The Charlie Kirk Show - TikTok Must Be Destroyed with Darren Beattie and Brendan Carr

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 Darren Beattie joins us from Revolver.news to talk about the aftermath of the midterm election and then the case for banning TikTok with Brendan Carr and how that impacted the midterms.

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00:00:31.000 Here we go.

00:00:32.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:34.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

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00:01:18.000 A lot to get to here.

00:01:19.000 We have producer Andrew on the line and also Darren Beattie from the wonderful Revolver.news, Revolver.news.

00:01:25.000 Darren, welcome back to the program.

00:01:27.000 Darren, you wrote a piece back in 2020 talking about how we could stop this manipulation, ballot capturing operation of the Democrats.

00:01:35.000 I wish more people would have listened to you.

00:01:37.000 Now here we are post-midterms, barely getting the House, not having the Senate, and with some of our superstars, after many days of counting and suspicious ballot dumps, look like are not going to be in office absent some aggressive lawsuits.

00:01:50.000 Darren, what is your analysis and how should we proceed?

00:01:52.000 Well, it's a very troubling situation.

00:01:55.000 And the bottom line is really a lack of the basic kind of voting infrastructure that the Democrats have built over a long period of time, but really, really capitalized on the sort of COVID environment and post-COVID environment so as to really enhance the robustness of their machinery that's capable of exploiting the mail-in system.

00:02:22.000 And the bottom line is getting out really low-information, low-interest, low-energy votes.

00:02:31.000 And that's how they win.

00:02:32.000 And it's a tremendous structural advantage.

00:02:34.000 And it was clear that that would be the case, irrespective of the question of downright kind of fraudulent activity.

00:02:42.000 This is just how the game is structured now.

00:02:45.000 And so I think it's like there's an interesting distinction between rigged and stolen.

00:02:51.000 And I think we need to think more about the rigged, how things are set up, how the Democrat machine exploits the mail-in system to its profound structural advantage.

00:03:04.000 And they do so, and they don't even need good candidates.

00:03:08.000 I mean, we're talking about candidate equality, and the Democrats are winning with people like John Fetterman, which is probably one of the ultimate flexes in American political history that you can win with John Fetterman.

00:03:22.000 I mean, it seems like they should be embarrassed, but when you really think about it, we're the ones should be embarrassed by that.

00:03:30.000 Yes.

00:03:31.000 And so, just by the way, some breaking news.

00:03:33.000 There's been a new ballot drop in Pinal.

00:03:35.000 Abe Homeday now trails by 2,269 votes, which would be incredibly important if we can get Abe Hamaday in more ways than one.

00:03:46.000 So sorry, Darren, I want to continue with this, though.

00:03:48.000 But Darren, is it time in states where it is legal for Republicans to embrace ballot harvesting?

00:03:55.000 Well, I think it's time for Republicans to learn how to learn how to navigate it.

00:04:04.000 I mean, I would say it would be better to just eliminate it entirely.

00:04:10.000 If that's not an option, then the GOP needs to learn how to game it and to think about what is going to be more kind of politically realistic.

00:04:20.000 Is it politically realistic to go back to, you know, part of the piece? that you mentioned, the revolver piece that we ran shortly after the 2020 election, you know, Democrats weren't always these big pro-mail-in ballot people.

00:04:33.000 In fact, Jimmy Carter ran a commission and a whole study that basically said how dangerous a mass mail-in voting system would actually be.

00:04:44.000 And frankly, I'd recommend people go and look at that Jimmy Carter study, but we need to deal in the realm of what's politically feasible.

00:04:52.000 And if it turns out that it's simply a non-starter to get rid of mass mail-in, which it might be, then we need to learn how to play the game as it exists today.

00:05:04.000 Yeah, Andrew, what is your take on that?

00:05:06.000 Yeah, I mean, I said this yesterday and I still hold to it.

00:05:09.000 It's like, I'm a big baseball fan.

00:05:11.000 I hate the designated hitter in the National League.

00:05:14.000 But guess what?

00:05:14.000 I just hate it.

00:05:15.000 It doesn't mean I'm going to throw my pitcher up to bat, you know, just to be a purist.

00:05:20.000 No, I'm going to put the best hitter I have, you know, at the plate to score the most runs.

00:05:26.000 And I think, you know, to this point, it's like, you know, you tweeted about this this morning, Darren.

00:05:30.000 I saw it.

00:05:31.000 You're saying like, you know, listen, Republicans used to have the advantage because we were able to drive engaged voters on election day.

00:05:39.000 Republicans always had that advantage.

00:05:40.000 We're more engaged.

00:05:41.000 We care more.

00:05:42.000 But the Democrats have the advantage on low agency, low information voters.

00:05:46.000 That's why the mass universal no excuse mail-in ballots has been such a thing.

00:05:50.000 These drop boxes have been such a thing that they're pushing.

00:05:53.000 But to your point, if we do not have the political power to overturn these abuses of our democracy, and I would call it that, then we just have to start investing money, resources, manpower, ground game.

00:06:07.000 And this has to come straight from the top of the Republican Party, in my opinion, into equalizing the playing field.

00:06:12.000 Because to your point, I think our messaging is better.

00:06:15.000 I think our ideas work better.

00:06:16.000 I think they're common sense, but we're just not doing that right now.

00:06:20.000 I don't know what it's going to take at the highest level of the RNC to start pushing some of these reforms.

00:06:25.000 But to me, it seems as clear as day this needs to happen.

00:06:28.000 Right.

00:06:28.000 And just if I could interject and add something to that, I think as far as I'm aware, like I really want to look into it more deeply because I'm not quite ready to concede that it's a non-starter in every state that, you know, to that we can't severely diminish, if not eliminate the practice of mail-in.

00:06:50.000 I think it's worth like really looking into what that would require realistically, what kind of resources, what the expected benefit that would be versus, and it's not just an easy thing to reconstruct a kind of machinery that can turn out really low interest voters.

00:07:06.000 And in fact, you know, an interesting way to think about it, you could say that the GOP version of that, at least after the Trump phenomenon, Trump was the machine that turned out low interest voters.

00:07:22.000 That was the forgotten man.

00:07:24.000 Those were the people that never went out.

00:07:26.000 And so what the Democrats achieved through a very efficient, well-oiled sort of almost mechanistic machinery of just like literally bussing in like people, it's almost an automated system of bringing in.

00:07:40.000 Trump achieved this, I think, in a much more noble way and inspiring way by actually re-engaging lowest interest people in the political process.

00:07:50.000 Now, as people are want to say in the technical world, Trump is a unique political phenomenon.

00:07:58.000 Trump is not necessarily scalable into the indefinite political future.

00:08:04.000 And so I do think we need to start thinking about what type of machinery we need.

00:08:09.000 Otherwise, it's like we don't have a chance unless we're running like once in a generation political talent.

00:08:17.000 And even there in 2020, it didn't work out for us.

00:08:20.000 So it's definitely something to look at.

00:08:25.000 But I think the mail-in will always have a kind of disadvantage to the Republican side.

00:08:31.000 And I think it's worth spelling out.

00:08:33.000 Stephen Miller actually had an insightful tweet on this that I kind of added to.

00:08:38.000 And he was saying, when it's a competition among who can best turn out the lowest interest voters, lowest engagement voters, that really changes the nature of what democracy is.

00:08:51.000 And as students of history know, the original understanding of how voting worked in America was not just anyone could vote.

00:08:59.000 You had to have property, you had to be a man and all these kinds of things.

00:09:03.000 And a lot of these criteria are probably not appropriate for today.

00:09:07.000 But I think the basic idea that one had to have some sort of investment in the system to vote, that you needed some kind of skin in the game, the last vestige of this was the system that at least gave a sort of structural advantage to people who cared.

00:09:25.000 And even that now is undermined by the practice of mass mailing and voting.

00:09:30.000 So it actually substantively changes the nature of what our democracy is.

00:09:34.000 So we're at a place right now where the Democrats accuse you of voter disenfranchisement of suppression just because you're worried that mass mail and ballots in every direction that could be captured by Alinskyite community organizers. 0.65

00:09:52.000 Yeah, the last kind, like you said, the last vestige of trying to have someone who's voting to care would be, I don't know, election day, getting in your car, going somewhere.

00:10:02.000 Democrats hacked that system.

00:10:04.000 They knew what they were doing.

00:10:05.000 Darren, Donald Trump is probably going to announce for the presidency tonight.

00:10:09.000 How should we think about this?

00:10:11.000 Well, I want to stand by and see what the announcement is.

00:10:15.000 But assuming that he does announce, which in all probability he will, but you never know because, you know, you just never know with Trump.

00:10:24.000 He can always surprise you.

00:10:27.000 But I think it's an encouraging thing.

00:10:28.000 He's the, you know, he's the head of the Republican Party.

00:10:32.000 He's the head of the movement.

00:10:34.000 And I think it's a good idea for him to announce.

00:10:39.000 And I think he needs to make the best use of it.

00:10:42.000 You know, people need hope right now.

00:10:45.000 And, you know, Trump, when he's bringing it, when he's running on all cylinders, is a formidable and unique political force.

00:10:55.000 And so we just need to hope the better angels are guiding him and that we see some of that magic that so many of us became addicted to from the 2015-2016 campaign.

00:11:08.000 Yeah, the feedback I'm receiving from a lot of people, and I think we're going to be streaming tonight his speech and also kind of our reaction to it tonight.

00:11:16.000 The reaction I'm getting from a lot of people is that they kind of want to see a little bit of that spark that they kind of grew fond of in 15, 16, and 17, and even parts of his presidency as well.

00:11:29.000 I'm receiving a lot of negative incoming of his communications towards DeSantis and Junckin.

00:11:37.000 Andrew, what is your take on that?

00:11:39.000 I think Darren's point about Trump being a unique political animal in the sense that he can turn out those voters that we just haven't seen any other Republican be able to turn out, especially at the national level.

00:11:53.000 But yeah, I'm hearing the same notes.

00:11:55.000 People are frustrated with some of the attacks on Yunkin and DeSantis.

00:11:59.000 I think DeSantis has now officially responded to those.

00:12:03.000 He's been asked about them in the press conference.

00:12:04.000 I'm not sure if we have that clip yet.

00:12:06.000 But, you know, I think we have to hope, to your point, that the better angels come out and that he channels his unique gifts in a way that really uplifts the party and gets people out to vote.

00:12:18.000 I mean, at this point, I still think it's a hard row to hope for anybody to beat him in a primary, but, you know, we're still early days here, you know.

00:12:28.000 So we're going to be watching really intently and seeing kind of his message.

00:12:32.000 And if he's forward-looking, I think that's a really interesting first step.

00:12:35.000 Yeah, Trump at his best is vision casting and is really painting a picture that gets people inspiring, getting people inspired.

00:12:43.000 Darren, also, you're keeping your eyes on the Twitter saga.

00:12:45.000 Where does that now kind of rest?

00:12:47.000 Are we seeing Twitter kind of get liberated from its previous tyrannical behavior now that Elon's in charge?

00:12:53.000 Well, I see mostly positive signs.

00:12:55.000 I mean, ultimately, the story is yet to be written.

00:12:59.000 There are some major personnel decisions that are yet to be made.

00:13:04.000 But I think so far, Elon is absolutely right to, as I call it, take out the trash. 0.71

00:13:10.000 He's firing a lot of the trash.

00:13:12.000 A lot of the people responsible for content moderation who just added unnecessary friction to the kind of conversational space on the global public square.

00:13:23.000 And many people have joined Twitter, and that has resulted in skyrocketing engagement and dynamism on the platform.

00:13:33.000 And so that's a positive thing.

00:13:36.000 But, you know, it's still in cautiously optimistic mode because I think we'll need to see how he ultimately resolves the content moderation problem.

00:13:47.000 Now people are seeing a spike in engagement, but that's largely a result of firing the people who would have been censoring things and also just an influx of a massive amount of users.

00:14:00.000 But it doesn't speak to the sort of underlying and enduring content moderation policy that I think is still under active consideration.

00:14:09.000 And that will be contingent on some, I think, key personnel decisions over the next couple months.

00:14:16.000 It's well said.

00:14:17.000 Darren Beattie, Revolver.news.

00:14:18.000 Thank you so much.

00:14:20.000 Thank you.

00:14:23.000 Look, in the good old days, we Americans argued about which policies to pursue to improve this beautiful country.

00:14:29.000 Charlie Kirk here.

00:14:30.000 Too often, we find ourselves arguing about whether or not America is great or not, or whether we should be ashamed or whether we should love America.

00:14:38.000 The reason for this is simple.

00:14:39.000 For too many years, too many of our schools have been neglecting to teach young people about our great heritage of liberty, presenting them instead a dishonest narrative of America as a fundamentally unjust or racist country.

00:14:50.000 Hillsdale College is weighing in for America, the wonderful Hillsdale College, by offering a free online course, such as The Great American Story, A Land of Hope, Constitution 101, The Meaning of History of the Constitution.

00:15:03.000 As we get closer to Constitution Day, September 17th, I encourage all of you to enroll in one of these wonderful free courses from Hillsdale.

00:15:09.000 And even better, encourage your friends and family to sign up too.

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00:15:16.000 That is charlie4hillsdale.com.

00:15:18.000 Check it out, charlie4hillsdale.com.

00:15:23.000 Right now, we have Brendan Carr joining us from the FCC.

00:15:29.000 And to talk about TikTok, I cannot put into words the damage that TikTok has done to our country.

00:15:36.000 I really wish one of the things Trump would have done is just completely and totally ban it from our country altogether.

00:15:41.000 It is a Chinese Communist Party mind virus infiltration. 0.84

00:15:46.000 It has very little to any redeemable value.

00:15:49.000 It's also promoting some of the most radical transgender ideas, liberal ideas.

00:15:55.000 And by the way, anytime a conservative such as myself or other people try to start a TikTok, we just get kicked off.

00:16:02.000 So there's not even a matter of allowing us on the platform.

00:16:04.000 So Brendan Carr's with us now.

00:16:05.000 Brendan, how are you doing?

00:16:06.000 I'm doing great.

00:16:07.000 Good to see you.

00:16:08.000 Brendan, make the case.

00:16:09.000 Why is TikTok such a threat to our society and what should we do about it?

00:16:13.000 You know, a lot of people look at TikTok.

00:16:15.000 It's immensely popular.

00:16:16.000 They think, well, it's just a fun platform for sharing memes or dance videos.

00:16:21.000 That's just the sheep's clothing.

00:16:22.000 Underneath, it operates as a very sophisticated surveillance tool.

00:16:26.000 It's pulling everything from search and browsing history, keystroke patterns.

00:16:30.000 It reserves the right to get your biometrics, including face prints and voice prints.

00:16:34.000 Up to now, TikTok officials have said, don't worry, this is all stored outside of China.

00:16:39.000 And then a couple of months ago, there was a bombshell report that got a hold of internal TikTok communications that said, quote, everything is seen back in China.

00:16:49.000 There's two core issues here.

00:16:50.000 One is all that data flowing back into China, which they can use for espionage purposes. 0.75

00:16:57.000 But the other part of it, I think you alluded to, is the content that's coming back to us from these algorithms that are designed and built in Beijing.

00:17:05.000 And if you look at the version of TikTok called Doyan, a separate app that operates inside China, it feeds children there science experiments, museum exhibits, educational materials.

00:17:17.000 Here in the U.S., what does it feed our children?

00:17:19.000 The Blackout Challenge, which encourages kids to suffocate themselves.

00:17:23.000 And there was just a court case that a court said, even assuming that TikTok intentionally fed to a 10-year-old girl a blackout challenge who did it and then died, they're not liable for it.

00:17:34.000 So this is a very disturbing application that's a problem from a national security perspective, but also a mental health perspective for America's youth.

00:17:43.000 Yeah.

00:17:44.000 So there's so many dimensions to this.

00:17:45.000 Let's start with the data.

00:17:46.000 What data in particular are they sending back to China?

00:17:50.000 Does that just include user data of their behavior in the app?

00:17:53.000 Because some people say that actually TikTok is able to monitor behavior outside of their application.

00:17:59.000 Is that correct?

00:18:01.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:18:01.000 You know, we've seen evidence of it getting data on clipboards, on different devices.

00:18:07.000 And again, the inside materials from TikTok's own officials are that it's getting sent back to Beijing.

00:18:14.000 And so that's a deep problem.

00:18:16.000 And what's the problem with that, among other things, is we're locked in a battle right now with Beijing when it comes to artificial intelligence or AI.

00:18:24.000 They want to dominate there and they want to use it for authoritarian purposes.

00:18:27.000 And what we're doing when we're sending our data back to Beijing is we're feeding, training, and improving China's AI.

00:18:34.000 And that's a threat for us, again, outside of TikTok itself that we're going to come to regret if we don't cut that off soon.

00:18:41.000 Yeah.

00:18:41.000 And so, you know, our show is a conservative program.

00:18:44.000 And Brendan, I know that you have to, you know, have your position at the FCC, but I think that this is something you can comment on more broadly.

00:18:51.000 Do you think it's fair to say that the values on TikTok definitely benefit Democrats or left-wing causes, that the ideological composition of TikTok is not exactly fertile ground for conservatives?

00:19:04.000 It's possible.

00:19:05.000 You know, there's some reporting out there that says one of the reasons why the Biden administration is potentially hesitating on taking tougher action on TikTok as there's at least some people counseling them that it's a good means for reaching out and motivating their base.

00:19:19.000 I don't know if that's true or not, but there's the argument that's out there.

00:19:22.000 But the reality is the concern here is bipartisan.

00:19:25.000 You've got a Democrat Senator Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intel Committee, who has said, and this is a guy that gets daily intelligence briefings that would probably result in you and me having to change our shorts afterwards in terms of the seriousness of the threat.

00:19:39.000 And he has said that it is TikTok that, in his words, scares the dickens out of him.

00:19:43.000 Democrat Rep Schakowsky in the House has written to Apple and Google raising concerns about TikTok.

00:19:50.000 So I think the tide is moving out on TikTok.

00:19:52.000 There is conservative concern, but there's bipartisan concern.

00:19:55.000 And right now, where things are is the Biden administration's Treasury Department has an operation called Syphius, which is a committee on foreign investment.

00:20:03.000 Right now, they are reviewing TikTok.

00:20:05.000 And there was a report at the New York Times that they've reached a preliminary deal with TikTok to allow them to continue to operate.

00:20:11.000 But that same story also said that the number two at DOJ, Lisa Monaco, doesn't believe that the deal is tough enough on China.

00:20:20.000 So I'm hopeful that we are seeing bipartisan consensus here, which is going to be required to get some concrete action.

00:20:27.000 Yeah.

00:20:28.000 So can it be done just through the executive branch, just a stroke of the pen to completely ban an app that 100 million Americans are using?

00:20:36.000 It can.

00:20:37.000 This is what the Treasury Department's CPIS process is designed to do.

00:20:42.000 And frankly, I think this is a basic IQ test for the Biden administration to show that they are standing up to China.

00:20:51.000 The argument that the DOJ can cut a deal comes down to this.

00:20:55.000 It's this thing called Project Texas.

00:20:57.000 And the idea there is that they are going to basically shift a lot of this to Oracle servers here in the U.S.

00:21:02.000 But there's several problems with that.

00:21:04.000 One, there was, again, leaked material that had a TikTok official in LA meet with another TikTok official outside of business hours, outside the office, ask detailed questions about the location of those Oracle servers and other details that strike me as casing those Oracle servers.

00:21:22.000 That's disturbing.

00:21:23.000 Another leaked material coming out of TikTok's DC office had them describing that Project Texas move and saying, at the end of the day, it remains to be seen if Beijing can still get access to it because these are their tools.

00:21:35.000 They built them in China.

00:21:36.000 So this idea that we're simply going to move this to Oracle and that's going to solve the problems, TikTok doesn't seem to think that that's the case.

00:21:43.000 And I think that we should believe TikTok on that.

00:21:44.000 Tristan Harris was on 60 Minutes and said something rather profound, PlayCut 315.

00:21:51.000 In their version of TikTok, if you're under 14 years old, they show you science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos, and educational videos.

00:22:03.000 And they also limit it to only 40 minutes per day.

00:22:06.000 Now, they don't ship that version of TikTok to the rest of the world.

00:22:10.000 So it's almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids' development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they've shipped the opium version to the rest of the world.

00:22:23.000 Is that a fair way to say, is this the new opium wars, Brendan?

00:22:27.000 Yeah, I mean, what I've said is TikTok is China's digital fentanyl. 0.92

00:22:31.000 And when you look at the very different picture that they are sending to their own youth and the picture that they're sending to ours, I think it's not, it doesn't take much of a leap to see that just even the divisiveness that they insert into this country, let alone the unhealthy viewing habits.

00:22:44.000 Again, like I said, the blackout challenge that they're feeding to kids that have literally resulted in young U.S. girls killing themselves based on the content that's being fed to them from TikTok.

00:22:56.000 And the threats go beyond that.

00:22:57.000 There was another recent report that had a Beijing-based group for TikTok's parent company attempting to surveil the locations of specific Americans not employed by TikTok through this app.

00:23:09.000 And so it's like we're in a situation now where almost every week another shoe drops.

00:23:13.000 I feel like we've had 17 or 18 shoes and the evidence just keeps mounting.

00:23:16.000 That's why I said I just do not see a path forward for the Biden administration to somehow bless TikTok to continue to operate here.

00:23:25.000 Yeah, I mean, and so for parents that are a little skeptical out there and they say, oh, my kid likes TikTok.

00:23:31.000 It's innocent.

00:23:31.000 It's fun.

00:23:32.000 It actually does result in the actual creation of ticks for young girls.

00:23:36.000 Is that right?

00:23:38.000 There's been all sorts of evidence pointing to different mental health, behavioral health, body image harms that come from TikTok.

00:23:45.000 And look, if people are really into these short-form videos, there's lots of ways to do that that isn't on TikTok.

00:23:51.000 There are competing platforms out there.

00:23:52.000 So I'm not going to tell people not to upload videos.

00:23:56.000 But when the parent company is deeply embedded in the CCP, it's concerning.

00:24:00.000 In fact, when they testified recently in Congress, they were asked, do you send this data to the Chinese government?

00:24:05.000 They said no.

00:24:06.000 Okay, it's a good answer.

00:24:07.000 They said, do you send this data to, I think this was Senator Hawley actually asking the questions, do you send this data to the CCP?

00:24:15.000 They said no.

00:24:17.000 And then the last question was, do you send this to employees back in Beijing that are themselves members of the CCP?

00:24:23.000 And TikTok said that they would defer on answering that specific question.

00:24:28.000 So that's basically, in my view, a yes.

00:24:29.000 You know, they're allowing Beijing-based employees to view U.S. user data who are themselves members of the CCP.

00:24:36.000 And once that happens, there's no limit on who can access the data.

00:24:39.000 So this is deeply disturbing on a lot of levels.

00:24:43.000 Yeah.

00:24:43.000 So then let's just play the odds.

00:24:45.000 What do you think the probability of some sort of concrete or constructive action is here?

00:24:49.000 Or do you think it's going to be maybe kind of split in the middle?

00:24:53.000 You know, I think the window for action people have been predicting was post-election before the next Congress gets seated.

00:25:00.000 So I think we are within sort of a three to four week period here now where we can expect final action from the Biden administration.

00:25:05.000 I'm not hopeful that they are going to do the right thing.

00:25:08.000 I think they're going to attempt to try to restrict the data flow to China to try to monitor it.

00:25:12.000 And they're going to think that that's going to be enough and try to sell that to the American people as tough.

00:25:16.000 But look, this is just a matter of trust.

00:25:18.000 I just do not trust the officials at TikTok.

00:25:21.000 Again, based on the fact that it appears they're already trying to case these Oracle servers.

00:25:24.000 So again, I think we need to be tough here and take a harder action.

00:25:28.000 I do think it's a matter of time, whether it's this coming weeks or maybe a year or so down the road.

00:25:34.000 But I'm not sure we're going to land it in the right place in these next few weeks.

00:25:38.000 Well, I hope that something changes.

00:25:40.000 Brendan, thank you for joining us.

00:25:41.000 Great commentary as always.

00:25:42.000 Really appreciate it.

00:25:43.000 Thank you.

00:25:43.000 Appreciate it.

00:25:44.000 Thanks, Charlotte.

00:25:47.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

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00:26:51.000 It is small potatoes compared to Bernie Madoff, FTX.

00:26:58.000 And it has a very interesting overlap politically.

00:27:01.000 Okay, so FTX, and I only understand this at a surface level, but enough to be able to walk you guys through it.

00:27:06.000 FTX was one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.

00:27:10.000 It was founded by Sam Bankman Freed, a 20-something son of two Stanford law professors.

00:27:20.000 One was a major Democrat fundraiser and activist.

00:27:23.000 other was a top expert on what?

00:27:26.000 Tax evasion and tax shelters.

00:27:28.000 I'll get to that in a second.

00:27:30.000 Now, when crypto really became a big thing two years ago, FTX became extremely prominent and Mr. Becker Fried, which I will refer to as SBF, became extraordinarily rich with his estimated wealth peaking around $26 billion.

00:27:46.000 Until last week, his wealth was estimated around $16 billion.

00:27:50.000 Now, I remember seeing an article about this guy, Sam Becker Friedman, Freed, I'm sorry, Sam Becker Freed, about how he's this major Democrat donor and how he wants to use his money and his resources to reshape America.

00:28:04.000 And I just, I didn't really think much of it.

00:28:06.000 I kind of shrugged my shoulders. 0.97

00:28:07.000 I'm like, okay, just another loser that wants to see, you know, kids get medically mutilated and our border wide open. 0.96

00:28:13.000 And so I just kind of shrugged it off. 0.98

00:28:15.000 I said, all right, whatever.

00:28:16.000 And, but without, so basically, crypto continued to grow and he got to be worth $26 billion.

00:28:22.000 So without getting too much into the details, because it's very, very, very deep.

00:28:27.000 This guy, San Bankman Freed, I want to make sure I get this right, which will be referred to as SBF, just as an acronym.

00:28:34.000 Last week it was revealed that he had used FTX to prop up a quant finance firm that he founded called Alameda Research.

00:28:43.000 This caused a crypto equivalent of a bank run, which quickly revealed that FTX had a $10 billion hole in its balance sheet.

00:28:53.000 People with money on FTX basically lost everything.

00:28:56.000 And it's highly likely that criminal behavior was committed.

00:28:58.000 It's almost guaranteed.

00:29:00.000 Now, a crypto adjacent expert that we know on this program put it this way: quote, Sam Bankman Freed is basically Verbal Kint in the movie The Usual Suspects, talking about the, quote, Kaiser Soze.

00:29:12.000 Remember the entire movie?

00:29:13.000 It's who is Kaiser Soze at the end of it actually ends up being Kevin Spacey.

00:29:17.000 Sorry, spoiler alert if you've never seen Usual Suspects, one of my favorite movies of all time, by the way.

00:29:21.000 He went to Congress and lectured them about other financial institutions using customer funds to make risky bets while he was actually stealing customer funds to make him hugely dangerous bets himself.

00:29:32.000 He went to Forbes in June and said other exchanges were secretly insolvent while he was actually secretly insolvent.

00:29:39.000 The esteemed senator from New Jersey, Corey Booker, was gushing all over him in the committee room.

00:29:44.000 Now, the reason this gets even more interesting if you're not into crypto is that Mr. Bankman Freed was a massive, massive, massive Democrat donor.

00:29:54.000 Now, he spent more than $30 million on the midterms, and he said he would spend a billion dollars in 2024 if Trump ran.

00:30:03.000 There's also this Ukraine connection as well that I'm trying to understand, but there's something with like Ukrainian aid and a connection there.

00:30:09.000 I'll get into that in a second.

00:30:11.000 Of course, now it appears that these donations may have been funded by stealing user funds on FTX.

00:30:19.000 Now, another interesting thing is Mr. Bankman Freed was a promoter of effective altruism, the Silicon Valley adjacent meme ideology of sorts, which claims to promote rational forms of altruistic behavior.

00:30:31.000 This is a big tent movement that allegedly takes many forms, but it basically means that you're justified in taking massive risks and huge risks and being extremely dishonest because it would let you maximize your wealth so you could give it away for altruistic causes.

00:30:47.000 So here's another way to put it.

00:30:49.000 SBF or Sam Bankman Freed is like that hypothetical paperclip making robot, hypothetical paperclip making robot that goes rogue and turns the world into a pay-per-click maping machine.

00:31:03.000 He relentlessly optimized for one dimension at the expense of all else, maximizing his wealth so that he could give it away anyway.

00:31:11.000 So look, that's very confusing in one way.

00:31:13.000 Let me just put it this way.

00:31:14.000 It was a total fraud.

00:31:15.000 It was a fraud beyond anything that we could have imagined.

00:31:19.000 That Bernie Madoff would just be gushing at.

00:31:21.000 He'd say, Wow, that's I never did anything that bad.

00:31:24.000 And it was a major financier.

00:31:26.000 And by the way, he probably spent even more than $30 million on the midterms if you count some of the other dark money organizations that we may never know of are business investments.

00:31:38.000 This is one of the biggest stories, and people are losing everything.

00:31:43.000 Now, there is a connection between FTX and Ukraine that I'm not going to have time to kind of connect to.

00:31:50.000 Some people say that Ukraine was an investor, but I do not think that they were an investor.

00:31:54.000 I just think Ukraine got money via FTX, I believe.

00:31:58.000 And SBF gave all this free money to Ukraine users after the invasion.

00:32:02.000 So he was very good at exploiting news and stories like that.

00:32:06.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:32:07.000 Email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:32:10.000 Thank you so much for listening.

00:32:12.000 God bless.

00:32:15.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - November 16, 2022

TikTok Must Be Destroyed with Darren Beattie and Brendan Carr

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