The Charlie Kirk Show - The Case To Pardon Derek Chauvin ft. Ben Shapiro

00:00:00.000 Okay, everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show, Ben Shapiro joins us for the entire episode to speak about why we should pardon Derek Chauvin.

00:00:07.000 This is an incredibly important episode.

00:00:09.000 You should listen intently, send it to your liberal friends, and talk about how we went so amiss during the summer of 2020. Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:20.000 Become a member today, members.charliekirk.com, and get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com.

00:00:26.000 That is tpusa.com.

00:00:29.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:30.000 Here we go.

00:00:31.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:33.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:35.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:38.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:41.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:43.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:44.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:00:45.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:01.000 That's why we are here.

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00:01:31.000 It was defined by that term, woke.

00:01:34.000 Where did woke begin?

00:01:36.000 Obviously, 30 or 40, 50, 60 years ago, via the Frankfurt School critical theory.

00:01:41.000 But there was a moment during COVID where it seemed as if the entire society exploded.

00:01:47.000 There was a moment that was caught on video that triggered what is now known as Floydapalooza.

00:01:55.000 We weren't allowed to think about it at the time.

00:01:58.000 We were only allowed to feel.

00:01:59.000 We weren't allowed to ask very simple questions about what's really going on here.

00:02:04.000 And as a result, the man in the video, Derek Chauvin, is now going to spend the rest of his life in prison.

00:02:11.000 Well, now further examination allows us to reanalyze this cultural flashpoint.

00:02:18.000 And a very brave man when it comes to this particular topic, and a great man, Ben Shapiro, is willing to speak out and not just ask the question, but advocate...

00:02:29.000 For a pardon for Derek Chauvin.

00:02:31.000 Joining us now is Ben Shapiro, host of The Ben Shapiro Show, and also the website is PardonDerek.com, co-founder of The Daily Wire.

00:02:40.000 Ben, welcome to the program.

00:02:42.000 Hey, Charlie.

00:02:42.000 Thanks so much for having me.

00:02:43.000 I really appreciate it.

00:02:44.000 So, Ben, I'm going to just say the floor is yours.

00:02:47.000 For some people that have not been following this with great detail, this might make them kind of take a second, like a little pause in a second beat.

00:02:55.000 Why are you advocating for Derek Chauvin's pardon?

00:02:58.000 And what have you learned through the course of your research and your rigorous pursuit of the truth that has led you to this advocacy?

00:03:05.000 Well, I think the reason that I'm advocating for the pardon is because Derek Chauvin is not guilty.

00:03:09.000 And I think that it's very important to explode narratives like the one that you were talking about because those narratives live on in our memory as sort of flashpoints that people draw upon as evidence of narratives that are false.

00:03:21.000 So the narrative that surrounded the Floyd Chauvin killing.

00:03:24.000 was the narrative that America was inherently racist.

00:03:27.000 Now, those allegations were never actually made at trial.

00:03:29.000 There was never any allegation by prosecutors or by anyone that Derek Chauvin quote-unquote killed George Floyd because George Floyd was black, and yet that was the narrative.

00:03:36.000 It burst out all over the country that systemic American policing was racist, that America had to undergo a sort of racial cleansing process that allowed for $2 billion in rioting.

00:03:46.000 In fact, a process that was so important that even if COVID was spreading around, you were allowed to take off your mask and shout in the streets for George Floyd and you would somehow be free of COVID for doing all of these things.

00:03:56.000 We all remember this.

00:03:57.000 It was really a quite terrible time in American history and it was being excused by...

00:04:01.000 The entire left, all of the legacy media.

00:04:03.000 And in fact, if you didn't post the black square in favor of Black Lives Matter, you were basically non-personed in terms of sort of social media and the way that you were approached in all of these spaces.

00:04:14.000 Now, the reality of this particular death is now known.

00:04:18.000 And we know pretty much everything there is to know about it.

00:04:21.000 And there are a bunch of reasons why Derek Chauvin should be part.

00:04:23.000 By the way...

00:04:24.000 While in federal custody, he was stabbed recently 21 times by a fellow inmate, so it's quite dangerous for him.

00:04:30.000 The reason why we now know all of this is because we know from jurors that they were pressured, that they felt the pressure, that they were scared to rule in favor of Derek Chauvin.

00:04:40.000 We now know, and we can see it at the time, the amount of public pressure that was brought in that particular case.

00:04:46.000 The mayor of Minneapolis was signing settlements with the family of George Floyd on behalf of the city in the middle of the trial.

00:04:51.000 The governor of Minnesota...

00:04:53.000 At the time was, of course, Tim Walz.

00:04:55.000 And Tim Walz was basically out there proclaiming the guilt of Derek Chauvin.

00:05:00.000 Joe Biden was running for president at the time in 2020. And he and the rest of the Democratic regime were talking about how Derek Chauvin was, how this was a key flashpoint in American history and how this was demonstrating sort of the apex moment of all of American racism contained in this particular incident.

00:05:16.000 So first, the first clue that this was not true.

00:05:20.000 Came, I think, from that, from the fact that it was deemed an incident of American racism and never did anyone ever make a claim.

00:05:25.000 There were not even federal hate crime charges.

00:05:27.000 There was no claim that Derek Chauvin quote-unquote killed George Floyd because he was racist.

00:05:31.000 Then you start to look more into the details of the actual death of George Floyd.

00:05:35.000 Everything from the autopsy report, the original medical examiner autopsy report suggested that he had died, not of failure to breathe because of pressure put on him.

00:05:46.000 But effectively have excited delirium, fentanyl overdose.

00:05:49.000 The idea in the actual autopsy report suggested that he had enough fentanyl in him that if he had just found this body on a sidewalk, the medical examiner, then he would have immediately determined that he had died of a fentanyl overdose.

00:05:58.000 We know from the actual tape.

00:06:00.000 So there are sections of the tape that people thought they saw.

00:06:03.000 The eight minutes or four minutes of the eight minute tape.

00:06:06.000 And then there was a lot of tape before that.

00:06:08.000 So if you actually look at the incident in its entirety, what you found out is that George Floyd was in a car outside of a place of business.

00:06:16.000 Where he had passed a counterfeit bill.

00:06:18.000 And the police came and arrived.

00:06:19.000 There's Derek Chauvin and the rest of the members of the officers who were there.

00:06:23.000 And Derek Chauvin arrested George Floyd.

00:06:26.000 And it appears that George Floyd either ingested drugs that were on him or he was already high.

00:06:32.000 The reason that he might have ingested drugs is because literally a few years before, we also have a videotape of George Floyd doing exactly that.

00:06:38.000 He was arrested.

00:06:39.000 And the officer had to force him to spit out the drugs.

00:06:43.000 They arrest him.

00:06:44.000 They take him out of his vehicle.

00:06:45.000 They put him into the vehicle of the police officers.

00:06:48.000 And a crowd is already gathering because this very often happens when there's a controversial police procedure that's happening.

00:06:53.000 And George Floyd is put into the back of the police vehicle.

00:06:56.000 He doesn't want to get in.

00:06:57.000 He's complaining.

00:06:58.000 He's saying that he's scared of being in the car, that he's claustrophobic and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

00:07:03.000 He gets in.

00:07:04.000 And immediately upon entering the car, he starts shouting that he can't breathe.

00:07:09.000 Before he's on the ground, right?

00:07:10.000 I can't breathe became sort of the...

00:07:12.000 Matter of the moment, the phrase of the moment, people chanting, I can't breathe, in homage to George Floyd.

00:07:17.000 He was saying he could not breathe from when he was in the car, suggesting either that it was untrue, that he could actually breathe, because normally if you can talk, you can breathe, or that he was already having difficulty breathing based on the fact that he had a very enlarged heart, that he had a lot of drugs in his system, and that he was actually having a medical issue before he was actually taken out of the car, by the way, at his request.

00:07:38.000 At his request.

00:07:39.000 He said, I don't want to be in the car.

00:07:40.000 And so they said, okay, so they took him out of the car and they put him in prone position on the ground.

00:07:43.000 Now, the Minneapolis police training model includes the sort of position that Derek Chauvin was using.

00:07:49.000 This was introduced at trial.

00:07:51.000 Derek Chauvin had been taught this by the Minneapolis Police Department.

00:07:54.000 This is a normal procedure.

00:07:56.000 In fact, much of the tape of him on George Floyd's quote-unquote neck from a different angle is him on George Floyd's shoulder.

00:08:03.000 This was admitted by witnesses for the prosecution.

00:08:07.000 At some of that time, he was on George Floyd's shoulder.

00:08:10.000 Now, at some point during that eight minutes, George Floyd went nonresponsive.

00:08:14.000 It seems to be unclear to Chauvin when he was nonresponsive.

00:08:17.000 But there is no medical evidence that, for example, there was damage to his trachea, which would cut off the air.

00:08:23.000 There was no bruising on his neck.

00:08:26.000 So the autopsy and medical reports suggested, again, that at best, there is certainly reasonable doubt that he died because of the suppression technique, specifically, that Derek Chauvin...

00:08:38.000 And so the entire trial was based on the supposition that simply by being put into the prone position and then Derek Chauvin being on his shoulder and then partially, not with his full weight, partially on his neck to suppress him, that this led to George Floyd's death in the form of murder, not even in the form of manslaughter, not even accidental death.

00:08:57.000 Second-degree murder is what he was convicted of in state court.

00:09:01.000 The evidence does not match up with this.

00:09:03.000 And we covered this extensively at the time.

00:09:05.000 And again, I was like everybody else when I first saw that tape.

00:09:07.000 I think everybody, when they first saw the tape, they said, this is ugly, right?

00:09:09.000 It looks ugly because it turns out a lot of police procedure actually looks quite ugly.

00:09:13.000 And so you can find tweets from me at the time saying this looks like bad policing by Derek Chauvin.

00:09:17.000 So first of all, bad policing is not the same as second-degree murder.

00:09:20.000 That's the first thing.

00:09:20.000 But second of all, as the evidence emerged, the medical evidence emerged, the medical examiner's original report, new evidence that was emerging about his condition, new tape that was emerging.

00:09:32.000 The backstory, all of it, as that emerged, it became clear that Derek Chauvin certainly was not guilty of second-degree murder, which is what he was charged with.

00:09:40.000 There are all sorts of questions about the charges.

00:09:42.000 As you recall, he was simultaneously charged with first and second-degree murder.

00:09:45.000 Those are charges that are mutually exclusive, and yet they were both brought in an attempt to allow the jury to find a second-degree murder if they weren't going to find a first-degree murder.

00:09:52.000 So there were all sorts of improprieties in the trial.

00:09:55.000 Even if you just want to take this from a legal level, the idea that Derek Chauvin had, quote-unquote, a fair trial is wrong.

00:10:00.000 The idea that the jury was impartial is wrong.

00:10:03.000 The idea that there was evidence sufficient to suggest beyond a reasonable doubt that George Floyd was murdered in the second degree is wrong.

00:10:10.000 We know for a fact that the entire narrative which was drawn for the entire country that America is systemically racist was rooted in an incident in which race was not even alleged.

00:10:19.000 I want to repeat that, everyone, to internalize that.

00:10:22.000 The 1619 Project was largely accelerated out of this.

00:10:27.000 Robin DiAngelo's fame was born out of this.

00:10:29.000 We had police departments defunding the police.

00:10:32.000 In fact, you can look at a material increase in crime in both Minneapolis and across the country because of this one incident.

00:10:40.000 Not just the riots.

00:10:41.000 We saw murder rates.

00:10:43.000 We saw arson.

00:10:44.000 We saw carjackings.

00:10:46.000 We saw widespread gang violence because of one incident.

00:10:49.000 And so...

00:10:50.000 Ben, I want to compliment you for your willingness to speak out on this because it wasn't just one injustice.

00:10:56.000 This was the gateway drug towards mass anarchy in the streets and an unnecessary thousands of people dying on top of the baseline crime rate.

00:11:09.000 Gentlemen, let's get real for a second.

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00:12:26.000 So Ben, some people in the audience are probably saying, wait a second, I saw the video for myself.

00:12:32.000 His knee was on the neck for nine minutes.

00:12:34.000 It's tattooed in my memory.

00:12:37.000 You guys, Charlie and Ben, are getting too cutesy here with trying to introduce data that isn't relevant.

00:12:45.000 Don't lie to me.

00:12:46.000 This is what happened.

00:12:47.000 It was obviously police brutality.

00:12:50.000 It wasn't some sort of legal conspiracy.

00:12:52.000 Ben, what would your response be to that?

00:12:55.000 And also, when did you start to form the opinion that this was a railroaded via the justice system against Derek Chauvin?

00:13:03.000 So when I started to change my opinion, and again, you can find tweets from me in May when this first broke, talking about police brutality, was watching the actual trial.

00:13:11.000 So when I watched the actual trial, when I read the medical examiner's report, when I was watching the defense witnesses and the prosecution witnesses, by the way, when I was watching all that go down, it occurred to me, they do not have the evidence to convict this man beyond a reasonable doubt.

00:13:23.000 I mean, that's just not the case.

00:13:25.000 And then when after the trial, further evidence came out about the predilections of the jurors.

00:13:30.000 So for example...

00:13:31.000 One of the jurors was photographed at a protest commemorating Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech during the summer of 2020. This is Coleman Hughes reporting for the Free Press.

00:13:39.000 At that protest, two of George Floyd's family members addressed the crowd, and this juror was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of King and the words, get your knee off our necks in BLM. How is that a fair trial?

00:13:48.000 In what world is that even remotely a fair trial?

00:13:52.000 I think that the image of Chauvin on top of Floyd became such an iconic image that...

00:14:00.000 It's very difficult for people to imagine that anything else happened, but there was tape both before and after the incident.

00:14:05.000 There's medical examiners' reports.

00:14:07.000 There's medical information about George Floyd and his prior status, and all of that makes an enormous difference.

00:14:13.000 Now, the imagistic power of Chauvin in the suppression position with Floyd obviously is going to have an outsized power in the public memory, but that's exactly why I think it's really important for people to speak out and I think for the pardon to occur, because in order for there to be a rethinking of things like this...

00:14:29.000 It is important to get people to even re-examine the issue.

00:14:31.000 There's so many things people think that they saw that they never actually saw over the course of the last 10 years.

00:14:37.000 I mean, so many different things.

00:14:39.000 Here, I recall the supposed Charlottesville speech by President Trump in which he supposedly said that neo-Nazis were very fine people.

00:14:46.000 And then if you go back and actually watch the speech, he never said anything remotely like that.

00:14:49.000 But that was emblazoned in people's memories because it was hit so hard and so often that many people still think.

00:14:55.000 That that is, in fact, true, and that is, in fact, the case.

00:14:58.000 There are still people on the left, many people, who still believe that hands up, don't shoot, in the case of Michael Brown and Ferguson was true, that he held up his hands and then was shot by a police officer.

00:15:06.000 And so the reality is that the way the memory works is if people show you an image over and over and over and over, that's the only thing in your memory about the particular case.

00:15:14.000 I'm not denying that the image is visually ugly.

00:15:17.000 I'm not denying that the tape doesn't, quote-unquote, look good.

00:15:20.000 What I am saying is that if you've ever done a police ride-along or if you know police officers, guess what?

00:15:24.000 Policing is a rough and difficult job that people who are rough and difficult, it's a tough thing to do.

00:15:30.000 Policing is very, very difficult.

00:15:32.000 You're in the worst situations with people at the worst moments of their lives.

00:15:36.000 And what that means is none of it looks good on tape.

00:15:38.000 I mean, honestly, do a ride-along with a cop for one night and you will see a bunch of things that would not look good on tape.

00:15:43.000 Why?

00:15:43.000 Because you're dealing with people who may be violent with police officers, who may be a threat, who may be high on drugs, who may not know what they're doing.

00:15:50.000 And so simply taking an image out of context and then saying, because this image is ugly and because it exists, I'm going to ignore all other evidence.

00:15:56.000 That is not the way certainly our justice system is supposed to work.

00:15:59.000 And that's the real key.

00:16:00.000 You don't have to believe that Derek Chauvin is quote-unquote innocent in order to understand that he is not guilty.

00:16:05.000 Those are not the same thing.

00:16:06.000 The standard of justice in the United States is that you have to be proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

00:16:11.000 And Derek Chauvin in the public mind was not just convicted of second-degree murder.

00:16:14.000 He was convicted in the public mind of first-degree murder, and he was also convicted of brutal American racism.

00:16:19.000 Again, I come back to this point.

00:16:21.000 These things were not alleged.

00:16:22.000 And just as I think that it is very important that President Trump, for example, pardon pro-lifers, because the image in the public mind that has been created by the legacy media for decades on end is that pro-lifers are violently protesting outside abortion clinics, and therefore they have to be arrested.

00:16:35.000 That's not true, and so I think the pardon is important.

00:16:37.000 Or the reason I think that it was important for President Trump, even if I disagree with him on some of the pardons on January 6th, to pardon non-violent...

00:16:45.000 And again, you don't have to agree with me on every aspect of this case to understand that Derek Chauvin did not receive a free trial and that the major railroading that went on here was not just a railroading of Derek Chauvin.

00:16:58.000 It was a railroading of our police broad writ, as you mentioned, and it was also a railroading of America in general because this turned into the launching point for a years-long effort to characterize America as deeply and irredeemably racist.

00:17:09.000 There's another element to this as well, which you touched on briefly.

00:17:13.000 There's so much, not just suspicion, there's something wrong with the original shift from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner report.

00:17:22.000 The original county report said something completely different than the later report.

00:17:27.000 And our friend from Alpha News, Liz Collin, has been on this since the very beginning, and she deserves a lot of credit, Liz Collin.

00:17:34.000 But there is evidence to suggest that the...

00:17:37.000 Hennepin County Medical Examiner was pressured in actually the report that was being issued.

00:17:44.000 Floyd had a lethal dose of fentanyl in his system, as shown by his autopsy, and there's evidence that he quickly ingested drugs, as you mentioned, to hide them from the cops.

00:17:55.000 He also had COVID and heart disease.

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00:19:02.000 Ben, just mention briefly here, The autopsy was totally coerced, strong-armed.

00:19:07.000 Usually we look at autopsy and say, well, there's no way politics could get in the way of a medical examination report.

00:19:13.000 But it shows here that there was such a thrust, there was a willingness to reach a conclusion that America's racist during this political season.

00:19:22.000 Remember, Trump was president during this.

00:19:25.000 There was political pressure.

00:19:26.000 Speak about the political pressure in the medical examination process.

00:19:31.000 Well, I mean, we know for a fact that there are people who are involved in this case, medical examiners and others, who are actually the subject of death threats.

00:19:37.000 If you became a public figure in the Derek Chauvin case, the chances that you were going to be subjected to public pressure were incredibly high.

00:19:44.000 There was only one major autopsy that was a complete documented autopsy of George Floyd, and it was performed, as you say, by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner.

00:19:51.000 A guy named Dr. Andrew Baker was performed about 12 hours after he died.

00:19:55.000 And that autopsy found zero evidence of asphyxia.

00:19:58.000 It found no life-threatening injuries.

00:20:00.000 It found instead that Floyd died of cardiopulmonary arrest, meaning his heart and his lungs stopped working during, quote, law enforcement subdual restraint and neck compression.

00:20:08.000 Also, he had a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl in his blood, 11 milligrams per milliliter, along with a small amount of meth.

00:20:16.000 As well as morphine, he also had arteriosclerotic heart disease, described as multifocal, severe hypertensive heart disease, and cardiomegaly, which is an enlarged heart.

00:20:25.000 The second autopsy that was created was paid for by Floyd's family.

00:20:30.000 It was incomplete.

00:20:31.000 They didn't have access to Floyd's toxicology report.

00:20:34.000 They didn't have access to his tissue samples.

00:20:35.000 They didn't have access to his organs, at least some of his organs.

00:20:39.000 And one of the two medical examiners who's brought in, Dr. Michael Bodden, who's brought in to suggest that it was the cops who actually killed him.

00:20:45.000 He got an enormous number of things wrong in the past.

00:20:48.000 He was a person who was hired to perform an unofficial autopsy on Michael Brown, who we mentioned earlier.

00:20:53.000 Michael Brown, of course, was the black man who was killed in a confrontation with a police officer named Officer Brown over in Ferguson, Missouri.

00:21:02.000 And the autopsy in that particular case, Biden declared that there was no evidence of a struggle between Brown and Wilson, which was not true, because the cop had claimed, correctly, that Michael Brown reached into the car and fired a gun.

00:21:15.000 In the car, which is what prompted the actual shooting of Michael Brown.

00:21:18.000 And Biden got it wrong in that autopsy.

00:21:20.000 He was the person who they called in.

00:21:22.000 So you have the original autopsy, which says no asphyxia, no actual physical evidence of serious damage.

00:21:28.000 And he died of cardiopulmonary arrest, which, again, if you're just doing a basic analysis of, are you going to get excited when you, this is really one of the questions, are you going to get excited when you get arrested and you have drugs on you and then you swallow some of the drugs?

00:21:41.000 My guess is you probably will.

00:21:42.000 This causes very often what they call excited delirium.

00:21:45.000 If it spikes your blood pressure, if it spikes your heart rate, if you have massive pre-existing conditions, if you're a big dude with a lot of drugs in your system, and you're claiming you can't breathe before you even get on the ground, then how can you claim that it was the knee that caused the I can't breathe, as opposed to all of the other circumstances that were causing all of this?

00:22:04.000 And again, just to put this in the most blunt terms, Chauvin did not crush Floyd's neck.

00:22:10.000 He did not crush Floyd's neck.

00:22:12.000 That must be repeated.

00:22:13.000 So, Ben, explain to our audience then how on earth federal charges got involved here and therefore the President Trump wrinkle and angle.

00:22:24.000 Because typically if there's a police situation where if the police acts improperly, usually the police officer will be handled by local authorities.

00:22:33.000 There might be a DOJ investigation, albeit rare.

00:22:37.000 But there were federal charges as well against Derek Chauvin.

00:22:40.000 What were they, and why do you believe that Derek Chauvin deserves a pardon from the President of the United States?

00:22:47.000 So the charges were brought under denial of civil rights.

00:22:51.000 So these charges were brought, and Chauvin basically pled them out because the supposition was that these sentences were largely set to run concurrently.

00:22:59.000 If it went to trial, he was one of the most highly publicized.

00:23:04.000 He ended up on the lower end of the expected sentence, which was between 20 and 25 years, which is why he took the plea agreement in the first place.

00:23:27.000 And again, the kind of attempt to say that this is a separate charge, this is one of the problems very often in criminal law, is that you can stack a federal charge on top of a state charge.

00:23:37.000 The idea that this was a unique violation of civil rights as opposed to simply, even if you want to make the case it was a second degree murder, that this had to do with violation of civil rights.

00:23:45.000 This is the sort of accusation that it was, in fact, racially driven, even though no evidence was presented to that real effect.

00:23:52.000 And so a pardon is.

00:23:55.000 Would that get him out of jail?

00:23:57.000 Because there's also state charges as well.

00:23:59.000 So explain to our audience how that works.

00:24:01.000 So he would be transferred back to a state prison.

00:24:04.000 There have been arguments made that I don't find particularly salutary or convincing, that if you were transferred from a federal prison to a state prison, this would be worse for him.

00:24:13.000 That's certainly not what we've heard from his lawyers.

00:24:14.000 The reason that I say that is because he was already stabbed 21 times last year in a federal prison, actually.

00:24:20.000 The idea here is, again, twofold.

00:24:23.000 If he is transferred, if the federal charges go away, if he's pardoned on the federal charges or a sentence commuted on the federal charges, he'll be transferred back to state prison.

00:24:30.000 You can, in some instances, get time chalked up against you in a way, like you serve less time in state prison, probably get five years off his sentence for serving in state prison in a way that you don't with the federal charges.

00:24:42.000 So just on a practical level, he will do less time in prison.

00:24:45.000 If the federal charge goes away, then he otherwise would.

00:24:47.000 He's not going to be pardoned on the state charges, unfortunately, because, again, the government of Minnesota is what the government of Minnesota is.

00:24:53.000 Only the governor of Minnesota, the famed oddity Tim Walz, has the power to pardon him on the state charges, which, of course, Tim Walz will never in a million years do.

00:25:01.000 But he would get time off his sentence in state prison in a way that he would not in federal prison.

00:25:05.000 And, again, it would, I think, create an impetus for a reexamination of his case, I would hope, at the state level at some point in the future.

00:25:14.000 A lesson for the audience and for us in times of hysteria to not repeat the same mistakes because in some ways I wish I would have even spoken out even more during the trial, but this was like top-level verboten.

00:25:28.000 The Overton window has moved dramatically where now this is an acceptable, a little bit boundary pushing, but somewhat acceptable conversation to have.

00:25:37.000 What is the takeaway for so many people here?

00:25:41.000 To make sure the next time the media is force-feeding something like this.

00:25:45.000 And have we adjusted, Ben?

00:25:46.000 Have we adjusted from some of the hysterias they've been trying to push towards us in the last couple of months or years?

00:25:53.000 I mean, I do think that we've adjusted to some of the hysterias.

00:25:55.000 I think that we are no longer willing to accept at face value many of the narratives that are put out by the legacy media.

00:26:01.000 On the other hand, I think that there is a possibility of jumping to the wrong conclusion just based on sort of reactivity.

00:26:06.000 The legacy media will put out a piece of news and the right will immediately just say it's false immediately.

00:26:11.000 A lot of the time that's true.

00:26:12.000 But I think that the main lesson we should take away from Floyd is that the social media era rewards immediate reaction and response.

00:26:19.000 That is what the social media era, if you're the first person to comment on something in any way, you're likely to get a lot of clicks.

00:26:24.000 And you're also likely to get it wrong.

00:26:26.000 And so I think that the lesson from the George Floyd situation should be, as it usually is, why don't we wait for the evidence to come in?

00:26:34.000 Before we jump to a conclusion about something that is highly publicized, why don't we wait for a little more evidence to come in?

00:26:40.000 And determine then whether or not the thing is true.

00:26:43.000 Because it turns out that at first blush, things may look one way, and it turns out that they are not that way at all.

00:26:49.000 We've seen this over and over and over from the legacy media, ranging from elements of war to elements of domestic policy, where if you just waited another three days, then you would know a lot more than you originally knew.

00:27:00.000 I will say that I think the American people have started to do that more, particularly on racially charged cases.

00:27:04.000 And we've seen just too many race hoaxes like Jussie Smollett for people to now take at face value any narrative that's put out.

00:27:10.000 People are like, you know, I'm going to wait like 48 hours, 48 hours, and I'll have a lot more information.

00:27:15.000 If that had been done in this particular case, if people had waited for the medical autopsy to come out, if people had actually waited before immediately running to the streets to protest by the millions about American police brutality and racism, the world would have been a much different and better place.

00:27:29.000 So let's play cut 11.

00:27:31.000 This was then former Vice President Biden before all that happened in 2020.

00:27:35.000 Very important here.

00:27:37.000 He did not caution against violence.

00:27:40.000 Play cut 11. Well, in addressing the unrest, former Vice President Joe Biden initially did not caution against violence but challenged white people to understand the everyday injustices black people suffer.

00:27:53.000 That is just one example of hundreds we could play.

00:27:56.000 Ben, what happened next then?

00:27:57.000 Remind the audience of the material increase in crime in just...

00:28:04.000 Arson, anarchy in the streets.

00:28:06.000 This was, unfortunately, one of the deadlier, more crime-ridden summers since the 1990s because of the misrepresentation of this incident, Ben.

00:28:18.000 So in order to truly understand what happened, you have to understand that the American crime rate had dropped steadily between about 2000, between 1994, which is when the crime bill was signed, the much maligned crime bill, and between 2013, the crime rate in virtually all of America's major cities went down.

00:28:32.000 Then 2014, you get what's called the Ferguson effect, a term coined by Heather McDonald, which suggested that after the Michael Brown case, which again was a completely false case, the idea that Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer, you saw a move toward de-policing in cities where cops said, you know, a term coined by Heather McDonald, which suggested that after the Michael Brown case, which again was a completely false case, the idea that Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer, you saw a move toward de-policing in cities where cops said, you know, I'm not going to go into a dangerous situation in which I have to face down somebody of a different race because I might end up on tape.

00:28:52.000 And if I do my job, I'm spending the rest of my life in prison.

00:28:54.000 And that led to an increase of literally hundreds of murders over the course of the next few years.

00:28:58.000 Then the crime rate seemed to even out over the course of the first Trump administration in many of these areas, sort of leveled out.

00:29:04.000 And then in 2020, it absolutely skyrocketed because all over the country, there were city councils that were withdrawing funding.

00:29:10.000 Police officers understood.

00:29:11.000 They knew the math.

00:29:12.000 Police officers are human beings, as it turns out, and they know the math.

00:29:15.000 If you go out and you do your job and if you have to shoot a person who is not your race, if you're a white cop and you shoot a black person and it turns out that it's under any disputed circumstances or even in many cases in undisputed circumstances, you will become a target of such ire that you may find yourself in the dock.

00:29:32.000 You're just not going to do it.

00:29:33.000 If there's a situation where bad things could happen to you...

00:29:37.000 Or you could just sit in your cop car.

00:29:38.000 You're gonna sit in your cop car and not do it.

00:29:40.000 And so what you see is a de-policing movement that comes not just from the top, but also from the bottom.

00:29:44.000 And the spike in the crime rate in America's major cities was extraordinary in 2020. That's precisely what you saw over

00:30:14.000 subsequent years.

00:30:15.000 And that doesn't even include things like Chaz Chop in Seattle, where an entire city of Seattle was basically taken over by Antifa rioters, or the takeover of Portland completely by Antifa and the wrecking of a great American city, the destruction of San Francisco.

00:30:29.000 All of these things happened on the back of the BLM moment when it turns out that the police became writ large, the great villains in the American national story, and it turns out that without the cops, things get real bad real fast. 0.59

00:30:39.000 Ben, stay right there.

00:30:40.000 I do want to talk about San Francisco, California, your former home, and Gavin Newsom made some news this last week.

00:30:49.000 Hey, Charlie Kirk here.

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00:31:47.000 That is ruffgreens.com.

00:31:51.000 Let's play Cut 187. Gavin Newsom forgetting that he supported legalized racial discrimination.

00:31:57.000 Play Cut 187. By the way, you're talking to someone who's never supported a defund police movement.

00:32:01.000 It was explicit.

00:32:02.000 Hold on, one sec.

00:32:04.000 You did support Prop 16 in 2020, which would have legalized racial... 0.68

00:32:09.000 Prejudice, right?

00:32:10.000 Prop 16 literally would...

00:32:11.000 I have to go back to my Prop 13. No, no, no.

00:32:14.000 Prop 16...

00:32:15.000 I'm talking 960 SAT, so a little humility.

00:32:17.000 You're the governor of the largest state in the country.

00:32:19.000 No, no, no.

00:32:19.000 I saw your debate against DeSantis.

00:32:21.000 You're good at this stuff.

00:32:22.000 You know what I'm talking about.

00:32:22.000 Prop 16 would have had legalized racial prejudice, which got defeated by 16 points despite all the institutions.

00:32:29.000 So you're asking me, what did wokeism look like when California, when all the institutions, yourself included, with all due respect, embraced this insane ballot measure?

00:32:38.000 Guess what?

00:32:39.000 Even the people of California didn't want racial discrimination.

00:32:43.000 I remember California since 1996 has had Prop 209s.

00:32:45.000 There was city council meetings where they said the white people aren't allowed here, right?

00:32:49.000 That's not good.

00:32:50.000 No, it's not good.

00:32:51.000 And so what ends up happening is a broader question of sensible, not racist suburban moms that are like, wait a second. 1.00

00:33:00.000 I have an eight-year-old white son.

00:33:02.000 Are you trying to say he's a racist?

00:33:04.000 Yeah.

00:33:04.000 And it creates a backlash that then bubbles up, right?

00:33:08.000 I appreciate the perspective.

00:33:10.000 Ben, you lived in California for some time.

00:33:12.000 You moved your entire company to a freer state.

00:33:15.000 That is Slippery Gavin Newsom.

00:33:17.000 What do you make of that?

00:33:19.000 You could talk more broadly.

00:33:20.000 It doesn't have to just be my conversation with him.

00:33:22.000 His podcast, his attempt to reinvent himself, to move to the middle end.

00:33:26.000 What is the truth of how California is?

00:33:30.000 Let's just say, operate in the last decade.

00:33:32.000 So first of all, Charlie, I thought you were spectacular with Gavin Newsom, and he could not stand up to the scrutiny that you put him under.

00:33:38.000 So just congratulations on that.

00:33:40.000 It was a great service to the country, frankly.

00:33:42.000 I mean, it's amazing to me when I hear Gavin Newsom talk about the wonders that he has wrought for the state of California.

00:33:46.000 My family literally fled California because of people like Gavin Newsom and his awful rule in California.

00:33:52.000 Crime rates.

00:33:57.000 It's very difficult to imagine a thing that Gavin Newsom did not help make worse in the state of California.

00:34:03.000 I mean, there was a massive decarceration movement that happened under both Gavin Newsom and his predecessor, Jerry Brown, an attempt to basically empty out prisons in California because of, quote unquote, over incarceration and because of prison crowding.

00:34:15.000 And so one of the things that major cities and counties in California did was they actually stopped prosecuting misdemeanors entirely because they were so afraid of actually jailing people that they said, OK, if you shoplift under a certain amount, we just won't call it a misdemeanor anymore.

00:34:27.000 And so San Francisco became a place where you could basically just walk into a CVS, fill up a couple of bags and walk out and know that even if you were arrested, that you were then going to be released back into public charge pretty much the next day.

00:34:38.000 And so police officers stopped actually doing any of this stuff.

00:34:41.000 Again, California is a great example of what happens when a state is so governed by wokeism and dumb ideology that the state gets materially worse.

00:34:49.000 And it's fun to watch Gavin Newsom now try to sort of fix his public profile.

00:34:55.000 He understands that in 2020, 2024, if he wanted to move in the Democratic Party, he had to move way to the left.

00:35:01.000 And now he's recognizing that after President Trump's victory that the Democratic Party, if it wishes to win in the future, is going to have to try to make some move toward the center.

00:35:09.000 The problem is that he has anchored his record so hard to the left.

00:35:12.000 It's very difficult to see how he can stretch beyond that back to a center that he abandoned long ago.

00:35:17.000 Ben, I think you should go on the Gavin Newsom podcast.

00:35:20.000 I think that you could prosecute the case in California.

00:35:22.000 Far better than I did.

00:35:24.000 I try to make it macro.

00:35:25.000 I have not lived in, let me put it this way, I have not had the pleasure of walking by Sepulveda Boulevard and having to walk over homeless people in order to get to The office building.

00:35:37.000 I've not had the first-hand experience, which he always, Gavin will always go to the argument from authority.

00:35:42.000 Oh, you don't understand, California.

00:35:43.000 We have the biggest this, the biggest that.

00:35:45.000 But they are spending down the inheritance of a prior generation.

00:35:50.000 And California should never lose population.

00:35:52.000 It's too beautiful.

00:35:53.000 It's too amazing.

00:35:54.000 It has all these assets, period.

00:35:56.000 Ben, your thoughts on that?

00:35:57.000 I mean, that's 100% true.

00:35:58.000 I talked about this on my show.

00:35:59.000 Just a few months ago, I went to visit L.A. because we still have relatives out there.

00:36:03.000 And we went to dinner with a couple who are still living there and did not leave the way that we did, despite my encouragement.

00:36:08.000 And right after dinner, we watched them get carjacked, like, pretty much right in front of us.

00:36:12.000 We walked one way with our security.

00:36:14.000 They walked the other way.

00:36:15.000 And another car pulled up right in front of them.

00:36:17.000 A bunch of guys jumped out of the car, grabbed them, stole their jewelry, took his keys and his wallet, and stole all of his stuff.

00:36:23.000 I mean, like, right in front of them.

00:36:25.000 And it took the cops 15 minutes to get there.

00:36:26.000 And this had been in the same year that he had also been assaulted by a homeless person and his wife threatened with a knife downtown.

00:36:32.000 I mean, like, this is what California has become.

00:36:35.000 So when I hear Gavin Newsom talk up the magic of California, if it were so magical, people wouldn't be leaving.

00:36:39.000 Again, people vote with their feet.

00:36:41.000 And what you've seen is that all the red areas of the country are gaining population and all the blue areas of the country are radically losing population.

00:36:47.000 By the way, this is such a threat to the future of democratic rule in this country.

00:36:50.000 I pointed this out before, and it's really important.

00:36:53.000 The 2020 census was done wrong.

00:36:54.000 The census department acknowledged it was done wrong.

00:36:56.000 If the 2020 census had been done correctly, President Trump would have been able to win reelection without winning any election.

00:37:02.000 Any of the blue wall states.

00:37:03.000 He won the election based on pure population in the South.

00:37:06.000 Well, so Ben, I got a good project for you.

00:37:10.000 If you read, I believe the census is the 14th Amendment. 0.82

00:37:13.000 It says the census must be done within 10 years, not in 10 years.

00:37:19.000 I think President Trump can call a new census.

00:37:21.000 I think President Trump should call a new census.

00:37:24.000 Why not?

00:37:25.000 Get Howard Blutnik out there and call a new census.

00:37:27.000 Absolutely.

00:37:28.000 He absolutely should, because the reality is, and again, this was publicly acknowledged by Joe Biden's Commerce Department.

00:37:33.000 They publicly acknowledged that the Commerce Department had done it wrong, and that again, there were seats in Congress, by the way, not just the Electoral College, in Congress, that were removed from Florida, from Texas, from Arizona, from a wide spate of states that President Trump won, and then there were states that lost population that were over-counted in the census, like New York, New Jersey, and California.

00:37:53.000 And as I say, Minnesota, all of these states lost population.

00:37:57.000 But they didn't lose congressional seats or electoral votes the way that they should have in line with the Senate.

00:38:01.000 So, listen, if that passes constitutional muster, and we should check that with the current Solicitor General and AJ, that is something absolutely the Trump administration should do because you want to talk about equal representation.

00:38:12.000 That is not equal representation.

00:38:14.000 Ben, congratulations on all the success, and thank you for speaking out on issues that other people were ignoring.

00:38:20.000 Hope to see you soon.

00:38:20.000 Thanks so much.

00:38:21.000 Thanks, Charlie.

00:38:22.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:38:24.000 Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - March 10, 2025

The Case To Pardon Derek Chauvin ft. Ben Shapiro

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