The Charlie Kirk Show - The People’s President vs the Pupeteers with JD Vance and Jason Chaffetz

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, down at Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:01.000 What form of government is going to define our future?

00:00:05.000 It's a great question.

00:00:06.000 Jason Schaffetz has a new book, The Puppeteers, that makes an argument that they want to make elections irrelevant with a permanent administrative state.

00:00:15.000 Then we have JD Vance, who I think hits it perfectly as well, senator from the great state of Ohio.

00:00:19.000 He's doing a wonderful job.

00:00:20.000 And then I elaborate on that towards the end of the episode.

00:00:23.000 Email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.

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00:00:52.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:53.000 Here we go.

00:00:54.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:55.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:57.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:01.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:04.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:05.000 He's an incredible guy.

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00:01:35.000 With us now is Jason Schaffetz, author of an important new book, The Puppeteers, the People Who Control the People Who Control America, a very important topic.

00:01:44.000 Jason, welcome to the program.

00:01:46.000 Hey, thanks for having me, Charlie.

00:01:47.000 So, Jason, tell us about the book.

00:01:49.000 Why did you write it?

00:01:50.000 And who are the puppeteers?

00:01:53.000 Wrote it because oftentimes the people in Congress, they're fighting the wrong fights.

00:01:58.000 The puppeteers, they're the ones that control the people who control what's going on in D.C.

00:02:04.000 And not only is it the administrative bureaucratic state, but I got to tell you, there are people all over the place that are in positions of power that, you know, they can use their resources, they can use their money, their power, their influence.

00:02:20.000 And we're talking, we do, we name names and we show the money.

00:02:24.000 Everybody from Brian Deese and Susan Rice and BlackRock and what they're doing to the state treasurers, Randy Weingarten at the teachers union, they have much more of an effect on education in this country than the Secretary of Education.

00:02:40.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:02:41.000 And so, you know, people are unclear about how all this came to be.

00:02:47.000 I want to get into that, but let's talk about one of them in particular, which is this administrative state, right?

00:02:52.000 So the question is this.

00:02:54.000 Does the president control the government or does the government control the president?

00:02:59.000 Jason, which one is truer in today's time?

00:03:06.000 A quick story I tell about in the book about the B team, where members of Congress, a member of Congress goes to meet with a cabinet secretary.

00:03:14.000 Cabinet Secretary is not there.

00:03:15.000 And so what they do is the senior staff says, oh, we can meet with you.

00:03:19.000 And the member of Congress is mad about it.

00:03:21.000 Says, I'm not going to meet with you. 1.00

00:03:22.000 I'm not going to meet with the B team.

00:03:25.000 I want to meet with the cabinet secretary.

00:03:27.000 And finally, the senior staff says to the member of Congress, we be here before you.

00:03:31.000 We be here after you.

00:03:32.000 We be the ones that make the decisions.

00:03:34.000 You be meeting with the right people.

00:03:37.000 And let's also understand that if you follow the money, we had this debt ceiling discussion, right?

00:03:44.000 We were talking about less than 10% of the budget.

00:03:47.000 You know, more than 75% of the budget is mandatory programmatic spending.

00:03:52.000 It's not just Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security.

00:03:54.000 It's hundreds of other programs.

00:03:56.000 They're on autopilot.

00:03:57.000 Congress never touches them.

00:03:59.000 In fact, we talk about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was set up with the Obama administration, not funded by Congress, not accountable to Congress.

00:04:07.000 Guess who was accountable to?

00:04:09.000 It was set up so that it was administered by the Federal Reserve, bypassing Congress, bypassing the American people and no accountability.

00:04:17.000 Nobody elected over there. 0.96

00:04:19.000 It's a really important book because it attempts to try to answer the question of ultimate sovereignty.

00:04:24.000 Who are the sovereign?

00:04:25.000 Are the people the sovereign?

00:04:27.000 Or is there some sort of a shadow, mysterious class that is calling the shots?

00:04:34.000 And the administrative state is obviously front and center in everyone's mind because we have this Department of Justice that basically wants to tell you how an election should go without you, the people, being able to vote.

00:04:47.000 I'm going to go in.

00:04:48.000 We're going to indict Trump.

00:04:49.000 It doesn't matter if he's running for president.

00:04:52.000 And so let's just go through some of the lists.

00:04:53.000 Who do you think, if you had to say, what are the Mount Rushmore of puppeteers?

00:05:00.000 Who are the top ones, right?

00:05:01.000 Let's name names.

00:05:02.000 Is it Barack Obama?

00:05:04.000 Is it George Soros?

00:05:06.000 Who are the puppet masters of the current regime?

00:05:12.000 I would go with Larry Fink right out of the shoots, the one who runs BlackRock.

00:05:16.000 If you look at the S ⁇ P 500, BlackRock owns at least 5% of 98.5% of those companies.

00:05:25.000 When Larry Kudlow was the economic advisor for President Trump, he had decades of economic experience.

00:05:33.000 Well, guess what happened?

00:05:34.000 When Joe Biden comes into play, they put in Brian Dees.

00:05:38.000 Brian Dees was a BlackRock employee.

00:05:40.000 He's a climate activist.

00:05:41.000 He had nothing.

00:05:42.000 He didn't want to better the economy.

00:05:44.000 He wanted to empower stakeholders, not get the best return on investment for retirees and whatnot.

00:05:52.000 The other one I put up there, the state treasurers.

00:05:55.000 It's sleepy races that nobody talks about.

00:05:57.000 Well, that's interesting.

00:05:57.000 But the state, if you look at the document, we got our hands on a document that I probably wasn't supposed to see.

00:06:04.000 The state Democratic treasurers, they call it the corporate benefits package.

00:06:09.000 And if you pay $50,000 or $100,000, you can sit with your state treasurer.

00:06:13.000 It just so happens if you add up the tally of what the state treasurers control that are controlled by Democrats, it's $2.5 trillion.

00:06:23.000 That's a lot of money in anybody's world.

00:06:26.000 And they say, it doesn't matter who you elect the president or in Congress.

00:06:29.000 We're going to use our proxy voting.

00:06:31.000 We're going to use retirees' money, the 401k money, and we're going to change and put in place what we want on climate change, DEI, ESG.

00:06:41.000 This is how we're going to troll.

00:06:42.000 And that's where the Democrats fight the fight, right?

00:06:45.000 That's where they go into these sleepy races. 0.76

00:06:48.000 This is so interesting.

00:06:50.000 So we have public policy that is being removed from the typical channels that the founders envisioned, which is the people elect representatives.

00:07:01.000 But now we have all these other extra governmental power centers, both inside and outside government.

00:07:06.000 You just identified one.

00:07:07.000 So state treasurers.

00:07:09.000 So I don't know, the state treasurer of California, right, would CalPERS, which is what, a couple trillion dollars?

00:07:16.000 Is it that much?

00:07:17.000 It's a ton, right?

00:07:18.000 Well, they control about $750 billion that's flowing through.

00:07:23.000 And that's the retiree program.

00:07:25.000 That's the teachers' retiree programs.

00:07:28.000 That doesn't even count some of those other programs that you're talking about, Charlie.

00:07:32.000 The numbers are off the charts.

00:07:35.000 And so, again, you got to peel it back and follow the flow of money.

00:07:39.000 And then I see Republicans in Congress, of which I used to be one, fighting over these bills that are going nowhere and don't actually change the trajectory.

00:07:48.000 Democrats want to put the economy and the government on autopilot.

00:07:54.000 So they're not, you know, these elections don't really matter as much to them.

00:08:00.000 That's what they want to do.

00:08:01.000 No, that's exactly right.

00:08:02.000 They want elections to be personality contests and performative, where the actual decision-making process is permanent by an immovable philosopher king class.

00:08:13.000 I think you've identified this perfectly, Jason.

00:08:15.000 So let's just go back into the history of this.

00:08:17.000 And it's okay if it's a mixture of both.

00:08:21.000 What came first?

00:08:22.000 Did government get too big and then that empowered crony interests to then be untouchable?

00:08:28.000 Or was it an untouchable crony interest class that then increased government control?

00:08:34.000 Like, just go through the history of how we became a country run by puppeteers, not by the people.

00:08:41.000 I really see the difference when Barack Obama came in office.

00:08:44.000 He was so savvy that the Democrats recognized that they needed to change the trajectory of how we do elections.

00:08:52.000 That's why Nancy Pelosi, who became so, so potent in what she did, put out HR1. 0.90

00:08:59.000 She wanted to change elections. 1.00

00:09:01.000 If you look at what Joe Biden then followed up and did with his executive order 14019 to get out the vote, that, you know, it sounds nice.

00:09:12.000 Hey, let's all get out the vote.

00:09:13.000 But using federal assets, federal people, federal money, and then is now claiming executive privilege.

00:09:19.000 So we can't see what he's doing.

00:09:20.000 But basically, he's leveraging physical facilities and 2.2 million federal employees to get out the vote.

00:09:26.000 When they recognize that they could actually get away with that and get around some of the other laws that were on the books, then they really went to town.

00:09:34.000 So I would argue that government got too big.

00:09:36.000 And that probably happened first.

00:09:39.000 But then the administrative bureaucratic state said, hey, we want to continue on in perpetuity.

00:09:44.000 We got to change the rules.

00:09:45.000 So I think that happened second.

00:09:48.000 And now, I mean, look at us.

00:09:50.000 We're $6 trillion a year.

00:09:53.000 We're $36 trillion in debt.

00:09:57.000 We pay more than $2 billion a day just in interest on that national debt.

00:10:03.000 And we're beholden to China and everybody else, this is all on purpose. 1.00

00:10:08.000 They put it together a game plan and they're executing on it.

00:10:11.000 Yeah, the state is immovable and it is.

00:10:16.000 You got to starve the beast.

00:10:18.000 You have to starve the beast.

00:10:20.000 If you don't starve the beast, you never solve this problem.

00:10:23.000 Jason Chaffetz is author of the book, The Puppeteers, The People Who Control, the People Who Control America.

00:10:31.000 It's a very deep topic, really smart.

00:10:34.000 The goal is to put the American government on autopilot and prevent election results from threatening their agenda.

00:10:41.000 Yes, yes, and yes.

00:10:44.000 They want elections to be irrelevant.

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00:13:01.000 So, Jason, I want to talk more about the book.

00:13:03.000 What do you think are the solutions to these issues?

00:13:06.000 So, the solutions are really found at the states.

00:13:09.000 First of all, you got to starve the beast, okay?

00:13:11.000 Congress, if they're going to do their job, they got to starve the beast. 0.87

00:13:14.000 And they got to take on the mandatory programmatic spending.

00:13:18.000 I understand Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, but there are hundreds of other programs that are on that automatic programmatic spending category that never get touched by Congress.

00:13:29.000 And they only debate about 10% of them.

00:13:32.000 But the second thing is, you really have to do things at the states.

00:13:35.000 State treasurers, state attorneys general, they have the power to actually do a lot of these things, enforce the issues.

00:13:43.000 And so, federalism is still the issue.

00:13:45.000 It is still the way that you can actually solve this problem.

00:13:48.000 The state attorneys general could be yanking people up, they could be making the changes, and the states can say no to what these feds are trying to do. 1.00

00:13:57.000 Yeah, the states really are the solution.

00:13:59.000 I agree with that.

00:14:01.000 And, you know, you look at some of the actors that are in play.

00:14:05.000 It's very obvious that John Fetterman's not in charge, obviously, and Joe Biden is not in charge.

00:14:09.000 Are there any other faces or aspects to the puppeteering class that you think deserve attention that we haven't spoken about already?

00:14:17.000 So, in the Puppeteers book, I talk about how they need racism.

00:14:22.000 They don't survive without racism.

00:14:24.000 And, you know, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, said that white supremacy is the number one threat to the United States of America.

00:14:34.000 Number one, really?

00:14:36.000 I mean, we point out how they do the statistics, what statistics they look at.

00:14:41.000 If there's some, you know, white supremacy that's going on that demands law enforcement, hey, go do that.

00:14:48.000 But it's not really the number one thing out there.

00:14:50.000 There's a reason why the Southern Poverty Law Center and these others try to target these groups because then it justifies them to use police powers.

00:14:58.000 Like facial recognition is one thing I talk about.

00:15:02.000 I held hearings about this when I was in Congress.

00:15:04.000 The FBI, despite the law, and I want to be clear about that, despite the law, has been collecting Americans' facial recognition for a long time now.

00:15:15.000 And when you go to get your driver's license, why should a 16-year-old suddenly be in the FBI database?

00:15:21.000 I mean, there's a reason why we don't collect your DNA and your fingerprints when you're born, because that would be wholly intrusive and absolutely fundamentally wrong.

00:15:30.000 But the FBI is getting around that.

00:15:32.000 They want to be able to see where you go, what you've done.

00:15:37.000 Do you go to a cancer clinic?

00:15:38.000 Do you go to a bar?

00:15:40.000 Do you go to a particular college?

00:15:42.000 Do you go to a political rally?

00:15:44.000 The Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI, is tracking that.

00:15:48.000 And as a suspicionless American, that should not be.

00:15:52.000 Jason Chaffetz is the author of the important new book, The Puppeteers.

00:15:56.000 Jason, congratulations and come back soon.

00:15:58.000 Thanks so much.

00:15:59.000 Thank you.

00:15:59.000 I found this article.

00:16:00.000 I read the journal.

00:16:02.000 This is a, I love, my favorite part of the Wall Street Journal actually is the community notes or letters to the editor.

00:16:07.000 And here's this doctor from Ohio, Kent, Ohio, Dr. Jason Kolb, who in four paragraphs challenges the trans alarmism better than anybody.

00:16:18.000 Let me just read this one thing here.

00:16:19.000 It's amazing.

00:16:21.000 Patients with gender dysphoria are suffering and to be treated with compassion and dignity.

00:16:25.000 But as physicians, we would never prescribe weight loss pills for patients with anorexia or refer them for weight loss surgery.

00:16:31.000 So why are so many in support of medications and surgery to treat patients with gender dysphoria?

00:16:36.000 Both conditions are distortions of body image, fear of being labeled transphobic, incomplete understanding of the risks and permanence of such treatments and misinformation about the benefits are likely the reason.

00:16:47.000 It is time to take seriously our promise to do no harm when it comes to patients with gender dysphoria.

00:16:53.000 Dr. Kolb from Kent, Ohio, one of the clearest little pieces I've seen from a doctor in quite some time.

00:17:00.000 I'm glad the journal published it.

00:17:02.000 Alarmism hurts children with gender dysphoria.

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00:18:29.000 Let's play some tape here just to kind of give some idea of what is going on with the reaction to Trump.

00:18:36.000 Let's go to Cut 48, Rachel Maddow.

00:18:38.000 We knew heading into this that he was planning to make these remarks.

00:18:41.000 We are prepared for his pre-fundraiser remarks tonight to again be essentially a Trump campaign speech.

00:18:48.000 Because of that, we do not intend to carry these remarks live.

00:18:52.000 As we have said before in these circumstances, there is a cost to us as a news organization to knowingly broadcast untrue things.

00:19:00.000 We are here to bring you the news.

00:19:02.000 It hurts our ability to do that if we live broadcast what we fully expect in advance to be a litany of lies and false accusations, no matter who says them.

00:19:14.000 And I do not say this with any glee.

00:19:16.000 We are the ministry of truth and lies will not be tolerated.

00:19:23.000 Rachel Maddow proclaims from the Pullet Bureau. 0.93

00:19:29.000 They believe they should be the gatekeepers of truth.

00:19:32.000 This is a common theme, everybody.

00:19:33.000 And the more you recognize and realize the philosophy of the contagion that came into power with Woodrow Wilson versus the promise of the founder, do you believe the people should be able to have information, the people to be able to make decisions?

00:19:46.000 Or do you want a council of experts, unelected experts, that get to decide for you what is best for you?

00:19:53.000 A Pulit Bureau of committees, a ruling of administration of whether or not you have to take a vaccine, of what food you get to eat, of are they actually your kids?

00:20:05.000 Rachel Maddow believes the same thing where she says, yeah, we're not going to let you view this.

00:20:10.000 PBS, when it gets, when Donald Trump is speaking, has disclaimers on the bottom as if we're listening to Saddam Hussein.

00:20:18.000 Play Cut 40, Jake Tapper believes the same thing, play cut 40.

00:20:22.000 We do have now some of the sound, as I told you, we're not, and the audience, we're not carrying his remarks live because frankly, he says a lot of things that are not true and sometimes potentially dangerous.

00:20:33.000 Says CNN.

00:20:34.000 Yeah, the number one peddler of the Russia hoax.

00:20:37.000 For years, he's telling us, if there was anyone that should be censored for peddling disinformation, it should be CNN.

00:20:47.000 Anybody.

00:20:48.000 They're deploying their surrogates all over cable television to try to make sense of this.

00:20:52.000 Andrew McCabe says, look, that Hillary Clinton and Trump, they're two separate cases, play cut 30.

00:20:58.000 And these two cases could not be more different on the facts.

00:21:01.000 Yes, Hillary Clinton maintained private servers. 0.99

00:21:04.000 Emails went across those servers.

00:21:06.000 Ultimately, she returned 30,000 emails to the Department of Defense, work-related emails.

00:21:11.000 Now, it's important to remember, those weren't classified documents.

00:21:14.000 That was simply the content of email exchanges that was later deemed to be classified.

00:21:21.000 Hold on a second, Andrew McCabe.

00:21:23.000 First of all, you're lucky you're not in jail.

00:21:26.000 And you're lucky you still have a pension.

00:21:29.000 Andrew McCabe was number two under James Comey.

00:21:32.000 He was very nervous for a while.

00:21:34.000 He should be in jail. 0.99

00:21:35.000 He is a cockroach. 1.00

00:21:36.000 He's a scum rat. 1.00

00:21:39.000 Some of those emails were marked with C for classified. 1.00

00:21:42.000 That's number one.

00:21:43.000 Number two, what do you mean that the government got them all back?

00:21:45.000 She bleached emails and destroyed devices. 0.93

00:21:48.000 Well, she had her lawyer do that. 0.98

00:21:51.000 Number three, she was Secretary of State.

00:21:54.000 She did not have declassification ability.

00:21:57.000 The president of the United States has full declassification ability.

00:22:00.000 Secretary of State doesn't have that. 1.00

00:22:02.000 And she set up this private server and this whole conduit. 0.99

00:22:05.000 Not to mention the crux of the Trump indictment has several layers to it.

00:22:13.000 It's a 50-50 chance on the Presidential Records Act.

00:22:16.000 And if he has a good legal team, I think he'll be okay.

00:22:18.000 The bigger issue that he's going to, and again, they overcharged for a reason, obviously, throw everything against the walls, 206, is the obstruction of justice issue, is the process issue.

00:22:29.000 Even though justice was not obstructed and they got all their documents back, even though Donald Trump wasn't selling these documents to the Saudis or the Iranians or faxing them to the Kremlin in exchange for wire transfers, of which is the essence of the Espionage Act.

00:22:42.000 Like, hey, you've classified information, you give it to the enemy for cash, money, favor, or to hate your country, then, okay, that's what the Espionage Act was supposed to be there for, antiquated law, not applied equally.

00:22:54.000 Instead, the government gets all their documents back.

00:22:59.000 But the issue that Donald Trump, President Trump, is going to have to fight more than any other issue is the obstruction issue.

00:23:10.000 That one's going to be tough because when the government, when the government alleges that, the standard is very, very subjective.

00:23:24.000 They're allegedly saying obstruction based on things he said privately to his lawyers.

00:23:30.000 That alone should be dismissed, that they can lift the attorney-client veil.

00:23:36.000 Hey, if we were able to lift the attorney client veil of Andrew McCabe talking to his lawyers or James Comey talking to his lawyers or Hillary Clinton talking to her lawyers, what would we get?

00:23:49.000 Well, joining us now is Senator JD Vance.

00:23:51.000 Feels good to be able to say that.

00:23:52.000 Senator, you made some news yesterday about holding up nominees.

00:23:55.000 Tell us about it.

00:23:56.000 Yeah, the basic idea, Charlie, is that Merrick Garland is using the political appointments of the Department of Justice as foot soldiers in a war of politics instead of a law enforcement agency.

00:24:07.000 That's exactly what he's turned the Department of Justice into.

00:24:10.000 And so what we've decided to do is use the authority that the people of Ohio gave me as a United States Senator and use that to gum up the works a little bit and to say to Merrick Garland that we're going to hold the nominations that you have to the Department of Justice until you commit your agency to the job of law enforcement and criminal prosecution, not of politics.

00:24:31.000 That's something we're able to do.

00:24:33.000 That's an action that I felt was important to take.

00:24:35.000 And I've heard it from a lot of people, Charlie.

00:24:37.000 They're sick of us just complaining about this problem.

00:24:40.000 They want us to take action.

00:24:41.000 They recognize we can't stop everything.

00:24:43.000 We can't stop every nominee, but we can at least make it a little bit harder for Merrick Garland to use the government agencies to go after his political opponents.

00:24:53.000 That's exactly what we're trying to do.

00:24:55.000 Charlie, I heard some of your commentary sort of in the lead into this.

00:24:59.000 And I just want to echo something that sort of I think is getting missed in a lot of the conservative commentary on this particular indictment.

00:25:06.000 There's a whole lot of argument that, yes, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton committed the same alleged wrongdoing as Donald Trump.

00:25:13.000 I think that grants way too much to the other side's argument here.

00:25:17.000 They did not do the same thing that Donald Trump did because they didn't have declassification authority.

00:25:23.000 The fundamental issue here, Charlie, is who controls the documents that's produced by our government?

00:25:30.000 Who controls the information that flows through the executive department of our government?

00:25:35.000 Is it the permanent unelected bureaucracy or is it the people's elected president?

00:25:39.000 Because if it's not the people's elected president, Article 2 of the Constitution is meaningless, and we do not have a real Republican form of government.

00:25:47.000 We have an oligarchy controlled by the deep state.

00:25:50.000 That is the real issue with this case.

00:25:53.000 The deep state is jealously guarding its own documents.

00:25:56.000 When those documents don't belong to them, they don't belong to anybody except for the American people through their elected president.

00:26:04.000 This is the best point, and this is how much I've missed Tucker.

00:26:06.000 I mean, it's just when you see an expert, you see an expert.

00:26:10.000 So Tucker last night has, you know, I do this for a living and I'm still learning how to do it.

00:26:15.000 And when I listen to Tucker, I say, oh, my goodness, how did I not think about that?

00:26:18.000 Right.

00:26:18.000 Because he just makes the points that are so obvious where Tucker broadens it.

00:26:22.000 He says, everything's classified in D.C. Like, of course, right?

00:26:25.000 I mean, memos about Flag Day or Arbor Day, they overclassify everything because they do believe in a secret gnosis or a secret knowledge or a secret cabal.

00:26:35.000 And then they're able to broaden those statutes to, of course, not enforce the classified document mishandling against their friends.

00:26:43.000 But if anybody they don't like comes in contact with the document, then of course Tucker goes on with this brilliant point.

00:26:48.000 You're trying to tell me Dick Cheney, you know, at Thanksgiving dinner wasn't talking about D. Of course he was. 0.97

00:26:53.000 I mean, you're trying to tell me that on his way to or from work, Bill Barr wasn't reading documents in the car.

00:26:59.000 These are all violations of the Espionage Act.

00:27:01.000 JD Vance, I think Tucker made the most important point, which is the essence of the thing, is that how dare you challenge the permanent administrative state?

00:27:09.000 That's exactly what's going on here, Charlie.

00:27:10.000 And let's take this from the level of abstraction to sort of just throw out a hypothetical.

00:27:15.000 Let's say that there are documents that show conclusively the role of the deep state in the Russia collusion hoax, which of course tried to take down the presidency of Donald Trump, had our entire government and media complex obsessed with a totally fake issue for a couple of years instead of solving the American people's problems.

00:27:34.000 What those documents might show is one, the exoneration of Donald Trump, but two, the deep corruption of our own administrative state.

00:27:43.000 Who do you want to control those documents? 0.99

00:27:45.000 The very people whose conduct they impugn, whose conduct they show was illegal?

00:27:50.000 Or do you want the elected president to be able to stay to hold on to this stuff, to take it back to his house after he leaves office and to make a political issue out of it?

00:28:01.000 The craziest thing here, Charlie, is: look, you know, I'm a Trump guy.

00:28:04.000 I know you support the president.

00:28:06.000 If you don't think Trump should have taken those documents, fine.

00:28:09.000 Make that argument, substantively criticize him, encourage people to vote against him.

00:28:14.000 You don't throw the Article II president in prison for doing something that he's constitutionally empowered to do.

00:28:21.000 It's nuts.

00:28:23.000 Yes, and it is about the question of who is the sovereign.

00:28:27.000 This is a constitutional question.

00:28:28.000 This is a moral question.

00:28:29.000 It's not about Donald Trump.

00:28:30.000 It's not about his tweets.

00:28:32.000 This is a big picture.

00:28:34.000 Is the framework that was fought over and articulated in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention still valid?

00:28:42.000 And by the way, we're long overdue for that answer to that question because we've largely been living in a post-constitutional republic.

00:28:48.000 And now this is the fork in the road.

00:28:50.000 This is the question: does the administrative state run the country or do the people run the country?

00:28:55.000 Does the president run the government or does the government run the president?

00:28:59.000 And we shall see.

00:29:00.000 Senator Vance, I wish we had more time.

00:29:02.000 One final thought, please.

00:29:03.000 I just say, look, the founders created a powerful president of the United States, a president limited, of course, by certain things in the Constitution, limited in his power to declare war, limited in his power to levy taxes.

00:29:15.000 We didn't want a dictator or a king, but they wanted a robust sovereign at the head of the federal government.

00:29:22.000 What the deep state is trying to do is destroy the people's elected presidency, not just for Donald Trump or his voters, but for all time.

00:29:31.000 If we don't stop this, Charlie, if we allow him to go to prison for declassifying documents, we're talking about paperwork here.

00:29:40.000 We're going to throw Donald Trump in jail for that.

00:29:42.000 If we allow that to happen, we have the end of the Constitutional Republic in this country.

00:29:47.000 They want to go more towards a parliamentarian system where the president is an attaché to the deep state, not a representative to the people.

00:29:55.000 It's a huge philosophical difference.

00:29:57.000 And you're actually one of the few people that get it, Senator Vance.

00:30:00.000 Keep fighting.

00:30:00.000 JD Vance, thank you so much.

00:30:02.000 Thanks, Prom.

00:30:05.000 The question of it really goes down to who is in charge.

00:30:09.000 And one of the reasons why they hate Donald Trump is that the ordinary person has a greater say in the business and the inner workings of our government than ever before, especially when it comes to challenging the neoliberal, neoconservative regime.

00:30:30.000 Tucker Carlson pinpointed this perfectly in his latest video, which I think was his best video.

00:30:36.000 It's play cut 45 of a short piece of tape of Tucker.

00:30:40.000 Boy, his voice totally needed 75 million views so far.

00:30:45.000 Play Cut 45.

00:30:46.000 Whatever else you say about him, Trump is the one guy with an actual shot at becoming president who dissents from Washington's long-standing pointless war agenda.

00:30:55.000 And for that, that one fact, they're trying to take Trump out before you can vote for him.

00:31:01.000 And that should upset me more than anything that's happened in American politics in your lifetime.

00:31:06.000 They want to take him out before you have an opportunity to vote.

00:31:11.000 Woodrow Wilson is the father of this belief.

00:31:15.000 Remember, he said, voting allows ourselves to believe in too much error.

00:31:21.000 In fact, Woodrow Wilson said, I want to get the exact quote here: government is not a machine.

00:31:27.000 It is a living thing.

00:31:27.000 No living thing can have its organs set against one another.

00:31:30.000 For its checks and balances, it must instead live.

00:31:35.000 The error of trying to do too much by vote.

00:31:39.000 Think about that.

00:31:41.000 An American president saying that we're trying to do too much by vote, that these elections give people too much power?

00:31:53.000 That's exactly what is going on here.

00:31:56.000 It is precisely what is going on.

00:32:01.000 You have bureaucrats, which literally means desk workers in the original French.

00:32:09.000 They want elections to become irrelevant.

00:32:14.000 They don't want elections to be referendums.

00:32:17.000 And it's hilarious, they do this all under the guise of democracy.

00:32:21.000 They want a permanent administrative decision-making class.

00:32:26.000 They want more Anthony Fauci's and less Donald Trump's.

00:32:30.000 They want less representative government and more administrative government.

00:32:36.000 It's a different form of government.

00:32:40.000 This is not even right versus left.

00:32:42.000 This is a question of what type of system do you want?

00:32:46.000 That is the question that is currently unfolding with the indictment of Donald Trump.

00:32:51.000 What sort of system do we have?

00:32:54.000 A system that the founders put forward in 1787 and ratified in the Bill of Rights in 1791 was bottom-up, not top-down.

00:33:04.000 It was that the people are sovereign, that states created the federal government.

00:33:08.000 But the irresistible temptation to grow the fourth branch of government, decade after decade, became irresistible.

00:33:17.000 Woodrow Wilson started it.

00:33:18.000 FDR massively expanded the federal government.

00:33:21.000 Lyndon Baines Johnson further expanded it.

00:33:24.000 Even Nixon expanded it.

00:33:25.000 Carter expanded it.

00:33:26.000 Reagan, I think, was overrated in his ability to reign in government, but he tried his best.

00:33:31.000 He said the right things.

00:33:32.000 He was a great president that unfortunately couldn't reign in the beast.

00:33:36.000 H.W. Bush didn't even try.

00:33:38.000 Government grew like crazy.

00:33:39.000 Clinton barely did a poor job.

00:33:41.000 Bush expanded government tremendously.

00:33:43.000 Obama expanded government tremendously.

00:33:45.000 And Trump for four years tried his best, but the Leviathan struck back.

00:33:49.000 And we are part of that 105, 106-year slide.

00:33:54.000 And it all reaches this crescendo point.

00:33:56.000 Do we do too much by vote or not enough by vote?

00:33:59.000 Is it the people or is it the deep state bureaucrats?

00:34:02.000 Should we have things by selections or elections?

00:34:04.000 These are the questions in front of us.

00:34:09.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:34:10.000 Email us your thoughts as always freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:34:13.000 Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

00:34:18.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - June 15, 2023

The People’s President vs the Pupeteers with JD Vance and Jason Chaffetz

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