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.
00:01:12.000Andrew Colvett, Executive Producer of this show, joined by Blake Neff, per usual.
00:01:17.000And we are honored to be joined right at the top here by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who is a man that is in the middle of a lot of the news that's happening, especially when it comes to Venezuela sludgy crude, a new term that I learned this morning preparing for this interview.
00:01:34.000Secretary Wright, welcome to the show.
00:02:35.000I think this issue of Venezuela, it's sort of a perfect illustration of President Trump's broader agenda, which is prosperity at home here in America and peace abroad.
00:02:49.000And in this case, they're deeply tied together.
00:02:52.000Venezuela was a giant oil producer 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago.
00:02:58.000American companies, American investment, American technology.
00:03:02.000And then they've collapsed under a socialist, communist, top-down, corrupt dictatorship that just ruined the country.
00:03:10.000And let's come back to Venezuela in a second.
00:03:12.000But for the United States, that shrinking oil going out means less oil on the market.
00:03:18.000On balance, it means higher oil prices.
00:03:20.000It means more refugees forced out of the country.
00:03:24.000It means they've gone into drug dealing and arms dealing and human trafficking to make money and fund their government, all of which has brought grave negative consequences to the United States and the whole Western hemisphere.
00:03:37.000So President Trump looks at this and says, we got to stop this immigration of drugs and people and guns and support for the adversaries of the United States, Iran and Russia and other terrorist organizations in Venezuela.
00:04:23.000This guy has run a narco-terrorist state.
00:04:26.000That guy is now in custody with his wife facing trial.
00:04:30.000And we're using the leverage over energy sales to get the existing interim authorities in Venezuela to work with the United States to pivot that country in a better direction.
00:04:42.000A better direction reduces crime, reduces drug dealing, reduces stressors on the American economy, and ultimately can bring prosperity, which is what capitalism and freedom brings, back to Venezuela.
00:04:54.000And it can bring lower energy prices and enormous business opportunities for Americans.
00:05:00.000Yeah, and I think we definitely agree with you on the opportunity.
00:05:14.000It was people have pointed out that they're saying is it the most oil in the world, but then that goes back to OPEC and OPEC goes on national estimates.
00:05:23.000And in theory, Venezuela was exaggerating.
00:06:10.000So, you know, it's a narrow measure of with today's technology and at today's price, how much oil could you lift out of the ground that we know about right now?
00:07:03.000See, normally, before they ship tankers around the world, even though we had sanctions on them, the Biden administration and too many others don't enforce those sanctions.
00:08:03.000We'll actually get a better price and more secure payment, much more than they could.
00:08:08.000And we'll put that money into an account and we'll bring that money back to Venezuela.
00:08:12.000But it gives us the leverage to change their behavior, to stop their destructive activity for America and Americans and steer their policies in a better direction.
00:08:23.000With the ultimate goal to lead to a representative government in Venezuela, restore freedom, democracy, and prosperity.
00:08:30.000So it is a giant geopolitical chessboard here that we're moving around.
00:08:37.000And so the question is, does that money then get shared directly with the Venezuelan companies or are American companies going to come back in and they're going to be profit sharing?
00:08:51.000And then are they ready to make that investment once again, Mr. Secretary?
00:08:57.000So look, Chevron is still in the country, and there's little changes we can make that can allow Chevron to expand their production.
00:09:05.000But what'll bring American oil companies back, and believe me, there are tons of them that are very anxious to come back, is just to believe that the rule of law will be respected and that the commercial agreements they can make are in the best interest of their country.
00:09:20.000You know, Venezuelan government owes lots of them billions of dollars.
00:09:27.000But our belief is, and I think these companies share that belief, is that with President Trump's leadership and the leverage we have today, we can move things forward in Venezuela.
00:09:37.000So it's once again, it's once again a profitable place for American businesses to go.
00:09:45.000If the oil companies make money, they're going to produce more oil.
00:09:48.000A lot of the revenue from that oil production goes into the government of Venezuela, but it also goes into the paychecks and economies of the country as a whole.
00:09:59.000So there's just, Venezuela 50 years ago was one of the wealthiest per capita nations in the world, and they've just collapsed.
00:10:08.000President Trump walked into a catch-22 when taking office.
00:10:11.000Do nothing, and America would be staring at a ticking debt bomb, the kind of crisis that could cripple our future.
00:10:16.000Instead, he's taken action with strong policies to slow the train and buy us some time.
00:10:20.000But the effects of past administration spending are still working through the system and experts predict dramatic price increases and market uncertainty.
00:10:28.000Trump is doing all he can, but no matter who's in office, protecting your retirement savings is ultimately up to you.
00:10:35.000And that's why many Americans are turning to real assets like gold and silver.
00:10:38.000Preserved gold is our go-to choice here at the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:10:42.000We use them because they make it easy to own physical gold and silver even inside your retirement accounts like an IRA or 401k.
00:10:50.000Now, hear from Charlie in his own words.
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00:11:04.000President Trump is fighting for America's future.
00:11:06.000Now it's your turn to help protect yours.
00:11:11.000Like I said, I've met you in person, and I know just you have so much.
00:11:16.000I was blown away just on a more personal level, just how much insight you have about so many different areas.
00:11:23.000And I think you have been doing a tremendous job at the Department of Energy.
00:11:27.000And you guys, by the way, your portfolio, people don't understand how large the portfolio is at the Department of Energy.
00:11:33.000You guys have a lot of different avenues and projects that you work on that people wouldn't necessarily have.
00:11:51.000So, yes, we want to launch a nuclear renaissance.
00:11:54.000We are also the designers and constructors of the nuclear weapons arsenal for the United States, the nuclear engines that power our submarines and aircraft carriers, and maybe least known, the 17 national labs, which are the greatest Nobel Prize-winning factories on planet Earth, and that are the anchor of our Genesis AI mission that we're launching in the country.
00:12:29.000Well, I mean, I think probably always geopolitics.
00:12:32.000So we're getting these, you know, I don't want to keep, I know you got an out here, but you're, we saw this GDP number get revised up where, you know, we're seeing numbers like 4.3, 4.9.
00:12:45.000How much of the success of the Trump administration economically starts with you and the energy policies that the president has outlined?
00:12:56.000Well, look, energy is, I call it the infrastructure.
00:12:59.000It's the basic plumbing of any economy.
00:13:02.000If you get energy wrong, nothing else matters.
00:13:04.000If you get energy right, you've just got a land of opportunity.
00:13:30.000Like if you just look at the Industrial Revolution, all the Industrial Revolution was you increased access to the energy to do work.
00:13:37.000And every step where we've taken a big leap forward technologically has just been more and cheaper energy.
00:13:43.000And the path of decline is deciding, oh, we need to reduce our energy usage, cap it, reduce it.
00:13:48.000Mr. Secretary, you know, the Industrial Revolution was sparked.
00:13:52.000Blake made an apt observation by access to cheaper and better energy sources.
00:13:57.000You have done a breakdown between red states and blue states.
00:14:02.000And I know we're getting a little off the Venezuela oil topic here, but how stark is the difference in energy policy and then prices between red states and blue states?
00:14:12.000Yeah, so I don't know how many people would love a little more than a 50% increase in their electricity prices, but that's the difference between blue states.
00:14:21.000If you average across all the blue states and you average across all the red states, blue states are over 50% higher electricity prices.
00:14:34.000Back to this energy thing, restrictive policies that make energy more expensive.
00:14:38.000Somehow blue states think that's virtuous, but in reality, it's just impoverishing for citizens and it's just a dissuasion for businesses to want to locate there, which is why there's continual migration from blue, high-energy price states to red, low-energy price pro-freedom states.
00:14:55.000Yeah, I'm looking at a chart right here.
00:14:57.000So they measure power costs in kilowatt hours.
00:15:00.000And it's kind of like a common measure of energy.
00:15:02.000And Texas, 12 cents per kilowatt hour.
00:15:32.000I'm certain the Secretary has strong opinions on this because I've seen some of the reporting on your critiques of European energy policy, Mr. Secretary.
00:16:28.000And they'll say, well, it actually just seems that the price of energy and the primitive forms they use got too high and they couldn't maintain civilization.
00:16:35.000Like the energy policy of this Trump administration versus the Biden administration versus Europeans, it couldn't be more stark.
00:16:45.000And it actually is the foundational choice, the first choice in a series of dominoes that falls after whether you're going to be pro-growth or anti-growth.
00:20:00.000This 37-year-old woman, apparently she has a female partner, the kid.
00:20:08.000First question: I don't know what a 37-year-old woman with a kid is doing out there going head-to-head with ICE agents, doing some sort of like citizen vigilante, you know, observing.
00:22:45.000So a thing that's built up to this is just this violent, there's been a growth of violent rhetoric against ICE, intended to delegitimize it as an institution.
00:22:55.000I know we have some clips related to that.
00:22:57.000So most recently, we had Democrat Representative Joe Morrell says there is no violent rhetoric against ICE.
00:23:07.000Frankly, what's really frustrating about this, I saw Speaker Johnson's comments who immediately says that there's been this effort to encourage people to engage in violence with law enforcement officers.
00:24:57.000I thought this was, I literally did not realize this would be a contentious point.
00:25:02.000One of the points that the left is making is that this shooting was unjustified because this woman's a U.S. citizen and this ICE agent is not a cop.
00:25:12.000So the U.S. citizens don't have to obey orders from an ICE agent.
00:25:17.000Yeah, I don't, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
00:25:21.000First of all, what it appears from what I saw on the couple of angles on the video is that she was impeding efforts by ICE agents to do their jobs.
00:25:30.000You're not supposed to be able to do that.
00:25:32.000She was given direction to sort of stop doing that.
00:25:38.000And when you put that in the context of vehicular assaults up over a thousand percent across the country on ICE agents and the demonization that's happened over the course of the last year by the left against ICE agents, it's created a powder keg, guys.
00:25:52.000Like I was in a committee hearing and talked about this.
00:25:55.000The Democrats' rhetoric on this is insane.
00:25:57.000But as far as this goes specifically, if the officer fears for his life or significant bodily harm, he can defend himself, which is what was happening there, right?
00:26:06.000I mean, the angle of, you know, by the way, you notice the tires sort of skid out too, which also reveals that the car was a little bit out of sort of control.
00:26:16.000But appears to be, from everything that I've seen, justified.
00:26:22.000I mean, anytime you have a loss of life, it's a tragic situation.
00:26:25.000But what's really strange about all this is that the Democrats, I'm surprised this hadn't happened sooner, but they continue to sort of create these conditions for confrontations with ICE agents who are supposed to do their jobs.
00:26:41.000And one last point, like deportations are nothing new.
00:26:44.000Like Bill Clinton deported millions of people.
00:26:48.000What's different now is the Democrats actually in the left, they don't actually believe in borders.
00:26:53.000They don't actually believe that anybody should ever have to go home, that once you're here, you should stay here in perpetuity.
00:27:00.000And they've created the villains, these ICE agents who are fathers and sons and daughters and aunts and uncles who are just doing their jobs.
00:27:07.000And what you'll never hear the left say, you'll never hear him say this, guys, is, you know what?
00:27:12.000Step away and let the ICE agents do their jobs because they don't want them to.
00:27:20.000But yes, an American citizen has to obey orders from ICE agents when they're impeding the progress of what the ICE agents are trying to do.
00:27:29.000And you certainly don't have the right to try to run them over.
00:27:32.000Senator, do you think there's any potential?
00:27:34.000We just, there's so much deliberate will to get people to go out there to harass ICE, target ICE.
00:27:41.000We've had car, like, why did this happen?
00:27:42.000This happened because we've already had car ramming attacks on ICE agents.
00:27:46.000We've seen people encouraged to use cars as a weapon.
00:27:49.000This is directly encouraged by a lot of lawmakers.
00:27:53.000I feel at some point there's got to be room for prosecuting someone in that they are basically developing a conspiracy to sabotage federal law enforcement in their city or in their state.
00:28:40.000They're willing to, you know, try to run over them.
00:28:43.000And then that's the, you know, then you have the Antifa element, which are sort of the foot soldiers of all this, who deliberately, you know, throw firecrackers to lure ICE agents out of federal facilities so they can be assaulted.
00:28:56.000So you have a more organized effort with Antifa for sure, which is why we were successful in petitioning with Marco Rubio to not only have them be declared a domestic terrorist organization, but also a foreign terrorist organization to get after their funding and shut these people down internationally.
00:29:13.000That's all part of this, but it's very coordinated.
00:29:15.000There's no doubt they share tactics and you create dangerous situations like the one you had in Minnesota.
00:29:21.000These are, they call them citizens observers, and they end up being, you know, harassers, stalkers of ICE agents, DHS, Border Patrol.
00:29:45.000Today alone in this country, there have been four different domestic terrorist attacks on federal officers by the ramming of vehicles.
00:29:54.000Three of them happened here in Minneapolis.
00:29:56.000We've seen over 100 of these vehicle rammings happen in just recent weeks, and this must stop.
00:30:03.000ICE alone is facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats against all of them.
00:30:12.000In fact, the very same officer who was attacked today had previously been dragged by an anti-ICE rioter who had rammed him with a car and drug him back in June.
00:30:23.000He sustained injuries at that time as well.
00:30:25.000Yeah, this is, so it's increasing, obviously.
00:30:28.000Here's my question for you, slightly off topic of that, though.
00:30:50.000Well, first of all, let me just point out, and I was in the Oval Office actually yesterday afternoon when this kind of news broke and was with the president and learned about even then, as Secretary Noam mentioned, that this officer in particular had been dragged just a few months ago, right?
00:31:04.000So like this person in particular had been involved in another one of these incidents.
00:31:08.000But to answer your sort of legal question, what'll happen if that, and I, Keith Ellison is, is a clown.
00:31:14.000So I would imagine that the temptation for him not to show the restraint that you're supposed to as an attorney general.
00:31:21.000I mean, I wrote a book, The Last Line of Defense on all the stuff I did as Attorney General.
00:31:24.000You could write another book on all the things you didn't do because you want people in those positions that have some regard for the law, right?
00:31:31.000Because it's a very powerful position.
00:31:33.000So, if he does charge the officer, what will happen then is that case, because of their federal agents, would likely be removed to federal court.
00:31:43.000So, because of supremacy clauses issues, that would likely be removed, and then he would have all the defenses available he would in the federal court system.
00:31:50.000So, I don't think there's any chance that this would stay in state court, quite frankly.
00:31:55.000But that might be the move that Ellison wants.
00:32:11.000And I think what we've seen in Minneapolis, and by the way, I think it's probably just the tip of the iceberg, but particularly in the Somali strongholds across the country, you've seen this kind of abuse with this really kind of pathological.
00:32:22.000There ought to be a response, and the response should be swift.
00:32:25.000So, one, we should move forward with stricter fraud controls as a condition for being able to accept money.
00:32:31.000There needs to be greater verification of who's actually getting the money, right?
00:32:36.000That seems very obvious to like a normal person, but it isn't actually baked in in a lot of these blue states because governors don't want to do that.
00:32:42.000We should insist that as federal dollars go out the door.
00:32:44.000Secondly, there ought to be real prosecutions.
00:32:47.000Like at DOJ, like make this a priority and send a very important message to these immigrant communities who think they can fleece taxpayers.
00:32:55.000But what my bill does specifically, it says that if you're part of one of these efforts or you're involved in a violent felony or you're involved in other kinds of felonies that we list in the legislation we're filing this week, you will be denaturalized.
00:33:09.000If it's proven that you did that, you're denaturalized.
00:33:26.000I think that's where we're at right now because, you know, we talk so much about illegal immigration, and we should.
00:33:33.000Thankfully, we have a border, but there's deportations closed border and we have to have deportations.
00:33:37.000But we don't talk enough about legal immigration, right?
00:33:40.000And the abuses that are taking place, whether it's H-1B or the OPT program, which we're sort of working on to try to get that reined in because there's a lot of abuse.
00:33:48.000But in this instance, where someone's been naturalized and they claim that they're going to be good citizens and have good character, there really isn't a good mechanism right now that if you're not that person you say you're going to be, that you would be denaturalized and sent back home.
00:36:14.000So we were just before the senator came on, we were talking about the violence, you know, the violent rhetoric against ICE, the really hateful stuff, American Gestapo, American SS.
00:36:24.000And that montage we played ended on, let's throw up picture 291.
00:36:45.000And the thought, the comparison that actually came to mind, a friend of mine made it and it was really brilliant, was he said the left's rhetoric against ICE is a lot like the strategy used by Hamas in Gaza.
00:36:59.000And so what they do is they do two things simultaneously.
00:37:03.000They promote actual violence against ICE or, you know, in the case against the IDF.
00:37:09.000They do actual violent stuff, but they also encourage more normal rank and file people to do really provocative and edge case behavior.
00:37:18.000So get in their face, like rub up against them, do all this stuff that's right to the line.
00:37:41.000You've had ramming attacks on ICE agents in Chicago.
00:37:44.000You've had these criminal blockades against ICE operations all over.
00:37:48.000And you have people saying, oh, shoot them, do stuff.
00:37:50.000In fact, we learned today the agent who was involved in this shooting last year was hospitalized because he was trying to stop an illegal alien and he got dragged in their car.
00:38:00.000Like he put his hand through the door and they drove and they dragged him.
00:38:04.000That was probably going through his mind as this was unfolding here.
00:38:07.000And so what they've been doing is they're trying to engineer a situation where everyone's jumpy.
00:38:12.000This is what, like I said, I made the Hamas comparison for a reason.
00:38:16.000What they'll do is they encourage people.
00:38:19.000Any person who's in the IDF knows, okay, these guys could be a suicide bomber.
00:38:26.000Or they might just be one of the gazillions of people who are trying to get in our face and do all this disruptive stuff.
00:38:32.000And they do this in a calculated effort where they know this will eventually lead to unfortunate situations where someone gets shot who wasn't a suicide bomber, who wasn't armed.
00:38:41.000And they do this for a cynical calculated reason.
00:38:43.000They're using these people as human shields.
00:38:45.000They are trying to create PR victories.
00:38:51.000People on the left deliberately encouraged activities like what this woman did because they know it could eventually result in someone getting shot.
00:39:00.000If they didn't want people shot, they would say, we're going to protest deportations.
00:39:05.000We're going to protest against the Trump administration's immigration policies, but don't get in ICE's way.
00:39:42.000The people who are responsible for this are the ones who instigated this woman and others to sabotage valid law enforcement, to get in the way of valid law enforcement, and to cause incidents where someone could die.
00:40:49.000I don't believe that this woman was trying to run him over necessarily, but she was willing to take a car, hit the gas so fast that it would spin out to try and flee from them and to hell with where she was pointing.
00:41:00.000She didn't seem to care at that moment because she just went to the middle of the day.
00:41:13.000If they order you to do something, you have to listen.
00:41:16.000And like a normal thing, a normal reaction that the right has to learn to say is if you do not listen to what police tell you and ICE are police, you may die.