00:01:00.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:22.000We're not going to emphasize this, but in addition to the federal charges that we expect against Donald Trump, the extent of which we are not sure, Georgia looks like it is winding up.
00:01:32.000Long wind up to use a baseball pitcher analogy.
00:01:36.000Fulton County case against Trump might be the most serious yet.
00:01:39.000Fanny Willis is ready to go all in, eyeing criminal solicitation charges and Trump inquiry of criminal conspiracy based on a phone call where he said, Can you go find votes?
00:01:53.000So you're going to have New York with Alvin Bragg.
00:01:55.000You're going to have Department of Justice, Florida documents, and then you're going to have Department of Justice, whether it be insurrection, seditious conspiracy, rebellion, January 6th related stuff remains to be seen.
00:02:21.000There's a pardon board of people that are all appointed by the governor, and we've controlled that office for the last 20 years, but somehow the pardon board isn't one that would just shoot down a sham prosecution like this, especially how Donald Trump has gone scorched earth against the good old boys network in the state of Georgia.
00:02:41.000Georgia has actually more counties per capita than any state in the country.
00:02:47.000There's a lot of localized political power in Georgia.
00:02:50.000A lot of dog catchers, mosquito abatement district school board members, mayors that you have to Brown knows to be able to win in Georgia.
00:03:08.000And by the way, Donald Trump said, hey, can you go find me?
00:03:13.000He did not say go steal or fabricate or find me.
00:03:18.000And I believe the phone call was recorded by Brad Rothensberger.
00:03:24.000Georgia was the most Democrat state in the country for a century after the Civil War.
00:04:26.000Stacey Abrams, who we used to mock, became this incredibly vicious community organizer.
00:04:32.000She threatened to sue Brian Kemp and not threaten.
00:04:35.000She actually was suing Brian Kemp and Roffensperger.
00:04:37.000They signed a consent decree, different than the RNC's consent decree from multiple decades ago, that basically Brian Kemp and Raufensberger relaxed the signature verification threshold.
00:04:47.000This happened coincidentally right before COVID was a thing.
00:05:06.000So Georgia is a state that we thought we were going to win automatically.
00:05:09.000But if you were reading all the kind of intelligentsia left-wing blogs, New York Times and all this, they were incredibly bullish on Georgia in August and September, October 2020.
00:06:03.000The day before, obviously, all the events on January 6th.
00:06:06.000January 5th, you had Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue both fall short in the runoff to Raphael Warnock and John Ossif, which ceded control of the United States Senate.
00:06:18.000A Senate that could have at least slowed down some of the Biden nominees, a Senate that could have locked down this Katangi Brown Jackson nut case that is now in the Supreme Court.
00:06:26.000So the Georgia reconfiguration was a master plan by Mark Elias and Stacey Abrams and Lorene Powell Jobs and George Soros and Arabella Advisors and America Votes.
00:06:38.000And I mean, of course, they had all the Fulton County, Cobb County, slowing down, stopping to count ballots.
00:06:44.000But Donald Trump made a certain calculation.
00:06:47.000This helped, by the way, Donald Trump in states like Ohio.
00:06:50.000Going after the good old boys network in certain states helped Donald Trump.
00:06:57.000If you do not pander to the southern hospitality, not just southern hospitality, but it says relationships are a big deal south of the Mason-Dixon line in politics.
00:07:09.000And both parties, by the way, but especially the Republican Party.
00:07:11.000A lot of graft, a lot of corruption, a lot of backslapping.
00:07:13.000Okay, now we have Michael Anton, as I set that up on a separate topic, who I think is the most gifted and talented essayist and writer in the conservative movement.
00:07:34.000Well, they interpret a clause in the middle, a parenthetical clause that reads, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States in the 14th Amendment as requiring birthright citizenship when that is not what the drafters of the 14th Amendment intended.
00:07:52.000Now, this gets very much into the weeds.
00:08:05.000It did not rule on the question of the legal status of the children of illegal immigrants, people who crossed the border illegally, who overstayed a visa, who were vacationing or working temporarily in the United States, but without any kind of legal status to reside in the United States.
00:08:21.000That has never been decided on not only by the Supreme Court, but by the court at any level.
00:08:26.000So what happened is sometime in the middle of the 20th century, after World War II, and really in the 60s, the federal bureaucracy just started granting citizenship to anyone born.
00:08:37.000And remember, this is a complicated issue because there's a state question, right?
00:08:42.000There's still no such thing as a federal birth certificate.
00:08:44.000Any of us who lived through Obama birth certificate brouhaha of 2008, 2012 remembers this, right?
00:08:52.000Birth certificates are issued by the states.
00:08:55.000And without being told by any higher authority, whether court or executive authority, the states would just say, you know, we can certify that you were born in the United States.
00:09:05.000And then the federal government started to say, well, if your state birth certificate says you were born in the United States, we're going to say that that amounts to citizenship.
00:09:12.000Now, again, this is just something that the bureaucracy, the government, decided to do on its own without being told.
00:09:19.000Granted, that many people in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party liked the outcome of the policy, so they declined to stop it.
00:09:26.000And now, and for, I don't know, at least a generation, they have been pretending that this was intended by law and intended by the 14th Amendment all along.
00:09:39.000There's no court decision that says this.
00:09:41.000There's not even an executive order that says this.
00:09:44.000And so as a result, you get not only the normal abuse that we're used to, that is to say, you know, people crossing the border illegally, obviously coming for a better life.
00:09:54.000I understand why people come from south of the border or why many, or if not most, people come from south of the border into the United States, because they're coming from poorer countries, often much more violent and dangerous countries, and they know they're going to have a better life for themselves and for their children.
00:10:08.000But it still breaks U.S. law, and there is no legal reason for their children to have citizenship simply by virtue of being born here.
00:10:17.000Let me ask you, Michael, so this has not been in the last hundred years, what I'm going to understand, challenged at the United States Supreme Court.
00:10:23.000I mean, it's just, this is not even an executive order.
00:10:26.000This is just bureaucratic precedent that the administrative state decided upon that.
00:10:30.000Essentially, the federal government for a long time has just decided if you can produce a state birth certificate that affirms that you were born on U.S. soil, you're a U.S. citizen.
00:10:41.000They've never been told to do this by Congress, by the Constitution, or by the courts, or even by executive order.
00:10:48.000This is one of the most important things for a civilization to basically get right.
00:10:52.000How rare is this in the Western world?
00:10:54.000I mean, France, Spain have got rid of birthright citizenship?
00:10:58.000I wish I'd known you were going to ask that because I had the exact numbers for a piece that I wrote.
00:11:02.000And I don't know, but it's about 80% of countries do not offer birthright citizenship, and something about like 20% do.
00:11:10.000And those 20% are overwhelmingly in the Western Hemisphere, although not exclusively.
00:11:15.000But pretty much nobody in Europe, Asia, the rest of the world offers this.
00:11:20.000And if you go not just by number of countries, but by population, you know, because some countries are bigger than others, it's something like almost 90% of the world's population live in a country that does not offer birthright citizenship.
00:11:32.000And one other important fact, countries have had it and then moved away from it, have gotten rid of it.
00:11:37.000But in the last 50, 60, 70 years, no country has moved in the direction of more birthright citizenship.
00:11:43.000They've only moved in the direction of restricting it.
00:11:45.000So, Michael, is it time for a Supreme Court challenge, considering the Supreme Court is more sane than insane right now?
00:11:53.000Well, you know, I usually am I'm wary of declaiming on things like that under my own name because I don't watch the court carefully.
00:12:00.000I know some people who really understand the court extremely well.
00:12:03.000I'll just name one name you're probably familiar with.
00:12:05.000That's Theo Wald, who's now the Solicitor General of Idaho.
00:12:08.000He's a close friend and a lawyer, and his wife is a lawyer.
00:12:11.000And, you know, he's tied in, and he would have a much better sense of what the likely outcome of a challenge is.
00:12:18.000I think, though, that the way to approach this is to start small.
00:12:26.000Now, obviously, with the Biden administration in power, none of this is going to happen.
00:12:30.000But the most obvious abuse is so-called birth tourism, where people, not poor people, but by definition, rich or at least affluent people from Russia and China scheduled to have babies in the United States.
00:12:44.000Southern California is a big destination, as is southern Florida.
00:12:47.000So they fly in six weeks before the birth.
00:12:50.000There are whole hospitals and industries that are geared toward taking care of these people.
00:12:56.000They get their child a U.S. birth certificate.
00:12:59.000They make sure to go and get a passport as quickly as possible.
00:13:03.000And then they go home, you know, with the idea that, well, they need the option.
00:13:08.000They can always come back essentially on the backs of their child status.
00:13:12.000That is an obvious abuse of the system that even if you believed the framers of the 14th Amendment intended birthright citizenship for the children of illegals, which I don't believe and I don't think the text supports.
00:13:23.000But even if you believed that, you'd have to admit that they certainly did not intend for birth tourism in the age of jumbo jetliners flying in rich people from hostile or adversarial countries to take advantage of U.S. citizenship.
00:13:39.000I don't want to say laws because these are not the laws, but misguided citizenship practices.
00:13:43.000So I would start there with that obvious abuse where you're going to get 80% at least of the American people agreeing this is terrible.
00:13:54.000We have to stop that and then work your way up toward the correction of the more widespread abuses.
00:14:01.000This is the big, the buried lead, and it ties to your other story here, Michael.
00:14:05.000The deep state is gearing up to fight a second Trump presidency.
00:14:07.000You think about gay marriage, Obergofaul, this issue.
00:14:10.000Congress is not participating in this.
00:14:12.000Roe versus Wade, this is administrative state and courts and largely bureaucrats that are unelected, unaccountable, and this fourth branch of government, this Leviathan that is calling shots.
00:14:23.000So Michael, tell us about this article you wrote for The Telegraph.
00:14:26.000The Deep State is gearing up to fight a second Trump presidency.
00:14:31.000Well, look, I mean, I'm sort of on record saying that I don't expect a second Trump presidency to happen.
00:14:36.000And I hope I don't upset any of my Trump supporting friends by saying that.
00:14:40.000And I'm not saying that because, you know, out of any disdain for Trump or for the movement or for the things that he represents.
00:14:46.000I just think that the forces arrayed against him are incredibly strong.
00:14:50.000And I don't see the counterforce arrayed against him as being nearly as strong to overcome what the deep state, plus not just the deep state, but what the tech companies and what the financial firms and what the foundations and the media and every, you know, and the Zuckerbucks, and you name it, can throw against him.
00:15:05.000Plus, all you have to do is read what these people say.
00:15:09.000And I unfortunately do maybe more of that than I should.
00:15:12.000But they're quite clear that they think Donald Trump is the biggest threat to America since 9-11 or even before that, bigger than Pearl Harbor, I've heard some people say it.
00:15:21.000And so they therefore think that they're justified in doing absolutely anything to stop him.
00:15:26.000And I take them seriously when they say that.
00:15:29.000And that means that they'll use any and all of their powers to make sure that there isn't another Trump presidency.
00:15:34.000And since they have a lot of powers, I unfortunately take seriously the fact that I think they can block it.
00:15:40.000And I think they will block it and intend to block it.
00:15:42.000And what I'm not yet seeing is enough countervailing force, you know, and not just force, but like the political savvy, the institutional savvy, the institutional infrastructure, the legal challenges to all these voting changes that make things easier for Democrats and harder on Republicans and so on and so on and so forth.
00:16:01.000I'm not seeing enough organization money and serious effort to oppose that.
00:16:05.000And so right now it looks like a pretty lopsided fight.
00:16:27.000I'm working on a lot of stuff right now.
00:16:29.000I guess my next thing is, well, you can look at something I just published on Compact called The Pessimistic Case for the Future.
00:16:35.000It's a little bit of a downer, but I hope it stirs thought.
00:16:38.000It's also the first chapter in a brand new book published by the Claremont Institute, edited by my colleague Arthur Millick, that I think 18 authors, all of which are going into different issues of why conservatism needs to change called Up from Conservatism.
00:16:54.000And then one other thing is my next article, which I'm finishing now, which will be out in the Claremont Review of Books, I guess in the next issue.
00:17:01.000So let's say a month or so, is a review of Patrick Denin's, I think, very important book called Regime Change.
00:17:21.000Do you believe in our founders' vision for America, that our republic will only survive if we are an educated and informed people who know our rights and our duties?
00:17:28.000Since 1844, Hillsdale College has sought to educate all who wish to learn about these timeless principles of self-government.
00:17:35.000For more than 50 years, the college has worked to spread that mission by sending In Primus their Digest of Liberty to millions of Americans, including me.
00:17:42.000In Primus features some of the best speeches given at Hillsdale events, and now an audio version of the popular speech digest is available in a new podcast of the same name.
00:17:51.000And like print publications in Primus, the podcast is always free.
00:17:54.000You can hear the best arguments from speakers such as Christopher Ruffo, Molly Hemingway, Mark Stein, Hillsdale College President Larry Piarn, among others, read by Hillsdale students.
00:18:03.000I started listening to In Primus and now my friends at Hillsdale, and I want you to listen for free as well.
00:18:09.000You can subscribe today to listen in at Primus at charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:18:15.000It is the best college in America, Hillsdale College, CharlieForhillsdale.com.
00:18:22.000Okay, joining us now is Mike Cernovich.
00:18:25.000Mike, I think, is one of the smartest people in the movement.
00:18:28.000I love how honest he is on social media, and he sees things as they are, and he doesn't really care if he gets hate for it because he's honest.
00:19:33.000And now there's no competitive primary.
00:19:36.000I've never seen a campaign altered like this in my lifetime.
00:19:39.000Some people are comparing it to Scott Scott Walker, who is a great governor.
00:19:43.000He ran for office, realizing it was a national scene, completely different vibe.
00:19:49.000So, if you're me, you're other people, you're pretty frustrated because you see a lot of denial from DeSantis supporters.
00:19:56.000You see a lot of frustration from them, a lot of rage.
00:19:59.000Even people that I consider friends for many, many years, nitpicking little sub-tweets about me, I can tell where they're being insulting, being condescending.
00:20:12.000And I think that fundamentally, you know, so rather than just why am I, why am I, here's what they did wrong.
00:20:16.000Fundamentally, the failure of the DeSantis campaign was that they didn't understand and they still don't understand the MAGA energy that existed in 2015 and in 2016.
00:20:29.000They didn't understand that it was fun.
00:20:32.000One of the reasons Trump won an unprecedented election, the close election, an election that could have gone either way, and that the regime didn't expect him to win, or else they would have done more shenanigans like they did in 2020, was if you just looked, who do you want to be with, right?
00:20:53.000And so many people who are conservative, they think they're real like intellectuals, right?
00:20:58.000That's the snobbery that I flagged in a number of my tweets that I've noticed as part of the conservative movement is these guys on Twitter, they're so haughty.
00:21:06.000And I think I've read the great books, and there's nothing I'm reading from your tweet that is so freaking amazing that I think, where's this guy's bull?
00:21:15.000This person, a brilliant articulator, wonderful insight.
00:21:31.000They yell at me, even though if anybody had followed along, super pro DeSantis, everything I say is good about DeSantis.
00:21:39.000I'm one of the only people who could be pro to Santis, but also still exist in MAGA world, just because, like, as you said at the intro, people know that I'm kind of a loose cannon, wild card.
00:21:49.000Call it whatever you want, but there's just some people who are able to exist back.
00:21:55.000And that's what I love about you, Mike, is that there's no agenda except the truth.
00:21:58.000And I think you're diagnosing it perfectly.
00:22:01.000First of all, there's these surprisingly hostile snobs that are anything but DeSantis.
00:22:09.000And they're not even allowing you to have any sort of criticism towards the campaign.
00:22:13.000It's kind of like everything is fine and everything is great and everything is fine.
00:22:16.000And I just, I'm like, guys, no, it's actually not like two things can simultaneously be true, by the way, which is I think that I'm behind President Donald Trump, but I also really like Governor DeSantis and I think he's done a wonderful job.
00:22:30.000And it's almost as if that can't, those cannot simultaneously exist, right, in the same universe.
00:22:38.000And, you know, the we had a dialogue with Dave Rubin the other day.
00:22:42.000And then privately, I've talked to some people and somebody said, well, Charlie, what do you think DeSantis could be doing differently?
00:23:46.000So you have a command and control problem and a culture problem.
00:23:49.000So if I'm handling messaging with the DeSantis people, I would say, why are you bickering with people who are 80% pro DeSantis because they criticize DeSantis?
00:23:58.000Don Jr. follows Mike Cernovich, retweets Mike Cernovich.
00:24:00.000Read what Mike Cernovich has said about President Trump, right?
00:24:10.000You want to have the power over the nuclear, which you're going to have people who come at you aggressively.
00:24:17.000And if you're going to cry about that and throw a tantrum about that, this can be a problem.
00:24:20.000Now, of course, the flip side is I've had they're very robotic.
00:24:24.000So I don't know if it's a botnet or they're just on group tax, but I've noticed a bunch of them go, oh, you just Cernovich, you can't take mean tweets.
00:24:31.000And I see that same coordinated, inauthentic messaging.
00:24:36.000So everything about the campaign is inauthentic messaging.
00:24:39.000I don't know if you guys have that memo or you read that memo yesterday that I tweeted that was full of just corporate gobbledygook, the kind of memo that you get when you work at a big corporation.
00:25:05.000To sell a candidate, you have to create alliances, maybe with people you don't agree with on everything, but you go, you know, that guy, he's not an enemy, right?
00:25:13.000You got to realize there's a difference between an enemy and someone who's not a friend.
00:25:18.000And then there's people like me who are friendly.
00:25:20.000So the DeSantis people, they treat friendlies like enemies.
00:25:24.000And then one of them said, well, we're glad we got rid of you.
00:25:26.000Meanwhile, I'm thinking, but I was never with you.
00:25:28.000I was just somebody friendly to DeSantis.
00:25:30.000So they need a whole image makeover, a whole messaging makeover.
00:25:35.000They need a complete reform of the command and control happening where it takes three days for a tweet to go out.
00:27:15.000But they don't know any of this, right?
00:27:17.000So that's what I mean by their snobbery is so unearned.
00:27:21.000Because why, like, if you've never built a brand, if you don't have any notoriety, if you don't have any impact, then why do you think you know more than people who do?
00:27:29.000You can say, for example, oh, well, I'm better than Cernovich.
00:27:33.000He's a degenerate lowlife or whatever.
00:28:07.000So if you're DeSantis, you need adversarial media coverage where they claim you're a bad person because you want to stop child sex trafficking.
00:28:14.000Instead, that same weekend, he made a line about Trump that I think was taken a little bit out of context by MAGA, but it was something like he could have maybe done more on January 6th, but he shouldn't be indicted.
00:28:26.000So that became the story where if you're just a casual Trump supporter, you go, wow, why is DeSantis attacking Trump?
00:28:32.000Where instead, that whole weekend could have been nonstop coverage of how DeSantis is a horrible person because he wants to stop child sex trafficking.
00:28:40.000So I think it's not going to that much.
00:28:45.000I mean, and we could list 10, 12 different ideas.
00:28:47.000Mike Cernovich, who, by the way, understood Trump well before anybody else in 2015, 16, was a big part of the populist nationalist movement.
00:28:55.000And just so everyone understands the credibility of Mike, Mike has been very harsh towards Trump in the last 18 months and has really been leveling some fair criticism, but he also looks how things are, not how he wishes that they should be.
00:29:07.000And he's like, look, this DeSantis thing, this dog is not hunting.
00:29:12.000Goodranchers.com is an amazing resource.
00:30:38.000So, Mike, I'm going to read a text from somebody in the DeSantis orbit in a second, but I want to go through your tweets here.
00:30:44.000You say, not even I could save the DeSantis campaign.
00:30:46.000My earlier advice, first mocked, then accepted a day late, would have given them momentum.
00:30:50.000It's hard to help people who don't have joy.
00:30:52.000MAGA influencers can be, let's just blur that out.
00:30:56.000But no one can deny they look to be having a good time.
00:30:59.000You've also said DeSantis can now drop out of the race with dignity.
00:31:03.000Say we must really get behind Trump given all the unlawful indictments.
00:31:06.000Trump says he'll make DeSantis attorney general.
00:31:08.000There's a way to save face here and not look you're bending the knee.
00:31:11.000This is the controversial tweet, Mike.
00:31:13.000Why should Trump bring DeSantis now into the orbit?
00:31:17.000Because we're winning or losing elections on 50,000 votes in three states, right?
00:31:22.000Trump won 2016 by 83,000 votes in four states.
00:31:25.000He lost, if you consider it a real loss in 2020 by 50,000 or 40,000 votes in three states.
00:31:34.000You can't really alienate anyone is the problem here.
00:31:39.000And one of the people I read and some people I've talked to have actually thought that the DeSantis campaign is designed to torpedo support for Trump in 2024.
00:32:36.000I don't buy into that he's necessarily trying to torpedo it, but I understand why a lot of people think that, because if you look at how they're acting, you would say this is not somebody who wants to win, right?
00:32:47.000You would say, Vivek, again, people have their things.
00:32:51.000I'm not here to get into all that, but Vivek is playing to win.
00:32:54.000Now, whether he really thinks he can win the presidency or whether he's trying to win himself a profile, these are different conversations to be had, but he's playing to win, right?
00:33:02.000He's on the field like, all right, we're fired up, ready to go, right?
00:33:05.000I was thinking about that actually yesterday when I met somebody who was part of the Clinton campaign in 2016.
00:33:11.000And she said, when we door knocked for Obama, every morning it was fired up, ready to go, fired up, ready to go.
00:33:50.000In fact, I'll read this text message because this is what the DeSantis people can't refuse to get through their head, that at times we're actually getting honest advice.
00:35:14.000Probably not a good idea to just declare war.
00:35:16.000So I'm going to just say really MAGA-based things and win people over as this kind of like happy warrior and charm, a guy that has zero experience.
00:35:25.000I love Vivek, but DeSantis has a track record.
00:35:27.000All DeSantis had to do was run as this cheerful, happy warrior and just kind of laugh, be like, oh, it's Trump being Trump.
00:35:33.000But honestly, I could do what Trump wants to do better.
00:35:35.000If he had that tone, this would be a race.
00:35:37.000Instead, the smugness, the arrogance, the hubris, the pride, the hostility towards people like us has been unlike anything I've ever seen.
00:35:52.000Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:35:53.000Email us your thoughts as always: freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:35:57.000Also, email me, freedom at charliekirk.com, your opinions on the DeSantis campaign to win a signed copy, potentially, of my book, The College Scam.
00:36:06.000Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.
00:36:10.000For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.