The All-American Halftime show at the Superbowl was a massive success, and we're here to talk about it and the incredible support that went into making it happen. Plus, we're joined by Blake and Mikey to discuss the aftermath of the incredible amount of support that was shown for Kid Rock.
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.
00:01:09.000Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week's edition of Thought Crime Thursday.
00:01:21.000Hugely successful All-American halftime show, TPUSA, number one U.S. live stream of all time, number two worldwide live stream on YouTube of all time.
00:01:34.000And it's, it's, you have to just be humbled by God's grace.
00:02:24.000You know, why was it that the All-American halftime show went as big as it did?
00:02:31.000I think part of it was that families could confidently have their children sit in the living room and watch something knowing confidently that booty cheeks or debauchery wouldn't be on the screen and that they wouldn't have to say, kids, go in the other room.
00:02:55.000But also, it uplifted values and it uplifted Christ and it uplifted the fact that a lot of people have that Bible that's on the shelf that needs a little bit of dusting off.
00:03:06.000But Jack, I thought you did a great job introing it.
00:03:29.000So as cool as that was, by the way, and I saw you tweeting up a storm about that when we were there on the set and I heard that he had like the jump spring for that, like the trapdoor.
00:04:04.000Usually usually um, usually you hear Bob, or like Mr Richie.
00:04:08.000Okay, all right, it'd be funny if he got you know like an honorary doctorate and they're like Dr Rock, Dr Rock, Dr Rock, that'll be his next iteration.
00:04:25.000Um, she said for the first time here we are watching this rubble halftime show and I don't have to have, like my, my thumb over, hovering over the remote, you know, having to click off because something is there that we don't want to see.
00:04:40.000Yeah, and she was like it was like good clean, fun and actually funny enough.
00:04:44.000She didn't actually like ask me for many you know spoilers in terms of any of that stuff.
00:04:49.000I think she just kind of trusted, if it's Tpusa, like it's gonna be good to go, that's so great, that's so great.
00:04:54.000So I know i've heard so much feedback from different people with that exact same thing.
00:04:58.000They just knew that it was Tpusa, so they knew it would be fine for their kids um, which I just think is so cool, but Blake.
00:05:04.000Do you have like a Kid Rock impersonation with when he's you're in your rock voice?
00:05:09.000No, I don't, I can't, i'm not your Saxon, my Saxon voice.
00:05:14.000I mean, if I want to be, if I want to be like a British Chav wait, what would it like?
00:05:20.000What would it sound like if if if uh, Sebastian Bach was was singing Ball With The Ball?
00:05:27.000You're really you're imposing a lot of, a lot of when he does my name, my name is I don't.
00:05:33.000The problem, among other things, is I don't know the word, the words to Bawa Deba oh dude, that was so literally the words of Ball With The Ball and my name is Kid Rock.
00:05:41.000Yeah, I had never heard of Bawa Deba until this halftime show came upon us.
00:05:46.000Yeah yeah, you lived on planet earth, come on, like in the last couple decades.
00:05:58.000As far as i'm concerned, music ended in the year 1991, in that one week gap between when Guns N's Use Your Illusion came out and then Nevermind, by Nirvana, and after that there was kind of no more music.
00:06:11.000I grew up thinking I just didn't like music, like true story.
00:06:14.000I just didn't like music because I didn't like anything that was on the radio.
00:06:17.000I didn't like any of these rap people.
00:06:18.000I didn't like this new metal, I didn't like this hip-hop and that's like all that was.
00:06:22.000Or this alt rock yep, never mind ghastly things like Radiohead.
00:06:26.000I was a very bad white person and then I, as I aged into, you know, middle school, I discovered wait, there were these musical albums and songs that were released prior to my birth and they are the, the true music of my people, the Midwestern white guy, and so I listened to my Midwestern white guy music and occasionally, my imported British heavy metal music, and you know, we have our alternative Halftimes and i'm very happy we put it on and a lot of people liked it.
00:06:54.000But, as i've repeatedly said, it's it's a bunch of acts that have never crossed my playlist in my life.
00:07:56.000And apparently it was really terrible if you were a fan at the stadium.
00:07:59.000They got so addicted to the cinema of it being on air.
00:08:02.000So if you were in the lower bowl of Levi's Stadium, everyone just didn't know what was going on.
00:08:08.000And it's amazing too to see this aspect of it where the people who are trying to give positive reviews and it's stuff like in that skit they're doing, someone is like asleep on two chairs and someone's like, oh, someone asleep on two chairs.
00:08:22.000Bad bunny totally gets the Hispanic experience, which is this very real thing.
00:09:44.000Have you ever seen what they used to do at the Super Bowl?
00:09:48.000Like, I think literally the first Super Bowl halftime show was a straight-up marching band just doing, like, that was what they had at the Packers Chiefs first one.
00:09:59.000I think it's literally like, my auntie asked me how many girlfriends I had.
00:10:04.000And it's like, I can't, let me see if I.
00:10:08.000Yeah, muchas no dias, many girlfriends.
00:10:11.000So he just keeps singing about how many girlfriends he has.
00:10:15.000Yeah, it's like, I have a girlfriend one week, and then I have a different one the next week.
00:10:20.000And then we have these brainless guys, like, you bootstrap, you know, the never Trump, the Never Trump, like, KuckCon Congress, like, those guys, they're doing these comments, and they're trying to say, among other things, this is a very like pro, this is like a traditional values, pro-family halftime show, and they just don't know the lyrics to the songs at all because no one does.
00:10:42.000No, but I'm, but I'm like, I'm making a criticism of it from a musical perspective, right?
00:10:47.000Like, not even beyond the lyrics, beyond the obvious, like, open borders globalism display, all of, like, the ridiculous, like, oh, we sleep on chairs sometimes at weddings when we're kids.
00:10:57.000Like, you mean, like, literally all kids would do.
00:11:02.000But no, it's, it's like, it's not catchy.
00:11:43.000I think it's kind of funny that they got Shakira to make their like crypto Africa.
00:11:46.000But everybody at least knows who Shakira is.
00:11:49.000You know, I didn't know that she was the Waka Waka singer until now.
00:11:53.000Here's the thing: I brought this up on Piers Morgan this week because we got into it and he was all he was doing this whole like, well, you guys just did that because he's Hispanic and blah, blah, blah.
00:12:03.000And I was like, And I was like, actually, no, people got mad at him because he was disrespecting the American people because he politicized things and I can prove this.
00:12:24.000It's the second time he's performed at the Super Bowl.
00:12:26.000Everybody forgets that when Shakira performed back in 2020, the guy who got up on stage to rap with her during the one Spanish song was actually Bad Bunny.
00:14:42.000I'm like, it's just funny because I feel like, you know, people are like, oh, like, obviously I was like, you know, introing the halftime show for TPSA and then like had the tweets about it last year.
00:14:53.000But I was like, I was like, I feel like I actually know more about Bad Bunny than the average person in this too, because I would be pointing out that the reason I knew about him before it wasn't the Shakira thing.
00:15:05.000But then I had, I um, I knew that he was, they inserted him as this, the caddy, like the sidekick character with this huge subplot in Happy Gilmore 2.
00:15:16.000And so when they did that, I was like, who's this random like Spanish character that they're adding?
00:15:21.000Like, why is he there instead of the actual cast of Happy Gilmore 1 and they're giving him all the screen time and like, why is Netflix doing this?
00:15:30.000And then I found out it was Bad Bunny.
00:15:31.000It's like, oh, so that's, you know, another corporate addition where they're trying to just like jam him, you know, into the whole thing.
00:18:28.000One of the tweets I saw during the Super Bowl was: if I was running for president of a Latin country, my platform would be to bring Latin music a second drum beat.
00:22:40.000But, you know, the because you have to understand, we had like we had three months, but it wasn't even really three months because we had Amfest in the middle and then we had Christmas and New Year's.
00:22:51.000And so it was really more like two months, you know, of time other than just reaching out to venues, casting that wide net.
00:22:59.000And look, we talked about this a little bit when I was on with Andrew, you know, before on Thought Crime, but we had a lot of pressure against us from, you know, elements of the industry, elements of,
00:23:14.000you know, different, different, I think, probably money and sponsors that were, you know, probably thinking, hey, if we support someone or work with someone who's going to be going up against the NFL, then that's like putting a black mark on us.
00:23:29.000So that's why, for me, I just, I'm so grateful to all the musicians that came out and took the chance.
00:23:37.000And, you know, Kid Rock as well for, you know, bringing his incredible star power, Brantley Gilbert, Lee Bryce, Gabby Barrett, who's, you know, I think really become the breakout star of all this, fellow Pennsylvanian, like myself, by the way.
00:23:50.000And, oh, by the way, one of the controversies that, and Blake, I'm sure you've seen this as well as the number of like the, there's like the ratings controversy, but the lip sync controversy.
00:24:10.000I guess we have like master footage too that we could probably, you know, see if they really wanted us to like go to that level, which is crazy.
00:24:21.000It was literally we had so many people watching that it just, it was like, you know, just a glitch on the stream where everything was out of sync, the video and audio.
00:24:58.000Like, there are not even, not even just like Sweden itself, but like there are probably, I would say, specific provinces of Sweden that have produced more good music than all of Latin America.
00:25:12.000And specific, probably specific parts, probably specific cities.
00:25:48.000That was, no, I was actually on with Tim Poole last night on his show, and he was saying, guys, you could do it like with numbers like that, you could put on an entire day-long festival.
00:25:56.000And here was his idea, which was really good, because one of the issues that we would have then if we were doing the live festival that way is we would also have that same issue of setup and breakdown between bands.
00:26:31.000So let's get, if you guys are in the chat, especially super chat, you know, who would you like to see?
00:26:37.000One thing though, you know, ask us who'd you like to see it for next year, but at the same time, and email 1776 at humanevents.com or freedomacharlikirk.com about who you'd like to see.
00:26:46.000But I will say, though, that this was definitely a crash course, I think, for, and a learning curve for a lot of us, that it's not even up to the artist sometimes regarding songs, regarding The rights regarding like things they can do, people they can play with.
00:27:01.000There's so many contracts, there's so many labels, there's so many just different like layers of complexity to whether or not you can perform one of these things.
00:27:12.000Like, we lost the X live stream just a couple of hours before we went live.
00:27:17.000And, you know, I think, though, in a sense, that that was actually kind of maybe a godsend.
00:27:22.000Like, that was actually maybe part of God's plan because when we tweeted out that we lost X, that drove more people to YouTube and Rumble.
00:27:32.000And perhaps we wouldn't have hit the record if that hadn't happened.
00:28:12.000It's no question why people in the stands weren't moving at all.
00:28:15.000And I know we have to be careful, you know, exactly how we talk about this.
00:28:18.000But like, any in this, and it reminded me a few years ago, I was watching it because like old school halftime shows were like, it was like Janet Jackson, someone big, like middle of the stage, like everybody's into it.
00:28:52.000And that's what I was nervous about: our all-American halftime show.
00:28:56.000When we flipped over, I was worried that it would look like less production quality than like a multi-like tens of millions of dollars that they spend on normal halftime stuff.
00:29:10.000And it's like, no, ours actually looked way better.
00:29:50.000And there's so many videos like this where it's going viral that people were just standing around totally disconnected.
00:29:57.000And like, you can't even really see the show either.
00:30:02.000Like, Tyler, so this speaks to what you're saying: that the people in the stands couldn't even tell what was going on down there because it just looks like this weird thicket of grasses.
00:30:11.000It looked like, no, it's like when the Velociraptors come out during Jurassic Park and you just could see like the grass moving.
00:31:41.000I mean, I just don't understand where people get around there saying mumbling is something that you want when it comes to music.
00:31:49.000Whereas what this was, and yeah, Tyler, like, I guess the issue now is that they make these halftime shows.
00:31:57.000They did this last year as well, where they make it for the TV audience only and they don't care about the audience that's actually there.
00:32:03.000So the people in the stands are like, yeah, it's dumb because it's not the spectacle that you would expect.
00:32:11.000It's more like a TV show or like a music video kind of shoot.
00:32:15.000It's just not the big Super Bowl halftime spectacle that I think people are used to.
00:32:21.000You know, like a stage, dancers, fireworks, et cetera.
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00:34:19.000Number two is that Puerto Rico, the words in his songs are talking about women from lots of different countries.
00:34:26.000He's using, he's appropriating his sub-American culture as Puerto Rican to try and hook up with all these other South American and Central American women.
00:35:45.000And next year, if they get some really awful, like, like one of those rappers who just raps about all the felonies he does, we do a version that's like the same beat, but he's rapping about all the community stuff.
00:35:57.000Yeah, like community soul volleyballs.
00:38:49.000No, the weirdest 9-11 story I know, not weirdest, but just like, I think most, in a sense, unique, is I knew a guy who was in a motorcycle accident like the day before on 9-10, 2011, or excuse me, 2001, and I'm thinking 11.
00:39:08.000And so he was in like a medical coma on 9-11, and then he wakes up on 9-12 and is like, hey, so did I miss anything?
00:39:20.000And everyone's like, uh, then they had to go to him and tell him, and like, he didn't believe anyone, obviously.
00:39:28.000And then they show him the footage, and he was like, there's no way, dude.
00:39:31.000But it was so weird because like he didn't have that emotional response to it because everyone else had gone through the trauma of that day and not knowing whether or not, you know, something else, like people, everybody thought there was going to be more attacks, right?
00:39:46.000Everybody thought there was going to be more going on, whereas he's just walking around seeing the flags everywhere, like sort of confused about how that happened.
00:40:41.000Like, you have to do this bigger and better, and you have to scare everybody.
00:40:45.000And then, because if you do it in enough advance now, now, I mean, again, like advertisers and things like that are really going to be, you know, twisting the screws here.
00:40:59.000I'll just say, Tyler, I don't know if you caught, I know we, we chatted a little bit, but if you go back and watch when I did Tim Cast last night, I mean, he was just, couldn't be more praiseworthy.
00:41:08.000And he was like, just all in, just all in.
00:41:10.000And I've heard from a lot of people, you know, who are, you know, other hosts of shows and different things where people are, people are just honestly shocked.
00:41:20.000Just absolutely shocked that it was record-breaking viewing where production quality.
00:42:32.000But here's the point I was getting around to making.
00:42:34.000Turning Point USA could have probably raised and charged millions and millions of dollars to do a bunch of ads, sponsorships, all that stuff, and intentionally did not do that.
00:42:49.000This was a, did not make any kind of revenue.
00:42:53.000They did not turn this into a revenue thing when it was very clear that this could easily be a revenue thing.
00:42:58.000Because that wasn't what the purpose was.
00:43:00.000The purpose of this was to live up to the expectations, things that Charlie, Jack, you had verbalized this very well, things that Charlie had said that really bothered him, that he would want to see done, and make it really cleanly just about that.
00:43:14.000Just about giving Americans all charged.
00:43:16.000In the first place, that's what I was thinking of.
00:43:43.000But here's the point: is that people looked at this and went like, you guys would be crazy not to monetize this or do things or raise money for turning point that would go back to the 501c3 to help operations and do all that.
00:43:55.000But this was so much bigger than that.
00:44:21.000I thought that was really important that nobody felt like they were being, nobody looked at this as like, oh, well, this is just another play.
00:44:32.000A lot of haters that were like these people that are like, oh, well, I didn't follow that buddy, but I don't watch that either.
00:44:40.000Although, Tyler, you did have an idea, and perhaps we should still do it, of doing like maybe like a t-shirt or something.
00:44:48.000Like make it like a concert shirt that people could get, a TPUSA shirt where it's got like the, you know, the bands, the acts on the front, and then on the back, it's got like that, you know, like a classic t-shirt, like a list of everyone who performed.
00:45:03.000And you could have like, I, you know, the All-American halftime show and then put the year, and then every year we could do a new shirt.
00:45:10.000Yeah, I still think we need a shirt that says, I switched the channel on whatever last Sunday was.
00:46:26.000You just like, you make it the symbolic thing.
00:46:28.000Every song that's performed, just make it one through 10 on iTunes or on Spotify or whatever app they'll be listening to music on by that time.
00:46:39.000Because by the way, and this is something that, okay, I do have, like, so there was, there's this argument that keeps getting made about like the ratings and all the rest.
00:46:48.000And everyone's always like, oh, well, you guys didn't beat the Super Bowl.
00:46:50.000Like, we never said we were going to beat the Super Bowl.
00:46:52.000We said we were going to do something that would, that would rival, that would take a chunk away, et cetera, which we did, obviously.
00:46:58.000But then when you look at all of those sort of ephemeral cases of, okay, well, what are other data points we can look at to see what the impact was?
00:47:09.000And again, it's Kid Rock on the top of the U.S. charts.
00:47:12.000Gabby Barrett was right there, like number four, number five, a couple of songs up because she was such a breakout star in terms of this.
00:47:19.000By the way, 25 years old, married at 19, three kids already.
00:47:23.000I mean, like, that's the Charlie Kirk.
00:47:26.000You know, that is the Charlie Kirk motto.
00:47:29.000Get married, have kids, be successful.
00:47:33.000Great person to work with, like super down to earth.
00:47:36.000Like, like literally one of the nicest people I've ever met.
00:47:39.000Not like the diva that, you know, people seem to think that like all musician, you know, musical acts are going to be.
00:47:46.000And but then the way the Nielsen ratings get get computed, that's like, I feel like, Tyler, I kind of feel like they're, you know, it's, they're doing this apples to oranges thing because our streaming numbers are based off of devices.
00:48:02.000So the number of TVs, the number of screens, the number of the number of accounts, whatever.
00:48:09.000But Nielsen, they don't do households.
00:48:12.000They do the household number and then they multiply it by three.
00:50:33.000Because when you actually start calculating the number of views with that metric, because I have friends that are in the marketing world that have put on these types of events that have done ads on the big game days.
00:50:48.000And he told me specifically, because he's funded these entire big ads, that the conservative estimates of 2.4 multiplier views.
00:51:00.000Realistically, it's probably closer to like three to four person.
00:51:05.000So, I mean, we're talking, I mean, we're talking, if that's the case, we're talking that there's a real possibility that this production took like literally half the viewership.
00:51:19.000I mean, it totally broke containments.
00:51:22.000And that's how you know God was involved.
00:51:25.000That's how you know it's God because it's not us.
00:51:28.000This was being brought up for the biggest events outside of the big game.
00:51:31.000Like the biggest events that are on TV, like, you know, Dancing with the Stars and American Idol and all those things.
00:51:38.000Those things get like five, six, seven million views.
00:51:42.000Like, we're talking like this was probably like five to eight times bigger than that as a brand, as an outside organization with no capitalization from the major media networks.
00:52:18.000I won't say who it was, but they're an important person.
00:52:20.000And they're like, after watching what the Turning Point team was able to do with Charlie's Memorial, which was like, you have to believe that that was God's hand just making that successful because it was so huge and so many people and it was so hard to do so quickly and everybody was so emotional during that time.
00:52:39.000But like watching everybody pull together and do this thing then too, people are like, wow, this is actually like a very scary unit here that we're up against.
00:52:50.000And what scares people even more is when they start realizing the funny part is, it's like, I can understand now why there's conspiracy theories that think that we have all this support from like places that we don't because it almost is, it doesn't make sense how capable this team is.
00:53:33.000The most powerful company in this world is not thrilled about Turning Point USA having the number one streamed event ever in American history.
00:53:42.000I just, I'm going to promise you, they did not see that coming.
00:53:46.000And that's the whole funny part about this whole thing.
00:54:20.000No, and kudos to, and by the way, shout out, of course, to the Rumble team as well for just being there, being so supportive.
00:54:27.000Chris Pavlovsky, he and I were chatting like right before it went live and talking about how he was going to see it.
00:54:34.000And then I did a little bit of the RAV pre-show and I was just looking at the Rumble numbers and that was sort of the first indication that I had.
00:54:42.000I was like, wait a minute, this isn't just big.
00:54:46.000This is way beyond anything that even we were projecting.
00:54:53.000Well, it's like, yeah, to your point here, at least officially.
00:54:56.000I will say, though, that and Andrew's not here, but he and I had like a phone call that morning and we were like, could you imagine if we get to like, could you imagine if we get to 10 million?
00:55:57.000So we're very, very grateful because Rumble is the unsung hero in most of Americans being able to consume even middle-of-the-road content now because Rumble exists.
00:56:15.000It's just, it's just such a perfect storm.
00:56:17.000That's the phrase that I keep just rattling through my head.
00:56:20.000It was just, it was just a perfect storm between all the years of pent-up demand, just for, which, by the way, country music, in and of itself, it is the most listened to genre of music in the country.
00:56:32.000It is the most purchased genre of music.
00:56:34.000It is the gets the most attendance if you go state by state.
00:56:38.000It is the number one genre in America.
00:56:40.000And yet, for 30 years, there has not been a headliner of country music at the Super Bowl.
00:56:45.000For 23 years, there's not been a single country artist in Shania Twain.
00:56:50.000Rock music as well has been completely shunted off for 16 years.
00:56:57.000And it's like, you guys are just cutting off this massive market, demographic market, which is, you know, very, very obviously the same demographics of people who watch the NFL.
00:57:10.000And in many cases, are the people who vote for Donald Trump?
00:57:13.000Well, what's so offensive about all that?
00:57:16.000Like, they exploited Hank Williams Jr. for years with his theme, the Monday Night Football theme song.
00:57:23.000So every football theme song that's existed for like Sunday Night Football and Monday Night Football has always been country.
00:57:29.000Like this is what's so offensive about this, this entire thing.
00:57:32.000And again, I'm not even a country guy.
00:58:22.000You know, like, let's get another who song that we used to market CSI episodes.
00:58:28.000Uh, it was, and then Hank, after Hank Williams, and they, uh, they, I mean, it's everybody, everyone, every, when everyone thinks of Monday Night Football, you think of Hank Williams, Williams Jr.
00:58:37.000Well, did you hear, so don't forget, they canceled Hank Williams Jr. and I was, so I was on Glenn Beck this week, and he told me the backstory that Hank Williams Jr. was listening to Glenn Beck.
00:58:49.000That's how he found out he got canceled.
00:58:52.000Like, the NFL didn't even reach out to him directly.
00:58:56.000And he was listening to Glenn, and he had these, and this is a story that Glenn told me, that he had these 10 Monday Night Football guitars, like acoustic guitars in his house.
00:59:07.000And he got so mad and so upset at the way that they treated him that he smashed them.
00:59:13.000He was just grabbing them and smashing them and smashing them and smashing them.
00:59:18.000And he finally came to the very last one and he stopped himself and he said, I'm not going to smash this.
00:59:52.000That's the anger of the average American who just wants to be able to turn on something that isn't disrespecting them for being an American, for liking his country, for caring about Jesus Christ, for saluting the red, white, and blue that so many people have been crapped on for years just because, oh, you know, you're some redneck American.
01:00:16.000And it's like, no, actually, that's like a huge, massive chunk of this country.
01:00:23.000That anger, I think, turned and God used all of that to turn it into something positive, which led to, and we haven't even really talked about that much yet, but the like Kid Rock sharing the gospel and his own salvation story, which is just crazy when you think of like the kid rock when we first met him to who he is today.
01:02:36.000You guys have, you guys got really mired in that.
01:02:38.000We told you we had to get to the others, but we'll have to push this next week, maybe.
01:02:43.000It is, I mean, I think it legitimately was just look that halftime show, the genesis of that was in many ways thought crime because this is where we would talk about halftime shows with Charlie.
01:02:56.000This is where we would hash things out.
01:02:58.000This is where you know we really kind of came up with the genesis that led to the show.
01:03:05.000And you look at it, number one U.S. stream on YouTube of all time.