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00:03:27.000So, we were talking a lot about the Pope, what he said about the conflict in Iran.
00:03:32.000He was saying God doesn't listen to the prayers of those who wage war.
00:03:37.000And then the president said some stuff critical of the Pope, he said he was soft on crime.
00:03:41.000And we didn't get to another topic that I think is equally important, which is we have a set of cardinals.
00:03:48.000Now, the cardinals are the senior clergy of the Catholic Church, they elect the Pope.
00:03:53.000There are several, about almost 200 of them around the world, there are 17 of them in the United States.
00:03:59.000But three of them went and did an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday where they were saying stuff just very overtly critical.
00:04:08.000They weren't just complaining about the war, they were even complaining about immigration enforcement in this country.
00:04:14.000And I'll be frank, that annoys me a good bit because it's one thing to say we should promote peace.
00:04:20.000Christianity has always promoted peace.
00:04:21.000It's one thing to weigh in on something so clear cut as, for example, abortion or assisted suicide, where the church has always held the same view on that for 2,000 years.
00:04:33.000But there are, unfortunately, Christian leaders who have come along and they've adopted this view that did not exist 100 years ago, certainly did not exist 2,000 years ago, that it's actually immoral for nations to have borders.
00:04:46.000So we want to play some clips from that.
00:04:48.000So this is one of those cardinals, Cardinal Joseph Tobin, and he's complaining about ice doing their job.
00:05:12.000I didn't say that they were people without law.
00:05:15.000But when people act in this way, when they have to hide their identities to terrify people, when they can actually violate other guarantees of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, well, I think somebody's got to call that out.
00:05:37.000First of all, the masks, Mr. Cardinal, are because they're getting doxxed and their lives are getting threatened.
00:05:44.000Second of all, what about your criticisms for the protesters, the agitators, those who run kamikaze missions with their cars trying to run over ICE agents?
00:05:56.000And by the way, Blake, again, you are my cover today.
00:06:01.000But it strikes me because some of the same allegations, not to deviate too far from what you're talking about here, Are leveled at the Pope himself because, you know, here he is in Algeria, which is a predominantly Muslim country, and he hasn't visited Nigeria, where the, you know, 7,000 Christians have been massacred in recent years.
00:06:41.000There is a limit to everything he can, certainly where he can travel, everything he can say.
00:06:46.000But that emphasizes the point you're making, which is you create a narrative by what you choose to emphasize the most, what you choose to talk about.
00:07:03.000There have been martyrs in Algeria within the last 30 years.
00:07:06.000But at the same time, yeah, if he's going to broadcast loudly that immigration enforcement is a problem, but not the fact that, for example, in Algeria, churches get shut down by the government pretty often.
00:07:19.000They find excuses to hinder Christian worship.
00:07:23.000In Algeria, Christian proselytization is illegal.
00:07:26.000They have convicted people of this within the last decade.
00:07:30.000And When you're not talking as much about that, not as loudly about that, but you're very loudly, for example, having church leaders say members of a country's government enforcing that country's longstanding immigration laws are a problem.
00:07:44.000We have another clip from that that I want to make sure we play.
00:08:05.000So what's wrong then with the current policy?
00:08:08.000This is a roundup of people throughout the country, people who have been living good, strong lives, been here a long time, raised their children here, many of their children born here, and are citizens.
00:10:11.000That's what we're seeing with these tractor protests all along the countryside this weekend.
00:10:17.000So, what has happened is that there's taxes on top of taxes, being taxed 60% on the liter of petrol over here.
00:10:27.000And, you know, we're seeing that they're protesting because that is unfair and they're already being taxed, first off, for.
00:10:39.000All asylum seekers, you know, refugees, this and that from last year, so now on top of it, with the inflation from the Iran conflict, uh, these people are fed up.
00:10:51.000These are blue collar people, this is uh, going across the political divide.
00:10:57.000And it's been here behind me to get them out because.
00:11:08.000They're voting today on emotions of no confidence.
00:11:12.000And if this passes this evening at 7 p.m. here, that would effectively mean that the T-shirt, the Prime Minister of Ireland, would have to resign along with his cabinet.
00:11:23.000And there have to be snap reelections to get the Irish patriots here heard and effectively the fuel prices lowered to an affordable, efficient rate.
00:11:35.000So, you know, these people have to make a living.
00:11:38.000So, Kevin, if I'm understanding this right, so you've got a nation that has been inundated with foreigners, a lot of signs out there saying Ireland's full, Ireland for the Irish.
00:11:53.000Then you've got the Iran war that kicks off, which obviously has fuel shortages, fuel prices spiking, especially in Europe.
00:12:02.000This has added on top of the price increases that have come through Green New Deal type.
00:12:07.000Taxes, and then there's already taxes that have been imposed because they need to pay for the social services for these new immigrants.
00:12:15.000So, meanwhile, the blue collar Irish are getting squeezed at all ends.
00:13:47.000And we'll check in for more updates as this story develops.
00:13:51.000But there is a potential election that would be a vote of no confidence within the Irish Parliament.
00:13:56.000Thank you, Kevin, which would obviously spark a huge change in that nation's government, sparked in part by the conflict in Iran, Blake.
00:14:07.000Figure out whether the demonstrators, if the demonstrators want less migration, that means it's a riot and an outburst and they need to crack down and seize their bank accounts.
00:14:16.000Whereas if they want a far left government to overthrow and they want to overthrow the government that way, that means they're marching for democracy.
00:14:28.000You're obviously being a little bit sarcastic there, but I do think that's important.
00:14:31.000A note you're making is that the same tactics could be deployed from the right or the left, but the media will paint one as virtuous, the other as sinister.
00:14:53.000But second, you know what else is lawless?
00:14:56.000Millions of people coming into your country, living here illegally, working here illegally, stealing people's identities, all sorts of things.
00:15:05.000It's, you know, remember a few months ago, there was that New York Times profile of the guy who stole this other person's identity, and they tried to frame it as a tragedy affecting two families.
00:15:15.000The guy whose identity got stolen and who got blamed for a bunch of crimes he didn't commit and got harassed by the IRS, and the guy who stole his identity.
00:15:23.000It talks about that guy going to church in the article.
00:15:26.000I'd always wonder why doesn't that guy's priest ever say, hey, you should find a way to go back to the country you're legally allowed to be in?
00:15:38.000It's so frustrating what these religious leaders do.
00:15:40.000Well, and you know, to kind of make a further point, what you're saying, Blake, is that.
00:15:46.000You know, today there was a big breaking news story.
00:15:48.000We're actually going to have Mary Margaret Olihan tomorrow on it.
00:15:52.000But this, the DOJ has released an 800 page report how the Biden administration and the Biden DOJ were targeting pro lifers, many of whom are Catholic, simply for their views that are longstanding church positions on life and unborn babies.
00:16:10.000But you don't see a lot of noise being made about that.
00:16:13.000So that makes me wonder again, the selective outrage is very, very frustrating.
00:16:21.000Putting President Trump's beef with Pope Leo aside, these are massive, massive, glaring inconsistencies, and I think they need to be called out.
00:16:32.000I wasn't expecting this, I have to say.
00:16:34.000But Death of Recess, it stopped me in my tracks.
00:16:38.000This isn't about dodgeballs and jungle gyms.
00:17:03.000How organizations like the NEA amassed enormous influence, how radical gender ideology entered classrooms, and why something as basic as recess, movement, freedom, childhood, you know, had to go.
00:18:24.000So, yes, the big news, the big news, of course, yesterday.
00:18:28.000Yesterday, we talked about Eric Swalwell's unfolding scandal that forced him to drop out of the governor's race, where he was the front runner.
00:18:37.000He went from two weeks ago, he was going to be the next governor of California, probably, and now he's out of the race, out of Congress, out of American life, possibly out of the public if they end up indicting him.
00:18:50.000He sort of issued a strange statement where He apologized to everyone he hurt while also saying the allegations against him are false.
00:19:19.000And then, thanks to Elon Musk's ex, we have the lovely reader's note.
00:19:23.000Katie Porter is an alleged domestic abuser who poured scalding potatoes on her ex husband's head.
00:19:29.000She has been seen on camera verbally berating staff for minor slights and has been described as abusive herself.
00:19:37.000Yeah, we're so blessed by the copious wonders of the Democrats in California.
00:19:43.000And unfortunately, now we're looking at, I mean, I'm happy to see Swalwell go down.
00:19:47.000You know, he was such a thorn in everyone's side, but it was so strategic.
00:19:51.000It would have been great if this had come out when it was just him versus Steve Hilton.
00:19:55.000After the primary, and then C would have been, you know, kind of just swept into office.
00:19:59.000So, of course, they had to drop it now.
00:20:01.000And it was very strategic, they all had the same talking points.
00:20:04.000And now, unfortunately, as happy as I am to see Swalwell go down and hopefully he'll go to jail, which is where all California Democrats actually belong.
00:20:12.000Unfortunately, now we're looking at Tom Steyer coming around, which is like worse than Newsome.
00:20:19.000Like, I don't know what it's like when you're drowning, you know, and someone hands you an anchor.
00:20:25.000As a California lifer, kind of, yeah, lay out what does this, we were discussing yesterday, what does this really tell you about the California Democrat Party where it's that mixture of ineptitude, you might say, because the state isn't well run, yet also, There's this real killer instinct in how they execute political hit jobs on their own people.
00:20:44.000And of course, how they keep a stranglehold on their state, no matter how messed up it is.
00:21:36.000We're getting rid of Gavin Newsome, which is a blessing, but I am very nervous about the future.
00:21:41.000We could be looking at a knockout punch of Tom Styre's governor and Nithya Raman as mayor of Los Angeles, who I know it's hard to believe, but she's actually worse than Karen Beth.
00:23:07.000But when you look at LA, I think, you know, Karen Kamala Harris won Los Angeles City by like, you know, 70, 75%.
00:23:18.000And so if it's down to two people, it's likely going to be a Democrat, unfortunately.
00:23:25.000Now, the only saving grace is potentially enough people were burned by literally burned by the fire, burned by COVID, have seen the decay of the city.
00:23:35.000They're being attacked, you know, by, you know, vagrants.
00:23:39.000Um, where they go to work and other in businesses being closed down, maybe some people will see the light.
00:23:46.000But I've thought this every time you know, I keep thinking, like, oh, the Gavin Newsom recall finally, and it never quite works just because of the demographics in the city, they're not looking good.
00:24:12.000Yeah, I will say that my whole take on Gavin Newsom, and it's an unpopular one, is that as bad as he is, and he is very, very bad, that there's always worse, right?
00:24:21.000Gavin Newsom is still sort of cut from an older mold.
00:24:25.000He kind of still ascribes to certain norms.
00:24:29.000If he becomes your governor, paint a picture of what that could be, especially if he has a communist as mayor in Los Angeles.
00:24:37.000What kind of policies are you really looking at as a possibility?
00:24:42.000And I don't know tons about Tom Steyer because he's always thought of as some kind of like joke, you know, when he pops up in every presidential campaign.
00:24:50.000But from what I've seen so far, just from his tweets and his posts, you know, Newsom was always mindful of running for president.
00:24:56.000So he never kind of wanted to look too far left.
00:25:00.000He's canceled some of the crazy things that have come out of Sacramento, actually, because I think he was trying to make himself plausible as a president.
00:25:09.000Dyer has no such boundaries or guidelines.
00:25:12.000He came out yesterday with a post that is the end of California, which is getting rid of Prop 13, which is what keeps people's property tax basically kind of quote unquote affordable.
00:25:24.000And they've been trying to overturn Prop 13 for decades, which would jump everyone's property taxes by, you know, 10x your property tax, it would kill the state.
00:25:34.000The tweet yesterday was about getting rid of the property tax just for corporations.
00:25:38.000Um, and so, I mean, if you're a small business, goodbye.
00:25:41.000If you're a huge, if you're Google in Santa Monica, maybe you can survive that.
00:25:45.000So, I don't really know all the implications of that, but be just like a stock, you know, commie light.
00:25:50.000Um, but again, California is not run by uh the governor, it's run by the kind of deep state of California out of Sacramento, and these people will never be budged.
00:25:58.000Like, even you know, Schwarzenegger couldn't crack that nut.
00:26:04.000and we will just get you know more high speed train trains to nowhere Sounds depressing.
00:26:11.000I feel like the story with California is it's always about the same as it was before, but a bit worse.
00:26:19.000There's a certain consistency to it that, well, it's not admirable, but there's something.
00:26:26.000And Peachy, I know we're going to get to the Catholic topic here as well, but how much of this, just as a sort of cautionary tale to the rest of the country, how much of this is because of population displacement, immigration policies?
00:26:40.000And by the way, if you talk about Prop 13, the only thing holding that state together right now is these old core families in these old core neighborhoods that make the communities work, that are a lot of them only able to afford California because they are priced in and grandfathered into Prop 13.
00:26:55.000What happens, the displacement of California that you've already experienced and what you could experience if Prop 13 is removed?
00:27:03.000Yeah, I mean, every year I have to say goodbye to friends who move.
00:27:07.000I think we're losing another family this year going to Tennessee.
00:27:11.000In COVID, our small Catholic school lost.
00:27:14.000You know, almost 20 families left for various other states, Idaho, Tennessee, and a lot went to Texas.
00:30:37.000I think I'm skeptical of the vast majority of allegations like this.
00:30:42.000I think it always should raise an eyebrow when someone's coming forward years later to make an allegation that's effectively impossible to prove or disprove after that amount of time.
00:30:53.000And this is so clearly a politically related hit job as well.
00:31:00.000He almost certainly is cheating on his wife a bunch, but that's not in itself illegal.
00:31:06.000But I will say he has done a lot to bring this upon himself because Eric Swalwell, it's always there's a certain good feeling that comes when people who egged on every left wing hysteria, every single moral panic of the past decade fall victim to it themselves.
00:31:24.000And so to that extent, It is richly deserved.
00:31:29.000Yeah, I will say there's been no more shameless plugger of the Me Too, believe all victims, victims deserve to be heard.
00:31:52.000I mean, I just wonder how, you know, really the crime here is, and those are all terrible.
00:31:58.000But the real crime is the cover up because obviously everyone, all of his colleagues knew, all of them knew that at the very least he was doing unspeakable things and being a very naughty boy.
00:32:10.000Did they know he was actually committing potentially assaulting crimes and rape?
00:32:15.000But the cover up is really the disturbing part that all these women and all these Democrat liberal women who wear white to the State of the Union and Me Too pins and called Trump a rapist and all this, they know who Swalwell is, but they don't want to say anything because he's a reliable vote and he's very popular with the media speaking out against Trump.
00:32:35.000You know, if you're going to come out and, you know, bash Republicans for being, you know, whatever, you think they're like being bad for women, but you're protecting actual rapists who are like your buddies and you're just hanging out with them in the Democrat parties.
00:32:54.000And Nancy Pelosi, for what it's worth, has denied any knowledge of these accusations against Eric Swalwell, which is noteworthy because even I had heard about them.
00:33:03.000And so if you've I've heard about them.
00:33:05.000How has Nancy Pelosi, one of the leading Democrats in California, not heard about it?
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00:37:09.000He is an editor at Tablet Magazine, and he's also the author of a new book called The Information State Politics in the Age of Total Control.
00:37:36.000It's a new kind of political regime that rules not through the consent of the governed in the way that we expect a democracy to rule.
00:37:45.000It doesn't rule through the formal procedures of law and constitutional procedure.
00:37:52.000Instead, it rules through control of digital code.
00:37:56.000So it essentially moves decision-making power from the recognizable centers that we know from the framer's intention from the history of America.
00:38:07.000It takes sovereignty and decision-making power from there and it relocates it essentially into the digital infrastructure.
00:38:15.000So debanking is an example of how the information state exercises power, mass information operations, mass censorship.
00:38:24.000All of these are the sort of tools of the trade of what I'm saying is really not just an abuse of government power, but an entirely new kind of political regime that's coming into being, and we're watching it be born now.
00:38:39.000Yeah, and I guess as laid out, I looked through a summary of the book, and it looks like we're kind of seeing what we were warned about 25 years ago with the launch of the war on terrorism, with the Patriot Act.
00:38:52.000We started to get concerned about extremism online, terrorist activities online, tracking those things online.
00:39:00.000And now we're seeing it turn around where they're built like the hunt for terrorists abroad has turned into this hunt for terrorists in the United States.
00:39:09.000And that's turned into, as you say, debanking, but also, especially, the censorship apparatus, correct?
00:39:16.000And there really is a straight line from this massive expansion of surveillance powers and not only governmental surveillance powers.
00:39:24.000You know, the Patriot Act was part of it.
00:39:26.000But what also happened after 9 11 is that the social media companies and the telecommunications companies. were essentially turned into kind of private surveillance units that were doing the work that the government couldn't do because it was unconstitutional.
00:39:42.000So they were pulling all of this data in.
00:39:44.000They were harvesting this data through programs like PRISM that we found out about through the Snowden leaks.
00:39:51.000And so the entire commercial side of the internet was also essentially functioning as a kind of mass dragnet.
00:39:59.000Now, what ended up happening after the war on terror started to wind down or as it entered its second decade, was that entire apparatus for surveillance, counterterrorism, was redirected from targets abroad to targets at home.
00:40:14.000So that huge machinery of repression and surveillance started to get targeted against Americans inside of the United States, first through programs like what was called Countering Violent Extremism that were monitoring the internet for extremist behavior in the U.S., ostensibly tied to terrorism, and then finally through this new counter disinformation establishment.
00:41:00.000Because right now, as I'm saying, there's this new thing coming into being, which is this kind of informational power that essentially takes over, governs through control of the digital platforms.
00:41:13.000But, you know, we still have a constitution in the United States.
00:41:16.000There's still laws that prohibit spying on American citizens.
00:41:20.000And so the government is aware that it can't carry out all of these functions it might like to carry out.
00:41:25.000And so it outsources this work through NGOs, through these sort of cutouts that it creates.
00:41:32.000And it establishes these convoluted institutional networks.
00:41:37.000And this really kicked into high gear in 2016 with the creation of something called the Global Engagement Center.
00:41:46.000which Obama chartered just as he was leaving office.
00:41:49.000And it was really the premier government run counter disinformation establishment.
00:41:55.000But the way it worked in its own mission statement was not just to carry out actions on its own as a federal agency, it was to affect what it called the whole of society effort.
00:42:06.000So the whole purpose was to align different powerful institutions, what they called stakeholder institutions across American society, You know, that could be media, it could be financial institutions, universities, et cetera.
00:42:21.000Get all of them on the same page, get all of them bought into this new mandate to not only counter foreign disinformation, but this expanding laundry list of bad forms of information.
00:42:35.000So foreign disinformation grew to domestic misinformation, which then eventually included malinformation, which became an actual term within another government agency called CISA.
00:42:50.000under the Department of Homeland Security made part of its mission monitoring the internet for malinformation, which referred to true statements, factually correct statements that were perceived to cause harm.
00:43:04.000Can you give us examples of that malinformation?
00:43:06.000And was this actually censored, suppressed?
00:43:11.000So, malinformation could include somebody questioning the efficacy of coronavirus vaccines.
00:43:18.000It could include somebody questioning climate change, climate change skepticism, opposition to the war in Ukraine, opposition to the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
00:43:30.000All of these were on the list of issues that the government agency, CISA, and the related institutions that were working with it, like the Election Integrity Partnership and other sort of related NGOs, these were the kinds of narratives that they were monitoring, that they, in coordination with the social media companies, were looking at.
00:43:53.000It's very hard to say exactly how many posts online were censored.
00:43:57.000You know, I went to Washington, D.C. I interviewed more than a dozen people who worked directly on this kind of thing, and I didn't get a single You know, solid estimate from anybody.
00:44:10.000It just in the millions is all anyone could tell me because there were deliberate firewalls created between the social media companies and the sort of NGO partners and the federal agencies.
00:44:23.000So it was set up in such a way that they were trying to create a denial of liability for everybody involved.
00:44:31.000Now, some of this came out through the Twitter files and other reporting, but just to give you an example of how it worked.
00:44:38.000You know, if, for example, the Election Integrity Partnership informed the social media platforms, Twitter, Facebook, that they were concerned about a particular narrative online, they didn't necessarily need to then tell Facebook or Twitter every post that they wanted censored.
00:44:56.000The social media platform could just dial it down on its own to suppress the visibility.
00:45:01.000It's sort of a perfect censorship machine because you just say, oh, as the government, we're concerned about this, we dislike it.
00:45:08.000And they do all of the censorship for you, but it's not ordered, so it's not violating the First Amendment.
00:45:14.000The information state, I want to take an excerpt from this.
00:45:18.000It's getting at one of the most extreme cases of this censorship apparatus that exists indirectly in American life.
00:45:26.000And everyone's going to remember this story.
00:45:28.000On the eve of the 2020 presidential race, the New York Times published a frontal attack on the principle of free speech.
00:45:35.000On the cover of its Sunday magazine, there was an essay, The First Amendment in the Age of Disinformation.
00:45:41.000The author Emily Bazalon, a graduate of Yale Law School, made the case basically that free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing.
00:45:55.000And just days after this article came out, we got.
00:46:02.000And if you've forgotten how heavily that was suppressed, we've heard a lot that the Intel agents, I believe 50 of them, came out and said, this shows the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
00:46:12.000But it wasn't just that they smeared it as disinformation.
00:46:15.000On Facebook, you were not allowed, not merely not to post the article, you could not message the article to people in a private message.
00:46:24.000The New York Post had its Twitter account blocked because they were publishing a true story that their reporter. Had research.
00:46:32.000This is really the information state as you're describing it in full flower.
00:46:36.000It's government and NGOs and news publications creating this miasma that just justifies the suppression of true information.
00:46:47.000And it's actually even worse than that in the sense that the FBI had obtained those laptops in, I believe, December of 2019.
00:46:57.000So for months prior to the scandal over the laptops becoming public, they were in the FBI's possession.
00:47:05.000Which means that the Bureau had already certified that they were authentic.
00:47:09.000They knew that they weren't Russian plants of some sort.
00:47:12.000And yet, the FBI went to the social media platforms prior to the leaked documents based on the laptops and prior to the New York Post reporting on the laptops and told the social media companies hey, we expect there to be another Russian hack and dump operation in the lead up to the election.
00:47:34.000This time, we think it's going to target Hunter Biden.
00:47:37.000So the FBI actually colluded in what was really an information operation to suppress legitimate reporting on the laptops, despite knowing that the laptops were authentic because they were in the FBI's possession.
00:47:53.000But let's follow up to, I guess, the obvious question.
00:47:56.000So they've built this apparatus and it managed to exist throughout, frankly, the first Trump administration, even though it was often actively hostile to it.
00:48:06.000And this apparatus still exists in our government.
00:48:08.000How do we go about breaking this information state?
00:48:12.000How do we take it apart and bring back a normal functioning media environment, a normal functioning information environment?
00:48:19.000How do we get as free as we were in the 1990s?
00:48:22.000Well, I think one of the things we need to look at is data ownership.
00:48:26.000And this is something I've been talking about for a while, but I think that it's an important idea to get out to the public.
00:48:34.000Essentially, when we're on the internet, all of our data is being harvested from us.
00:48:43.000We don't get anything for it as we're producing this data.
00:48:47.000It's treated as if it's free, but then it's bundled in ways that monetize it so it becomes extremely valuable.
00:48:54.000And because there's this sort of mass data harvesting at scale, It makes it possible to create these sort of manipulated mass media environments.
00:49:04.000Now, if you had to actually pay people for their data that you're using, I think it would disincentivize a lot of the collection of data, which would disincentivize some of these mass surveillance efforts.
00:49:20.000And that in turn, it would have a kind of cascade effect where it would also disincentivize censorship because the censorship relies on the mass surveillance.
00:49:28.000So essentially, creating something like a property rights structure for people's data is a step in the right direction.
00:49:35.000The other thing I would say, and I come at this less in the sense of immediate political solutions and more in terms of what I think is wrong with the environment in a bigger picture way, because the policy stuff is just not my specialty.
00:49:53.000But I would say in a big picture sense, one of the things that the internet has done and that social media has done is that it's really eroded national borders and boundaries.
00:50:03.000So, if you're somebody who believes in border enforcement, we have to carry that same sensibility over to online spaces.
00:50:12.000We have to think about what it means to create an environment on social media, for instance, where Americans can enter into a political conversation with other Americans that's not going to be inundated by people who are not Americans stepping into that political conversation.
00:50:28.000I think X has taken a good step in that direction by adding to the user data. of posters on that site where they're posting from but there's more that can be done in that direction All right.
00:50:45.000Is there something we can do to really, for example, what could the Trump administration do to dismantle this if it was of a mind to do so in the three years it has?
00:50:54.000I mean, it's taken some very serious steps, I would say.
00:50:58.000Seriously, it rolled back both CISA and the GEC.
00:51:01.000So the two primary federal agencies that were involved in this were immediately targeted by the Trump administration.
00:51:09.000It doesn't mean they can't be reconstituted.
00:51:12.000At some point in the future, or that the duties of those offices can't be moved elsewhere.
00:51:16.000But the other thing is to start to introduce legislation that, a bit like the settlement we just saw come out of the Missouri versus the Biden case, that prohibits coordination between the federal government and social media companies about posts to censor.
00:51:38.000So that settlement, which was just reached in this big case that went to the Supreme Court and then got kicked.
00:51:43.000Down it only lasts for 10 years and it only prohibits some of that activity.
00:52:17.000For more than 12 years, they've stood with Americans who believe freedom is worth fighting for, funding the Christian conservative movement when others stayed silent.
00:52:25.000And here's the deal you don't have to give up quality or service when you switch to Patriot Mobile.
00:52:30.000They deliver premium, priority access on all three major U.S. networks, so you'll get the same or better coverage than you have today.
00:52:53.000We got to work together to save our country.
00:52:55.000So go to patriotmobile.comslash Charlie or call 972 Patriot and use the promo code Charlie for a free month of service.
00:53:02.000That's patriotmobile.comslash Charlie or call them at 972 Patriot using the promo code Charlie and switch today.
00:53:12.000We haven't talked about it yet, but there was something very unfortunate that happened on Sunday to people who care about Christianity, people who care about conservatism, who care about nationalism around the world.
00:53:25.000You might already know what I'm talking about.
00:53:27.000There was an election in the small European country of Hungary.
00:53:32.000And to talk about it, we're going to be joined by Jeremy Carl.
00:53:36.000He's a fellow at the Claremont Institute.
00:53:38.000He's the author of The Unprotected Class, and he was one of Charlie's favorite nominees to this administration, unfortunately.
00:53:53.000So, yeah, just to set the stage here Viktor Orban was the prime minister of Hungary for the past 16 years.
00:54:01.000He definitely, when you'd reach around and you'd try to find a leader who you'd say, like, who's the guy you think is doing everything right or mostly everything right?
00:54:10.000And I think you and I would both agree Viktor Orban is a guy we would look to.
00:54:14.000While every other European country was bringing in immigrants by the millions, he was saying, Hungary is above all for Hungarians.
00:54:23.000We're going to preserve our national character.
00:54:25.000While every other country was racing towards secularism, he was promoting Christianity in his country.
00:54:30.000And especially while everyone else is annihilating the family, they took a lot of steps to protect the family.
00:54:36.000But 16 years is a long time to hold power, and they were defeated in Sunday's election.
00:54:44.000Jeremy, can you explain to us how this came to pass?
00:54:47.000Yeah, well, I've spent a couple different fellowships in Hungary for a few weeks each over the last few years, so I have had.
00:54:55.000Some time to sort of spend there and understand a little bit about kind of what's going on.
00:54:59.000I think you kind of hit on the key thing, which is 16 years is just a long time.
00:55:04.000Helmut Kohl, who was the prime minister who unified Germany after communism, was in for 16 years and eventually he just got bounced.
00:55:12.000Now, do I think that there were things that were problems?
00:55:19.000I think ongoing corruption, while sometimes perhaps overstated, was still a real issue.
00:55:25.000I think that there were people who were not happy about the Way that Russia Ukraine relations were being handled by Orbán, although there were equally many who were happy that he was keeping.
00:55:38.000But I just think that combined with a huge amount of pressure from the European Union, standing up media outlets, withholding funds, doing everything they could to help Orban's opponent.
00:55:49.000And, you know, this time it just turned out to be too much to overcome.
00:55:54.000Yeah, it really, I think one of the things I wanted to talk about this because there's important lessons from it, which is even if you really deliver, if you deliver on the border, if you deliver on family stuff, if you deliver on a lot of your red meat issues, it's politically unforgiving because you still also have to deliver on.
00:56:12.000The core stuff, which is you have to make sure the economy is growing and you have to make sure that you're not seen as corrupt, shady.
00:56:21.000If that reputation gets embedded, it can destroy even the best policies.
00:56:25.000And I think that's a big takeaway to take from here.
00:56:27.000But I also wanted to bring it up because I've seen a lot of defeatism about it because, let's be frank, a lot of bad stuff might be about to happen in Hungary.
00:56:36.000If you want to prove that it's a bad sign, we have a tweet by Barack Obama on Sunday night.
00:56:44.000Which got 65 million views, where he says, The victory of the opposition in Hungary yesterday is a victory for democracy, not just in Europe, but around the world.
00:56:56.000It's a testament to the resilience and determination of the Hungarian people, a reminder to all of us to keep striving for fairness, equality, and the rule of law, which, as you and I know, is 100% bunk.
00:57:09.000Hungary is a good example to look towards for all the attacks that they'll bring against you, which we've certainly seen play out here in America, that you can.
00:57:18.000Hold every election, you can campaign fairly in every election, you can literally win four elections in a row and then finally lose one.
00:57:26.000And they'll just say, You're not democracy, because for them, democracy doesn't mean holding elections, doesn't mean winning elections, doesn't mean listening to what the people want.
00:57:36.000It means listening to what we've decided needs to happen in Brussels or at Davos or at the United Nations or wherever Barack Obama happens to be.
00:57:54.000Madjar, who was the candidate who beat him, is a former member until actually very recently, a fairly senior member of Orban's party who essentially almost ran to his right on some issues.
00:58:07.000Certainly, he did not give any ground on immigration or national identity or some of these things.
00:58:12.000And he basically said, you know, I'm going to kind of do a lot of the same things that Orban was doing, but I'm going to sort of improve relationships with the EU and maybe, you know, alter a little bit vis a vis Ukraine and Russia.
00:58:26.000and I'm going to cut down on corruption.
00:58:29.000Now, I think there's reasons to be Pessimistic if you look at George Soros's son and Obama sending out celebratory tweets, that this is in fact what's going to happen.
00:58:39.000But the fact that at least he was, you know, that's how he felt he needed to do to win is an indicative of the fact that Orban really has set the political tone in Hungary in a way.
00:58:54.000And so that's a pretty big achievement.
00:59:26.000I had a friend who was just in Budapest, and he said the ads he saw really made it look like the election was a referendum on Ukraine and on Russia.
00:59:34.000But you have to be wary because we've already seen reporting, the European Union is.
00:59:39.000Really celebrating this because Orban was by far the gutsiest leader in standing against them.
00:59:44.000They were cutting off European Union funds, saying, You're an autocracy.
00:59:51.000And they've already been saying, We'll release these funds if you get on board with the euro, if you get on board with immigration, if you get on board with a lot of our foreign policy agenda.
01:00:03.000And so a lesson here is you have to be ready for these guys who are going to promise you, I'm not going to change any of the big stuff you like with this guy.
01:00:12.000But if they're more vulnerable to pressure from the outside, from globalists, from Sorrow's World, from the European Union, from the global American empire, as it were, you're going to lose your country eventually.
01:00:26.000And actually, the other aspect of this that I think is very interesting that I'm actually writing about right now is the degree to which it showed how much, to be frank, a number of our key senators still hate Trump's foreign policy.
01:00:41.000Now, JD Vance went all the way to Hungary to campaign.
01:00:45.000For Orban in the waning days, which shows how much of an emphasis we put on this as an administration.
01:00:51.000Trump and Orban have been very close, good friends.
01:00:55.000You had in the wake of this election, immediately McConnell had a sort of celebratory op ed on Fox News, which kind of was indistinguishable from somebody, something that would have been tweeted by Hillary Clinton.
01:01:11.000You had Roger Wicker, who's the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, from very deep.
01:01:15.000I want to read that because it's think of what we read from Obama earlier.
01:01:19.000There's a similar tweet from Hillary Clinton.
01:01:21.000And now we have this Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican from a Republican state.
01:01:26.000The freedom loving people of Hungary have voted decisively in favor of democracy and the rule of law.
01:01:32.000I congratulate them and Peter Magyar, the next prime minister of Hungary.
01:01:36.000They have rejected the malign influence of Vladimir Putin, the world's most malicious dictator, and decided their own future.
01:01:43.000So, contrast this by a Republican senator and what was stated by Obama.
01:02:15.000And if we have Republican senators who can't see what an asset that was, what an ally that was, and all they see is Vladimir Putin everywhere, they shouldn't be leaders in our party, period.
01:02:27.000Yeah, well, obviously, I agree with you.
01:02:28.000And again, I think the shocking thing is not so much that he thinks this.
01:02:32.000I mean, I know, frankly, a number of Republican senators who, based on my own experience through the Senate, either think this or, to a first approximation, at least will entertain it, but that he felt comfortable enough to just say it.
01:02:47.000And again, he didn't even frame it in terms of, well, I'm glad that I'd like to see us be more pro Ukraine, and I think the opposition will let us do that, and that's great.
01:02:58.000I mean, that would be still pretty bad in my view because he could just be silent.
01:03:02.000But he literally repeats like the left's talking points on rule of law, on democracy, that are just false.
01:03:10.000And so it's just, it's a shocking example.
01:03:13.000And there's a couple other senators who also chimed in of just how much Trump continues to fight with his own party to set the direction of his foreign policy.
01:03:41.000But as the Vice President explained, he knew it was unlikely to save him, but you had to try because he was an ally of ours who deserved it.
01:04:04.000We certainly knew there was a very good chance that Victor would lose that election.
01:04:08.000We did it because he's one of the few European leaders we've seen who's been willing to stand up to the bureaucracy in Brussels that has been very, very bad for the United States.
01:04:18.000We didn't go because we expected Victor to cruise to an election victory.
01:04:22.000We went because it was the right thing to do to stand behind a person who had stood by us for a very long time.
01:04:28.000So this wasn't about Russia and fundamentally it wasn't about Europe.
01:04:31.000It was about the United States and the fact that he's been a good partner.
01:04:35.000To both me and the president personally, but also to the United States.
01:04:40.000I really admire that from the vice president.
01:04:42.000I think that message of standing with those who stand with us, who stand for what we believe in, is a very positive one.
01:04:48.000And I think it was gutsy of him to go because he had to know it was likely that he would lose and they'd do the whole, oh, Vance, kiss of death on this guy.
01:05:12.000A good message to our allies that if you're with us, that we are going to stand with you.
01:05:16.000And I think over the long term, obviously, that's a very good message to send.
01:05:21.000And then obviously, you know, we'll see what happens with the new guy.
01:05:25.000I think it'll be interesting to see whether he really tacks to the left or whether he attempts to sort of continue at least some of Orban's legacy and, but maybe play a little nicer with the European Union.
01:05:39.000So we'll just have to see how that develops.
01:06:50.000So, DEI, in addition to being racist and discriminatory, is making us all poorer.
01:06:55.000Yeah, I mean, I think it's totally plausible.
01:06:57.000I always do approach these large macroeconomic studies as somebody who's done a little graduate training in economics with a little bit of.
01:07:06.000I think that you're kind of trying to deal with large multi causal things and it's hard to just pinpoint them.
01:07:13.000But that having been said, what they're really saying and trying to quantify is just something that should be screamingly obvious to everybody.
01:07:19.000Because if you do away with the propaganda words around DEI, all we're basically saying is when you hire people who are less qualified based on the color of their skin or some other characteristic of theirs other than their competence, you're going to wind up with a less efficient, less powerful business.
01:07:39.000I mean, it should be obvious to everybody.
01:07:41.000And I salute them for at least trying to put a number on that that turns out to maybe not be so insignificant.
01:07:47.000It really highlights kind of the outrageous.
01:07:50.000It's good that we've mainstreamed DEI almost as a negative thing, but it's also ridiculous that we use terms like DEI when we could just say racial discrimination is actually bad and we're constantly accused of it.
01:08:03.000Yet it is the left that has built their entire political ideology on discrimination, that we need to put a thumb on the scale for.
01:08:11.000Hiring, whether it's based on race, based on sex, based on sexual orientation, based on any number of things.
01:08:19.000And they just, they basically just lie about it.
01:08:22.000And they tell us this is fairness when we should be able to stand up and say, very obviously, that's not true.
01:08:29.000And again, I think part of their control of language is how they keep political power.
01:08:33.000And it's one of the reasons why when I put anti white racism in the title of the subtitle of The Unprotected Class, even guys like Chris Rufo, who've done great work on this and endorsed the book, You know, sort of did a, you know, intake of breath, like, are we allowed to say that?
01:08:49.000And, you know, my view, which I think you now see a lot more politicians saying that since the book came out, is that it's very important to just be really clear about what we're talking about and not let them, you know, hide behind terms like affirmative action or DEI.
01:09:05.000What they're doing is racial discrimination or they're doing gender or sex discrimination.
01:09:10.000And we should just be really clear that, like, what they're doing is un American and we should call it by its name.
01:09:22.000I'm sure you monitor this because you're such the expert on it.
01:09:26.000Can you give us a sense how much progress, besides this report, has the administration been making on dismantling this apparatus, both within government and within the private sector?
01:09:37.000I think they've done a great job, all things considered.
01:09:39.000I'm a huge fan of Harmeet Dillon, who is our assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department.
01:09:46.000She and her team, I think, have been doing outstanding work.
01:09:49.000They had to backfill a huge amount of staff because when she came in and said, Hey, guess what?
01:09:54.000Our definition of civil rights is actually that you're going to treat everybody equally.
01:09:58.000A lot of the existing attorneys had no interest in that.
01:10:01.000And so she lost about 70% of her attorneys.
01:10:05.000But from everything from getting rid of disparate impact to getting rid of DEI to everything from, I mean, they're kind of suing on, they've created a Second Amendment division.
01:10:18.000They've pursued religious freedom issues that have been very favorable.