On this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, we are joined by Michelle Tandler to discuss the new tenant director in NYC, Sia Weaver, and her views on the need for more single family housing in the city.
00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:09.000All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:11.000I wanted to bring on Michelle Tandler.
00:01:14.000She had a tweet that went extraordinarily viral about Mamdani's new tenant director in New York City.
00:01:53.000And it was crazy because she scrubbed her social media accounts and her crazy tweets, but you grabbed these and screenshotted them and made sure the world still had access to them.
00:02:04.000And Blake, why don't you just set the table for why this is important?
00:02:09.000Because there's two real competing visions right now.
00:03:33.000I took these back in September, actually, when she first was sort of, I first came across her, her as a person, her Twitter account, and just saw a lot of stuff that was pretty concerning.
00:03:46.000So I took some screenshots back in September.
00:03:48.000I was planning to write a thread on her views on housing since she was the housing advisor for his campaign, which I thought was pretty relevant.
00:03:55.000Housing in New York City is one of the most important topics politically.
00:04:02.000I believe the vacancy rate is something like 1.4%.
00:04:06.000The cost of housing is astronomical here.
00:04:09.000And I have for a long time believed that the reason the cost of housing is so high here is because of progressive housing policies.
00:04:15.000Things like rent control, rent stabilization, zoning restrictions, a lot of bureaucracy and red tape on building.
00:04:22.000It's not a very developer-friendly city.
00:04:24.000I don't have enough knowledge to be able to speak to how friendly it is towards landlords, but I can certainly say Sia Weaver does not seem friendly towards landlords.
00:04:31.000She seems to have a very, very defined view of landlords as being evil, which I just think is short-sighted and wrong.
00:04:39.000You know, I don't, these housing units don't just like fall from the sky prefab, pre-made for people to inhabit.
00:04:45.000Like, it takes a lot of people to create a housing unit and a lot of people to keep a housing unit operating.
00:04:50.000And a lot of her beliefs are pretty destructive, in my opinion.
00:04:53.000So I screenshot a bunch of her stuff, also just some of her other views that were pretty offensive.
00:04:58.000She has a lot of really offensive things to say about people of different racial categories, et cetera.
00:05:04.000And they just, yeah, when she was announced in a position of power, I shared it.
00:05:39.000That's the one I started my thread with.
00:05:43.000There is no such thing as a good gentrifier, only people who are actively working on projects to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism and people who aren't.
00:05:57.000First of all, she lives in a gentrifying neighborhood.
00:05:59.000And for people who aren't familiar with the word gentrifying, it usually refers to people who move into neighborhoods that are historically poorer or more filled with people of color.
00:06:08.000So it's, you know, a term that used to describe whiter, richer people moving into those neighborhoods.
00:06:14.000I mean, from what I understand, Sia Weaver lives in Crown Heights, which is historically a working class, mostly Jewish and black neighborhood in Brooklyn.
00:06:42.000She says, you know, public housing for everyone, rent control and public housing for everyone, massive government interventions to solve gentrification.
00:06:52.000Yeah, she is against the private market.
00:08:03.000I think that's actually going to be the most interesting thing to be looking at over the next couple of years is how much power does the New York City Mayor's Office have.
00:08:12.000There's a lot of unknown there about checks and balances.
00:08:15.000From what I can tell, I think she'll be focused on the topics that she's been writing about a lot.
00:08:24.000And, you know, if you look, I don't know if you have the clips up of her videos, but she's pretty explicit.
00:08:29.000She basically says, I don't know if you're able to get to it now, but she basically says, what we want to do is have, we want to drive down the value of housing.
00:08:39.000So we want to have lawsuits against the landlords.
00:08:46.000She has sort of a list of weapons, you would say.
00:08:50.000Yeah, we've got to bring down the value of real estate.
00:08:53.000Yeah, we've, we, we, and this is, this echoes something that Mamadani said in his, when he was uh sworn into office, where he says, we're going to get rid of rugged individualism and we're going to replace it with collectivism.
00:09:06.000I think the reality is, is that for centuries, we've really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good.
00:09:15.000And we are going to trend in transitioning to treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity will require that we think about it differently.
00:09:26.000And it will mean that families, especially white families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have.
00:09:41.000So she's going to seize property from white families.
00:09:47.000The part that I found so fascinating about that clip is it starts with for centuries, for many centuries.
00:09:53.000It's like, yes, for many centuries, we've had private property.
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00:11:18.000Michelle Tandler, you are a New York resident.
00:11:21.000You have a website that is notes from the front because you're fighting the good fight in a very blue, very dystopian new world with Mamdani as your mayor.
00:11:31.000And you've got absolute communists that are now appointed to really powerful positions.
00:11:38.000We're sort of trying to figure out how powerful Sia Weaver is going to be.
00:11:41.000Let's play one more clip from this peach of a lady.
00:11:46.000Just an awful, awful way of looking at the world.
00:11:50.000People like homeownership because they like control, and that's been perverted by like deep racism and deep classism in our society.
00:11:57.000So like we have to not have a racist and class of society.
00:12:01.000And so that's like something we need to think about like deeply.
00:12:05.000But you know, we, it's about, to me, it's about control and why rent control is really important is because rent control alters the dynamic, the power dynamic between renters and who owns the building.
00:12:20.000So it's all about control, apparently.
00:12:22.000People like having well, so what it is here is this is clearly a woman with just a giant, just a giant ball of resentment that that is, that's really what motivates her.
00:12:33.000I mean, some of the stuff, I don't even think we've gotten a chance to read it yet, but she has stuff where she's like, oh, I wish, oh, yeah, really needing to repress the desire for revenge right now.
00:12:44.000I wish I believed in God so I could believe that all men who take credit for women's work and all white men who take credit for the work of women of color would one day burn.
00:12:54.000Like, that is not an emotionally well-calibrated individual.
00:13:21.000And Delta should kick all white people and Christmas outfits off planes.
00:13:26.000She's just, she's spent years posting depressive resentment against her neighborhood, her community, people who are white like herself, implicitly against her parents, whatever she may feel about them.
00:13:40.000And she just, she's now manifesting all of her personal resentments as a political platform.
00:13:47.000And that's actually a lot of the modern left is it's taking personal gripes and grievances and justifying them on the grounds of actually, I have a revolutionary political platform.
00:14:01.000Michelle, I totally agree, by the way.
00:14:03.000And there's a whole spiritual dynamic.
00:14:04.000I think that tweet you pulled is like very telling because the left oftentimes tries to replace God with some sort of, you know, mission here on earth to fill the gaping void in their hearts.
00:14:16.000But Michelle, on the ground in New York, what is it like?
00:14:19.000I mean, are people talking about this person a lot?
00:14:22.000Is her profile raising because of how extreme some of her views are?
00:14:29.000We don't know what's in her heart or mind, but it's certainly, I don't, I've never met someone who has like a deep sense of peace writing that they want to see people burn.
00:15:08.000We're going to see a huge walkout and a lot of cops like retiring early or quitting, which could impact public safety.
00:15:14.000People are nervous about just his general lack of job experience.
00:15:18.000I don't think he really worked for his first six years after college.
00:15:21.000He's had like a bunch of different stints, but people are nervous about his ability to run the complexity of the city, things like sanitation, transportation.
00:15:31.000Like the what's concerning is I think Mayor Mamdani agrees with Sia.
00:15:37.000If you go to the last tweet in the thread, it shows Mamdani saying back in 2020, people often ask what socialists mean when we say we want to decommodify housing.
00:15:47.000Basically, we want to move away from a situation where most people access housing by purchasing it on the market and toward a situation where the state guarantees high-quality housing to all.
00:15:55.000So, you know, people are wondering, why isn't he firing her after all these tweets have come out?
00:16:00.000I think the reason is because he agrees.
00:16:03.000I mean, that was, I think, how I originally came across her.
00:16:07.000I saw that she was retweeting this, but anyway, so this is, this is a belief system.
00:17:12.000And I think that the fact that there already is this sort of socialist government-run housing, you know, vertical within the New York City government, and it's being run poorly, it sounds like, notoriously bad, shows that this is going to end in a very bad position.
00:17:29.000Michelle Tandlert, thank you for capturing these tweets.
00:17:34.000I think this is just a fascinating insight into a really radical person that represents, I think Blake's right, sort of a larger swath of the left than we really care to believe, but I think it's true.
00:17:45.000There's a lot of these crazies out there, and now they're getting into positions of power, which is terrifying.
00:19:42.000He says about the book, college education has become rotten to its core, but it doesn't have to be.
00:19:48.000Higher education began as a Christian endeavor.
00:19:51.000And in College Without Communism, Dr. Kent Engel and Joshua Lisek explain how we can undo the damage and restore college as it is meant to be.
00:20:01.000And so, Dr. Engel, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:20:30.000I mean, you obviously know something about this.
00:20:32.000You're creating a network of universities and college campuses that partner with local churches often that doesn't have communism in it, which has become a radical idea.
00:20:48.000Yeah, well, first of all, as a president who is on the front lines of having the privilege to invest in a generation that we believe God is raising up to make a difference in this world, to come alongside their life, the original intent of higher education is focused on spiritual and moral development.
00:21:07.000When you get the chance to be able to pursue truth and able to pursue character development and shape virtuous leaders, all in the purpose of helping these students discover their divine design, the way God made them, the way God created them.
00:21:23.000We're reminded in Ephesians 2.10, you are a masterpiece created in Christ Jesus to do good things, which he prepared long ago.
00:21:31.000Well, how long ago we know in Psalm 139, before you took your first breath, God was creating you and making you in your mother's womb.
00:21:40.000And we tell every student that comes our way, you're a solution to an issue, to a challenge, to a people group in this world.
00:21:46.000And we get the privilege to pour education into your life so that you can be a good steward of that.
00:21:51.000But what's sad is we see so many universities and colleges, and of course, as of late, we see that in a lot of the Ivy League colleges, but that have drifted from this original understanding of how education started.
00:22:06.000It was all about formation, all about discipleship, all about the integration of truth, faith, and learning.
00:22:14.000What they've done is they've traded truth for ideology and they've traded wisdom for indoctrination and for freedom of thought to conformity.
00:22:27.000And so we need to create a new framework that helps us to make sure that we get education back on track, doing the very thing that we're supposed to do, provide stewardship for these amazing students that God sends our way.
00:22:57.000And how are we providing experiential education so that actually what they're learning in the classroom, they actually get to do it right at the same time and get out into the workforce and do things that will make a difference and have an impact in their communities.
00:23:11.000Yeah, a lot of people, one of Charlie's favorite things to say was that the root word of education means to lead forth, to bring about something which is potentially present in that student.
00:23:22.000And so much of education has turned into a conversation.
00:24:29.000I've seen so many students from our local church and from our community that have chosen to go to a state college or to a private college that doesn't focus on the foundational issues.
00:24:42.000And what happens is they're told truth is relative, that faith is, you know, not part of what we really believe shapes our lives.
00:24:54.000They look at patriotism as naive, and then they look at this whole idea that moral clarity is fluid and it's all opinion.
00:25:02.000And that's what's shaping these students at these classes.
00:25:06.000In fact, what's crazy to me is the president of Harvard, President Garber, just came out just a few days ago and said, we were wrong.
00:25:17.000We should not have allowed faculty activism in the classroom and for them to be in to form political thought that was more conformative rather than being able to reason together.
00:25:30.000And that's what I loved about Charlie, and that's what we resonated.
00:25:33.000And Charlie had the privilege to visit with Charlie on our campus, our traditional campus there in Lakeland, about three years ago.
00:25:42.000And we talked about these very issues.
00:25:45.000And I love that he understood his divine design.
00:25:50.000He understood what God called him to do to come alongside this next generation to help form them so they could live out truth.
00:25:59.000They could live out what it means to have a call of God upon their lives to make a difference in this world and to get education that would simply become stewardship for their life.
00:26:10.000And I love how he chose the greatest place to do that, the university.
00:26:20.000You have the ability to dialogue and reason together and talk about thoughtful engagement that will hopefully give you the tools that will connect you to truth.
00:26:34.000And of course, true education is connecting to truth that we understand is a person, and that's Jesus Christ.
00:26:41.000Jesus said, I'm the way, the truth, and the life.
00:26:45.000And if you abide in my word, and we know the word is Christ, because John chapter 1 talks about the word became flesh, lived among us full of truth.
00:26:56.000And so if we can connect students to truth and declare that truth in their lives, they're going to be able to live lives of purpose and lives that fulfill destiny that God has for them and to make a difference in these communities.
00:27:09.000That's why we're also about going into communities nationwide.
00:27:13.000We also know that students can't necessarily come to our traditional campus, but why can't we go to them and help shape their lives with truth and character development and formation and all the things that are important to be a good steward of God's call upon your life?
00:27:30.000As college has spiraled out in cost and it's, you know, you started to see the backlash to it, more people not going or curtailing it to save money.
00:27:38.000There have been people who have said this is an anachronism that you can learn as well online.
00:28:24.000Well, first and foremost, I think a traditional campus offers things that obviously other types of delivery models can't.
00:28:31.000And I think an in-person opportunity is to create community.
00:28:36.000What's it like to live in community that can pursue what higher education is all about together?
00:28:45.000And there's something about being face-to-face in a way where you can reason with each other, dialogue with each other, learn with each other, if it's done with that original commitment of what higher education should be, that formation process.
00:29:01.000And then you have all aspects of life because it's about a holistic development.
00:29:05.000It's about physical, mental, emotional, all those kinds of things.
00:29:09.000Those things can happen on a residential, traditional way if it's guided and it's committed to what the original purpose is all about.
00:29:18.000So I think that's what makes it unique.
00:29:21.000But again, we want to be able to provide, which is an important issue in higher ed today, is accessibility.
00:29:27.000And I think that's why we have seen the tremendous growth that we've had.
00:29:31.000When I first came to Southeastern University almost 15 years ago, the student body was about 2,000.
00:29:37.000But we started to look at what are the issues in higher ed, and that is accessibility.
00:29:44.000How are we, are we, first of all, offering the need-oriented educational programs the workforce is calling forth?
00:29:50.000And we constantly are changing and updating that.
00:29:53.000And then look at the accessibility of delivery.
00:31:23.000Every single dollar you spend is either supporting your values or working against them.
00:31:28.000In today's economy, where you spend your money, it really matters.
00:31:32.000And that's how we take back our country.
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00:32:13.000You're supporting a company that supports you.
00:32:16.000It supports this show, supports Turning Point USA.
00:32:18.000If you believe in our First and Second Amendment rights, the sanctity of life, and supporting our veterans, this is where you belong.
00:32:51.000And tell us about how that impacted the writing of this book.
00:32:56.000Yeah, well, yeah, this book, I share the story of why I'm so passionate about this issue.
00:33:02.000My wife and I had the privilege in the early 90s to, right after the Ceausescu government had fallen.
00:33:08.000So they were reeling from the effects of the devastation of communism in the nation of Romania.
00:33:15.000And we had the privilege to go there to adopt three of our three children.
00:33:20.000And I remember going there and I was just shocked at what I saw.
00:33:23.000I saw a nation that was impoverished and oppressed and spiritually bankrupt.
00:33:31.000And we went to all these orphanages around the country and thousands upon thousands of children there.
00:33:39.000And several of these orphanages, we would walk in room after room, and there would be 30, 40 babies lying on a cold floor, underfed, uncared for.
00:33:51.000And what was wild is the eeriness of it being silent.
00:33:56.000You would think with all of those babies, there'd be crying and all that.
00:34:00.000And you would look and there would be this distant stare even at that infant because there was a lack of love and care.
00:34:06.000And I'll tell you, it's not because the parents who abandoned them didn't love them.
00:34:13.000Because, of course, communism comes in rooted in Marxism and you add socialism comes in promising opportunity and equality.
00:34:22.000But what happens is the state takes control and you're left with control and you're left with an impoverished state, stripped away from the very freedom that allows you to flourish and have hope.
00:34:37.000And we were able to, we talk about this all the time with our three children.
00:34:43.000You know, we had the privilege to rescue them and bring them to America.
00:35:21.000I've seen these students, these good, strong, conservative students that go to a place like this.
00:35:28.000And after just a short period of time, their faith, they start questioning their faith.
00:35:34.000They start questioning their values that they were raised in their home.
00:35:38.000And again, it's because of this intentional design to lead them off the path of truth, that truth is just a relative thing, and that your faith is really outdated, and you should question that.
00:35:56.000And so they get this indoctrination and it starts to lead them away.
00:36:00.000And they want to give up when what we get to do at a faith-based university is quite the opposite of that.
00:36:08.000We get to help them really get in tune with truth and reality and character and morality and all the things that are important to live a life that will give them joy, that will give them peace, that will give them that sense that I am significant in what God designed me to do and accomplish.
00:36:27.000And I look at these universities that have come in, and this hasn't been by accident.
00:36:33.000They have realized that the way you shape the world, the way you shape a nation, is by starting in the classroom.
00:36:40.000If you can shape the student, they will go out and shape the culture.
00:36:45.000And that's why this issue is so important that we make sure we're getting a hold of these amazing students, letting them know that God has a plan and a purpose for their life, and we can provide that educational stewardship.