The Charlie Kirk Show - March 13, 2023


The End of the American Empire? with Col. Douglas Macgregor and Vivek Ramaswamy


Episode Stats


Length

35 minutes

Words per minute

189.07634

Word count

6,687

Sentence count

459

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

22

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us to discuss the latest with Russia and Ukraine, including a possible peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, and Iran and Saudi Arabia re-establishing diplomatic relations, and a possible deal between the United States and Russia.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us to discuss the latest with Russia and Ukraine.
00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:07.000 And then Vivek Ramaswamy believes it's a bailout and it's wrong to help the depositors of Silicon Valley Bank.
00:00:13.000 Email me your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:16.000 Subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.
00:00:17.000 Open up your podcast app and type in Charlie Kirk Show and get involved with Turning Point USA today at tpusa.com.
00:00:26.000 That is tpusa.com.
00:00:28.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:29.000 Here we go.
00:00:30.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:32.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
00:00:34.000 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.
00:00:42.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:00:43.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
00:00:50.000 Turning point USA. 0.65
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00:01:15.000 Welcome back, everybody.
00:01:16.000 Email us freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:01:18.000 Last week, we covered several stories.
00:01:20.000 There was a significant amount of foreign policy news that we did not get a chance to cover.
00:01:25.000 And we have a fabulous guest to help make sense of the very confusing at times news that's happening overseas.
00:01:35.000 Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us.
00:01:38.000 Colonel, thank you so much for joining the program.
00:01:41.000 Several topics I want to explore with you.
00:01:43.000 The first of which is this news about Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia restoring diplomatic relations as it was pushed along by China, it seems.
00:01:54.000 And Iran and Saudi Arabia actually seemed closer to war a couple years ago.
00:01:59.000 And there's a lot of religious reasons for that and sectarian reasons, see Shia and Sunni Muslim.
00:02:05.000 But it seems as if they're having restoring of diplomatic relations and China's brokering it.
00:02:10.000 What's the takeaway here?
00:02:12.000 I think we need to come to the realization that for reasons of finance and economics, our grip on things is weakened.
00:02:23.000 To be frank with you, the Russians have now visited with the Saudis.
00:02:26.000 Now the Chinese have been to visit with them.
00:02:29.000 And the Saudis are preparing, like much of the non-European world, to exit use of the dollar.
00:02:35.000 They see us, frankly, as falling apart financially and economically.
00:02:40.000 They don't have much confidence in our ability to protect them.
00:02:44.000 And they see a better way ahead with Russia and China, both of whom have enormous influence over Iran.
00:02:50.000 Much better influence over Iran than we do.
00:02:54.000 So I think this is one of several steps that you're going to see in the future.
00:02:59.000 Remember that China and Russia are both members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
00:03:06.000 And the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is building a financial system that is external to ours.
00:03:13.000 In other words, most of the world wants to dump the U.S. dollar.
00:03:17.000 And you can see that happening in our banking sector right now.
00:03:20.000 Why?
00:03:21.000 Because frankly, we're debasing their currency.
00:03:24.000 Whenever they do business in dollars, we pass our debt on to them.
00:03:28.000 Our debt is now, what, 33, 34 million, something, a trillion in that department.
00:03:34.000 Nobody wants to do business with us anymore.
00:03:38.000 And what is it safe as the kind of new 21st century geopolitics is setting in that China is now the one that is not just trying to broker deals between Iran and Saudi Arabia, but also they're the only ones talking about a ceasefire or potential peace deal with Ukraine and Russia.
00:03:57.000 Yeah, absolutely.
00:03:58.000 Well, the thing that Americans don't understand because they've been propagandized for years in the wrong direction, China is not interested in war with anybody.
00:04:07.000 China is entirely about business and prosperity and self-enrichment.
00:04:11.000 They are going to be the dominant power in Asia for reasons of economics and finance.
00:04:16.000 It has nothing to do with military power.
00:04:19.000 So they're in a position to visit with Zelensky after they visited with Putin and probably offer a deal of some kind.
00:04:25.000 I suspect the Chinese will say, if you're willing to come to a new territorial arrangement with Russia, we will bankroll your restoration, your reconstruction.
00:04:36.000 The problem for Zelensky is that he's entirely dependent on the Cabal in Washington and the Kolomoyski and Soros and other oligarchs, if you will, in the West.
00:04:47.000 So I doubt seriously he'll take the deal.
00:04:50.000 But I think that's what the Chinese will ultimately do. 1.00
00:04:53.000 The Chinese want desperately to build rail lines to carry commerce and commodities and services back and forth between Europe and China, Japan, and Korea.
00:05:04.000 Central Asia can be stable now thanks to Russian influence and control. 1.00
00:05:10.000 The problem they've got right now is Ukraine. 0.79
00:05:12.000 Ukraine is in the way of that commercial traffic and that economic relationship.
00:05:17.000 So they want peace desperately.
00:05:18.000 They don't want war.
00:05:20.000 And I think they're probably going to get it.
00:05:22.000 They're just not going to get it immediately because I don't think we'll allow it.
00:05:26.000 I'd like the latest take on the details on the ground, your latest take between Russia and Ukraine.
00:05:33.000 According to the Daily Mail, it says that Russia suffers deadliest day in Ukraine war as 1,090 men lose their lives.
00:05:42.000 And the Daily Mail says Putin's bloodlust takes horrendous toll on his own forces with bitter battle of Bakhmut raging.
00:05:50.000 What is the latest on the ground in Ukraine and how does it apply to us?
00:05:55.000 Well, all those headlines are lies, Charlie.
00:05:57.000 The Russians haven't taken those heavy casualties at all. 0.66
00:06:00.000 In fact, we think that the Russians have had, since the beginning of the war, somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 dead.
00:06:08.000 The exchange rate over the last few weeks has been about one Russian for every five Ukrainians.
00:06:14.000 The Ukrainians have been bled white, and they're getting ready for reasons that make absolutely no military sense to commit more forces to Bakhmut, which has turned into an enormous ambush, if you will, for the Ukrainians. 0.69
00:06:28.000 The Russians are happy for thousands of Ukrainians to pile in there so that they can be concentrated and become easy targets for artillery, rockets, missiles, drones, and so forth. 1.00
00:06:40.000 There's very little direct fire between the two sides in the area because the Ukrainians have simply made themselves lucrative targets. 0.99
00:06:48.000 And they've taken tremendous casualties.
00:06:50.000 We think that they're up to 200,000 dead at this point.
00:06:54.000 So you've just got to take anything that comes out of the Western media and quite frankly dismiss it.
00:06:59.000 They're all lies trying to bolster the Ukrainian cause because Ukraine is on its last legs.
00:07:06.000 Now you have the muddy season.
00:07:08.000 And the muddy season followed a very, very short winter.
00:07:11.000 The Russians opted not to attack in the winter because they just didn't get the hard freeze all over Ukraine that they need for hundreds of thousands of troops to advance.
00:07:21.000 So they've decided to sit back and the Ukrainians continue to come to them, which makes it easy for them to kill the Ukrainians. 0.99
00:07:27.000 Ukrainians have become pop-up targets. 0.95
00:07:29.000 And at the same time, you've got this terrible mud. 0.93
00:07:32.000 And the black earth in Ukraine is 10 to 15 feet deep.
00:07:36.000 So you're talking about a mud pit in which tanks and trucks and anything, frankly, on the ground that moves will just sink to the bottom.
00:07:45.000 So there's nothing going to happen in terms of major offensive operations from the Russian side until the mud dries out.
00:07:52.000 That'll take another month or two.
00:07:55.000 So I said, I conveyed a similar opinion to what you just said to a neoliberal, neoconservative recently.
00:08:03.000 And he asked me this question, and I didn't have a great response.
00:08:06.000 He said, well, then how come there has not been more territorial gains by the Russians if the Russians are dominating?
00:08:12.000 How would you respond to that?
00:08:14.000 Well, the Russians control territory that constitutes 90% of gross national product in Ukraine.
00:08:22.000 They now control all the key resources, coal, iron, even agriculturally.
00:08:29.000 They've got some great territory, but most of it is manufacturing.
00:08:33.000 What Ukraine has for a scientific industrial base, anything that is worth holding on to, the Russians have already got. 0.99
00:08:41.000 They can take the rest of it when the ground dries out if that's what they decide to do.
00:08:46.000 And the area they're sitting on top of is traditionally Russian. 0.52
00:08:49.000 The population there is in Russian.
00:08:51.000 In fact, the Ukrainians have complained bitterly in Bakhmut about the fact that the Russian people there continually informing the Russians as to their location.
00:09:00.000 And one of the reasons the battles in the Donbass have taken so long to fight is that the Russians have declined to use their conventional weapons of mass destruction, the thermobaric warheads on their heavy rocket artillery.
00:09:13.000 If they did that, the battles would be over within a day or two.
00:09:17.000 But they've got thousands of Russian citizens, Russian speakers who live in Ukraine in those areas, and they're not willing to kill them.
00:09:25.000 So the Ukrainians have naturally tried to get close to the Russian speakers.
00:09:28.000 That hasn't worked out very well for them because they tell the Russians where they are. 0.99
00:09:32.000 The Russians come in. 1.00
00:09:33.000 It's long and arduous, but eventually they kill them and drive them out. 0.98
00:09:38.000 You don't hear that on the Western media. 0.97
00:09:41.000 That is for certain. 0.97
00:09:43.000 Well, you got to remember, Charlie Putin is evil. 0.98
00:09:45.000 Anything he does is evil. 1.00
00:09:47.000 Russians are bad. 1.00
00:09:48.000 It's all nonsense. 0.99
00:09:50.000 And when we finally get to the truth, we're going to find out that the only serious war crimes committed in this war were committed by Ukrainians against Russians and against the civil population.
00:10:00.000 I mean, the situation in Iran, in Ukraine, is really desperate.
00:10:05.000 I mean, you're now dragging in boys and women to fill the slots that young men formerly filled.
00:10:10.000 He's got very few reserves left of able-bodied men.
00:10:14.000 His generals keep telling him to pull out of this, but he keeps feeding the meat grinder.
00:10:19.000 And if you're willing to come and impale yourself on the Russian defenses, there's not much incentive for the Russians to move.
00:10:26.000 Why not wipe out the Ukrainian army, what's left of it? 0.97
00:10:30.000 By the time the spring rolls around, there'll be almost nothing left.
00:10:32.000 And I think that's where we are.
00:10:34.000 Now you're talking about blackouts everywhere, all over Ukraine.
00:10:38.000 The whole energy sector is being destroyed.
00:10:40.000 There's almost no air defense left, which means the Russians can use whatever they want, aircraft, missiles at will. 0.87
00:10:48.000 Colonel McGregor, the New York Times, the CIA via the New York Times says they didn't bomb the Nord Stream pipeline.
00:10:55.000 With all your experience, who do you think bombed the Nordstream pipeline?
00:10:59.000 Well, you know, I'm told that Santa Claus and the Good Fairy died in the same car crash that killed Santa Claus and a whole host of other fictional characters.
00:11:12.000 Look, the idea that a private boat, a yacht, sailed with very dangerous and volatile explosives into the Baltic and somehow or another magically found a spot and sent divers down on their own to do this damage.
00:11:32.000 And they were allegedly Ukrainian is absurd. 0.96
00:11:35.000 There is no Ukrainian naval capability.
00:11:38.000 There's no naval capability in the Baltic other than American or potentially British capability, with some exceptions with the Norwegians and Swedes that could do this.
00:11:48.000 We did it.
00:11:49.000 Cy Hirsch told the truth.
00:11:52.000 And I'm sure that 95% of everything he said was accurate.
00:11:56.000 He may have gotten some minor details wrong, but there's no question about it.
00:12:00.000 Sei Hirsch is right.
00:12:03.000 The intelligence agencies do this via the New York Times, where they say something.
00:12:08.000 Can you just kind of talk a little bit about this, where they say something where they try to mislead you, but technically, if in many years from now declassified documents come out, they can say that, well, we told you that it was a force close to Ukrainian forces, but it's the way that they could deny it.
00:12:08.000 They do this all the time.
00:12:26.000 I mean, they're just lying by other means.
00:12:29.000 Well, look, Charlie, everything that is being told to the American people and the Europeans in the West about the Ukraine war has been largely fictional.
00:12:38.000 There's very little truth in any of it.
00:12:41.000 I mean, that was the point that I was trying to make when we last spoke.
00:12:44.000 The Nordstrom problem is very much the same.
00:12:47.000 Remember that initially the answer was, oh, well, the Russians must have done it to themselves. 0.91
00:12:52.000 That was dropped.
00:12:53.000 That went nowhere.
00:12:55.000 And now it's the mysterious elements of the non-existent Ukrainian Navy in civilian attire went out and did it.
00:13:02.000 That's absurd nonsense.
00:13:04.000 The whole narrative for this war is nonsense.
00:13:07.000 People don't understand how much they've been lied to, but this is helpful.
00:13:11.000 The bad news is the Russians know the truth. 0.99
00:13:14.000 And we effectively executed or committed an act of war against Russia, but we also committed an act of war against Germany.
00:13:23.000 The German population is quietly enraged.
00:13:27.000 And it's going to be very difficult for the Germans to stay with us much longer, whether it's NATO or it's this phony war with Russia in Ukraine.
00:13:38.000 Everyone is sick of it in Europe.
00:13:40.000 The governments haven't changed yet, but when they go down, that'll be the end of all the nonsense.
00:13:46.000 Quietly enraged.
00:13:47.000 That usually doesn't go well when the German people get quietly enraged. 0.96
00:13:52.000 History tells us that.
00:13:53.000 So kind of in closing here, what is your prediction then of the next year of how things end up getting resolved in the Ukrainian-Russian dispute?
00:14:02.000 How do you see this playing out?
00:14:05.000 Well, the first thing, Charlie, is that what's happened with the Silicon Valley Bank is going to spread to other banks.
00:14:12.000 Our national sovereign debt is finally going to come crashing down on our heads.
00:14:17.000 We're going to watch our currency debased.
00:14:20.000 We'll see an attempt to ratchet interest rates down to come through this.
00:14:26.000 None of it's going to work.
00:14:28.000 We're going to be bankrupt.
00:14:29.000 We're going to have to default.
00:14:31.000 As this happens, it's going to be impossible for us to sustain the level of support that has kept Ukraine alive, at least to the Ukrainian forces fighting against the Russians.
00:14:42.000 That's why I think Xi's visit is important.
00:14:45.000 And remember that China, Russia, India, increasingly Brazil, all of the Central Asian states, parts of Southeast Asia are all exiting the financial system that we dominate and control.
00:15:00.000 Everyone is getting away from our debt.
00:15:02.000 And excuse me, these countries are now pegging their currency to gold.
00:15:10.000 And that's something we cannot do.
00:15:13.000 So we're about to enter into an entirely new world.
00:15:16.000 Within a year, the world that you see today won't exist anymore.
00:15:20.000 I just hope it's not a brave new world.
00:15:23.000 Colonel Douglas McGrether, thank you so much.
00:15:25.000 Sure.
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00:16:48.000 Is it a bailout?
00:16:49.000 Should we bail them out?
00:16:51.000 Well, presidential candidate and very successful entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy joins us to discuss his op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.
00:17:01.000 SVB doesn't deserve a taxpayer bailout.
00:17:04.000 Vivek, welcome back to the program.
00:17:06.000 Good to see you, Charlie.
00:17:07.000 How are you?
00:17:07.000 I'm excellent.
00:17:08.000 Thank you.
00:17:09.000 So, is it a bailout?
00:17:11.000 Some people say it's not even a bailout.
00:17:13.000 Just we have a lot of time here.
00:17:14.000 So, just explain your whole argument for our audience.
00:17:17.000 The floor is yours.
00:17:18.000 Thank you.
00:17:19.000 It's important to understand what's going on.
00:17:20.000 So, Silicon Valley Bank is a bank in Silicon Valley that has many tech startups and tech companies as its clients, as its depositors.
00:17:28.000 What they did is they took those deposits and they invested in some risky securities, including mortgage-backed securities that lose their value when interest rates go up.
00:17:37.000 But here's the other thing: their clients, the tech startups, also do more poorly when interest rates go up, which means they need more access to cash.
00:17:45.000 So, what happened in our country to fight inflation created by Biden?
00:17:48.000 Interest rates went up.
00:17:49.000 That was a double whammy for Silicon Valley Bank, and the bank crashed.
00:17:53.000 So, what happened last night is the federal government stepped in and said that if you're a depositor at Silicon Valley Bank, one of those tech companies, you still get your money above the level that you had previously said was the rules of the road: $250,000 to protect mom and pop.
00:18:08.000 No, you get it even if you're Roku, a tech company that had nearly half a billion dollars in there, even though you made a risk management decision to put way too much money in Silicon Valley Bank without diversifying it, you still get your money back because the government's going to help you do it.
00:18:23.000 That was the decision that was made last night.
00:18:24.000 So, before criticizing it or anything else, that's what happened.
00:18:27.000 Now, I think that that is crony capitalism.
00:18:30.000 It is absolutely a bailout.
00:18:31.000 They went out of their way.
00:18:32.000 Anytime somebody issues a press release, especially if it's the government that says this is not a bailout, that tells you all you need to know.
00:18:37.000 It is absolutely a bailout.
00:18:38.000 They changed the rules of the road after the fact to help people who took risks that they shouldn't have taken to still get that bailout.
00:18:46.000 And the thing that bothers me about it, there's a lot of things that bother me about it, Charlie, but the irony is Silicon Valley Bank itself was one of those banks that was lobbying for a really long time, saying that we get to take these risks, that other bigger banks don't, that we aren't having to be subject to the same capital requirements because we're not systemically important.
00:19:05.000 The government should and will never step in to save us.
00:19:07.000 That shouldn't do that.
00:19:08.000 That's why we at Silicon Valley Bank get to do it this way.
00:19:12.000 Well, guess what?
00:19:12.000 In their hour of need, not only Silicon Valley Bank, but all of their cronies in Silicon Valley, and I know this, I got calls from many of them over the weekend trying to influence what I was saying, said that, you know what, in their hour of need, yes, we are systemically important.
00:19:24.000 Janet Yellen, what does she do? 1.00
00:19:26.000 Declares an emergency status, declaring them to be systemically important last night, and actually backstops those depositors anyway.
00:19:33.000 I think it's an egregious risk failure if you're the CFO of a multi-billion dollar company to park that much money at Silicon Valley Bank without diversifying it.
00:19:42.000 Yet, what do we do now?
00:19:43.000 We're using the public.
00:19:44.000 We're using the government to backstop that and say, that's okay.
00:19:47.000 That bad behavior, do what we do in this country in our culture anymore, reward more bad behavior.
00:19:52.000 And what do you get?
00:19:53.000 Expect more of it in the future.
00:19:55.000 And then you hear this narrative that some people put up that it's, oh, it's about the workers.
00:19:58.000 It's about the workers of those startups.
00:20:00.000 Don't buy it for a second because actually, here's how it works.
00:20:04.000 Most of those are venture-backed technology startups in Silicon Valley.
00:20:08.000 That's 40,000 of them.
00:20:09.000 That's the customer base of Silicon Valley Bank.
00:20:12.000 Here's how it actually works.
00:20:14.000 Those business models today of those tech startups, they're the same as they were two weeks ago.
00:20:18.000 They haven't changed.
00:20:19.000 So if the business still works, if it's the same business, then their investors can put in more money, those venture investors that back them.
00:20:26.000 That's painful if you're a venture investor because that means more dilution.
00:20:30.000 That's painful if you're a CEO or a founder.
00:20:32.000 I've been one before.
00:20:33.000 It's painful because you dilute your ownership in the company.
00:20:35.000 But hey, that's the consequence of making a bad decision.
00:20:38.000 That's how capitalism works.
00:20:40.000 But what they're doing is they want to hide that fact.
00:20:42.000 And they're saying, no, no, no, this is just about the workers because we'd have to fire the workers, even though the business model still works because the CFO made a big mistake.
00:20:49.000 And I think they're trying every trick in the book, Charlie, where they said, no, this is about American innovation.
00:20:54.000 These are the people in Silicon Valley who shouldn't be punished.
00:20:56.000 I heard this plenty over the weekend.
00:20:58.000 It irritates me because people in East Palestine and Ohio, here something bad happens to them.
00:21:02.000 They don't get a bailout.
00:21:03.000 But the argument is that, no, no, no, this is, these are actually the innovators of the American economy.
00:21:07.000 So even if they made bad financial decisions, they deserve to be bailed out because they're depositors.
00:21:12.000 They tried that.
00:21:12.000 They said it's about the workers.
00:21:14.000 But at the end of the day, what is this really about?
00:21:16.000 Is this a bailout for Silicon Valley?
00:21:18.000 Not for Silicon Valley Bank, but for Silicon Valley itself, the tech startups that made the poor decision of putting way too much money with Silicon Valley Bank.
00:21:26.000 But it wasn't just a bad decision.
00:21:28.000 Many of them were privately rewarded for doing it because Silicon Valley Bank had special deals with some of those founders and companies that required them to put that money in Silicon Valley Bank.
00:21:38.000 And guess what?
00:21:38.000 The taxpayers, they were never going to participate in the upside of those deals.
00:21:42.000 But guess what?
00:21:42.000 The U.S. government now is still there to backstop them when things don't go well.
00:21:46.000 So I know that was a lot there, but I just think it was important to note what's going on.
00:21:49.000 So I hope that was helpful.
00:21:51.000 Do you think there is money then in Silicon Valley or elsewhere that they could extend to these depositors?
00:21:56.000 And just to make sure I understand your argument, your argument to Roku is tough luck, you're going to take a $499,725, $725,000 haircut.
00:22:10.000 Is that right?
00:22:11.000 Yeah, just about.
00:22:12.000 That's right.
00:22:12.000 Because we shouldn't have two sets of rules in this country.
00:22:15.000 We shouldn't have one for Roku or the Rokus of the world and one for everybody else.
00:22:19.000 Okay.
00:22:20.000 That's exactly the signal that we've now sent, though, because $250,000 was the cap, they say, for FDIC insurance.
00:22:26.000 Well, guess what?
00:22:27.000 You know what?
00:22:27.000 That cap no longer applies.
00:22:29.000 It's a different rule of the road if you're a special favored darling.
00:22:32.000 So I think that's a problem.
00:22:34.000 But I also think that there's a separate issue that I want to recognize, which is there is a loss of trust right now in banking.
00:22:40.000 And so no one wants a run on the bank across America.
00:22:44.000 And I think that what the federal I argued this in my Wall Street Journal op-ed is the thing that we should see done is strongly prospectively in advance, not changing the rules after the fact, but prospectively for everybody else.
00:22:55.000 If we want to raise that FDIC threshold, we should raise it, but we should raise it for everybody evenly.
00:23:00.000 We shouldn't do it selectively for people who are in the favored class of Silicon Valley Bank depositors.
00:23:05.000 So that's a bit of my view there.
00:23:06.000 I'm not rejecting the importance of protecting those banks.
00:23:09.000 The counter to your point would be: I agree with you ideologically, but what do we, how are we going to prevent bank runs then, right?
00:23:18.000 So if we don't make Roku whole, if we don't make Etsy whole, or I'm sure there's so many other companies that would be recognizable, then you could see another 20, 30, 40, 50 banks collapse this week because people start calling for their money to be withdrawn or transferred or put into other places.
00:23:37.000 What would be your response to that?
00:23:39.000 It's a good question, Charlie.
00:23:41.000 So I laid this out in my Wall Street Journal op-ed today too, because I think it's really important to be clear.
00:23:45.000 We can separate how I think we should have handled Silicon Valley Bank from prospectively how we need to handle everyone else.
00:23:52.000 So I think the Federal Reserve is a lender of last resort.
00:23:55.000 The Federal Reserve does a lot of things that it shouldn't do, but this is one of the few things that it should.
00:23:59.000 I think that you can raise the FDIC threshold temporarily during the conditions of fear of a bank run to a higher level as a way of averting that bank run, but do it prospectively in advance without tinkering with the rules after the fact.
00:24:11.000 And then here's the thing, Charlie, is we're actually seeing a lot of that fallout today.
00:24:15.000 So it looks like what Janet Yellen did last night didn't necessarily have the panacea effect.
00:24:20.000 And I think the way I would have done it, I'm running for president, right?
00:24:23.000 Here's how I would have handled it.
00:24:24.000 If I were president right now, I mean, this is going to be a different situation two years from now, but right now, the way I would have done it is said, if you made a bad decision in the case of Silicon Valley Bank, which was poorly mismanaged, no bailout, no amnesty, or else you're actually going to just create incentives for more of that bad behavior in the future.
00:24:41.000 But prospectively, we're changing the rules of the road for everyone together, not picking favorites after the fact, but everyone together to say that we'll temporarily raise the FDIC cap to a level significantly higher than $250,000 and use the Federal Reserve as a lender of last resort to shore up confidence.
00:24:59.000 In some ways, Charlie, I actually think they actually, we actually have the worst of all worlds where for years, Silicon Valley Bank and the federal government claimed that these would be the kinds of banks that you wouldn't save, that would be fine to let die if they make bad decisions, because they're not systemically important.
00:25:15.000 What did they do last night, Janet Yellen and the federal government?
00:25:18.000 They invoked an emergency rule, emergency authorization.
00:25:21.000 There's always emergency rules.
00:25:22.000 It's always emergency, right?
00:25:23.000 It's just fear mongering.
00:25:24.000 It's a fear mongering.
00:25:26.000 What they do is they effectively say that this is an emergency.
00:25:30.000 Do you think that inspires public confidence?
00:25:32.000 So this idea that you're actually preventing the bank run by doing some extraordinary thing to save a bunch of Silicon Valley tech startups that you said you were never going to save, not only are you not solving the problem, you might even be throwing kerosene on the underlying fire.
00:25:45.000 And that's a possibility that ironically, no one's actually considered.
00:25:48.000 And here's the other thing.
00:25:49.000 People in Silicon Valley, they had an incentive this weekend.
00:25:52.000 It was a little ugly to watch, to be honest with you, but I think it's important to see it honestly.
00:25:56.000 They had an incentive to create the risk of a bank run in the rest of the country.
00:26:01.000 Why?
00:26:02.000 Because the bigger that perceived risk was, the more likely it was that as of Sunday night, before Monday morning, before there's that Monday morning bank run on America, they got bailed out, those tech startups did.
00:26:12.000 So in some cynical way, kudos to them.
00:26:15.000 You know, they won the game of crony capitalism.
00:26:17.000 But at the end of the day, that's not good for the country.
00:26:20.000 And I think people need to get accustomed to understanding the incentives of the people they're hearing from, from Mark Cuban, from David Sachs.
00:26:27.000 I'm not impugning these guys personally.
00:26:29.000 I'm just saying that when you listen to them, you need to understand that their portfolio companies and maybe even their own portfolios are banked with Silicon Valley Bank.
00:26:37.000 And so the bigger perception there is for a national emergency, for a national bank run, the more likely it is they were going to get bailed out first.
00:26:45.000 And so I think that's a big part of what was going on here that people missed.
00:26:48.000 And I got plenty of calls over the weekend that really...
00:26:51.000 Without saying any names, do you think some of the leading voices are actually personally exposed here that they actually were above the threshold significantly and they stand to lose tens of millions of dollars?
00:27:01.000 Yeah, I think the way it plays out is more that they're portfolio companies.
00:27:04.000 So a lot of venture investors were pushing this, but their portfolio companies had exposure at Silicon Valley Bank.
00:27:09.000 Absolutely.
00:27:10.000 They're following self-interest, but I think people who are listening to them need to see through that.
00:27:14.000 And they had some skewed incentives this weekend to create the fear of a bank run in America, to fearmonger.
00:27:19.000 And, you know, it's similar.
00:27:21.000 I mean, there's some parallels.
00:27:22.000 This is a little abstract, but even to the Ukraine situation, the way you deter Russia isn't by doing it directly, but by doing it via Ukraine.
00:27:28.000 Here, the way you save the system is by saving Silicon Valley Bank rather than just focusing on the system.
00:27:33.000 It's a form of argument you see often these days, Charlie.
00:27:35.000 I want to explore this because I also am curious, did it go through, did we exhaust every private option to potentially purchase Silicon Valley Bank?
00:27:48.000 Look, it is time to consider a rollover of that 401k into an IRA.
00:27:54.000 The investment world is completely different in 2023, and you cannot do the same thing as last year.
00:27:59.000 Woke companies are aggressively implementing ESG.
00:28:04.000 Interest rates are going up and inflation is still lingering.
00:28:06.000 If you have over $150,000, now is the time to move your money to a biblical responsible investing strategy with my friends at PAX Financial Group.
00:28:14.000 Here's how you can connect with PAX.
00:28:16.000 Text Charlie to the number 74868.
00:28:19.000 That's it.
00:28:19.000 Just take out your phone.
00:28:20.000 Text Charlie, C-H-A-R-L-I-E to 74868.
00:28:28.000 So take out your phone, text Charlie to number 74868 for biblical responsible investing.
00:28:35.000 Text Charlie to 74868.
00:28:40.000 Give us an update.
00:28:41.000 How is it running for president of the United States?
00:28:43.000 What do you see and what are you hearing?
00:28:44.000 It's a lot of fun, actually.
00:28:45.000 I'm enjoying engaging in open debate across the board.
00:28:48.000 One of the things I've enjoyed doing is also, and I think it's going to be something I'm going to double down on this campaign, Charlie, is I'm going to debate the left in their own home turf.
00:28:55.000 I mean, I've gone on CNN.
00:28:56.000 I've gone on CNBC.
00:28:57.000 I think we need more of that in this country.
00:28:59.000 And I think the good news is what I've discovered is we're able to win.
00:29:02.000 You take the debate with reason and logic.
00:29:04.000 And so I'm looking to be an ambassador to actually advance that agenda.
00:29:04.000 We win every time.
00:29:08.000 I'd say the disappointing part about this is just the corruption that I see in the entire process.
00:29:12.000 It's been eye-opening coming in as an outsider.
00:29:14.000 I mean, I'm going in to fight corruption in the federal government.
00:29:17.000 I've been one of the only candidates to actually talk about express ways of how you actually gut, fire, constitutionally take the guts out of the federal administrative state and bureaucracy.
00:29:27.000 But the eye-opening part is, you know what, it starts at home.
00:29:30.000 I mean, the RNC, I've called on Ronna McDaniel how many times to just clearly state the rules of the debate. 0.94
00:29:35.000 She says she wants a loyalty pledge.
00:29:36.000 Well, if you want a loyalty pledge, how about just saying what the rules are for actually making the debate and how you're going to conduct it?
00:29:41.000 You know, this idea of a consultant who calls me and, you know, it's a broken system is the answer.
00:29:46.000 I think that is to be commended.
00:29:48.000 Check out Vivek's website.
00:29:49.000 He's gaining a lot of momentum.
00:29:52.000 He's a great guy.
00:29:53.000 Now, Vivek, one of the kind of pillars of your presidential campaign is to try and push back against all these woke idea pathogens.
00:30:03.000 I mentioned on Friday that Silicon Valley Bank seemed very interested and invested in DEI programs and all this other stuff.
00:30:13.000 I didn't say that was the only reason, but I said I venture to guess that it played into the culture and the prioritization of things that don't matter over things that do matter.
00:30:23.000 Do you think that's fair here, Vivek?
00:30:25.000 Can you talk about how Silicon Valley Bank was very invested in DEI and Pride Month?
00:30:31.000 Sure.
00:30:32.000 And now they don't have a company anymore.
00:30:34.000 Sure.
00:30:34.000 And I call it like I see it, Charlie.
00:30:36.000 And I've been, as you know, no greater opponent of woke capitalism in America in the last few years than me.
00:30:41.000 But I'm not going to claim that's the essence of the story.
00:30:43.000 It was what we talked about before, but it's a side story that matters.
00:30:46.000 So their head of risk management out of the UK was issuing her own lived experience as a queer person of color without actually just how about focusing on risk management if that's your function at a bank. 0.53
00:30:56.000 And risk management was actually a big failure at this company.
00:30:59.000 But it runs deeper than that, Charlie.
00:31:00.000 People miss this.
00:31:01.000 It's not just the hypocrisy of it or the distraction factor.
00:31:04.000 It's part of the game itself.
00:31:05.000 So they made a commitment last year of $5 billion.
00:31:09.000 You don't think about that?
00:31:10.000 That's a staggering number.
00:31:11.000 $5 billion to sustainable finance and green initiatives, to literally their words, not mine, to ensure for a healthier planet.
00:31:19.000 How about a healthier balance sheet instead of focusing on a healthier planet?
00:31:23.000 You would say that in retrospect, but it's part of the game because it's virtue signaling to this administration.
00:31:28.000 This was just last year.
00:31:29.000 And what do they do in their hour of need?
00:31:31.000 Who do they depend on?
00:31:32.000 They depend on, guess what? the current administration to show up and help.
00:31:36.000 And in some ways, you could say the gambit paid off because they're bailing out the depositors of that bank and the culture that created that ESG virtue signaling.
00:31:44.000 So in a certain way, ironically, Charlie, because of the bailout of those depositors of those businesses, tech companies that bank there that shouldn't have, you know what?
00:31:52.000 They were vindicated because that virtue signaling has a role to play in the way the whole charade works out.
00:31:57.000 Yeah, it's an interesting point you make here because I do have a heart for people that are running virtuous small businesses and really trying to make it.
00:32:07.000 But the picture that you're painting, and I want to make sure I'm understanding this accurately, is that Silicon Valley was also a major underwriter of these highly speculative, incredibly woke, sometimes financially risky companies.
00:32:23.000 And when people like Rokana and others go on and say, you know, you're going to see so many small businesses and entrepreneurs fold, that's not, it's not exactly a true picture.
00:32:33.000 These are people that also have venture funding and they didn't want to overly dilute themselves, right?
00:32:39.000 And so then can you talk about that for a second?
00:32:42.000 Yeah, so they're now using the lexicon.
00:32:44.000 I just had a debate with somebody else on a different podcast on this with, you know, David Sachs, who's a venture capitalist and a good guy, but very self-interested lens that I think affects the way that they analyze this problem.
00:32:54.000 These are not the small businesses that most people think about when they think about American small business.
00:32:58.000 These are venture-backed tech startups.
00:33:00.000 You look at their business plans.
00:33:01.000 It's how they get to be a trillion-dollar company and make billions of dollars for themselves.
00:33:05.000 But now claiming, hey, it's just small business status.
00:33:08.000 If I put, why were they, why were they able to put?
00:33:11.000 Let me ask you this, these small businesses, tens of millions of dollars, or even in certain cases, hundreds of millions of dollars in Silicon Valley Bank.
00:33:18.000 The answer is it's not the kind of small business that they're using as the connotation to argue for now.
00:33:23.000 And you know what?
00:33:24.000 If they made a bad decision, many of those are worthy businesses.
00:33:27.000 They're innovative businesses.
00:33:28.000 I'm not knocking the business models.
00:33:29.000 I'm a fan of innovation in this country, including venture-backed innovation.
00:33:33.000 But when you make that mistake and you have a capital hole, then your investors or those business models, if they really work, you can attract equity capital from someone else.
00:33:41.000 But you know what happens when someone else puts in equity capital to your company?
00:33:45.000 Yes, you get diluted.
00:33:46.000 So that's that's unfortunate.
00:33:48.000 These founders would rather have debt than actually dilute their shares.
00:33:53.000 Exactly.
00:33:53.000 And Silicon Valley Bank was one of the unique institutions that provided venture debt to those founders, which allowed them to preserve motor ownership.
00:34:01.000 There you go.
00:34:01.000 But part of the deal is that they bank with Silicon Valley.
00:34:04.000 So that's the part that people haven't really seen here.
00:34:06.000 Yeah.
00:34:06.000 And so I guess the last question is, was this actually ever opened up for a private actor to come in?
00:34:12.000 Because again, if some of these are really phenomenal decisions, wow, okay, you're doing a great job here.
00:34:18.000 You got 30 employees and you were appropriately underwritten.
00:34:22.000 I mean, JP Morgan could have come in and said, we're going to go buy your best 100, right?
00:34:27.000 I mean, was this even open up for public auction?
00:34:29.000 The federal government said, we don't even want to entertain that.
00:34:31.000 We're just going to invest in those companies.
00:34:33.000 With a business.
00:34:34.000 You could invest in those companies.
00:34:35.000 But it was fearmongering.
00:34:37.000 It was fearmongering over the week and said, there's going to be a bank run on America unless Silicon Valley Bank specifically is bailed out by Sunday night before Monday market opens.
00:34:44.000 Well, that's what they ended up getting in the end because that's a lot easier of a way out to just say, hey, I'm the CFO of Roku.
00:34:50.000 I park half a billion dollars or nearly that in one bank, unstable bank, Silicon Valley Bank.
00:34:56.000 Hey, I get vindicated.
00:34:57.000 That's a lot easier than selling shares and diluting yourself.
00:35:00.000 And so, you know, the game was played and unfortunately they won.
00:35:03.000 Got to run Vivek Ramaswamy.
00:35:04.000 Check out his website.
00:35:05.000 He's gaining a lot of momentum.
00:35:06.000 Vivek, appreciate it.
00:35:07.000 Thanks so much.
00:35:08.000 Thank you.
00:35:09.000 Thanks so much for listening.
00:35:10.000 Everybody, email us your thoughts.
00:35:11.000 As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:35:13.000 Thanks so much for listening and God bless.
00:35:18.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.