00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:09.000All right, welcome to hour two of the Charlie Kirk Show is underway, and we are turning our sights on Iran.
00:01:16.000There has been, I would say, diversion.
00:01:22.000And we're talking obviously about whether or not Trump is going to take kinetic military action, fully support economic, moral support of the Iranian people, all that stuff.
00:01:32.000There's a huge question about military action.
00:01:35.000To help us unpack this is Maya Tusi, I hope I got that approximately correct, founder of Tussi TV, based out of London.
00:01:47.000So there's multiple questions swirling right now about the Iranian question if you're an American, right?
00:01:53.000Will President Trump take action militarily to support the independence movement that is obviously pouring over into the streets?
00:02:00.000But there's also a question about how brutal has the regime crackdown on protesters really become.
00:02:07.000I've seen some reports quote a number of 2,500 dead, which is already extraordinary, by the way.
00:02:12.000I've seen other reports that it's 12,000.
00:02:14.000Do you have any insight on what the accurate figure is?
00:02:17.000Yeah, so you can't really take any of these because in the past, we've had a lot of uprisings and crackdowns.
00:02:24.000I've had hundreds and hundreds, sometimes over a thousand when it comes to the massacre.
00:02:29.000But obviously, the official figures that the mainstream media keep going with is 1,000, sometimes 600.
00:02:36.000On the ground, all the information that we have from the hospitals and the whistleblowers obviously goes to the idea that it's thousands.
00:02:46.000There was a leak from the inner circle of Al-Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, a few days ago, and the documents signed by him, the direct order, and they believe they themselves that it was about 12,000.
00:02:59.000Now, there are also unofficial figures that's just come out that is closer to 20,000.
00:03:03.000But as President Trump said, even one is enough.
00:03:24.000Is there a, is there a, I mean, it's an awkward question to ask, but certainly when you're dealing with Iran that has a history of squashing uprisings, often violently with lethal force, this is not necessarily something new, but this is new because of the scale and the scope and just how widespread these protests have become in Iran.
00:03:44.000Why don't you take us into that psychology about what is driving these protests?
00:03:52.000And why does this maybe portend an actual change in leadership in Iran?
00:03:57.000Yeah, so firstly, when it comes to any potential action by the US and President Trump, it's not really just about the scale of the uprising, which I'll get into.
00:04:06.000It's also about how dangerous the Islamic Republic has become to the world, including to President Trump directly, because they tried to assassinate him a couple of times over the last couple of years.
00:04:15.000The reality of the situation is that this uprising was obviously building up for a very long time.
00:04:25.000And of course, there's been massive crackdowns because the regime, as the Iranians would call them, the Islamic occupation regime, don't really care.
00:04:34.000But this time round, the regime is extremely weak.
00:04:38.000The trigger point was when the currency in Iran collapsed.
00:04:41.000And that was over two weeks ago, almost three weeks ago.
00:04:44.000And of course, there's a lack of water, lack of electricity, a lack of money, lack of jobs, and lack of recognition on the international stage.
00:04:55.000This time around, it wasn't just anger.
00:04:58.000They are very, very motivated and they know they've got nothing else to lose.
00:05:02.000Usually in the past, when you kill a few hundred people, people would go home, they get scared.
00:05:06.000But after thousands have been massacred, people continue to stay out because they also finally have a unifying leader in the crown prince, Vazda Pahlavi.
00:05:14.000And President Trump until now has had their backs, which has really helped people on the ground.
00:05:21.000But they definitely need support as soon as possible.
00:05:24.000So is there an ideological platform that unites these people other than wanting to overthrow the current government?
00:05:32.000Like, do we have, let's just be right, are there Islamists who also oppose the government?
00:05:37.000And also, are there steps the government could take to try to mollify this short of total collapse?
00:05:44.000Like, I guess, apparently, I learned recently there actually is a council of clerics that could, for lack of a better term, fire the Ayatollah and say, there's a new one.
00:05:55.000So people keep comparing it to Gorbachev and Soviet Union.
00:05:58.000It's very, very different because this is a cult of personality behind one figurehead.
00:06:03.000And the reality is they basically pretended to do what you just said, like reforming from within, things like that over the last few uprisings.
00:06:12.000People know that this is an occupation since 1979.
00:06:15.000There was a paramilitary occupation that basically resulted thanks to Jimmy Carter, US Democrats, MI6, the Fifth Republic in France, that basically decided, let's get behind the Ayatollahs because they were scared that the Soviet Union in the middle of Cold War are going to take over Iran in the 70s.
00:06:33.000So they thought, let's back these guys.
00:06:35.000They seem to be stupid enough that they can be controlled as puppets.
00:06:38.000That backfired because the next day the Islamists went on and chanted death to America.
00:06:42.000Right now, your question about what, you know, in terms of power vacuum or who is involved, well, Iran is very different to countries like Libya or Iraq or Syria.
00:06:52.000There are no extremist groups in that sense.
00:06:54.000There is no vacuum because people finally are united behind one concept.
00:06:59.000Even if not necessarily the crown prince, which it is true, they are all united behind the original flag of Iran, the history, the heritage.
00:07:09.000It's more similar to the situation in Poland.
00:07:11.000After the National Socialists in Germany got kicked out, and then again, after the communists from the Soviet Union got kicked out, Poland said, we just got our country back.
00:07:55.000Well, what about another concern I know we've seen is America's repeatedly had some involvement in the Middle East where you topple a government and then our own government is surprised to learn, oh, wait, there's a lot of ethnic grievances in this society.
00:08:27.000Is there any risk of a crack up along those lines if there's a power vacuum?
00:08:32.000So this was a worry a couple of decades ago.
00:08:35.000In fact, under the Islamic Republic, these different ethnic groups and regional groups were essentially being divided.
00:08:42.000But over the last few years, the movement against the Islamic Republic has actually united them.
00:08:47.000You now have the Persian Iranians, so that's my ethnicity.
00:08:50.000We've got the Kurdish Iranians, Azeris, and all the others.
00:08:52.000Even the Kurds in Iran, compared to the Kurds in Turkey or other places, they are actually calling for a united Iran and they're calling for the Crown Prince to return.
00:09:00.000So all these other ethnic groups and other religious groups are getting together.
00:09:04.000So ironically, the IRGC have united them.
00:09:07.000But again, as I mentioned, it's very different to the situation in Iraq.
00:09:11.000But it's the liberal mainstream media that are not helping the situation.
00:09:14.000They continue to spread this propaganda.
00:09:17.000For example, the CNN and many others have been calling it economic protests when it's an actual uprising.
00:09:23.000They're literally calling for the overthrow of the regime.
00:09:26.000But at least they're calling it something compared to certain other people, the self-appointed queens of expertise, like Candace Owens, who are saying that there are no protests.
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00:12:52.000Could we get Islamist parties running in the election who would then act on his behalf?
00:12:56.000Or is there any is there a platform that exists other than reinstall this old monarch?
00:13:02.000Well, that's a very good question, actually, because their propaganda has been for decades, and especially recently, that, oh, you can't bring back the king because that's an absolute monarchy.
00:13:15.000It works in Britain, more modern Britain, technically, a constitutional monarchy and actually having parliamentary democracy.
00:13:22.000And it's going to work in Iran because these two countries have had the history and the heritage.
00:13:27.000If I were to create a new country from scratch, I would probably create more of an American model with the constitution and everything else because the Republic in America has the good checks and balances.
00:13:36.000But in those cultures, constitutional monarchy works.
00:13:38.000And your question is actually very important because what is the limit?
00:13:42.000Because the crown prince, his values are liberal democracy and of course freedom and free speech.
00:13:48.000Does there have to be a line when it comes to certain groups or ideologies being restricted?
00:13:56.000So my personal opinion is that it's a very gray area because yes, my instinct would say, yeah, probably ban the radical communists and ban Islamists, radical Islamists from having a party, but then doesn't that create a bigger problem in terms of underground movements?
00:14:11.000But I don't really think there's any problem overall in the cultures like Iran.
00:14:16.000They don't really have Islamist problems and they don't really have communist problems.
00:14:20.000They are socialists like any other country.
00:14:22.000And generally speaking, the culture, obviously around 30% of Iran are Muslim, practicing Muslim, and they're all Shia.
00:14:29.000They're not necessarily ISIS al-Qaeda.
00:14:31.000Apologies for the connection, by the way.
00:14:36.000But I think if you're going to go with liberal democracy, you're just going to have to allow people to have the freedom to set up their parties and basically have the checks and balances to ensure that the monarch prevents anybody from becoming a tyrant.
00:14:49.000So Myra Tussi, founder of Tusi TV, thank you again.
00:14:52.000This has been a fascinating discussion.
00:14:55.000I'm just going to preface it at the top.
00:14:57.000So we had Elika LeBon on, another Iranian, perhaps you know her, and she stated to us that the protests will be successful only with outside intervention.
00:15:11.000It felt like a direct pitch for American intervention.
00:15:24.000And forgive me if I have not heard this story before, and it feels like we perhaps there is a propaganda or a messaging campaign going on that wants to sort of, you know, lead us down the path of another foreign intervention.
00:15:38.000Now, I've heard you say that this is different.
00:15:55.000How am I to interpret these signals, though, that we are perhaps getting dogwalked into another foreign conflict in the Middle East when we have our own problems here at home?
00:16:03.000And what would your ask of the United States be?
00:16:07.000Yes, well, the Americans should put America first, and you should not really get dragged into different walls.
00:16:13.000And as I said, I'm not advocating for the U.S. troops to put boots on the ground.
00:16:23.000On the one hand, on a more kind of personal emotional level, I would say, in my own subjective opinion, well, the U.S. government in 1979 with Jimmy Carter caused this chaos, not necessarily just for the Iranians, for themselves and for the region.
00:16:40.000It would be nice if you could fix it for yourself, at least.
00:16:43.000But you don't have to directly do regime change because the people are ready to finish the job.
00:16:48.000Right now, the priority is to stop the killings and paralyze the regime.
00:16:52.000And the hope is that those inside the Iranian military who are saying they are defecting, they can defect and they can continue and finish the revolution.
00:18:12.000He has to actually stand on trial, just like the National Socialists did in Germany.
00:18:17.000But if you paralyze the actual IRGC, we believe that there are people in the military, the actual military, the army of Iran, who are ready to take control until the crown prince returns to his country and then they can have a referendum on their future constitution.
00:18:35.000I mean, you know, listen, the president, to your point, has been presented a suite of options from diplomatic options to military options.
00:18:42.000And listen, we stand with the people of Iran.
00:18:44.000We would love to correct the wrong of 1979 and have an Iran that we can work with and that was welcomed back into the international community.
00:18:51.000Those things are all, we're completely in agreement.
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00:21:34.000As we were talking, a lot of people don't know the small business administration is essentially a public-private partnership.
00:21:40.000We're not giving grants out to small businesses.
00:21:43.000We're providing a government guarantee on commercial loans for your local community banker to have the incentive to make that loan to a startup business to help that community have flourishing small businesses, have an ecosystem of startups and expansion.
00:22:00.000And that goes into even manufacturing.
00:22:02.000Most manufacturers in America meet the small business threshold.
00:22:07.000Well, it depends on your industry, but for manufacturing, you can have up to 1,500 employees as long as you're not over the net worth level.
00:22:16.000And that's why 98% of America's manufacturers qualify as small businesses.
00:22:21.000I just came from a great small business manufacturing startup in Tempe, just down the road.
00:23:11.000The trade deficit has reached its lowest level in nearly two decades, while our exports hit a record high of $302 billion.
00:23:18.000So President Trump's fair trade policy is restoring America's industrial dominance and strike.
00:23:22.000So obviously we have much further to go.
00:23:26.000But, you know, and then we've got this tariff question that is looming.
00:23:29.000The Supreme Court's going to rule on that.
00:23:32.000I do believe even just we had John Carney on, Breitbart Economics editor there saying that even if the Supreme Court rules against us, there's other levels, levers the Trump administration could pull to still, you know, enact tariffs because they are powerful.
00:23:48.000How have you seen those play out with small businesses?
00:23:50.000Because, you know, some small businesses are probably going to see a negative impact, but a lot are going to see a positive impact.
00:23:57.000I mean, I've crossed this country from Alaska to Maine, walking factory floors, talking to builders, entrepreneurs.
00:24:05.000Look, when you hear the word tariff, think fair trade.
00:24:08.000And that's what this country has not had.
00:24:11.000And I am just grateful for President Trump for his courage and his vision to believe in American industry to help us reindustrialize.
00:24:20.000And you look at every part of the Trump economic agenda from tax cuts to deregulation to generating a skilled workforce and those incentives to get back in the workforce.
00:24:30.000And you see the building of this boom on top of the $18 trillion coming in.
00:24:35.000So look, tariffs are just one piece of it, but they're an important piece that we haven't had.
00:24:40.000And everyone forgets that Biden had a rose garden ceremony adding tariffs to China during his term that the Democrats never put.
00:24:47.000It felt like this crazy scenario where America was just willing to get fleeced in countless ways because we had almost like this guilt about being the richest, most powerful nation.
00:24:59.000So we didn't feel that we had the moral standing to exert our force to benefit our own people.
00:25:05.000So we just let everybody else have trade barriers to us.
00:25:08.000We let everybody else bilk off the American military.
00:25:11.000And President Trump is rebalancing those relationships.
00:25:14.000I've been completely in favor of President Trump's tariff agenda from the start.
00:25:19.000I think, Blake, you've had some questions.
00:25:21.000This is typically the yin and yang that we play here on the show.
00:25:40.000But then, so SBA is this engine sort of behind the scenes, providing capital, taking some of the risk out of these capital arrangements with riskier small business startups.
00:25:52.000But then there's this other side of it that you've inherited, where there is fraud that you are uncovering.
00:25:57.000Now, we're talking about Somali fraud.
00:25:59.000We're talking about foreigners coming in, again, bilking off the system.
00:26:34.000That is with a T. We've seen a lot of Bs floating around with Somali fraud, $9, $19 billion, whatever the number that is.
00:26:40.000And to give a number on suspected fraud specifically, their internal watch, like in 2023, so this is Biden era, they said about estimated $200 billion in potential fraud with the PPP loans.
00:27:12.000And that's what we did when it came to Minnesota.
00:27:14.000As soon as that came on the radar, I asked the team to dig through the Minnesota loans.
00:27:18.000They immediately found about 7,000 borrowers, 400 million in fraudulent loans in Minnesota alone.
00:27:26.000That tells you that there are billions and billions out the door, fraudulently to thousands that should never touch SBA services again, and they need to be referred to the DOJ, and that's what we're doing.
00:27:36.000Are these mostly Somali networks, or is it kind of across the board?
00:27:42.000We're investigating further to see how systemic it is because the level of fraud is almost organized.
00:27:50.000And I've called it organized crime in some cases.
00:27:53.000And we need to look across all government programs and see where people are systemically defrauding the government.
00:27:58.000The thing that stands out about this, which is if you or I were to say, okay, I want to scam Medicaid, and you just went to 20 people we know and said, hey, I have an idea to scam Medicaid.
00:28:16.000Well, and you have some communities that we've voluntarily brought into our country where that's just not the natural reaction, where they'll either 100% say nothing or a lot of them will help you.
00:28:26.000Well, because they don't feel culturally tied or their heritage is not tied to the proud culture.
00:28:32.000It's wrong to scam your cousin or your brother, but not to scam the government.
00:28:35.000And to your point, I totally agree that it is organized because, you know, we think of organized crime as the Italian mafia.
00:29:41.000We're going to start cracking down on this very systemically ourselves because we can't trust the states to do it, particularly those like California, Illinois, Minnesota, and others who've shown a willful disdain for taxpayer dollars.
00:29:53.000And by the way, small businesses are some of the biggest taxpayers.
00:29:56.000And so that's part of my advocacy is to say, I'm going to make sure these programs are going to deserving job creators on Main Street.
00:30:03.000Yeah, and it's like you know them when you see them.
00:30:06.000You know the real deal companies that should be getting the backing of the SBA.
00:30:10.000And here's President Trump just having your back here.
00:30:20.000We have also suspended nearly 8,000 SBA loans, small business association loans to suspected scammers in Minnesota, of which there are many.
00:30:47.000You can't have corruption on a scale that nobody's ever seen before.
00:30:50.000And you're sitting as a governor and you don't know what's going on.
00:30:53.000It's impossible, even though he's a stupid guy.
00:30:56.000It's a really important, you know, I love this about President Trump, that he gets, his instincts are almost always right.
00:31:03.000So when you guys at the SBA are working on rooting out this fraud, auditing it, this task force, have you gotten any cooperation from the state of Minnesota?
00:31:30.000And we're going to continue to do it because, first of all, it's right for the taxpayers.
00:31:34.000And second of all, it's creating an incentive system when it goes unchecked to do it even more.
00:31:40.000So imagine that if 20%, as Treasury Secretary Besant said, 20% of all these programs are fraudulent, someday it could become 30% of an even larger number because these programs continue to grow.
00:31:51.000Well, in COVID, really, I mean, Blake, you know, calling me the normie.
00:31:55.000Blake was actually the guy that during some of the aftermath of COVID and these loans that went out and these scam artists that would set up like a transportation company.
00:32:04.000And it was like, I mean, this became a meme online because you could all spot it, how it was, you know, what it was, what it looked like.
00:32:11.000You could find obvious scam businesses.
00:32:13.000One employee very recently created and consulting a Learing Center.
00:32:20.000Yeah, and so COVID unleashed a lot of this.
00:32:22.000And I think you're completely right, Administrator Leffler, Kelly, that when you do not police this, you're only going to incentivize the creation of more and more and more fraud.
00:32:33.000Well, and that's our commitment to small businesses and taxpayers is that we're just getting started.
00:34:23.000Blake has a really good question, though, about a certain variety of loans.
00:34:27.000So, and other, yeah, another part of your portfolio.
00:34:30.000So there is, it's not super famous, but it's called a 8A certification.
00:34:36.000It needs basically being certified as a disadvantaged firm.
00:34:42.000Some would say minority-owned, but it can also be women-owned or certain other groupings.
00:34:46.000And it makes you eligible for favorable federal treatment.
00:34:50.000And it's getting noticed by a lot of people, especially online.
00:34:53.000This is a vector the federal government has used for, let's just call it, DEI, or as we say on the show, anti-white discrimination, anti-white male discrimination.
00:35:01.000And my understanding is this does still exist within the SBA.
00:35:05.000So could you talk to us a bit about that?
00:35:08.000Now, let's just level set on what small business is.
00:35:10.000It makes up 99% of all businesses in this country.
00:35:13.000And under President Trump, we have a record 36 million.
00:35:16.000There's a group of small businesses that are under statute entitled to about 5% statutorily of federal contracting.
00:35:26.000So small businesses that are socially and economically disadvantaged.
00:35:29.000Well, under Biden, they tripled that target to 15%, and it created a big vacuum for veteran-owned businesses to get federal contracts.
00:35:38.000Well, what we found in that was it was a front for shell and pass-through companies to put someone in front of the business and say that they were a small business, that they were socially and economically, they self-certified, that they were disadvantaged.
00:35:52.000And then they were able to get these huge contracts.
00:35:54.000Now, when Kamala was searching out root causes, she put of immigration, illegal immigration, she put a $700 million contract out, and it ended up coming through bribery.
00:36:07.000The DOJ is investigating it through an ADA program.
00:36:10.000Now, that's not a small business that does a $700 million contract.
00:36:14.000I remember, I think when that hurricane hit Puerto Rico a decade ago, there was an issue where they hired like a one, it was a, I think a black woman owned a company to supply like 50,000 meals to the island, and that was a disaster.
00:36:26.000And I have, I've personally had friends who have set up a business to get a government contract where they just cut in a guy who was part Native American or something and said, you get 51% of it.
00:38:32.000Well, I know there's been a lot of, like, there's a lot of weird theories about conspiracies around Palantir.
00:38:37.000Basically, what Palantir is, as far as I understand, send us your emails, freedom at charliekirk.com if you think I'm wrong.
00:38:43.000It's basically getting databases to talk to one another.
00:38:46.000So you cross-reference different agencies and what they know, and you can root out fraud that way, which seems very common sense to me.
00:38:52.000I actually independently brought on Palantir because this scale of the fraud that we're looking at is so vital that we use AI, that we are data-driven in our analytics, and then we have this support externally because there's a lot of resistance internally to right-sizing the federal government and tracking down fraud.
00:40:03.000Like I said, I just came from a construction site, hard hats and everything.
00:40:07.000These are the people who make this country great, and we've got to support them and get big government out of the way and get back to supporting free enterprise.
00:40:15.000Well, ridding it of this DEI stuff, this anti-white garbage, ridding of the fraud.
00:40:30.000We are going to hold people accountable.
00:40:33.000We're going to press this to the full extent possible for American taxpayers, for American families.
00:40:41.000The GAO, the general accounting office, believes that there is somewhere between $300 and $600 billion of annual fraud, roughly 10% of government spending, that disappears due to fraud.
00:40:55.000If we can recapture that, that is 1% to 2% of GDP.
00:41:01.000So, Kelly, let's end this where Scott ended this.
00:41:38.000Yeah, and all the data centers, the AI, the crypto, the small businesses.
00:41:42.000And by the way, if you're deploying capital more efficiently to better operators and you're getting rid of this DEI garbage, you're going to end up getting a bigger multiplier, forced multiplier on the backside.
00:41:53.000It's going to have a bigger economic impact.