The Charlie Kirk Show - February 09, 2023


The New York Times's Plan To Ban Us With Darren Beattie


Episode Stats


Length

32 minutes

Words per minute

152.1118

Word count

4,898

Sentence count

368

Harmful content

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The New York Times is singling out our podcast for censorship and more. We also have Darren Beattie who joins the program to talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence and why we should all be worried about it.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, it's the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:01.000 The New York Times is singling out our podcast for censorship and more.
00:00:06.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom, at charliekirk.com.
00:00:09.000 We also have Darren Beattie who joins the program.
00:00:14.000 Very important.
00:00:15.000 Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:19.000 That is freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:21.000 And subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast by opening up your podcast app and typing in Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:28.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:29.000 Here we go.
00:00:30.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:32.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
00:00:34.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:00:38.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:00:41.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:00:42.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:00:43.000 His spirit, his love of this country.
00:00:45.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
00:00:50.000 Turning point USA. 0.65
00:00:51.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:00.000 That's why we are here.
00:01:03.000 Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at AndrewandTodd.com.
00:01:12.000 I'm going to connect what I saw last evening at Arizona State University to a new piece in the New York Times, and that is this theme of censorship.
00:01:22.000 Left-wing governments, movements, communities, politicians, they need censorship.
00:01:32.000 They need to be able to silence dissent.
00:01:36.000 Dissent is a threat to a totalitarian regime.
00:01:41.000 You see, we as conservatives don't view different ideas as a threat.
00:01:46.000 We might view them as annoying. 0.99
00:01:48.000 We might view them as silly. 0.97
00:01:50.000 We might view them as a waste of time. 0.93
00:01:55.000 We don't necessarily view them as a threat to our worldview.
00:01:59.000 Now, mind you, there are certain liberal ideas that shouldn't be taught in schools, critical race theory being one of them, post-modernism, post-structuralism.
00:02:07.000 But outside of schools and when it gets into the kind of public domain, conservatives, for good reason, don't spend a lot of time writing articles calling left-wing sites or news outlets misinformation spreaders.
00:02:21.000 There is a changing landscape of media happening right now.
00:02:28.000 Media is changing in front of our very eyes.
00:02:29.000 It's very interesting.
00:02:30.000 The first one is the New York Times on their business page today has a whole thing on artificial intelligence.
00:02:37.000 They're only a week behind the Charlie Kirk show.
00:02:41.000 That's okay.
00:02:42.000 Where they say the people on screen are fake.
00:02:44.000 It's very interesting, and it's true that you can now develop completely synthetic broadcasts that will say whatever you want it to say and will look neatly tailored.
00:02:56.000 Of which I think to myself, how is that any different than MSNBC?
00:03:01.000 How is the artificial intelligent news reader any different than what you see already on cable television?
00:03:10.000 It's no different.
00:03:11.000 So they say the disinformation is real, the New York Times writes.
00:03:16.000 In another video, a female news anchor heralded China's role in geopolitical relations at an international summit meeting.
00:03:22.000 The computer-generated avatars were supposedly anchors for an outlet called Wolf News.
00:03:27.000 You mean Wolf Blitzer's show?
00:03:31.000 I'm only kidding, but the New York Times is really worried that there might be computer-generated artificial intelligent images that will just do what they're told because someone puts it on screen.
00:03:46.000 That's already been happening for quite some time.
00:03:49.000 However, what they're trying to warn against is that look at all this potential disinformation that can permeate our society.
00:03:58.000 And that connects with this story here in the New York Times, where it talks about how podcasting is growing.
00:04:04.000 Media is changing in some ways for the better and in some ways for the worse in front of our eyes.
00:04:14.000 It says Steve Bannon's podcast is Top Misinformation Spreader study says, and it has a chart.
00:04:19.000 Now, the chart that they use here, this is a very sloppily put together article, largely because the story that they have here, but the story that they have is based on a study that was done by the Brookings Institution quite some time ago.
00:04:35.000 And it has a chart of who are the greatest faults.
00:04:38.000 They say share of episode that contain false, misleading, or unsubstantiated statements.
00:04:43.000 War Room with Steve Bannon, number one, and the Charlie Kirk show is number two.
00:04:49.000 16.6% of the time, the New York Times says, in conjunction with the Brookings Institution, we are spreading false, misleading, or unsubstantiated statements, of which I say name one example, the Brookings Institute.
00:05:04.000 Is it Brookings Institution or the Brookings Institute?
00:05:06.000 No, it's the Brookings Institution.
00:05:07.000 It's not the Brookings Institute.
00:05:09.000 The Brookings Institution published this, published this.
00:05:12.000 And look, Brookings gets a lot of questionable funding.
00:05:16.000 They receive a fair amount of support from shady sources.
00:05:22.000 Brookings is the most uniparty think tank imaginable.
00:05:26.000 And now there is a new division of Brookings where all they do is they listen to our podcast and they label it disinformation and misinformation.
00:05:35.000 We're number two on that list.
00:05:37.000 Now, of course, that comes with a sense of enjoyment and a sense of accomplishment that what they would say is false, misleading, and unsubstantiated.
00:05:46.000 Why would I enjoy that or consider accomplishing?
00:05:48.000 Because I know it's not true.
00:05:50.000 I know what they're telling me, what they're saying about our program is not true.
00:05:53.000 We go through rigorous study.
00:05:55.000 We have contrarian guests.
00:05:56.000 We ask different questions.
00:05:58.000 We dive into contrarian narratives.
00:06:02.000 We are not spreading false, misleading, or unsubstantiated statements.
00:06:05.000 We are simply asking questions and trying to get closer to the truth.
00:06:09.000 That's what news and journalism is all about.
00:06:12.000 But why is the New York Times doing this now?
00:06:15.000 The answer is threefold.
00:06:20.000 Number one, the new Pfizer story that Project Veritas put out, thanks to the wonderful work of James O'Keefe recently, shows the pharmaceutical industry is doing everything they can to try to stop any communication platforms that might be able to publicize a challenge to the pharmaceutical regime running our country.
00:06:43.000 That's number one.
00:06:44.000 They need to start to get shows like ours, shows like Steve Bannon's, shows like the great one, Mark Levin, who's on the list.
00:06:54.000 They have to silence us.
00:06:56.000 They have to shut us up.
00:06:58.000 That's number one.
00:06:59.000 Number two is if you look at this list, they're all conservative, except Brett Weinstein, the Dark Horse podcast, who I actually listened to his podcast as an original kind of inspiration to have the courage to speak out on the vaccine.
00:07:16.000 Not that I didn't have the courage, I just was uncertain about it.
00:07:18.000 And he confirmed so much of my kind of instincts that there was something not right here.
00:07:22.000 Maybe we should just ask questions.
00:07:24.000 Brett Weinstein deserves great credit for that.
00:07:28.000 But the second reason is that War Room, Charlie Kirk Show, Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, Michael Savage, Brett Weinstein, Daniel Horowitz, Lauderworth Crowder, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rudy Giuliani that they list.
00:07:39.000 You combine those shows together.
00:07:43.000 It is a greater reach, a greater impact, a deeper ability to shape narratives than CNN, MSNBC, and they know it.
00:07:54.000 Media has changed so substantially that people are now going to ulier methods of distribution and media to be able to find out what's happening in the world.
00:08:08.000 And the New York Times finds that to be very troubling.
00:08:10.000 And so they label us as misinformation, which of course is not true.
00:08:15.000 You see here on the list, War Room number one, Charlie Kirk show number two, a close second.
00:08:19.000 I'll take the silver medal behind Steve Bannon.
00:08:22.000 But look, this is the third thing.
00:08:23.000 This is what they do.
00:08:24.000 It's exactly, and this is why I spoke out so forcefully back in May and before that about the censorship and the campaign against Alex Jones.
00:08:37.000 This is the same playbook they used against InfoWars and Alex Jones.
00:08:40.000 I'm not saying you have to like Alex Jones and think he's great or all that, and some people say he's terrible.
00:08:45.000 That's irrelevant to my point.
00:08:47.000 What is relevant is the same playbook, the same blueprint that they used against Alex Jones, the New York Times is now trying to use against our program, which is exactly why I felt compelled to say, we're not going to allow this to happen again.
00:09:02.000 This show is a direct threat to them.
00:09:05.000 And by the way, anyone from the Brookings Institution is welcome on this program anytime, and we can discuss, you can have the floor uninterrupted, why you think I am a spreader of misinformation, false or misleading, unsubstantiated statements.
00:09:20.000 No, the New York Times is platforming this because they want us silenced.
00:09:26.000 The same way that Twitter silenced me.
00:09:28.000 And we'll get into that.
00:09:31.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
00:09:33.000 When Roe versus Wade fell as the law of the land last year, all it did was increase what pro-abortion states are doing to entice and mislead women to abort their children.
00:09:42.000 States are now advertising to travel just to get an abortion.
00:09:46.000 It's become abortion trafficking.
00:09:48.000 So the need to provide the truth as girls and women are contemplating what to do about their pregnancy is greater now than ever before.
00:09:55.000 Ultrasounds save babies because ultrasounds give the truth at a time everyone else is saying it's not just a baby, it's just a clump of cells.
00:10:03.000 When you introduce a girl to her baby by providing an ultrasound, you are giving her the truth at the most important time of her life.
00:10:10.000 And more than 85% of the time, she will choose life.
00:10:13.000 You don't have to make a lot of noise to make a big difference for life.
00:10:16.000 Just give an ultrasound at preborn.org to be a hero for life.
00:10:19.000 That is preborn.org.
00:10:20.000 $140 gives five mothers a free ultrasound and saves babies.
00:10:24.000 $200 can save 10 babies.
00:10:26.000 Go to preborn.org.
00:10:27.000 I love this organization.
00:10:28.000 I'm a donor to it.
00:10:29.000 Check it out: preborn.org.
00:10:33.000 Television, radio, YouTube, they all used to be somewhat free, but they've gradually become more and more centralized and controlled.
00:10:41.000 Podcasts have the lowest cost of entry of any form of media.
00:10:46.000 They're truly small D democratic. 0.60
00:10:48.000 You buy a microphone and you just talk.
00:10:51.000 And if you have a good idea or you have interesting guests or you're an expert in something, you can grow very quickly.
00:10:57.000 You can make a ton of money like Joe Rogan has.
00:11:00.000 I mean, Joe Rogan is probably one of the highest paid media people.
00:11:03.000 God bless him.
00:11:04.000 He deserves it.
00:11:05.000 And he had tons of courage on the COVID issue, especially.
00:11:08.000 And it just kind of started with Joe Rogan with buddies and friends.
00:11:11.000 If you go look at the old Joe Rogan experience videos or podcasts, it was just kind of Joe Rogan chilling with friends back in 2011, 2012, and uploading the audio file.
00:11:19.000 I was like, I don't know if anyone's going to listen to this.
00:11:21.000 And then it slowly became kind of the center of the contrarian zeitgeist.
00:11:27.000 That sounds interesting.
00:11:28.000 The center of the contrarian zeitgeist.
00:11:30.000 What I'm trying to say is that if you have a different idea, that is not, it's heterodox.
00:11:34.000 Heterodox ideas live here, is what the subheader of the Joe Rogan experience should be.
00:11:39.000 150 years ago, we had hundreds and hundreds of small newspapers and journals that catered to every audience.
00:11:47.000 Today, those journals and papers are largely gone.
00:11:51.000 Podcasts are the replacement.
00:11:53.000 You see, what is such a threat to the regime, and one of the reasons why podcasting is so successful is that it doesn't require a ton of capital to continue to produce or to be able to distribute.
00:12:12.000 And you look at the New York Times list right here of what they consider to misinformation spreaders.
00:12:18.000 You'll see it's all conservatives.
00:12:20.000 Now, it just gets a little bit more concerning than this because some of you are emailing us, oh, come on, Charlie, what's the big deal here?
00:12:24.000 We know this.
00:12:25.000 No, this is the big push, though.
00:12:27.000 They are now going to pressure Apple and Google, the podcast distributors, to censor our program.
00:12:37.000 That's the significance here.
00:12:39.000 They kicked Alex Jones off of Apple.
00:12:41.000 And so now with articles like this, the drumbeat, if you dare question mainstream narratives, you should no longer be able to have a podcast on Apple.
00:12:51.000 The quote at the top of the Brookings study is this, quote, since the advent of the medium, podcasts have generally offered a space where you can say whatever you want.
00:13:00.000 Once written off as a dying medium, podcasting has undergone rapid growth and monetization while largely avoiding content moderation and regulatory debates.
00:13:10.000 And that is true in one sense.
00:13:13.000 Podcasting, you can do whatever you want.
00:13:15.000 No rules, not regulated.
00:13:17.000 Now, similarly, the New York Times article includes this line, quote, the findings underscore the vital role that Apple and Google and a constellation of podcast applications play in connecting disinformation peddlers to their audiences.
00:13:33.000 Now, read between the lines here.
00:13:36.000 The agenda of this article is not to inform readers.
00:13:40.000 The reason they wrote this and the reason that I am in the New York Times today, it's to put pressure on Apple and Google and other companies to deplatform programs that the elite left consider misinformation.
00:13:55.000 And you could add Spotify to that list as well, which of course is any show that disagrees with them.
00:14:01.000 So what do they, how do they decide this?
00:14:04.000 Well, it is a Brookings institution that has very strong opinions of their own.
00:14:08.000 So they're not exactly an impartial referee.
00:14:11.000 They're not exactly, let's say, neutral.
00:14:15.000 But it's a couple topics that we have decided to ask questions about over the last couple of years.
00:14:21.000 Number one, the vaccine.
00:14:23.000 We made a decision to ask questions about the vaccine.
00:14:27.000 We made a decision to ask questions about BLM, burn, loot, murder, or BLM, Black Lives Matter, whichever one you want to use the acronym for in 2020.
00:14:41.000 Or buy large mansions, BLM. 0.97
00:14:44.000 You could fill it in however you want.
00:14:45.000 We decided to ask questions about the integrity of our elections.
00:14:50.000 We made a decision to do that.
00:14:51.000 We knew that we were going to get pressure for doing that.
00:14:55.000 We made a decision to ask questions about bio labs in Ukraine.
00:15:00.000 We made a decision to ask questions about ivermectin hydroxychloroquine, intravenous therapy, baby aspirin, vitamin D supplementation, and early treatments.
00:15:11.000 We made a decision to ask questions about big tech manipulating our elections.
00:15:18.000 And by the way, almost every one of those decisions we made, over time, we were vindicated.
00:15:25.000 And they were the misinformation spreaders, not us.
00:15:30.000 I want to tell you guys about COVID tax relief.
00:15:33.000 COVID tax relief is an amazing service that exists for you because of Washington, D.C.'s addiction to overspending.
00:15:41.000 Again, I'm not a fan that this money exists or that's out there or that it's available, but as they say, it is what it is.
00:15:47.000 Look, COVIDTaxRelief.org got a small retail business, almost $80,000.
00:15:52.000 COVIDtaxRelief.org got a manufacturing business, nearly $250,000.
00:15:57.000 COVIDTaxRelief.org got a large distribution business, almost $900,000.
00:16:01.000 If you run a business, church or nonprofit, and paid your employees through all or part of the pandemic, you could qualify for up to $26,000 per employee through the Government Cares Act.
00:16:11.000 COVIDtaxRelief.org receives a low commission, very reasonable, only after you receive the money.
00:16:15.000 So go to covidtaxrelief.org.
00:16:17.000 That is covidtaxrelief.org, covidtaxrelief.org.
00:16:21.000 Check it out right now, covidtaxrelief.org.
00:16:27.000 I do want to thank you, the audience.
00:16:31.000 You are the reason we keep on doing what we are doing.
00:16:35.000 You are the reason why we take on the tough topics.
00:16:39.000 And your emails today have been fabulous and supportive, saying, Charlie, keep fighting, don't back down, keep on talking about the tough stuff.
00:16:48.000 And so that really, that really touches us and me personally.
00:16:53.000 The connection that we have to you, the audience, is very special.
00:16:58.000 You guys can always go to charliekirk.com.
00:17:01.000 There is a support tab there.
00:17:03.000 If you guys ever want to get behind the work we are doing, it's charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:17:10.000 And you, the audience, you are the jet fuel that allows us to continue to climb.
00:17:16.000 Okay, Darren, welcome back to the program.
00:17:19.000 Great to be here as always.
00:17:21.000 So, Darren, I want to talk to you about the meme case.
00:17:24.000 I want you to lay it out.
00:17:25.000 You have a wonderful piece on Revolver.news.
00:17:27.000 And then I want to make our announcement, our modest contribution to the cause that hopefully will inspire our audience to do something.
00:17:35.000 So state the case, Darren, and then we'll make our announcement.
00:17:38.000 Well, I mean, it really is one of the most disturbing and certainly the most important First Amendment case that unfortunately a lot of Americans haven't even heard of yet.
00:17:50.000 And it involves the case of a young man called Douglas Mackey, who is allegedly behind a now kind of legendary Twitter account in the 2016 sort of Trump campaign era.
00:18:07.000 And this humbly young man just operating this pseudonymous account that trafficked in memes and a lot of the memes were really funny.
00:18:16.000 Some were controversial.
00:18:17.000 Some were both controversial and hilarious.
00:18:22.000 MIT conducted a study of the most influential media accounts on the 2016 election.
00:18:29.000 And to their shock and consternation, this pseudonymous Twitter account operated by some young man in New York, allegedly, was more influential on the 2016 election than CBS and other just multi-multi-million dollar corporate media outlets.
00:18:51.000 And I think that was kind of a thorn in the side of the regime.
00:18:56.000 And so they decided to go after this guy.
00:18:59.000 And what are they saying?
00:19:00.000 Well, one of the memes in question is following a meme format that's designed to mock the intelligence of Hillary Clinton and her supporters.
00:19:10.000 God forbid, right?
00:19:12.000 And what it says essentially, Hillary supporters, if you want to vote for Hillary, don't even bother, you know, just text Hillary to this number. 0.98
00:19:22.000 It's like with the suggestion that Hillary voters are so dumb that they would text Hillary to a number instead of go vote. 0.97
00:19:30.000 It was clearly following a satirical format. 0.99
00:19:35.000 But shortly after Biden took office, they arrested this guy.
00:19:39.000 Now they're charging him and he faces up to 10 years in prison for this satirical meme mocking Hillary supporters.
00:19:48.000 How on earth can they do this?
00:19:50.000 Well, they're dredging up some ancient statute that was originally designed to combat the Ku Klux Klan and prevent the Klan from like physically intimidating African-American voters from going to the polls.
00:20:10.000 And they're saying that the statute that was designed to prevent the Ku Klux Klan from like blocking a street to prevent an African-American from going to vote encompasses a prohibition, a criminal prohibition on satirical Twitter memes saying, oh, you want to go vote this, vote this thing.
00:20:34.000 And the thing is, the government hasn't even been able to produce a single aggrieved party.
00:20:40.000 That is to say, a single individual who did not go vote because they were discussing.
00:20:46.000 That's the whole crisis.
00:20:47.000 Then you have no victims.
00:20:49.000 And so let me just kind of share a part of this, why I'm so passionate about it.
00:20:54.000 So I got my start working in politics as a volunteer in the suburbs of Chicago.
00:20:59.000 And the 2010 election was the first election.
00:21:01.000 I knocked on a bunch of doors.
00:21:02.000 And I'll never forget there was a get out the vote rally for then Congressman Mark Kirk, no relation, ended up being a very moderate senator.
00:21:10.000 But I'm glad he won.
00:21:11.000 He beat Dan Seals.
00:21:14.000 And there was this get out the vote rally.
00:21:17.000 And someone got up on stage the Saturday before the election.
00:21:21.000 And they said, I want all of you to go vote on Tuesday.
00:21:24.000 And for all you Democrats, make sure you go vote Wednesday.
00:21:29.000 Exactly.
00:21:29.000 Now, why am I saying that?
00:21:31.000 That is kind of a typical one-liner in goofy boomer politics, right?
00:21:36.000 Let's just be honest.
00:21:37.000 Like, oh, yeah, I want my opposition to go vote on a different day.
00:21:40.000 And everyone would laugh and chuckle.
00:21:42.000 Darren, what you're saying is that is now criminal speech according to the Biden administration.
00:21:48.000 But it goes beyond that.
00:21:49.000 It's criminal speech.
00:21:50.000 And they're trying to put this young guy in jail for 10 years.
00:21:53.000 And I think we all know, like, if it wasn't actually about mocking Hillary and if MIT didn't determine that this guy had more of an influence on the election than, you know, CBS and the other sort of corporate controlled Hillary aligned media, this, you know, prosecution would never happen.
00:22:14.000 But it's actually even bigger than that because, of course, they're saying that this is disinformation.
00:22:21.000 And so what it's really about, and this is why it's so dangerous, what it's really about is an attempt by the Biden regime to codify the entire disinformation scam into the criminal code.
00:22:35.000 So that disinformation, which as we discussed in many occasions on this show and elsewhere, disinformation is the regime's new censorship predicate.
00:22:46.000 And what they're doing is they're saying if you engage in disinformation, that is speech we don't like, you're not only going to be deplatformed from all social media platforms, you're not only going to be fired from your job, you're going to be put in jail, which, as I've said, is kind of the ultimate deplatforming.
00:23:03.000 That's right.
00:23:04.000 So that's what's really at stake here.
00:23:06.000 New York Times today has our show as the number two spreader of disinformation, Darren.
00:23:11.000 So you're exactly right.
00:23:12.000 Oh, you better watch out.
00:23:13.000 You might face 10 years, Charlie.
00:23:16.000 That is unfortunately not hyperbole.
00:23:18.000 So what we're going to do at Turning Point USA, just to motivate our audience, this is a young man.
00:23:22.000 His name is Douglas Mackey.
00:23:24.000 He made memes.
00:23:24.000 He made jokes in the 2016 election.
00:23:27.000 Okay.
00:23:29.000 And because of this, the Biden administration is trying to break him financially, put him in jail as a Soviet show trial because he made graphics and memes that there is not a singular provable victim, but they want to try to set a legal precedent that if you make fun of a Democrat presidential candidate, it could land you in jail.
00:23:49.000 They're trying to stunt creativity.
00:23:51.000 They're trying to stop the entire subterranean internet culture that was one of the life forces behind Donald Trump's successful 2016 campaign of just kind of meme internet culture where people would make fun of Hillary and they'd make fun of WikiLeaks.
00:24:05.000 They make fun of all this.
00:24:06.000 They want to stunt all of it.
00:24:07.000 So what we're doing at Turning Point USA, we're going to match up to just a little bit, $10,000 of his legal fund.
00:24:15.000 It's meme defensefund.com.
00:24:17.000 So this is to help him with legal fees.
00:24:20.000 So our audience, and Darren, you could put on your website, if we can raise $10,000, Turning Point USA will match it, which will give a $20,000 net total contribution to his legal fund.
00:24:31.000 Darren, why is it important that we get behind this?
00:24:35.000 Well, it's important for a lot of reasons.
00:24:36.000 It's important because a young guy is facing 10 years in prison for something ridiculous, for satirical memes against Hillary.
00:24:43.000 But it's important for the country because, again, it's bad enough that the regime's trying to censor any kind of opposition under the manifest pretext of disinformation.
00:24:56.000 But to take it a step further and make it a criminal offense puts us so close to this dystopian China-like situation that we couldn't even call ourselves a free society anymore.
00:25:09.000 That's how dangerous it is.
00:25:10.000 So everyone who cares about the role of free speech in the deliberative democratic process, anyone who cares about just the importance of humor and satire in a kind of free and flourishing society, this case is the most important case.
00:25:28.000 So I really encourage everyone, and I, you know, I congratulate you for stepping up for this because it's truly an issue of national importance.
00:25:39.000 Free speech is a precondition for freedom in every other context.
00:25:44.000 If we don't have free speech, we have nothing.
00:25:47.000 Alexander Solshenitsyn used to speak frequently on how the cartoonists received some of the harshest treatment in the gulags.
00:25:58.000 The people that would satirize Stalin, the people that would write cartoons against the regime.
00:26:06.000 I mean, let's just be honest, what it was.
00:26:08.000 And there's a reason for that because humor can pierce and penetrate in a way that other mediums can't.
00:26:18.000 Humor is memorable, humor is true.
00:26:22.000 And again, totalitarian dictators have a lot in common, including the need to chill speech.
00:26:28.000 But they also, more than even chilling speech, you're not allowed to mock the ruler.
00:26:37.000 This Nord Stream story is, it seems to be limitlessly interesting.
00:26:44.000 There's so many wrinkles to it.
00:26:46.000 How should we think about it?
00:26:47.000 What is the truth?
00:26:49.000 Well, in short, the Nord Stream one and two were critically important pipelines that were constructed that enabled Russia to provide energy to Europe, including and especially Germany.
00:27:04.000 They'd always been a profound thorn in the side of NATO, NATO-aligned countries, and in particular, the United States, in particular, that color revolution faction that I've spoken about that is singularly obsessed with Russia.
00:27:21.000 And sure enough, in the immediate aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Nord Stream pipelines just kind of blow up.
00:27:33.000 And, you know, nobody knows for sure what exactly happened.
00:27:39.000 I haven't heard anything remotely logical or plausible along the lines of Russia blew up their own pipeline, which kind of was the standard line promoted by people associated with the regime in some capacity.
00:27:55.000 But President Biden and Victoria Newland, who has a long history with Russia, was involved in the color revolution, Euromaidan, basically telegraphed that one way or another, the pipeline is going down, kind of cryptic, almost sort of mafia-style threats.
00:28:16.000 And now there's been an explosive report by this Pulitzer-winning journalist, Seymour Hirsch, purporting to give a very detailed operational account of how, yes, the U.S. did it, and not just a U.S. proxy, which is always a sort of a possibility, but the U.S. did it directly.
00:28:40.000 It was Navy divers operating in the pretext of some kind of harmless exercise.
00:28:47.000 They pretended to do this exercise, but really planted explosives.
00:28:51.000 This was all being conducted and planned before Russia's invasion even happened, and that it was coming from the very top levels of the Biden White House.
00:29:02.000 Now, the truth about this story is Seymour Hirsch has been very accurate.
00:29:07.000 He's wanted Pulitzer.
00:29:09.000 It's an unnamed source, and it looks like it relies on only one source.
00:29:13.000 But the claims and account here is absolutely explosive.
00:29:17.000 It's hard to overemphasize the severity of this because in any normal context, this would amount to an act of war.
00:29:27.000 And interestingly enough, not just an act of war against Russia, which is more obvious, but an act of war against Germany, because Nord Stream 2 is actually a critical piece of Germany's economic infrastructure.
00:29:42.000 And the behavior of Germany and other European countries as like good, obedient, dog-like vassal states, United States, is more conspicuous than ever. 0.75
00:29:53.000 Because the most we've seen from Europe and Scandinavian countries is we have seen no evidence that the U.S. claims that this was Russia blowing up their own important pipeline, which is like their most precious piece of infrastructure to Europe that had been in construction for years.
00:30:10.000 The notion that they blew up their pipeline was ridiculous.
00:30:14.000 And the Scandinavian countries are basically between the lines intimating that it was the U.S. or U.S. proxies by saying there's absolutely no evidence.
00:30:23.000 And the broader sort of geopolitical take home from this, I think, is that as much as we want to think of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in terms of Russia, obviously, and the U.S. proxy war with Russia, I think there's a different and equally important story that pertains to our relationship with Europe.
00:30:43.000 Because up until this point, Macron and others were talking about strategic autonomy, reasserting Europe's geopolitical sovereignty.
00:30:52.000 All of that is absolutely thrown out the window.
00:30:55.000 There could be no more spectacular display of complete American dominance and hegemony over the affairs of Europe than us, whether directly or indirectly, sabotaging Germany's pipeline and getting away with it completely.
00:31:14.000 There's one wrinkle here that I seem focused on.
00:31:17.000 If we did indeed do this, which is a cash cow for Russia, and also, obviously, Germany benefits, hasn't Russia shown rather extraordinary restraint by not retaliating? 0.64
00:31:29.000 Well, they've already shown extraordinary restraint given all the weapons that we've been providing directly to their enemies.
00:31:36.000 I mean, Russia is in a very unenviable and difficult position geopolitically.
00:31:42.000 Putin's decision to invade the Ukraine has proved disastrous for Russia.
00:31:46.000 And this story about Nordstream is yet another example.
00:31:50.000 Darren Beatty, right of time, revolver.news, check it out.
00:31:53.000 And also support Douglas Mackey at meme defensefund.com.
00:31:58.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:32:00.000 Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:32:03.000 Thank you so much for listening, and God bless.
00:32:08.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.