The Charlie Kirk Show - The Mideast Gas Fire + The NYC Dumpster Fire

00:00:03.000 My name is Charlie Kirk.

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00:01:09.000 All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:11.000 It's March 19th, 2026.

00:01:14.000 We got to get right into this because a breaking news story over the evening was about a place I'd never heard of called South Pars Gas Field in Iran.

00:01:24.000 And here to help make some sense of it, right at the top is going to be Eric Bowling, who is an expert when it comes to these types of things.

00:01:31.000 Welcome to the show, Eric.

00:01:32.000 Hey, thanks, Andre.

00:01:33.000 Hey, Blake, what's going on, guys?

00:01:35.000 So let me just read part of Trump's truth, and we're going to get your analysis on this.

00:01:40.000 So he says, Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars Gas Field in Iran.

00:01:50.000 A relatively small section of the hole has been hit.

00:01:52.000 The United States knew nothing about this particular attack.

00:01:56.000 And the country of Qatar, Qatar, was in no way, shape, or form involved with it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen.

00:02:03.000 All right.

00:02:04.000 So this has now been, I would say, contradicted by Israeli officials that says actually the U.S. did know about it.

00:02:13.000 And there's a little bit of back and forth on that.

00:02:14.000 We're not sure what to make of this at this point.

00:02:18.000 I'm loath to call President Trump a liar.

00:02:21.000 So something's going on here.

00:02:22.000 Eric, do you have any insight as to what the true story here is?

00:02:26.000 Well, Andrew, I've been doing this for nearly 40 years.

00:02:29.000 The oil, I've been through Gulf Wars, I've been through massive geopolitical stresses in the Middle East.

00:02:34.000 And when it involves a producing country or countries in the Middle East, oil is always going to be at the center of it.

00:02:40.000 I'm positive, I know Pete Hex said very well, I'm positive.

00:02:44.000 Trump knew that any sort of attack on Iranian oil infrastructure would cause prices here in the United States to spike even further.

00:02:55.000 Any attack in the Middle East is going to do it. 1.00

00:02:56.000 But when you hit the oil infrastructure, it's a big mistake.

00:03:00.000 I doubt Trump would have sanctioned hitting an oil infrastructure in Iran.

00:03:05.000 In fact, Besson Today came out and said, look, we may even allow Iranian ships to navigate the Strait of Hormuz.

00:03:13.000 Now, look, this is a couple days after the fact.

00:03:18.000 However, the price shock that's happening is because you're talking about Iranian oil.

00:03:23.000 Iranians produced 3 million barrels of oil.

00:03:25.000 And what they did in response to the Israeli attacks is they started hitting other Gulf state oil platforms, refineries, et cetera.

00:03:34.000 And this is all leading to the nervousness, the jitteriness of the energy markets, driving prices up.

00:03:39.000 We're going to hit $4 a gallon probably over the weekend.

00:03:42.000 We may go to five.

00:03:44.000 If this continues, we could actually go to $5 a gallon.

00:03:46.000 Trump, he's a good businessman, but he's also a good economist in his mind.

00:03:52.000 I think he probably saw the effect of hitting those oil infrastructures in Iran was a bad idea.

00:03:57.000 And I tell you what happened just hours ago.

00:03:59.000 Iran turned around and either targeted, certainly hit the Israeli refinery, with the biggest refinery in Israel as a retaliatory measure.

00:04:09.000 Now they're saying it may be shrapnel, but who knows if they may have missed and shrapnel hit the refinery.

00:04:15.000 But there's a refinery shut in right now.

00:04:16.000 So once you start playing around infrastructure, all butts are off on how oil prices could go.

00:04:23.000 Yeah, well, so let's get Pete Hegg said.

00:04:25.000 He was asked about it this morning, SAT 17.

00:04:27.000 So with the strike yesterday on South Bar's gas field, you know, if the U.S. didn't know about it or didn't approve of it, it kind of seems like a trend of Israel apparently pursuing their own objectives over U.S. objectives.

00:04:41.000 Why are we helping Israel prosecute this war if they're going to pursue their own objectives? 0.85

00:04:46.000 We hold the cards.

00:04:48.000 We have objectives.

00:04:50.000 Those objectives are clear.

00:04:52.000 We have allies pursuing objectives as well.

00:04:54.000 And the truth speaks for itself.

00:04:56.000 I mean, President Trump was very clear about that.

00:04:58.000 Iran has weaponized energy for decades. 0.76

00:05:02.000 Israel clearly sent a warning, and POTUS has made it clear, very clear.

00:05:06.000 Iran knows when you hit Karg Island and you hit military capabilities on Carg Island, which is the only thing we hit, we can hold anything at issue.

00:05:16.000 Anything.

00:05:18.000 The United States military controls the fate of that country.

00:05:21.000 So what he's saying is we clearly have Israeli objectives.

00:05:25.000 Our allies have objectives.

00:05:27.000 The U.S. has other objectives.

00:05:29.000 But the bottom line here is, Eric, it's causing this really, I think, strange oil market.

00:05:36.000 And this is really where you bring a lot of expertise here.

00:05:39.000 Go ahead and throw up.

00:05:41.000 It looks like we're having the emergence of essentially three different, three distinct oil markets, Asia through Omana, Dubai, Europe, Brent, and U.S., West Texas, right?

00:05:52.000 WTI.

00:05:53.000 Correct.

00:05:54.000 What the heck is happening and why this huge price gap between the different oil?

00:05:59.000 That's simply a fun.

00:06:00.000 So look at oil.

00:06:02.000 Kind of look at the world global oil reserves.

00:06:06.000 We use about 100 million barrels a day globally, all countries included.

00:06:12.000 The difference in the price between those three, and by the way, there's probably 50 grades of crude oil.

00:06:18.000 But the three main benchmarks, they call them benchmarks, is all prices are determined based on those.

00:06:23.000 Well, I would say two, Brent and WTI.

00:06:27.000 West Texas Intermediate, that's the oil we produce. 0.77

00:06:30.000 We produce 13 million a day.

00:06:32.000 We use 20 million.

00:06:33.000 We have a gap.

00:06:34.000 We have to import oil from Canada, China, not China, Canada, Mexico, and others.

00:06:38.000 The Brent is higher.

00:06:40.000 And Andrew, I've done this a long time.

00:06:42.000 For the past 15 years, the difference between Brent oil, it's always higher because of location and transportation because it's produced way up north in the North Sea in order to bring it down.

00:06:54.000 There's transportation costs.

00:06:55.000 But the difference has always been $5 at the maximum, $1 or $2 at the minimum.

00:07:01.000 They run very close in price.

00:07:03.000 Now it's $16, 17, could be pushing $18 a barrel difference.

00:07:08.000 And that's because getting that oil from the North Sea through certain areas of Europe.

00:07:14.000 Europe is having a very hard time getting enough oil.

00:07:17.000 China is as well, but they have deals with Russia and whatnot.

00:07:19.000 But Europe is going to be very, very sensitive to price shock.

00:07:22.000 Gasoline price shocks for sure.

00:07:24.000 They're equivalent of a gallon.

00:07:26.000 They use liters, but over there are equivalent.

00:07:28.000 They're probably going to hit $10 a gallon of gasoline before, probably within the next couple of weeks.

00:07:36.000 So, Eric, I think a lot of people have noted, okay, the prices are surging more in other places compared to the U.S.

00:07:42.000 And I've seen some people present this as that means it's no big deal for us, but maybe give us a sense.

00:07:48.000 Like, my feeling is that if we have a giant energy spike everywhere outside the U.S., even if we're self-sufficient in our own energy, that's going to have pretty severe ramifications for our own country and our own economy, correct?

00:08:02.000 100%.

00:08:04.000 We are absolutely sensitive to the price of rent oil going up, even though it's going up a little bit more.

00:08:10.000 So before the conflict, I would say a week before we hit Iran, oil was $65 a barrel.

00:08:10.000 It is up.

00:08:17.000 The day before we hit Iran, it was $67 a barrel.

00:08:21.000 The day afterwards, it started the week after, one Friday after the, we hit them on Saturday.

00:08:26.000 By Friday, it was $76 a barrel.

00:08:28.000 It's going to hit $100 a barrel before the end of this week.

00:08:31.000 So we are very, very sensitive, even though we're not as sensitive to the bread price.

00:08:38.000 We're still, it brings all, here's why, only very quickly, I know you got to go, but because if you, at some point, if you're running rent oil and it's too expensive, you can retool your refinery to use WTI if it makes sense to transport it at a cheaper rate.

00:08:54.000 So we've got, you know, a news that was breaking this morning that it looks like Japan, who, by the way, the Prime Minister of Japan is meeting with President Trump the White House currently.

00:09:04.000 Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain, they're all going to start working with us.

00:09:11.000 It looks like a bit of a about face to help clear the Strait of Hormuz.

00:09:15.000 Is that going to fix the problem or are we still looking at inflationary upward pressure from this oil spike?

00:09:23.000 Yeah, so $4 is baked in the cake.

00:09:25.000 $450 is probably baked in the cake already, maybe $5.

00:09:28.000 And by the way, we haven't entered the Strait of Hormuz.

00:09:32.000 Our Navy hasn't yet because it's not safe.

00:09:34.000 Iranians have a lot of tools.

00:09:36.000 They can lob missiles from the shore.

00:09:38.000 Look at that shoreline, top of that map right there.

00:09:40.000 That is all Iranian shoreline. 0.98

00:09:43.000 They can shoot missiles from anywhere.

00:09:44.000 They've also said that they can mine the Gulf.

00:09:47.000 Trump says there's no mines in the Gulf, but I've seen confirmed video of Iranian submersible drones that are mines and that they can remotely control from land.

00:09:58.000 And there's hundreds of them that they haven't put in the water yet, which they could still do.

00:10:02.000 Iran's in an existential threat right now. 0.86

00:10:05.000 They're literally looking at possibly the end of Iran as anyone's known it.

00:10:09.000 And they probably feel that way on the inside right now.

00:10:11.000 They're liable to do anything.

00:10:13.000 And what they're doing right now is attacking other Gulf countries' petrochemical production.

00:10:20.000 They hit Saudi Aramco's refinery.

00:10:22.000 Saudi Aramco final, one of the biggest refineries in the Middle East, is shut in.

00:10:26.000 Kuwaitis shut in a refinery.

00:10:29.000 They've hit Bahrain production.

00:10:31.000 You just mentioned a gas field in Iran being hit by the Israelis.

00:10:36.000 This is massive, massive oil disruption.

00:10:40.000 I had a captain on my show yesterday, not even a captain, he owned the shipping company, has 15 ships going through the Strait of Hormuz.

00:10:46.000 And I said, Captain, have you put one through?

00:10:48.000 I said, why not?

00:10:48.000 He said, no.

00:10:49.000 He said, too dangerous.

00:10:50.000 I said, okay, Trump administration has come up with a $20 billion Lloyds of London insurance policy.

00:10:55.000 Does that change the thing?

00:10:56.000 I knew what his answer was going to be.

00:10:57.000 Does that change anything?

00:10:58.000 He said, no.

00:10:59.000 I said, why not?

00:11:01.000 Because no one I know, nor would I ever send a crew through the Strait of Hormuz just because there's insurance in case they get blown to smithereens.

00:11:09.000 It's not safe.

00:11:10.000 And if the Iranians, all they have to do is threaten or show one or two mines, you don't know where they're going to be. 1.00

00:11:16.000 There's not going to be a lot of confidence in navigating that Gulf.

00:11:21.000 I personally think we should put our boot on Iranians' neck, go into every industry they have. 1.00

00:11:27.000 It's going to be collateral damage.

00:11:29.000 It's going to be really bad for the Iranian people. 1.00

00:11:31.000 Take out their media.

00:11:32.000 Take out all their infrastructure.

00:11:33.000 Take out their highways.

00:11:34.000 Get them to the point where they submit and they say, we'll cut a deal with you for oil.

00:11:39.000 And what I would say was I would send our oil companies in, our major oil companies in and bring their production up.

00:11:46.000 They're doing less than half of what they could possibly do, potentially do.

00:11:50.000 We bring that oil price, their oil volume up, and we take that oil at the market price.

00:11:55.000 Iran stays whole. 0.99

00:11:57.000 We get oil independence in particular.

00:11:59.000 But wouldn't that just strengthen the regime?

00:12:02.000 Sorry to cut you off there, Eric.

00:12:04.000 Wouldn't that just strengthen the regime's hand?

00:12:06.000 If there's hope that they're going to topple, there's a press conference going on right now in the White House.

00:12:13.000 And Scott Besson is saying that the regime is already wiring money all over the world.

00:12:19.000 Treasury's on top of it.

00:12:20.000 They're going to seize the money.

00:12:22.000 The Trump administration is still signaling that this regime is about to collapse, Eric.

00:12:26.000 So they may be on their heels, Andrew.

00:12:30.000 I find it hard to believe that they're about to collapse.

00:12:33.000 I mean, they still have a lot of fight left in them, even if it's a fight to the death, which they will do at this point, because this is their existential threat.

00:12:44.000 They're not going to just decide we're going to roll over.

00:12:47.000 I believe you cut a deal with them, an international legal deal with them, where they can't ever back out of it.

00:12:52.000 And we are energy independent forever.

00:12:54.000 I mean, are we really in the business of making sure countries aren't nuclear weaponized?

00:12:59.000 I mean, North Korea has become under Clinton.

00:13:05.000 How about Pakistan?

00:13:06.000 Are we going to go take out Pakistan because they have nukes? 1.00

00:13:09.000 I mean, it's a fool's game. 0.97

00:13:11.000 This is over oil. 0.97

00:13:12.000 This isn't over regimes or nukes.

00:13:14.000 This is about oil.

00:13:15.000 Eric, just the natural question that follows up then is maybe how much time?

00:13:20.000 Like you've mentioned, obviously there's a lot of economic pressure coming from this.

00:13:24.000 What sort of timeline are we looking at for economic issues escalating where we need to start taking, you know, how long do we have before we really need to get this wrapped up?

00:13:34.000 Do you think?

00:13:35.000 It's acute right now, Blake.

00:13:36.000 Right now, we're on a path to higher prices, oil prices, gasoline prices.

00:13:41.000 It doesn't matter if this is all clear, decided today.

00:13:44.000 We're still going to see substantially higher prices going forward.

00:13:47.000 All these Gulf countries that are major producers of energy have shut their production, and some of them are damaged.

00:13:53.000 Some of them have shut down systems that could take 30, 45 days to get retooled, get re-up, running again to full capacity.

00:14:01.000 That energy off that, those hydrocarbons off the oil market will keep prices higher.

00:14:07.000 Will they stay at $100 a barrel?

00:14:08.000 Maybe not, but they could stay at $90, $85.

00:14:12.000 $85 a barrel turns into about like $3.50 a gallon in gasoline.

00:14:17.000 That is just way, way too high when it should be in the 50s.

00:14:21.000 Trump had it almost near 50%.

00:14:22.000 Think about this for one second.

00:14:25.000 I'm skeptical enough to believe that all Saudis, Bahrainis, Omanis, all the Iraqis, they're all kind of saying, hey, Trump, go ahead. 0.60

00:14:36.000 We got you.

00:14:37.000 We support you.

00:14:38.000 But the reality is they like $100 print on the oil market.

00:14:44.000 They actually need that.

00:14:44.000 They love that.

00:14:46.000 So they're going to be in no rush to ramp up production because the minute they start ramping up, prices come down.

00:14:52.000 So they will slow walk that on the way down.

00:14:54.000 So I think we're in dire straits already, Blake.

00:14:58.000 And just how bad it gets is kind of up to the policymakers in D.C., Eric.

00:15:04.000 What are we looking at in terms of inflation?

00:15:07.000 You know, they held the rate again steady.

00:15:12.000 What are you seeing coming down the pike? 0.99

00:15:13.000 Yeah, we're at 3%, which is a little bit elevated right now and higher than we had been for the second half of 2025.

00:15:22.000 I think 4%, 4.5%, given this event.

00:15:26.000 If it lasts another month, 6%.

00:15:28.000 Oil is tied to every single product that we use.

00:15:31.000 Andrew, you just sipped a cup.

00:15:32.000 There's oil.

00:15:33.000 There's a petroleum input somehow in there as well.

00:15:36.000 It's in almost every single toilet paper.

00:15:38.000 There's petroleum in toilet paper.

00:15:40.000 And don't forget, anything you produce in one part of the country to the other, you bring it to the other part, you got to transport it and you do it with rail or truck.

00:15:48.000 That's diesel fuel right there.

00:15:50.000 Eric Bowling, time is of the essence.

00:15:54.000 You made the case for urgency.

00:15:56.000 We'll talk to you soon.

00:15:56.000 Thanks, Eric.

00:15:57.000 Thank you guys.

00:15:58.000 Appreciate it.

00:15:58.000 Thank you guys.

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00:17:12.000 All right, John Solomon joins us now.

00:17:15.000 John, it's great to have you back because there's so much news going on, especially on the Intel front.

00:17:22.000 I got to hit this first, though, before I wanted to talk to you about China.

00:17:26.000 We will get there in just a second, but there was kind of a bombshell.

00:17:30.000 So obviously everybody's aware that Joe Kent resigned the letter.

00:17:34.000 We talked about it on the show yesterday.

00:17:36.000 And then this comes out yesterday evening, and I'll play a clip here.

00:17:42.000 Well, let's not actually skip it.

00:17:45.000 Basically, he's under investigation for leaking classified documents.

00:17:49.000 The investigation is being led by the FBI.

00:17:51.000 And apparently, the investigation started before his resignation.

00:17:56.000 What do you know, John Solomon?

00:17:58.000 Yeah, that is an accurate description of what we know.

00:18:00.000 Several months ago, the FBI began examining a potential leak of information and technology that they believe is connected to Joe Kent or his office.

00:18:11.000 That has been ongoing.

00:18:12.000 It is nearing a resolution.

00:18:14.000 It's in that period of time when it's nearing a resolution.

00:18:18.000 Often when you get to this point, you get a notification that you're either a subject or a target of the investigation.

00:18:23.000 Target means you're about to be indicted.

00:18:25.000 Subject means your behavior is being examined.

00:18:28.000 It's usually around the time of resolution that you get those notifications.

00:18:31.000 We don't know if that happened, but we are told that the decision on whether charges are to be brought is going to happen soon.

00:18:39.000 This does go back into last year, late in 2025, is when the investigation allegedly began.

00:18:45.000 And then all of a sudden on Monday, he dropped that bombshell of a letter.

00:18:50.000 And, you know, again, when you look at the whole of Joe Kent, no matter what happens in this outcome, he's a man who was deployed 11 times to a combat zone in Iraq and Afghanistan.

00:19:00.000 He's an American hero for doing that.

00:19:02.000 He lost his wife to a combat attack.

00:19:05.000 She also was an American patriot and lost.

00:19:08.000 That part of his career stays intact.

00:19:09.000 But if you go into the civilian side and you're trusted with intelligence and you don't handle it properly, there are going to be consequences, particularly in this administration, which is very serious about prosecuting links.

00:19:20.000 And so we'll have to wait and see what the evidence is.

00:19:22.000 But there was an investigation ongoing before he ever released his letter expressing his dissent for the Iran operation.

00:19:31.000 Yeah, Tulsi was asked about this.

00:19:33.000 DNI Tulsi Gabbard, SOC 27.

00:19:36.000 Do you agree or disagree with what this letter was put out by former Director Kent?

00:19:42.000 He said a lot of things in that letter.

00:19:45.000 Ultimately, we have provided the president with the intelligence assessments, and the president is elected by the American people and makes his own decisions based on the information that's available to him.

00:19:57.000 But do you agree with, does that statement he made, blaming Israel, concern you?

00:20:02.000 Yes.

00:20:03.000 So that was a pretty significant moment there, John Solomon.

00:20:07.000 Because a lot of people link DNA Tulsi Gabbard with Joe Kent, thinking that they are ideologically in lockstep.

00:20:15.000 That was a break right there.

00:20:17.000 Yeah, that was a very significant moment.

00:20:19.000 Now, I would have preferred if they followed up saying, you're concerned because you agree with his assessment on Israel. 0.95

00:20:24.000 You're concerned that he made it.

00:20:25.000 There's some ambiguity about what yes meant, but I think we generally have a sense of where Tulsi Gabbard stands based on the last 48 hours of testimony.

00:20:34.000 She has not endorsed the president's decision.

00:20:37.000 She puts it at his doorstep.

00:20:39.000 And yesterday, when given the opportunity to, I think, coherently and cohesively describe the intelligence of what led the president, I don't think she did a very good job.

00:20:49.000 I think Pete Hegseth and General Kaine this morning in their briefing did a much better job describing the threat and what would lead a president to believe that there was an imminent threat from Iran.

00:20:59.000 And these are the things that we wrote about this morning, all of it in open source intelligence, but they're pretty serious things.

00:21:06.000 In January, the United States government discovered three Revolutionary Guard members on Arsa.

00:21:12.000 And I will tell you that Revolutionary Guard members from Iran don't come here for winter vacation.

00:21:16.000 They were sent here for a mission.

00:21:18.000 They were forcibly deported very quickly.

00:21:20.000 Then we learned that Iran had secured a half billion dollars of Stinger missiles from Russia.

00:21:27.000 These are shoulder-fired missiles capable of taking down a civilian or military aircraft, a capability that Iran traditionally has not had.

00:21:35.000 Then we learned that they were trying to get, and we're at the final stages of negotiation, and acquiring a hypersonic missile from China that would be able to reach much further American assets outside the immediate Middle East theater, the immediate Persian Gulf.

00:21:51.000 And by the way, hypersonics, we don't have a great defense system against this.

00:21:55.000 Those components, along with the fact that Iran admits itself it tried to reconstitute its nuclear program as soon as the Midnight Hammer was launched last summer, were the components that drove the president to decide that American assets were in increasing risk and to do that. 0.50

00:22:12.000 It isn't some magical spell that B.B. Netanyahu has over the president.

00:22:15.000 Anyone who knows the president knows he makes his mind up on his own, often to the shock of some people, not ready for what he's about to do.

00:22:23.000 Well, John, I mean, you know, to be fair to Tulsi, you could look at the same intel here and come up with different conclusions.

00:22:32.000 I don't think it's any shocker that maybe Tulsi is less interventionist than some within the Adam.

00:22:39.000 Yeah.

00:22:39.000 I agree.

00:22:40.000 So her job wasn't to, what I would say is when you serve a president, your job isn't to express your own political opinion or try to give yourself.

00:22:49.000 Your job is to tell the committee what data points did the president have to make decisions.

00:22:54.000 Listen, I think it's perfectly great in America to disagree with a decision your president makes.

00:22:58.000 That's our lawful right to do it.

00:23:00.000 It wasn't easy to do under the Biden years.

00:23:02.000 They tried to suppress us lots of times.

00:23:03.000 But in the Trump era, no one's going to stop you from expressing your opinion.

00:23:06.000 But her job as the intelligence chief was to give the data points, and there are data points. 0.56

00:23:11.000 You can disagree whether that constitutes an imminent threat.

00:23:14.000 But the opportunity yesterday was to give those data points.

00:23:17.000 We were able to give those data points.

00:23:19.000 I don't think she did as good a job as she could.

00:23:21.000 And I think there was a little bit of virtue signaling going on.

00:23:24.000 I've covered scores of these hearings over my career.

00:23:28.000 I have never seen an intelligence chief that couldn't put the intelligence in front of the Congress.

00:23:33.000 She could even say she disagreed with it, but she should have at least told us what the intelligence was.

00:23:37.000 We now have those data points, but I think it would have been helpful for people to know what the data was.

00:23:42.000 Yeah, fair enough.

00:23:43.000 Let's change our focus here.

00:23:46.000 There is, so one of the storylines is this China interfering in our elections.

00:23:52.000 Tell us what you've uncovered in your reporting, John.

00:23:54.000 First, we need to remind people, because they probably didn't get a lot of coverage here, but two years ago, Great Britain was thrust into national crisis when it was learned that China had hacked into parts of their election voter registration database, just people how they register their data, because it does have your driver's license, your social security number, or other personal identifying.

00:24:13.000 Great Britain was enormously alarmed.

00:24:16.000 There were big hearings and blue ribbon commissions.

00:24:16.000 People were fired.

00:24:19.000 New election security provisions were done.

00:24:23.000 And by the way, the Biden administration expressed enormous alarm that this happened to Great Britain, and they even indicted some of the hackers from China that did this to China, or did this to Great Britain.

00:24:33.000 Here's the dirty secret that the Biden administration and the U.S. intelligence committee knew when they were expressing outrage at what happened in Great Britain.

00:24:40.000 It happened here all the way back to 2020.

00:24:43.000 But it was kept a secret from the American public, from the Congress, and it appears from the statements of an intelligence community ombudsman, a civilian that's supposed to protect our interests in the intelligence community, because the ombudsman said that the intelligence community, the CIA and others, decided to keep this information from the president, the public, and the Congress because they didn't like President Trump and his policies.

00:25:06.000 They actually used pejorative terms to describe the commander-in-chief in their own private emails.

00:25:13.000 And they made a decision to put their personal politics ahead of their country and their commander-in-chief's need to know, and they just didn't let the country know.

00:25:20.000 So America and Great Britain suffered the same crisis.

00:25:24.000 Americans were kept in the dark.

00:25:25.000 Great Britain reacted with great alarm.

00:25:27.000 I think that's a very, we have to get to the bottom of this politicization of these intelligence agencies.

00:25:33.000 We talk about it in the context of Russia collusion and the fake scandal there, but when you start depriving a president or the intelligence committees of actionable intelligence, you're moving to a point of harming national interest.

00:25:46.000 And that is what the ombudsman in the Biden era decided to allege in a document that we made public this week.

00:25:54.000 So it then kind of goes to Fulton County, right?

00:25:57.000 So again, DNI Tulsi Gabbard's testifying before the Senate and then today the House.

00:26:03.000 And she obviously was photographed at that Fulton County rating.

00:26:07.000 What do we know about her presence there specifically?

00:26:12.000 I don't think the criminal case here ties to this China stuff.

00:26:16.000 I think the criminal case here ties to the fact that if you're an election administrator in Georgia or Maricopa County in Arizona, where we also have some investigation going on, and you don't follow your state laws, you don't create equal protection for your voters, it becomes a federal crime.

00:26:30.000 And so the FBI's interest in Georgia and in Arizona was simply to signal that they may prosecute local election administrators because they didn't follow the law.

00:26:42.000 They created exemptions or didn't do things the way the law in their state required, and that becomes a federal offense if it's intentional.

00:26:49.000 I think that's all.

00:26:50.000 I don't know why she showed up.

00:26:51.000 I know of no reason she needed to be there other than maybe the president asked her to show up is what I've been told.

00:26:57.000 That's fine.

00:26:58.000 What we do know is that Tulsi Gabbard has known about this Chinese election intelligence for about eight months and only recently began moving in a direction of declassifying it under pressure from Justin News.

00:27:09.000 We've been asking daily for about seven weeks now for Tulsi Gabbert to make this available.

00:27:14.000 The first documents we got were not declassified by Tulsi Gabbard.

00:27:18.000 They were declassified by Avril Haynes, her predecessor in the Biden administration.

00:27:22.000 The Biden administration and former Biden administration officials were much more willing to talk about how shocked they were that Trump knew or Trump people knew about this Chinese infiltration and didn't act on it back then.

00:27:34.000 They were glad to throw some shade on that.

00:27:36.000 But this is a serious matter because the second you know that China got voter registration data, what we learned a few months ago from our reporting about what the FBI learned becomes more important.

00:27:47.000 All right.

00:27:48.000 Voter data is accessed by Chinese intelligence.

00:27:50.000 Then China sends driver's licenses to Chicago O'Hare report.

00:27:55.000 And the FBI's Chinese intelligence sources tell them it was an effort to send those licenses here so someone could file fake ballot requests and vote and stuff the ballot box for Joe Biden.

00:28:08.000 That's what the FBI documents.

00:28:10.000 So we're starting to see it continue.

00:28:11.000 Now, it doesn't mean that anything ultimately happened, but it was a more organized effort than we were led to believe.

00:28:17.000 And the reason we were not given this information was a political decision by some biased intelligence analysts.

00:28:24.000 That should concern us all.

00:28:25.000 Yeah, that is concerning.

00:28:26.000 I mean, I think Tulsi Gabbard is a star.

00:28:30.000 I trust her motivations here or her political calculations, but I think you're absolutely right.

00:28:37.000 The American people have an interest in knowing as much as we possibly can about election integrity.

00:28:42.000 I don't know if you're going to be a star next week if she declassifies them.

00:28:44.000 Yeah.

00:28:45.000 Well, amen.

00:28:46.000 All right.

00:28:46.000 Thanks, John.

00:28:49.000 The online world moves fast and it's moving even faster these days.

00:28:52.000 That's why TikTok approaches teen safety with families in mind from the start.

00:28:57.000 Because discovery and creativity are both wonderful things, but it's important to make sure that safety comes first as well.

00:29:03.000 On TikTok, teenagers have over 50 built-in protections right from when they join.

00:29:09.000 Accounts for teens all start private by default.

00:29:11.000 They're not open to the entire world.

00:29:13.000 And for those under 16, direct messages are turned off.

00:29:16.000 Only their friends can comment on their videos.

00:29:19.000 And that kind of approach matters because feeling confident and comfortable about these platforms your teenagers are on shouldn't mean digging through a bunch of menus and trying to set everything up yourself and worrying that you got it wrong.

00:29:31.000 TikTok is taking a proactive approach.

00:29:33.000 Their protections are built in from the moment those teenagers join so that safety and peace of mind for parents is there right from the start.

00:29:41.000 All of this is to say, when safety comes first, discovery and creativity can follow without fear.

00:29:47.000 Learn more by going to tick tock.com slash guardiansguide.

00:29:52.000 That's tick tock.com slash guardiansguide.

00:29:58.000 All right, I want to tell you guys we got some great news.

00:30:00.000 A lot of bad stuff going on in the world.

00:30:03.000 But meanwhile, Turning Point Action is working behind the scenes.

00:30:06.000 And I wanted to make sure we called this out.

00:30:09.000 Today, we are launching and opening a new office, a new field office in Nevada.

00:30:16.000 So Turning Point Action, you see the beautiful logo there.

00:30:16.000 Right.

00:30:19.000 Our field office is now open in the state of Nevada.

00:30:23.000 Why is this important?

00:30:25.000 Because we are building what we call the red wall.

00:30:28.000 Everybody knows about the blue wall.

00:30:28.000 All right.

00:30:30.000 It's Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.

00:30:33.000 It's those three pesky states that Democrats have held for election cycle after election cycle until 2016 and 2024 when we took it back.

00:30:41.000 But we can take those states off the electoral map in a sense if we win Arizona, which we are massively active in.

00:30:50.000 If we win New Hampshire, which we're massively active in, which a lot of people don't realize has more registered Republicans than Democrats.

00:30:57.000 You got to win the Indies in that state.

00:30:59.000 That's the key.

00:30:59.000 But still, there's more Republicans than Democrats in New Hampshire.

00:31:04.000 And then, of course, Nevada, which we took back.

00:31:06.000 And notably, there's more Republicans registered now in Nevada for the first time in many decades, actually.

00:31:14.000 Probably about 20 years, Democrats have had the registration advantage in Nevada.

00:31:19.000 That has now flipped.

00:31:20.000 Republicans now have a small, small advantage.

00:31:24.000 So this is key.

00:31:25.000 So we're hiring now hundreds of staffers in these three states, hundreds and hundreds in each state.

00:31:32.000 And we're combining those with a bunch of thousands of volunteers.

00:31:37.000 So in 2024, we had thousands of volunteers that would come in, link hands with the paid staff, the ballot chasers on the ground, and we created a machine.

00:31:47.000 We know the machine works.

00:31:48.000 Why?

00:31:49.000 Because we borrowed a lot of the best practices from the left that had a two decade head start on us in this arena.

00:31:55.000 And so now we're taking ground.

00:31:56.000 We're catching up.

00:31:57.000 We're building the army that will deliver these three states for 2026 and hopefully 2028 and build that red wall. 0.94

00:32:04.000 Blake, you are a master of history.

00:32:08.000 For those who don't understand the significance of the blue wall and maybe they're not aware of the population shifts to the Sunbelt, explain why this is important.

00:32:18.000 Yeah, I mean, so basically, a lot of blue states have been run badly for a long time.

00:32:25.000 And so that's the first thing you want to start with is we've got these people have been fleeing from, and also just deindustrialization.

00:32:33.000 So deindustrialization, a lot of other factors, they've driven people out of Illinois.

00:32:37.000 They've driven people out of New York, but they've also driven people out of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan.

00:32:44.000 All of these states have either lost people or they've slowed to a relative crawl.

00:32:48.000 They're not where immigrants move as much.

00:32:50.000 They're not where Americans move to seek opportunity.

00:32:53.000 They've moved, frankly, heavily to mostly Republican-controlled states, Florida, Arizona historically, Texas.

00:33:00.000 And every 10 years, we have that census.

00:33:03.000 It redraws the lines.

00:33:04.000 It reallocates electoral votes.

00:33:06.000 And, you know, back in 1960 when Kennedy won, the biggest state was New York.

00:33:10.000 It had almost 50 electoral votes.

00:33:12.000 It's now only in the 20s, I believe, for how many electoral votes it has.

00:33:17.000 And so the Democrats used to be able to rely on, oh, if we can just win Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, it's very, very hard for us to lose an election.

00:33:26.000 But we're getting to the point where even if they win all those states, and as we've seen with President Trump, they don't always win them, even if they win all of those states, they're still not going to be able to win unless they can snag these Sunbelt states.

00:33:39.000 Now, as we all know, kind of Californication is a problem that those states used to be rock, solid, red.

00:33:46.000 They are a lot of them now more purple.

00:33:48.000 Nevada used to vote very consistently Republican.

00:33:51.000 Arizona voted Republican for basically a half century straight.

00:33:55.000 They've gotten more purple.

00:33:56.000 The Democrat plan is flip them.

00:33:59.000 And our job is step in there, stop any of that sliding, make them rock, solid, red, make them kind of like Florida, where Florida was trending blue, and we flipped it back the other way.

00:34:10.000 Just Jack Pesobic sending us a note right now.

00:34:13.000 He says, I'm in New Hampshire.

00:34:15.000 Trump signs all over.

00:34:17.000 So that's telling.

00:34:18.000 And people don't realize New Hampshire is kind of like this beacon, this red dot in the New England area, where they tend to have a lot of conservatives at the state level.

00:34:27.000 For whatever reason, they're sending Democrats at the federal level.

00:34:30.000 So we want to stop that.

00:34:31.000 And the ROI in New Hampshire is just the potential ROI is really, really favorable for us.

00:34:38.000 If we spend a relatively small amount, we can get a relatively large impact there.

00:34:43.000 But this is a massive, massive day on the calendar for us, having a field office in Nevada.

00:34:50.000 And to Blake's point, how do we do this?

00:34:52.000 We target low-propensity, conservative-leaning voters, right?

00:34:56.000 These are people that maybe don't show up all the time, but we need them to show up.

00:35:00.000 And it's going to be an even greater challenge without President Trump on the ballot.

00:35:04.000 So President Trump is one of those polarizing political figures who just happens to draw out the Democrats.

00:35:11.000 They come out to the polls to resist him, and he draws out a lot of low-propensity conservative voters as well.

00:35:17.000 Our challenge in 2026 is how do we get these people to the ballot box to keep these seats red, to keep the Republicans in office?

00:35:26.000 And that's going to be our challenge.

00:35:28.000 And that's why putting a field office in a place like Nevada is such a big, big milestone.

00:35:33.000 So while all this noise and all this distraction is going on and you got feuding people and podcast wars, whatever, we are doing the quiet work building to make sure that those low-prop, conservative, right-leaning voters get out to the polls.

00:35:49.000 How do we do that?

00:35:50.000 It's a fusion of relational organizing, data-driven live data updates.

00:35:55.000 Every day when we touch pace with somebody, we put a note, we learn more about them, and then we build a relationship and we follow up with them.

00:36:03.000 We tell them when the deadlines are.

00:36:04.000 We tell them how to get their ballot in.

00:36:06.000 And every state has different rules, and we follow the rules of each different state.

00:36:12.000 But this is the way that you actually win elections.

00:36:15.000 This is the hard, on-the-ground work that we're actually doing.

00:36:18.000 So if you want to get involved, go to tpaction.com, tpaction.com.

00:36:23.000 Tyler and the team are doing an amazing job.

00:36:25.000 There's going to be a whole opening ceremony there in Las Vegas, Nevada today.

00:36:30.000 So please get involved.

00:36:31.000 Check it out.

00:36:31.000 If you want to volunteer, if you want to apply for a job, we are hiring like crazy.

00:36:36.000 So a big hat tip to the team there.

00:36:38.000 Show the picture one more time, guys.

00:36:40.000 Yeah, I mean, it's just, I really want to drive that home.

00:36:42.000 It's always what set Charlie apart.

00:36:43.000 There's a lot of people offering takes about politics.

00:36:46.000 There's a lot of people trying to provide ideological vision.

00:36:48.000 Charlie did all of that, but he also always stepped up for the hard work, kind of the thankless work, the tough work of get offices open, build relationships with ordinary people, actually get votes out.

00:37:01.000 And he was always great about that.

00:37:03.000 And our goal is to always remain great about that.

00:37:06.000 Congratulations to the Turning Point Action team.

00:37:06.000 Yeah.

00:37:09.000 Phenomenal work here.

00:37:10.000 Huge milestone.

00:37:11.000 We're going to keep Nevada red.

00:37:16.000 Hi, folks.

00:37:17.000 Andrew Colvett here.

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00:38:15.000 I want to welcome to the show Lydia Moynihan.

00:38:17.000 She's a New York Post columnist, and you might have seen her in the many viral clips from CNN, Abby Phillips show. 0.98

00:38:26.000 I believe it's Newsnight.

00:38:28.000 News night.

00:38:29.000 News night.

00:38:30.000 All right.

00:38:30.000 Welcome to the show, Lydia.

00:38:31.000 It's great to have you.

00:38:32.000 It's your first time joining us.

00:38:34.000 I'm so thrilled to be here.

00:38:36.000 I'm glad you're thrilled to be here.

00:38:38.000 What thrilled to have you?

00:38:39.000 So let's just start right there.

00:38:41.000 You are a New York Post columnist.

00:38:43.000 You live in the city.

00:38:44.000 And here you are.

00:38:45.000 You're doing Abby Phillip, the Abby Phillip Newsnight show, a show that gets clipped, I think, more than potentially any other show.

00:38:54.000 How did this start?

00:38:55.000 And what's it like being on set there?

00:38:57.000 So I've been doing the show now for about six months, I would say.

00:39:01.000 And it's interesting, I think, in this world where everyone lives in their own echo chamber with their own algorithm.

00:39:08.000 I think it's actually great television and great to see people on both sides engaging and talking to each other.

00:39:14.000 And it's interesting.

00:39:15.000 I mean, there's times I feel like we're all share something that it's a basic fact to me.

00:39:19.000 And a lot of folks there have never even heard of it.

00:39:21.000 And I think, you know, the five on Fox does really well.

00:39:24.000 And people want to see these completely separate echo chambers interact because we live in a country now where you can go about your daily life and be in a complete bubble on social media with the people you interact with in your city and just never be confronted with anything that might challenge your beliefs or your ideas about something.

00:39:45.000 All right.

00:39:46.000 So I have, so you and I actually first exchanged texts right after this.

00:39:51.000 We covered it here on the show.

00:39:53.000 Blake had some hot takes on it as well.

00:39:55.000 And that was, of course, when Abby Phillip repeatedly and mistakenly said that the IED bombing or attempted bombing was targeting the mayor's house.

00:40:06.000 We have to play some quotes, Andrew.

00:40:10.000 It wasn't an IED.

00:40:11.000 It was a loose grouping of nails.

00:40:16.000 And yeah, they didn't call it an ID.

00:40:18.000 I don't know why we're simping for terrorists, but that's where we find ourselves.

00:40:21.000 Cut 16.

00:40:22.000 Two Republicans say Muslims don't belong here after an attempted terror attack against New York's mayor, Zorhan Mamdani.

00:40:30.000 And the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, says nothing really to condemn those comments.

00:40:36.000 Well, there you have it.

00:40:37.000 She would, to be fair, she corrected the record.

00:40:42.000 So we got to be fair to Abby Phillip.

00:40:45.000 She's a colleague of yours.

00:40:46.000 So I want to be respectful.

00:40:48.000 Sot 24.

00:40:49.000 This morning, I issued a correction first thing in the morning on X for a mistake that I made in last night's show.

00:40:56.000 But I also wanted to do so on air as well.

00:40:58.000 I incorrectly said that the bombs that were thrown by ISIS-inspired suspects in New York over the weekend were directed at Mayor Mamdani.

00:41:06.000 They were not.

00:41:06.000 I failed to catch and correct that mistake in real time, and I take full responsibility for that.

00:41:12.000 And while we do make mistakes, it is important to acknowledge and correct those errors when they happen.

00:41:17.000 All right.

00:41:18.000 Classy moved.

00:41:19.000 You were on the set, though, when that happened.

00:41:22.000 What, I mean, it's not like it wasn't corrected in real time.

00:41:25.000 I think the other sort of right of center panelists corrected her and she still missed it.

00:41:31.000 What were you thinking as this moment was playing out on TV?

00:41:35.000 Well, look, again, I think everyone's just in their silo where maybe they don't even know that what they're saying is incorrect.

00:41:43.000 And I think it was great that she went out there and did correct it.

00:41:47.000 But I think this is just a bigger problem where there isn't really any reality check of what's going on.

00:41:53.000 And I think it's interesting seeing the way that the mainstream media has and has not covered what in my mind is frankly one of the most important and most significant stories is the fact that there were four terrorist attacks.

00:42:07.000 I believe all of them by naturalized citizens.

00:42:09.000 So people who were not born here or in the case of the terrorist attack here in New York, both of those men, their parents were born in Afghanistan.

00:42:17.000 So there's a lot to discuss there.

00:42:19.000 And of course, attacks against Jewish people in a synagogue.

00:42:24.000 There are a lot of things to suss out.

00:42:27.000 And it's interesting in that case, the approach that the mainstream media takes is, let's talk about Islamophobia.

00:42:32.000 And that's, of course, not the story.

00:42:34.000 The story is that there's actually terrorist attacks and people are shouting, Allahu Akbar, right?

00:42:39.000 They're doing this in the name of religion.

00:42:41.000 And then the angle that is covered, and we saw this, of course, with Zoroy Mamdani.

00:42:45.000 I'm sorry to keep harping on him.

00:42:47.000 I know every time we talk, I bring him up, Andrew, but this is just the quintessential way of sort of spinning something and making an accusation that somebody is Islamophobic.

00:42:57.000 So he talked about when he was confronted by the fact that he is very close with Hassan Piker, who believes that America deserved 9-11.

00:43:05.000 He said, didn't address it, basically just said, oh, well, my aunt, who may or may not be a real person, she got mean looks on the subway after 9-11. 0.92

00:43:13.000 And it's completely failing to address a very important and real and legitimate issue and then just attacking somebody and saying that they're bigoted because they're noticing this pattern.

00:43:26.000 And that's kind of the approach that we saw, obviously, with Momdani.

00:43:28.000 And it's the approach that we're seeing the media takes as well.

00:43:31.000 They're not addressing this issue of, wow, there's a terrorist problem.

00:43:36.000 Americans are in danger right now.

00:43:38.000 They're just saying, oh, anyone who's trying to address that problem is bigoted for noticing it.

00:43:43.000 Blake, what's with the selection bias?

00:43:46.000 You've been in media and journalism.

00:43:48.000 What is the undercurrent?

00:43:50.000 What is the driving motivation for this?

00:43:52.000 I think it's pretty straightforward.

00:43:54.000 There used to be more balance to a lot of institutions in American life.

00:43:58.000 Like the press always leaned liberal, but leaning liberal in even the 60s, where we think of it as a left-wing time, leaning liberal meant, oh, maybe 70% of them voted for Kennedy and 30% voted for Nixon.

00:44:11.000 But in a lot of these newsrooms at major outlets, we're talking 95-5, 99 to 1.

00:44:20.000 And it breaks down your ability to think reasonably about things.

00:44:25.000 You don't get questioned.

00:44:27.000 You have a lot of assumptions that don't make sense, but no one's calling you out on them.

00:44:33.000 And there's a lot of groupthink that takes over.

00:44:36.000 I've heard accounts from the New York Times where here's a classic one from a few years ago.

00:44:41.000 It was pretty obvious right away, for example, when the Rittenhouse shooting happened that Rittenhouse was engaged in self-defense.

00:44:47.000 He didn't do anything wrong.

00:44:48.000 And I've heard stories, there were New York Times reporters terrified to even take that assignment because if they had to report that fact, it could destroy their career in the newsroom because people there were that unhinged.

00:45:00.000 And if you repeat that over and over and over again, and then if you're in a kind of lower IQ area like CNN, they're not quite firing on as many cylinders as the New York Times, you just get these absolutely embarrassing stories where they actually have to come out and admit it because it all seems reasonable to them until they get called out on X or on some other public platform.

00:45:21.000 Yeah, and Lydia, that was my read on that instance, by the way.

00:45:24.000 It was because all the early reporting was that, you know, it was a bombing outside or attempted bombing outside of the mayor's mansion.

00:45:31.000 So I actually think Abby Phillip just didn't know that she was wrong.

00:45:35.000 Well, and Andrew, I just kind of want to go back to something that Blake was saying about the sort of selection bias.

00:45:40.000 And I think when you think about historically how we get these people in media kind of telling us what the story is and breaking things down for us, they are in, they go through the university system, which my colleague Isabel Vincent here at the Post had a great story yesterday just highlighting people who are literally children of IRCG members are teaching in universities like University of Illinois and Emory.

00:46:03.000 And so you think about you're going through this university system where literal terrorists' children are professors and teaching.

00:46:12.000 And then you go into this other ecosystem, typically in a big city like New York or LA where it's quite liberal.

00:46:19.000 And then all of your colleagues are also thinking the same way as you.

00:46:22.000 So it's just literally from the time you leave your house, no matter who you are, if you're going to an elite university and then continuing on to get a top job, especially in media in a liberal place like New York or LA, you're just not challenged with any of your viewpoints.

00:46:39.000 You're inculcated in something that's extremely left-wing.

00:46:42.000 And then that just carries on with no one challenging those presuppositions.

00:46:46.000 I couldn't help but find this clip and you're sitting right next to the person involved in this.

00:46:53.000 This is Lee McGowan.

00:46:55.000 And this clip is just, it's a peach.

00:46:58.000 Cut 26.

00:46:59.000 So your answer is to continue to let Iran back hezbollah. 0.91

00:47:02.000 No, that's not my answer.

00:47:03.000 I'm getting back.

00:47:04.000 Okay, so someone has to take them.

00:47:06.000 No, it's not a false choice.

00:47:07.000 We did not need to be a war.

00:47:08.000 We did not need to be in this war.

00:47:10.000 We started the war for no reason.

00:47:12.000 The bad guys here.

00:47:13.000 We are the bad guys here.

00:47:15.000 That's a, that's a that's strong.

00:47:17.000 You can be against this uh war in the first place, just to be clear.

00:47:22.000 Uh, but that's quite a thing to say from leading who is?

00:47:26.000 That's the issue is again totally valid to challenge what the strategy is and ask questions.

00:47:33.000 But we're seeing on the left, it's like people are rooting for us to fail.

00:47:38.000 It's like people want this to be a disaster.

00:47:41.000 So Donald Trump has egg on his face that's what it feels like is going on and I genuinely think and I know we're going to talk about Mamdani and his wife Rama that there seem to be people and obviously the fact that there are protests and people honoring, holding services to honor the ayatollah.

00:47:57.000 There are clearly people here who actually do think that America is the bad guy in this war and, of course, in no universe could that be possible.

00:48:04.000 You're looking at a regime that murders people for sport.

00:48:07.000 They just today executed a young man who walked the streets trying to trying to protest back in january. 0.99

00:48:14.000 They hang gay people from cranes. 1.00

00:48:16.000 They rape women as punishment. 1.00

00:48:18.000 They're the largest exporter of terror. 0.99

00:48:20.000 Like, let's be very clear, in no universe are we the bad.

00:48:24.000 They are the bad guys through and through.

00:48:25.000 And again, you can debate the war, but there's there's no way that you could characterize Iran as anything less than the most evil regime on the face of the earth. 1.00

00:48:35.000 Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of this is, we've let a ton of people, millions of people in our country that hate us and it's the third worlding of the United States and we're we're living the consequences right now, but probably nowhere as I guess.

00:48:50.000 Uh poignant, can you feel that as New York City your uh, your home, where you live?

00:48:56.000 And there's a bunch of reporting now out from the NEW YORK POST of Rama Duwaji I think I got her name right.

00:49:02.000 Finally, that is the wife of mayor Momdani.

00:49:05.000 Uh, and you could go up and throw this image up.

00:49:07.000 It says, in a series of unearthed social media posts, Rama Duwaji reportedly celebrated Palestinian plane hijacker Lila Khalid Khalid.

00:49:16.000 Uh like, this is shocking stuff.

00:49:20.000 Um yeah, there you go.

00:49:22.000 The NEW YORK POST is reporting it.

00:49:24.000 Uh, this is, you know, Anti-israel activists who called. 0.99

00:49:27.000 She's associating with some Anti-Israel activists who called Jews cockroaches. 0.95

00:49:31.000 Has multiple links to Mamdani's family. 0.97

00:49:34.000 This is the.

00:49:36.000 You know.

00:49:37.000 It was interesting because we had Coach Tuberville on the show and he said the enemy is inside the gates now.

00:49:42.000 And it became this huge back and forth with Chuck Schumer.

00:49:47.000 What is going on in New York City and how bad really is this mayor's office?

00:49:52.000 Well, it's really concerning.

00:49:53.000 And this is on the heels.

00:49:54.000 I mean, there's been a few pretty alarming headlines coming out against about Rama.

00:49:59.000 The most recent one, just in the last 12 hours or so, is that, of course, she had liked all of these posts and reposted them on Tumblr, which not a lot of people are on Tumblr anymore um, but one, for instance, says American soldiers fighting in imperialist wars are not brave, nor are they fighting for anyone's freedom.

00:50:16.000 They're mercilessly slaughtering third world civilians and fighting to maintain American hegemony. 1.00

00:50:22.000 Um, that's just kind of a flavor of the things, and she's also used the n-word. 0.99

00:50:27.000 A lot of fun things out there um, and it comes on the heels of another report that she was illustrating a children's book or not a children's book sorry, illustrating a book um, written by a woman who said things like, Jews are cockroaches, they're rabid demons uh, they're sons of Satan. 0.94

00:50:45.000 So this is, this is a ongoing issue and, we see, obviously goes back to when she was a young woman in her teens, but it's continuing. 0.96

00:50:54.000 This isn't like one little thing that she said 10 years ago.

00:50:57.000 This is a long-seated issue that's extended for decades.

00:51:02.000 And so, of course, she was lauded and celebrated when Mamdani was first elected.

00:51:07.000 She had this fabulous photo shoot in New York magazine, and she was heralded as this artist in Gracie Mansion, and she was just so wonderful.

00:51:16.000 And it's interesting to see there hadn't been a lot of sort of opo research or reporting on her specifically.

00:51:22.000 But now that we're seeing all these things, I'm waiting for New York Magazine and some of these other publications that just lionized and celebrated her to come out and say, oh, we apologize for featuring and lauding a woman who likes and reposts things that are extremely, not even just offensive, but things that are advocating for terrorism.

00:51:45.000 Yeah, welcome to New York.

00:51:46.000 Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure if you're not.

00:51:47.000 And we're paying for her to be in Gracie Mansion. 1.00

00:51:50.000 Yeah, and I just want to flag, like, when they say, like, liked posts, you know, liked this person who was in the PSLF, that they're basically the ones who pioneered aircraft hijackings.

00:52:00.000 Like, a big reason I think Al-Qaeda might have thought, let's hijack planes and fly them into buildings, is because this Palestinian group kind of popularized aircraft hijackings as this dramatic political terrorist stunt in the 60s and 70s. 0.98

00:52:14.000 They were doing one every few weeks, basically, for a long time.

00:52:17.000 Yeah.

00:52:18.000 And then I would also note too, so it's sort of been a one, two, three punch.

00:52:22.000 There was also a story last week that came out that she had liked a bunch of pro-terrorist, pro-Hamas posts in the wake of October 7th.

00:52:31.000 Obviously, a horrible day.

00:52:33.000 And to have somebody, again, who Mamdani cosplays is somebody who cares about everyone in the community, to have someone in Gracie Mansion who's celebrating the murder and the rape of Jews is just, it's beyond. 0.59

00:52:47.000 And I would note, you know, you said New York has obviously changed a lot.

00:52:50.000 And in the wake of his election, everyone kept saying, like, oh, how could a city that was, you know, sustained a terrorist attack just two decades earlier vote for this?

00:52:59.000 And it's interesting among the people who actually have lived here for more than five years, more than 10 years, Mamdani did not win.

00:53:07.000 It was really new people who've been coming here who elected him.

00:53:12.000 Are those newcomers from the U.S. or are we talking immigrants?

00:53:17.000 Oh, yeah, no, Yeah.

00:53:18.000 No, people who have moved here from outside the U.S.

00:53:22.000 We got to get a handle on our legal immigration system.

00:53:24.000 It's a big theme on this show.

00:53:26.000 Lydia Moynihan, thank you so much.

00:53:28.000 Great to have you.

00:53:28.000 Your first time on the show.

00:53:30.000 We'll have you on again soon, I'm sure.

00:53:32.000 Andrew, such a pleasure.

00:53:33.000 Thank you.

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00:56:10.000 All right.

00:56:11.000 Without further ado, honored to have our next guest, Alex Marlow, editor-in-chief of Breitbart News, as well as host of the Alex Marlowe Show.

00:56:19.000 Welcome, my friends.

00:56:20.000 Good to see you.

00:56:20.000 Always great to see you, Andrew.

00:56:21.000 Thank you for having me on the Kirk show.

00:56:23.000 Listen, man, there's a lot of stuff.

00:56:26.000 We've been going through story after story, but I want to zoom out on the state of the movement, right?

00:56:32.000 Yeah.

00:56:32.000 There was this poll yesterday that was circulating.

00:56:35.000 CNN had it up.

00:56:37.000 I believe they conducted the poll that said 100% of MAGA supports the president.

00:56:42.000 I just don't believe that that's statistically possible or true.

00:56:47.000 I don't know where they got that from or how they posed the question.

00:56:51.000 But there's no doubt that this Iranian conflict, war, excursion, whatever you want to call it, is, you know, it's a challenge to the movement.

00:57:01.000 You see Megan Kelly sounding off.

00:57:03.000 You see Tucker Carlson.

00:57:04.000 You have the Joe Kent resignation.

00:57:06.000 There is a lot of noise out there right now.

00:57:09.000 Alex, how do you process this?

00:57:12.000 How are you thinking about it?

00:57:13.000 Yeah, thank you.

00:57:14.000 Yeah, it's a great, it's a great question to ask because this is the question for the year because we all want MAGA to endure.

00:57:21.000 We all want to make sure that Americans are safe and prosperous and thriving.

00:57:25.000 And then the question is, is this war that's going on right now, is this getting us closer to that?

00:57:31.000 And I think there's going to be a lot of people who think that the president has earned a lot of credibility and i'm in that group where he gets a little leeway here if he feels like he had the imperative and the intelligence to wage a successful uh war, that he should have a little time to do it.

00:57:45.000 If he's doing his strategic bombings, he's trying to take out high profile targets and if you look at sort of a reasonable standard is, are we devastating Iran's ballistic missile capabilities?

00:57:55.000 Are we developing, are we devastating their ability to create nuclear weaponry?

00:57:59.000 Uh, are we perhaps making so that it's less likely they support terror proxies that kill ourselves and our allies in the region, then it's been pretty successful so far.

00:58:08.000 But if you look at it the way Joe Camp framed it up on Tucker Show yesterday, which is that Iran was never really going to develop a nuclear weapon and that they were only enriching as a bargaining tactic and we should have stuck around longer to bargain with Iran and you take that side, then uh, obviously you're going to be very discouraged about what's happening right now and you see uh, 119 barrels of oil and no real incentive for Iran to open up the Straight Of Hormuz, and you could see this thing spiraling really quick.

00:58:36.000 So I, I feel like, whichever side you're on right now, I do recommend operating with a cautious lens, because if you're someone who's already thrown president Trump under the bus, then it's probably because you are.

00:58:50.000 You're taking cues from a really extreme but often credible and very persuasive faction of the online right, and if you are think that Trump is infallible here, then unfortunately, Middle East Wars are a place where a lot of presidents falter.

00:59:05.000 So I see a lot of wisdom on both sides, and that makes it a very tough one, because it's very hard to come in andrew and declaratively say this is going one way or the other.

00:59:13.000 Yeah, and so there's two.

00:59:15.000 You know, I I watched clips.

00:59:16.000 I did not watch the whole thing um, but there's two clips floating around from Joe Kent's interview with Tucker Carlson.

00:59:24.000 Yeah, one is basically kind of outlining the divergence.

00:59:28.000 Let's say that and Pete Hegseth alluded to this that Israel and the United States have uh, oftentimes overlapping ambitions with the Iranian strikes.

00:59:38.000 Sometimes their objectives diverge.

00:59:41.000 So let's start there.

00:59:42.000 Um, what do we make of this divergence?

00:59:45.000 I I, I personally, you know understand that Israel has its own objectives.

00:59:51.000 Sure that does not surprise me however, to suggest that president Trump is lacking any agency to make his own decisions, especially on something where he's been so consistent uh, when it comes to Iran, for at least a decade, about nuclear uh capabilities.

01:00:06.000 Uh I, I find it is a bridge that's a little far for me uh, to to wrap my head around.

01:00:11.000 I totally with you on this.

01:00:13.000 So this is.

01:00:13.000 There's a couple of things that Kent threw out there that I think are very serious, and I think it'd be wise for the White House to address them over time.

01:00:20.000 Uh, the first one is a suggestion that Trump had sort of moved the goalpost and Iran is not on the brink of getting a nuclear weapon, and that their enrichment was only designed as a negotiating tactic. 0.59

01:00:31.000 It was not designed to get nukes.

01:00:33.000 Uh, this is something I have heard, but is directly contradicted by the administration's line via CIA director John Ratliff, who said flat out that Iran was enriching to create a nuke to destroy America and our allies, and uh, Of course, I'm lightly inclined to side with the administration because they've built up a lot of credibility with me.

01:00:51.000 But Kent's not a joker.

01:00:53.000 So that's worth taking seriously.

01:00:54.000 It's worth taking that on on a serious level.

01:00:56.000 I think that's real to understand that that is a, I think that's a legitimate concern that people have got.

01:01:01.000 Where I start losing him is the suggestion that Trump is only doing the bidding of Israel because throughout the course of the two hours, and I watched the whole thing, both men really praised President Trump a lot.

01:01:13.000 But the whole implication of the whole text here is that Trump is also getting played and rolled by Israel and doing Israel's bidding, whether or not because he feels like he's under threat, whether or not he's doing this because he's easily manipulated. 0.54

01:01:27.000 That's sort of incoherent to me, that Trump is the greatest leader imaginable and the perfect guy for the moment, but also is getting succored by Israel, a country of 9 million people.

01:01:37.000 That strikes me as a little incongruous.

01:01:39.000 And I think that's one that does make me question some of what's going on and make me feel like there's more than meets the eye to some of this conversation.

01:01:46.000 But it's clear that Israel definitely wants regime change.

01:01:50.000 I think that some of our allies in the region, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who are sort of newer to the America First Hent, largely since the Abraham Accords, which have largely been a triumph, I think they would like to see more widespread devastation to Iran than perhaps is in our immediate interest in America. 0.93

01:02:06.000 So I don't think it's just Israel in the region, but I think it would be nice to get some clarity on some of those legitimate issues Kent and Tucker raise in the conversation.

01:02:16.000 Yeah, so then it goes into obviously this point that, and I played this in hour one, I think it's worth playing again because, you know, Joe Kent is now officially, we're told, under investigation by the FBI for leaking classified documents.

01:02:31.000 And I want to be very clear: Joe Kent deployed 11 times for the U.S. military.

01:02:36.000 He's that's unassailable.

01:02:38.000 All right.

01:02:38.000 Gold star husband?

01:02:39.000 Yeah, gold star husband lost his wife.

01:02:42.000 You know, absolutely unassailable.

01:02:44.000 And a lot of my friends really love Joe Kent a lot.

01:02:48.000 I don't know him that well personally.

01:02:50.000 But this was an interesting moment when Tulsi Gabbard was asked about it.

01:02:54.000 And I want to get your take on it.

01:02:55.000 SOT 27.

01:02:56.000 Do you agree or disagree with what this letter was put out by former Director Kent?

01:03:03.000 He said a lot of things in that letter.

01:03:05.000 Ultimately, we have provided the president with the intelligence assessments, and the president is elected by the American people and makes his own decisions based on the information that's available to him.

01:03:17.000 But do you agree with, does that statement he made, blaming Israel, concern you?

01:03:22.000 Yes.

01:03:24.000 That was a moment right there.

01:03:26.000 Having she said yes, it was a little ambiguous of what she was actually saying she was troubled by.

01:03:33.000 What did you think was communicated in that moment, Alex?

01:03:36.000 Yeah, I think that's really, I think he goes way too far in this regard, especially noting that there are other allies we have in the region who would like to see regime change in Iran as well.

01:03:45.000 And just the thought that Trump is just some sort of a patsy for Israel, it just doesn't make sense for anything else in Trump's character.

01:03:53.000 And they cite one piece of evidence, which is the clip from Marco Rubio saying they got intel that Israel was going to go in and it was sort of a do or die moment, I guess, for us to go in or not.

01:04:03.000 I had a feeling that's just one data point out of millions that were probably part of the president's calculation.

01:04:07.000 The president loves being a peacetime president.

01:04:10.000 He loves starting no new wars.

01:04:11.000 So, you know, he's only doing this.

01:04:13.000 He knows a lot of his base is not going to support it. 0.96

01:04:15.000 He's not a dumb person.

01:04:16.000 He's a very bright person who is very conscientious of his own people, his own supporters.

01:04:21.000 And they knew not all of them were going to get on board. 0.97

01:04:23.000 And that's why some of this stuff just goes way too far with the just blanket, this is Israel's fault, and Trump is a sucker for Israel. 0.97

01:04:31.000 That does not compute to me. 0.95

01:04:32.000 And I did find, I got to say this, we're on the Charlie Crook show.

01:04:35.000 I thought him speaking for Charlie was very crass to me.

01:04:39.000 And it's the, we're all, those of us who knew Charlie well, Andrew, you knew him the best of all of us.

01:04:43.000 I knew Charlie very well.

01:04:44.000 That's a really delicate thing.

01:04:45.000 And he was out there in the biggest podcast in the world speaking on behalf of Charlie and speaking on behalf of in the context of implying perhaps Israel murdered Charlie and then using that in the exact context to suggest that Israel is compelling America to bomb girls' schools on a Rhinian base.

01:05:02.000 I mean, it's starting to get a little bit.

01:05:04.000 I'm seeing the orange yarn one, always Saudi and Philadelphia meme starts popping into my head here. 0.86

01:05:12.000 Now we're just connecting all sorts of different dots without any hard evidence.

01:05:15.000 Yeah, and I want to get into that a little bit more in the next segment, Alex, because, you know, obviously I logged that, I clocked that.

01:05:22.000 Blake clocked it.

01:05:23.000 We instantly shared that clip and discussed it.

01:05:26.000 And I think it deserves a whole segment.

01:05:29.000 Let's just wrap this segment up really quickly with, you know, Megan Kelly tweeted out something like, if you really want to destroy MAGA, you know, have the CIA surveil Tucker and the FBI indict or the DOJ indict Joe Kent.

01:05:49.000 Do you read it that way, or do you think we're more stable than that?

01:05:54.000 Yeah, I think we're more stable than that, but I do take that into deep consideration.

01:05:59.000 I'm a person who's a very online, conservative person.

01:06:02.000 I'm aware of where the pulse of a lot of the highest energy people online are, and they really like Joe Kent and they're very skeptical of us doing Israel's bidding at all. 0.87

01:06:10.000 And that's a real factor here.

01:06:12.000 But the FBI investigation started earlier, and we know there are these strange leaks that are certainly designed to put some sort of a wedge between America and Israel.

01:06:22.000 And some people in this audience probably think that's deserved, but it's certainly a thing that's happening.

01:06:26.000 And but it's worth considering.

01:06:31.000 Let's talk about what's really happening right now.

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01:07:35.000 Let's just hear this clip.

01:07:37.000 This was obviously with Tucker Carlson, Joe Kent, SOT 31.

01:07:42.000 And then, you know, Charlie Kirk is killed publicly in a very horrific way.

01:07:47.000 And we're not really even allowed to look into that at all.

01:07:50.000 And Charlie Kirk was one of President Trump's closest advisors, and he also advocated heavily against a war with Iran.

01:07:57.000 He was in the Oval Office in the lead up to the 12-day war.

01:08:01.000 I wasn't particularly close with Charlie.

01:08:03.000 He was very gracious to me when I was running for Congress, very, very supportive.

01:08:07.000 So we knew each other.

01:08:08.000 And the last time I saw Charlie Kirk on this earth was in June in the West Wing.

01:08:15.000 And he said, Joe, stop us from getting into a war with Iran.

01:08:19.000 So when one of President Trump's closest advisors who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and for us to rethink at least our relationship with the Israelis, and then he's suddenly publicly assassinated, and we're not allowed to ask any questions about that.

01:08:38.000 So he says, we're not allowed to ask any questions about that.

01:08:41.000 I can personally attest that I don't believe that that is the truth.

01:08:46.000 I believe there's been a billion questions asked, both publicly and privately, behind the scenes.

01:08:53.000 So many leads have been pursued.

01:08:55.000 Alex, get your reaction, and then I'm going to throw it to Blake.

01:08:58.000 Yeah, first of all, I think that Charlie did not want regime change war in Iran, but he did support the president.

01:09:05.000 I think he would have given the president a wide berth and a certain level of trust.

01:09:09.000 I don't think it would have gone on indefinitely, but I think that two and a half weeks in that Joe Ken is speaking on behalf of Charlie.

01:09:16.000 I find that to be grotesque.

01:09:17.000 I just do.

01:09:17.000 And I'm a Joe Kent fan.

01:09:18.000 So this is disappointing to me that he's going out there at this level because I think I respect so much of what he's done, both in political life and, of course, his service is just fantastic.

01:09:30.000 And the fact that he's speculating at this level, I think that is connecting Charlie, who appears to have been murdered by a trans furry freak, to what's going on in terms of Trump's Iran policy right now.

01:09:43.000 It doesn't add up to me.

01:09:44.000 And the thought that Joe is saying this right after he left the government, we know while he's under investigation by the FBI, the timing of it, so he leaves the government.

01:09:53.000 And because he couldn't ask questions when he was in a position of immense power, now he's going in the private sector and getting a lot of attention.

01:10:00.000 It just reeks to me that there's something off.

01:10:02.000 There's a variable we're not seeing here, but it doesn't make any sense that I couldn't ask questions.

01:10:06.000 So now I'm quitting.

01:10:08.000 That doesn't add up as well.

01:10:09.000 So there's something way off about this.

01:10:11.000 I mean, I'll be honest.

01:10:13.000 I'm quite angry about what he did.

01:10:15.000 I think his agenda was very clear.

01:10:16.000 He's saying, oh, we're not allowed to ask questions.

01:10:18.000 No, I believe we were allowed to ask questions.

01:10:20.000 That's why the FBI investigated the crime.

01:10:22.000 That's why they collaborated with Utah authorities to find and charge the suspect, which they did.

01:10:28.000 And we have ample evidence that there's a ton of evidence in this case.

01:10:31.000 Maybe the reason he wasn't involved is it's actually not his department's job to investigate crimes once they're committed.

01:10:37.000 Maybe the reason he wasn't looped in as much is because they already suspected him of leaking and he appears to have continued to be leaking things.

01:10:45.000 And I'm just, I'm so angry about Charlie, a person we care about, being used in just as a political football in this blatant way where he's using bits of like conversations he supposedly had, bits of evidence to really paint a picture that he can't actually demonstrate evidence for.

01:11:07.000 It just, it made me very upset and it demonstrated, frankly, why I suspect it's a good reason he's not in government anymore.

01:11:14.000 I know a lot of people have fondness for him, but I think I think this was incredibly, I think this was odious behavior by him.

01:11:21.000 And, you know, he dismisses some clear evidence on Trump's behalf.

01:11:25.000 It doesn't come up in the conversation at all.

01:11:27.000 I mentioned those other allies that were definitely would like to see even more done to Iran. 0.76

01:11:32.000 But also think about how Trump basically laid out a red line a year ago in a letter saying no more ballistic missile development, no more nuclear development to the point of beyond civilian means and no more funding care proxies.

01:11:44.000 Iran literally did all three of those things.

01:11:45.000 Joe Kent's aware of this.

01:11:46.000 He's spoken about it.

01:11:47.000 He's tweeted about it.

01:11:48.000 He's even gone pretty far to say that he's called on Trump to basically knock out Iran's ballistic missile capabilities, which is pretty far out there.

01:11:56.000 And then now he's here and he just got there, seemed like within a matter of two weeks.

01:12:02.000 It just is incongruous to me.

01:12:04.000 I just want to fixate on that because we know there are people who will say things publicly because they're on side or they're part of the movement.

01:12:11.000 They might have private misgivings.

01:12:13.000 But it's just incredibly aggravating what he's done where he himself, he has no evidence of the thing he's implying.

01:12:22.000 All he can say is, I was cut out of the investigation when it seems there's ample reason to cut him out of the investigation because he's a guy who runs off and does stuff like this.

01:12:31.000 And I like we'll be that we've been the first to say Charlie didn't want war with Iran.

01:12:37.000 He argued against it.

01:12:38.000 He argued against it to the president.

01:12:40.000 We've tried very carefully to present what we knew Charlie believed, how we think he might react to this while acknowledging we aren't sure because he's no longer with us.

01:12:51.000 We're trying to not use him as this blatant, you know, veto power over everything.

01:12:56.000 And I'm just so upset that Joe Kent runs off, and this is like the first thing he does because he knows it'll go viral.

01:13:03.000 He knows it'll get a ton of attention.

01:13:05.000 When, as he admits, he actually doesn't have anything.

01:13:07.000 He has no evidence.

01:13:08.000 He just does that classic, we're not allowed to ask questions.

01:13:11.000 A ton of people have asked questions.

01:13:13.000 They've never, if they're given answers, they don't like the answers and they pretend they were never given them.

01:13:17.000 Yeah, the lack of hard evidence definitely strikes me.

01:13:20.000 It's so speculative, the argument that's being advanced.

01:13:23.000 And just to repeat, just the invoking Charlie is just when he admits multiple times that you didn't know him very well, just really off-putting to me.

01:13:32.000 Yeah, and I just want to underscore a fact here because I'm privy to certain details that I'm not allowed to speak about publicly.

01:13:40.000 And I want the audience to know every single question that has been floated in any way, shape, or form, we have chased down and we have done our best to.

01:13:51.000 So my point is, he's saying we're not allowed to ask questions.

01:13:54.000 Well, just because you're not presented with the evidence doesn't mean, or given access to that part of the investigation, doesn't mean that the questions haven't been asked and the lines of inquiry haven't been followed.

01:14:05.000 You know, that does not mean things have not been investigated because I know a tremendous amount of things have been investigated and by people that love Charlie, people that cared about Charlie.

01:14:16.000 So here's the last thing, you know, and I constantly go back to this Turley quote in my head where he says, if 90% of the evidence against Tyler Robinson was thrown out, this guy would still get the death penalty.

01:14:28.000 If the defense somehow succeeded in throwing 90% of this evidence out, he'd still be found guilty in a court of law.

01:14:35.000 The amount of evidence that is accumulated against this guy is incredible.

01:14:40.000 And like, just believe me on that.

01:14:44.000 They have this guy completely.

01:14:46.000 Did people seem to know about it beforehand?

01:14:48.000 Yes.

01:14:49.000 Was he radicalized by other people?

01:14:51.000 Yes.

01:14:51.000 I am desperate to get to the bottom of those questions.

01:14:55.000 I'm even, I'm open to all kinds of different things.

01:14:58.000 But to suggest that somehow Tyler Robinson was not the guy that pulled the trigger, I think is a line where I just have to put my foot down and say, no, this guy did the deed, and he deserves to be punished by the court of law.

01:15:12.000 Final thoughts to you, Alex.

01:15:14.000 Yeah, it's a great summary, and all this is designed, timed to do maximum damage to Trump and his war effort, which, like it or not, we're in it for at least a little bit longer and divide the MAGA movement.

01:15:27.000 That's very sad to me as an OG member of the MAGA movement.

01:15:30.000 Alex Marlow, thank you so much.

01:15:36.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - March 19, 2026

The Mideast Gas Fire + The NYC Dumpster Fire

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