysis for multiple reasons.
00:33:40.000On the first hand, Charlie, there's this narrative that Israel talked George W. Bush into fighting Iraq.
00:33:45.000And frankly, nothing can be further from the case.
00:33:47.000In fact, both the president of Israel at the time in 2002, Shimon Peres, and the leader of the Israeli right, Ariel Sharon, literally both told George W. Bush, do not do this because you're going to topple this.
00:33:58.000It's going to become an Iranian province overnight in Iraq there.
00:34:01.000You're going to destabilize the region.
00:34:02.000So that narrative has always been bunk.
00:34:04.000But Charlie, there's a much more important argument here, which I advance in my book, Israel and Civilization.
00:34:09.000I have a whole chapter on this, which I think is imperative for young Americans, young conservatives, young Christians to understand that Israel serves the American national interest in this region by oftentimes doing our dirty work for us.
00:34:21.000When it comes to pruning the jihadist excesses of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Qatayib, Hezbollah, all the Houthis, all the various proxies of the Iranian regime, to doing tremendous damage to the Iranian regime itself in the first few days of the 12-day war, therefore making it so that these B-2 bombers could go in with the Iranian missile defense, with the Iranian radar completely obliterated there, with not a single shot fired there.
00:34:46.000I mean, Charlie, what Israel and the U.S. just did to neutralize the Iranian nuclear program, I'm a sports fan, it's essentially equivalent to an alley-oop of sorts.
00:34:53.000I mean, I think back to the old early 2000s, Kobe Bryant to Shaquille O'Neal.
00:34:57.000It is a tag team operation to neutralize a hegemonic threat from a regime that chants not just death to Israel, but death to America as well.
00:35:05.000All of this, by the way, is in service of trying to stabilize the Middle East and therefore kind of make it easier for America to pivot to China, which is our big threat.