The Charlie Kirk Show - "Trust the Experts" Failed. What Now? ft. Walter Kirn

00:00:03.000 My name is Charlie Kirk.

00:00:05.000 I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic.

00:00:11.000 My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth.

00:00:14.000 If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're going to end up miserable.

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00:00:39.000 I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade.

00:00:41.000 Most important decision I ever made in my life.

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00:00:48.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:49.000 Here we go.

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00:01:09.000 All right.

00:01:10.000 Welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:11.000 I'm very excited about this next guest.

00:01:14.000 I think he's one of the most impressive and important thinkers, political commentators of our current moment.

00:01:23.000 And not enough people, in my opinion, I've told him this, know about his thinking, his thought work, his writing.

00:01:30.000 And that is Walter Kern.

00:01:32.000 He's the editor-at-large of County Highway, and he's co-host of This America Week.

00:01:37.000 I think that's what it is.

00:01:38.000 America This Week.

00:01:39.000 That's what I got.

00:01:40.000 That makes a little more sense.

00:01:41.000 That makes sense.

00:01:42.000 Yeah, America This Week with Matt Taibbi, who's a great journalist in his own right.

00:01:47.000 It's very accomplished.

00:01:48.000 Walter, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:51.000 I'm glad to be here.

00:01:52.000 I'm really sorry that I postponed my last invitation while Charlie was around.

00:01:58.000 It was the first invitation.

00:02:01.000 And I just wasn't sufficiently prophetic to know how short time was.

00:02:08.000 And I thought I could do it later.

00:02:10.000 And this is the visit that I'm doing later.

00:02:13.000 And it's a sad one for me because I would have so wished to have talked to him.

00:02:17.000 Yeah, I know.

00:02:18.000 And you and I actually got to meet backstage at the Megan Kelly event here in Glendale.

00:02:24.000 And I got to tell you, I got to fanboy a little bit.

00:02:27.000 I do that rarely, very rarely.

00:02:30.000 But, you know, Blake understands this because we make content and there's only so much content you can consume when you're making content as well.

00:02:39.000 You've got, you know, you but America This Week, which is funny that I got the name wrong, I listen to that often with you and Matt because I think you guys have a way of breaking down the news that's swirling, the big stories of the day.

00:02:54.000 And so I wanted to have you on the show because I think, like I said in the intro here, you are an important thinker.

00:03:02.000 You're an important, I think, distiller of these larger stories and you make them make sense and you bring out the most important through line, right?

00:03:12.000 So what do you really need to pay attention to?

00:03:15.000 So this is we're going to have you on the entire hour here, Walter, and we just want to make sense of what happened in 2025, maybe go back to 2024 and back further, but we want to also look forward to 2026 and this new year that we've just embarked on, a year that I'm grateful that we have.

00:03:33.000 And so I haven't been so grateful for the passing of a year into the next as I have this one.

00:03:39.000 I will tell you that much.

00:03:40.000 But so let's start at the big question.

00:03:45.000 Help us make sense of our current moment.

00:03:47.000 If you had to distill all of these disparate pieces of Somali fraud and Democrats are now pro-Maduro and, you know, you've got cultural elements weaving throughout. 0.98

00:03:57.000 What are you observing?

00:03:58.000 What are you thinking about right now, Walter Kern?

00:04:01.000 Well, let me, just for those who don't know me, introduce my point of view and my reasons for having it.

00:04:09.000 I'm chiefly a novelist, and I was a literary critic and a kind of columnist for all kinds of magazines from Time to the New Republic, Harper's Magazine, fairly liberal magazines.

00:04:22.000 And I see us as living inside a story.

00:04:27.000 There's a big story that goes back thousands of years, and there's a smaller story that goes back, you know, just years and then weeks and then days.

00:04:37.000 And what I try to do is examine what's going on in terms of narrative, but not in the sense of pushing a narrative as we often see the mainstream media doing, trying to get us to pick a preferred version of reality.

00:04:57.000 But in terms of a real drama, a drama that involves the big things, our lives, our freedom, our history as a culture, and the big events that affect it.

00:05:07.000 So if I were to take this moment in time, January 2026, and tell you where we are in the current story as I see it, I would say we're at a first act break in which we suddenly look around and realize that not only were we right to distrust certain kinds of authority,

00:05:34.000 you know, in the media and in government, you know, particularly, I think, under Biden, when we weren't even treated to the facts about his health situation and mental condition, but due to this Somali fraud, 1.00

00:05:50.000 which I think is just an aperture into a bigger story, we're suddenly realizing that we've been in the middle of a daylight theft, a theft of our resources, of our money, of our attention, of our ability to interpret things.

00:06:11.000 Suddenly, a new filter is dropping, and we're seeing that politics is not just about ideology, but it's about resources and what I think is the ongoing cover-up of a great diversion of our resources.

00:06:28.000 So as Americans suddenly think about themselves, you know, paying the bills, paying their taxes, raising their families in light of what seems to have been an almost full scale across the board.

00:06:42.000 You know, we have the Minnesota example as a microcosm, but the macrocosmic example extends, you know, to the federal government and to many, many states.

00:06:50.000 We ask ourselves, are we in a society anymore that we can go on supporting?

00:06:58.000 Just as the revolutionary colonists wondered if they could survive under the British, we're starting to realize that we may be in a situation in which the very legitimacy of our government, you know, and its promises to protect us, to use our resources wisely, to provide for the common welfare such as we believe it's necessary, are all empty.

00:07:23.000 And in fact, we've been in the middle of a con job.

00:07:27.000 I knew a big con man in my life, a guy who called himself Clark Rockefeller, and who was a friend of mine for years, turned out not to be a Rockefeller, turned out, in fact, to be a murderer.

00:07:38.000 And I remember the week after he was exposed in the news as a German immigrant who had a whole other name and a whole other history than I had known him to have for 10 years.

00:07:52.000 I suddenly felt like I was floating in space.

00:07:55.000 I was like, I don't know the guy's real name.

00:07:58.000 All the stories he told me seem to have been a cover-up for a life of crime.

00:08:04.000 I don't know his motives.

00:08:05.000 I don't know if I'm in danger when I'm around him because he was exposed as a suspect in a double murder, a grisly double murder many years before.

00:08:14.000 And I went to the bank that day and I thought, I'm giving the bank my money, but I don't know where it goes after I hand it over.

00:08:22.000 I was giving a key to a contractor who had to work on my house and I said, but what if he is part of a burglary ring?

00:08:29.000 And suddenly everything that I, all the bonds of trust and all the expectations of reciprocity that go into daily living were broken.

00:08:40.000 And I think we're in that as Americans.

00:08:42.000 We suddenly looked around and realized we're on a spacewalk when we thought we were secure inside a spaceship.

00:08:50.000 Hmm.

00:08:51.000 Yeah, I really relate to that actually, because, you know, given what we're going through with, you know, the trial for Charlie's assassin coming up and all these conspiracy theories swirling, it sort of suddenly occurred to me that, you know, listen, we went from don't trust the experts to never question the non-experts.

00:09:13.000 You know, it's like, but that's what you're talking about.

00:09:16.000 It's like the legitimacy of the system when it becomes in question in such a massive way, especially following COVID and some of the revelations that we learned in the wake of that.

00:09:31.000 It feels like there's no solid ground to place your feet.

00:09:34.000 Imagine a drama in which you find out your wife is cheating on you, but then you find a letter and find out she's cheating you with your best friend.

00:09:40.000 Oh, not only your best friend, three of your best friends.

00:09:44.000 And you look around and you think, can I trust anything?

00:09:47.000 How do I go forward?

00:09:49.000 To what do I cling now in order to have solidity?

00:09:53.000 And that's, I think, where we are.

00:09:57.000 President Trump walked into a catch-22 when taking office.

00:10:00.000 Do nothing, and America would be staring at a ticking debt bomb, the kind of crisis that could cripple our future.

00:10:05.000 Instead, he's taken action with strong policies to slow the train and buy us some time.

00:10:10.000 But the effects of past administration spending are still working through the system, and experts predict dramatic price increases and market uncertainty.

00:10:18.000 Trump is doing all he can, but no matter who's in office, protecting your retirement savings is ultimately up to you.

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00:10:54.000 President Trump is fighting for America's future.

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00:11:01.000 Yeah, so, but yeah, how did we get here to this moment then, Walter?

00:11:05.000 How did we get to a point where we can't trust the ground under our feet?

00:11:09.000 Well, I think it's Act One because the Trump presidency and the re-election of Donald Trump provided a kind of refresh to the whole cycle.

00:11:19.000 You know, that was a point at which people who had anticipated and worked hard to bring about a result on the behalf of Donald Trump's election succeeded and sat down for a minute, reflected on their expectations and the promises that they felt they'd been made and started over.

00:11:38.000 And that first year of Trump is a pretty natural, a pretty natural time span to review.

00:11:47.000 When he came in exactly almost a year ago, I think people were expecting justice.

00:11:55.000 They wanted an immediate kind of redemption and even revenge for the sins of COVID, for the deep state hoaxes.

00:12:08.000 Coup against him that had been going on for years, and for the deceptions that had come.

00:12:16.000 from the opposite party and from our own government in an attempt to unseat him, from the legal cases that were flimsy to the charges about Russia and so on.

00:12:27.000 So everybody got in their seat and they prepared for a gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and it didn't happen.

00:12:33.000 And there was a lot of instant dissatisfaction, a lot of it fomented and aggravated by his enemies who want to create dissatisfaction in his followers.

00:12:45.000 Look, he's not doing anything.

00:12:46.000 Nothing will happen.

00:12:48.000 He's not what he promised.

00:12:49.000 He's not the gunslinger.

00:12:51.000 He's not the agent of justice.

00:12:52.000 He's just another politician.

00:12:56.000 Well, I think that's just changed because both the revelations of this fraud, which are really an extension of the Doge revelations, but with much more vividness, have suddenly come a spate of actions on his part.

00:13:15.000 Whether it's this Maduro raid, whether it's what we're seeing right now in Minnesota, which is a 2,000 agent descent of federal force on what appears to be a criminal racket of almost unimaginable riches and financial dimensions.

00:13:38.000 And so this is the year of action.

00:13:40.000 So combined with that sense of floating and displacement that I described before, we're also getting a feeling, oh, wow, we just shifted gears.

00:13:50.000 And the thing that we maybe some longed for and felt frustrated that they hadn't gotten immediately is now going to come very swiftly.

00:14:01.000 And whether or not it's too late, whether or not it's, you know, people have gotten too cynical to even believe justice is possible, I don't know.

00:14:15.000 But it's an action time and he's telegraphing it all across the board.

00:14:21.000 I guess it's interesting to me, as Andrew pointed out, you've been around a little longer than us.

00:14:26.000 I do think if you want a reason for optimism.

00:14:28.000 Twice as long.

00:14:29.000 Yeah, if you want a reason for optimism, you can look at in the late 70s, America was in malaise, as Carter called it.

00:14:36.000 Even in the 90s, you get, you know, Chuck Palanak is writing these novels about how everything's fake and terrible.

00:14:41.000 In the 90s, everything's awful.

00:14:43.000 He said that this is.

00:14:43.000 And of course, maybe I'm only going off the movie here, but I know one of your books up in the air is about a lot of the ennui from, you know, since the corporate world is getting detached from human values and such.

00:14:56.000 So is there anything to be said?

00:14:58.000 This might just be a constant.

00:14:59.000 Are things truly worse now?

00:15:01.000 Or maybe are we just psychologically worse because of the internet, for example?

00:15:05.000 Worse isn't a word I like to use because the framing around better and worse is always changing.

00:15:14.000 You can look at it in the short term, the long term, and so on.

00:15:19.000 I think that things are actually starting to become hopeful because we've started to reach the roots of some of the problems that before we were confused, baffled, and depressed by.

00:15:33.000 I think people are starting to feel a sense of agency and comprehension about how these bad systems work and what might disrupt them.

00:15:45.000 And I think they are moving out of a period of cynicism about bred by their, I think, over exaggerated expectations of action into a sense that maybe it's possible for the bad guys to be defeated.

00:16:04.000 We now know who they are.

00:16:05.000 We know how their formulas work.

00:16:07.000 We know how their crimes are set up.

00:16:10.000 We know the scale of them, which I think is shocking people.

00:16:15.000 And it's not Elon Musk anymore, as it was last spring, sort of putting himself out front.

00:16:21.000 It's people like Nick Shirley and, you know, the commoners who are suddenly picking up the pitchforks.

00:16:30.000 But they're picking up the pitchforks in a pretty constructive way.

00:16:34.000 You know, they're not baying for revenge.

00:16:36.000 They're not rioting.

00:16:37.000 They're not, you know, just foaming at the mouth.

00:16:42.000 They know where to look and they're finding the evidence.

00:16:45.000 They're gathering it.

00:16:46.000 They're sharing it.

00:16:48.000 And they are, I think, preparing themselves for action.

00:16:53.000 And they're also persuading their neighbors and friends.

00:16:56.000 I think, you know, that all of this new critical information dropped over the holidays was a great opportunity for people to share it and discuss it and meditate on it.

00:17:11.000 So just as January is when the New Year's resolutions kick in, I think this is kind of harmonically timed for people who want to kick into gear.

00:17:24.000 Yeah.

00:17:24.000 And, you know, I have so many thoughts, Walter.

00:17:28.000 You know, I agree with you.

00:17:30.000 You know, we had Jonathan Kieperman on just before the new year, and one of the things that he was saying is it was similar in tone to what you're saying.

00:17:36.000 He was saying, you know, the ship is pointed in the right direction for probably the first time in living memory.

00:17:43.000 You know, and it's hard to communicate that to a base that is not going to be satisfied until Fauci is strung up by his entrails in the public square, right?

00:17:51.000 So you've got these exact overnights.

00:17:54.000 You always have to remind people, guys, we secured the border overnight.

00:17:56.000 That's such an unthinkably huge win that seemed impossible five years ago.

00:18:00.000 A thousand percent.

00:18:01.000 And, you know, and yeah, there's other, there's other monsters to slay here, but, you know, you talk about this sense of agency and you talk about this new footing that we found in Trump.

00:18:12.000 And I couldn't help think about Charlie's reaction on election night.

00:18:16.000 And I know what that was.

00:18:18.000 I don't know if you've ever seen the clip.

00:18:19.000 I have it ready to play.

00:18:20.000 I haven't.

00:18:22.000 It's a beautiful clip.

00:18:23.000 And we were all here.

00:18:25.000 What was happening in that moment was Charlie wouldn't let himself believe that it was possible until it was done because he knew that he was he needed to he needed to keep pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, because the agency that we had been robbed of in 2020, in 2022, we almost had PTSD from it.

00:18:49.000 And you could see this wiping away from him in the moment.

00:18:52.000 And I think that's why it went so viral.

00:18:54.000 Play cut 223 for Walter.

00:18:56.000 Fox News decides Donald Trump is president of the United States.

00:19:02.000 We've got our republic back, folks.

00:19:06.000 Let's go.

00:19:08.000 There it is.

00:19:13.000 Everybody should remember this moment.

00:19:15.000 Look, I'm going to echo Charlie from earlier.

00:19:17.000 Remember where you were when this happened.

00:19:20.000 Remember where you were when you realized that the uniparty and all of these, you know, just the establishment, you said it's time to actually participate.

00:19:30.000 And look what you guys have done.

00:19:32.000 And if anyone deserves to get tears in his eyes, it's Charlie.

00:19:37.000 I think we all agree.

00:19:38.000 I think Erica is one of the money in the break room. 1.00

00:19:41.000 No one has worked harder than Charlie for the money.

00:19:43.000 We got to hear some words here from you, Charlie.

00:19:46.000 You put all this together, my man.

00:19:47.000 Let's hear it.

00:19:48.000 I am just humbled by God.

00:19:51.000 It's all God.

00:19:53.000 It's all God.

00:19:54.000 God alone.

00:19:56.000 Got alone.

00:19:59.000 Decision desk has it.

00:20:01.000 Pennsylvania.

00:20:02.000 It's gone.

00:20:04.000 It's beginning.

00:20:08.000 It's a great clip.

00:20:09.000 Boy, you choked up watching it.

00:20:11.000 Yeah.

00:20:12.000 That's poignant.

00:20:13.000 I just remember feeling like I couldn't believe it until it was true either.

00:20:17.000 And let me tell you where I was on election night.

00:20:21.000 I was here in Livingston, Montana, where I live, and I was at the Elks Club in downtown Livingston, population 7,000.

00:20:30.000 My magazine slash newspaper, the one I help edit, County Highway, which is an only in print paper, had announced on X that we were having a party at the Livingston Elks Club for election night.

00:20:44.000 It was not a partisan party.

00:20:46.000 Any of our subscribers were welcome, and so were people from town.

00:20:49.000 Anybody who wanted to come was welcome.

00:20:51.000 It was not going to be a Donald Trump celebration or a Joe Biden celebration.

00:20:56.000 It was simply going to be a party for whoever showed up.

00:21:00.000 Well, hundreds of people showed up.

00:21:03.000 All we did was announce the invitation.

00:21:06.000 They came from Europe.

00:21:07.000 They came from all over the country.

00:21:08.000 They were not all uniformly pro-Trump by any means, by any means at all.

00:21:18.000 We turned on the news at about five.

00:21:21.000 There were three TVs in the Elks Club.

00:21:24.000 And then we started talking with each other and people started meeting for the first time and talking about how they'd gotten to Livingston, Montana, which is a popular place to vacation, but it's also an obscure spot.

00:21:36.000 Well, hours went by in which people were more interested in talking to each other than they were looking at the news.

00:21:42.000 And I finally tipped my head back up at the screen.

00:21:47.000 And I see Trump as one.

00:21:48.000 And I flashed back to 2020 when I was alone in a cabin.

00:21:52.000 And I tweeted this.

00:21:55.000 It was called Twitter then.

00:21:57.000 When there was that pause in the vote counting, I said, uh-oh, everybody's now assessing.

00:22:03.000 And by that, I meant democratic power structure, is assessing what they need and how they're going to go get it.

00:22:10.000 And then, you know, we waited for a couple of hours.

00:22:14.000 I'm on mountain time.

00:22:15.000 And suddenly everything reversed.

00:22:16.000 All the trends reversed.

00:22:17.000 That's where the PTSD came from.

00:22:20.000 Well, in 2024, when I looked up and it seemed, you know, Trump had won, I thought, this isn't Trump winning.

00:22:28.000 This is for all the closed churches.

00:22:30.000 This is for all the closed businesses.

00:22:33.000 This is for all the families that were set at each other's throats over minor things like masking and so on.

00:22:40.000 This is for RussiaGate, which undermined the entire journalist structure of America and enrolled them in a major lie, as far as I'm concerned, which they at a certain point knew.

00:22:51.000 This is for everybody who pretended they didn't realize we were being led by a zombie.

00:22:55.000 It wasn't a win for Donald Trump.

00:22:57.000 And when Charlie says it was God, that I think might be truer in this case than it is in many cases.

00:23:04.000 I don't like to somehow think that God moves all politics.

00:23:07.000 It's kind of sometimes a low affair.

00:23:10.000 But in this case, it seemed like there was an opportunity to start climbing again.

00:23:19.000 Stop falling down the stairs.

00:23:21.000 Stop taking the blows.

00:23:22.000 Stop taking the whipping.

00:23:24.000 And I felt in that room, even though there were a lot of people who weren't supporting Trump, a sense of refreshment.

00:23:33.000 And I think getting ready for year two was what year one was all about.

00:23:39.000 Even a fighter jet needs a runway to take off.

00:23:42.000 Can't just, you know, there are some that can lift straight off, but most of them have to, you know, run along the ground before they can get airborne.

00:23:49.000 And I think we're getting airborne at the moment.

00:23:54.000 Yeah, I mean, would you even agree with that?

00:23:56.000 Yeah, no, I think we saw that in the first admin, too.

00:23:59.000 I would often tell Charlie, I thought the last year of the Trump administration was the best one.

00:24:03.000 Not ignoring COVID, all the background stuff was so good.

00:24:06.000 It finally got appointments, were really humming.

00:24:09.000 That's when you only got, for example, and they got anti-DEI stuff year four.

00:24:14.000 It was finally like, wait, we should do something on this.

00:24:16.000 It just took too long.

00:24:18.000 Now we're seeing a lot of stuff that we saw in year three or year four happening in year one.

00:24:23.000 And I think the valid hope is everything can accelerate even more in the years to come.

00:24:29.000 They'll find more levers they can pull at the DOJ, at the State Department, at all these different agencies.

00:24:37.000 There's a lot more awareness of what they're capable of doing.

00:24:40.000 And I have, I see every reason to be optimistic about what they'll be able to do in the years to come on that front, at least.

00:24:47.000 I think a lot of people walked into Washington.

00:24:50.000 I'm thinking of my friend Jay Bhattacharya at NIH, and they had, they'd fought, he'd fought COVID.

00:24:57.000 He'd been a kind of COVID realist.

00:25:00.000 These lockdowns aren't necessary.

00:25:04.000 We're trying to stop something that's already spread too far.

00:25:08.000 It's not a deadly disease if you look at the actual number of casualties versus those who've been infected and so on.

00:25:16.000 Well, he came into Washington, an honest man from Stanford University and represented, I think, as much as purely as anyone, somebody whose voice had been suppressed, somebody who had been marginalized and was going to represent real change.

00:25:31.000 My conversations with him over the last year suggest and imply to me that when he got there, he suddenly realized that running a gigantic bureaucracy and being an honest person are a difficult pairing in this world, and especially in Washington.

00:25:49.000 Getting people to explain to you how the workflow worked, getting people to, you know, not only say yes to an order, but perform on it was hard.

00:26:01.000 Going through your staff and bringing real outsider, honest energy to a situation which had been inert, obscure, self-satisfied, often corrupt, takes a lot of time.

00:26:16.000 And the other side was whipping up dissatisfaction with the pace.

00:26:21.000 It was all sudden, it was all of a sudden.

00:26:23.000 Well, he's not delivering his promises fast enough.

00:26:26.000 The promises they didn't want to see him deliver at all, the other side was saying weren't being performed on quickly enough.

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00:27:31.000 That's 833-850-2229 or click on the pre-born banner at charliekirk.com today.

00:27:41.000 All right, so Walter, you know, it occurs to me that so much of what we're talking around here is either a byproduct or a relative, close cousin to this media industrial complex that was blown up at the advent of the internet.

00:27:58.000 And then it's been sort of this slow death march, you know, cable cutters, things that, you know, we've been moving more digitally.

00:28:07.000 That's created a massive opportunity for shows like this.

00:28:10.000 Creators like Charlie, now myself and Blake are now public figures.

00:28:14.000 So it's, but, but it's also created a conundrum for truth, for veracity.

00:28:21.000 How do you verify things?

00:28:22.000 Now we've got AI.

00:28:23.000 Blake was just telling me he couldn't verify whether Mader.

00:28:26.000 It was crazy.

00:28:26.000 That story that you've almost certainly heard where they blew up Chavez's mausoleum.

00:28:32.000 Yeah, Hugo Shop.

00:28:33.000 I literally can't figure out if it's true or not because people are posting photos and other people are saying that is an AI fake photo.

00:28:39.000 Yes.

00:28:40.000 And I haven't been able to look in deep enough and either could be true.

00:28:43.000 So what do we do in this landscape?

00:28:46.000 There was another one.

00:28:47.000 Someone posted a thread that was like, I work at Uber Eats and they're scamming everyone and like all their stuff.

00:28:54.000 Like they're doing all this scummy stuff, like special expedited delivery stuff.

00:28:59.000 It's just done to get more money out of you.

00:28:59.000 That's all fake.

00:29:02.000 And he had all this evidence and he sent it to a journalist and that was all AI fabrications.

00:29:06.000 It was like an AI done hit job against a food delivery company.

00:29:11.000 Well, all of these examples underscore the question I'm asking.

00:29:15.000 And I haven't really distilled it in a very good question yet.

00:29:18.000 But Walter, you strike me as a guy who is very concerned with what is the ultimate truth, what is the deepest truth.

00:29:27.000 What do we do when you have a population of 350 million people, not to mention the global population, all trying to suss through these different disparate information streams?

00:29:38.000 How do you get everybody on the same page?

00:29:40.000 How do you get truth across?

00:29:42.000 What do we do in this landscape?

00:29:44.000 You don't try to get everyone on the same page.

00:29:46.000 That was an illusion and a grandiose mythological white whale that was pursued in the age of television and mass media.

00:29:56.000 It's no longer possible, and I don't think it's any longer desirable.

00:30:01.000 One of the virtues of people not knowing what's real beyond the horizon is that they start concentrating on what's within their horizon.

00:30:10.000 We have spent far too long in the United States knowing what's going on in New York, knowing what's going on in Los Angeles, knowing what's going on in Washington, and not knowing what's going on across the street.

00:30:26.000 The difficulty of obtaining truth about what's going on around the world should cause us, I think, to slightly give up on it.

00:30:33.000 Because there is a family, a house, a street, a town, a neighborhood, a church, a group of friends that needs your attention.

00:30:44.000 I promise you, those were the things that they tried to break up during COVID when the powers that be tried to leverage that pandemic into permanent rule for themselves.

00:30:56.000 They knew that their first strike had to be at your church, at your hardware store, at your grocery store, at your family, at your dinner table.

00:31:05.000 Well, those are the things you have to reclaim first.

00:31:08.000 You know, I have a friend who's very into solar magnetic storms and sort of doom and apocalypse around big earth changes and so on.

00:31:21.000 And I thought to myself one night, he'd warned me that there was a big ejection of plasma from the sun and all the lights might go out.

00:31:29.000 And I said, well, if the lights go out, where do I start?

00:31:32.000 What do I do next?

00:31:33.000 I figure out who I can trust.

00:31:35.000 I figure out what I have to trade.

00:31:37.000 I figure out What I can defend and who I'm going to defend.

00:31:43.000 And all those questions that would come in the wake of a disaster are ones that we need to be asking right now because the disaster is this, as you say, melting of reality.

00:31:54.000 And starting on first principles and starting at home and starting with the world you can look around and see with your own eyes is the solution.

00:32:04.000 And then those pods, as it were, those cells, just like the body, the body isn't made of some big giant piece of, you know, chicken McNugget.

00:32:15.000 It's got cells in it, little active, isolated engines that link up and work together.

00:32:24.000 And at the cellular level, we have to, I think, renew our, you know, renew our contracts if we're going to have a bigger social contract.

00:32:35.000 And this vain thought that everybody is going to be guided by some obelisk that beams truth down from the central authorities is does not serve us well.

00:32:48.000 It causes us to ignore our own garden.

00:32:53.000 Yeah, I love, I love what you're saying.

00:32:54.000 I mean, we've been, you know, saying for a long time politics starts local, and you're kind of broadening that conversation to sort of say, look, we just got an email today, someone who said they were inspired to get involved in Maricopa County politics.

00:33:06.000 Great, Charlie.

00:33:07.000 Well, yeah, absolutely.

00:33:08.000 I mean, that is where it starts.

00:33:11.000 You know, Walter, I mean, I, gosh, my problem with you, Walter, is I want to talk about too many things, and there's just not enough time.

00:33:20.000 Well, I'll come back.

00:33:21.000 I'm still bound by the clock here.

00:33:23.000 Yeah, I would be remiss if I didn't give you an opportunity to talk about what Charlie's assassination meant for our country.

00:33:32.000 And, you know, as I'm hearing you talk earlier, you mentioned Nick Shirley and this sort of new wave that is slowly kind of forming.

00:33:40.000 You've got Dan Bongino that's coming back, and he's, you know, he's saying he's going to wage war on certain, you know, influences within maybe the conservative movement and beyond.

00:33:51.000 I just think it's interesting.

00:33:53.000 I believed in my whole heart, especially after we got past the memorial, that there was going to be this sifting of the movement.

00:34:00.000 There was going to be this, like, this changing of the guard, sort of a new out of necessity, this newness that was going to be created out of the chaos and the loss.

00:34:12.000 And I just, so without feeding you answers, I want to hear what you have to say.

00:34:17.000 But I believe that there is something that we are observing.

00:34:19.000 It will not become clear to us until some time now.

00:34:23.000 But what, what did losing Charlie, what did you observe?

00:34:27.000 What did it mean?

00:34:27.000 And where are we going next?

00:34:29.000 Well, to be very cold about it and systematic, as though I don't have a heart, a power vacuum develops when someone of Charlie's magnitude and competence and gifts is lost.

00:34:43.000 And in that power vacuum, all sorts of opportunistic creatures come rushing in and they live by the law of the jungle.

00:34:53.000 How much space that has been left vacant can I occupy?

00:34:57.000 How securely can I occupy it?

00:34:59.000 How can I fend off competitors?

00:35:01.000 And that was a frankly ugly process to watch.

00:35:04.000 And I guess it still goes on to some extent.

00:35:07.000 But in another way, it's a tribute to how big a space he occupied that it was that it left so much vacant for so many sort of competitive, Darwinian struggles over power and attention.

00:35:23.000 But I think the real meaning of the thing is the meaning of the moment after that I felt and others felt, which was someone has just given in what is not understood as a war, but suddenly looks like one because of the combatant falling.

00:35:39.000 Given everything.

00:35:40.000 And he's given everything in the purest way.

00:35:44.000 He wasn't a man behind a plexiglass.

00:35:48.000 He was someone openly sitting with a square stance before a crowd of his fellow Americans, taking all comers, listening, and speaking back.

00:36:01.000 He was the avatar of openness.

00:36:04.000 And that that openness was rewarded with destruction was, I think, a shock that showed us how far we'd gone, how far we'd fallen.

00:36:14.000 You know, when truly, you know, when demagogues and people who are, you know, have armies behind them and so on are assassinated.

00:36:25.000 Well, you know that they kind of lived by the sword.

00:36:29.000 But to live, but to live by the word and die by the sword is a whole other thing.

00:36:35.000 And to watch someone who lived by the word die by the sword was a terrible moment.

00:36:40.000 And it affected me deeply.

00:36:42.000 I'll be honest with you.

00:36:43.000 I'm a little old for campus activism and a lot of the other things that Charlie.

00:36:50.000 You take you, Walter.

00:36:52.000 Well, but, you know, I was aware of him in my peripheral vision.

00:37:00.000 And suddenly when he moved to the center of my vision in this terrible way, terrible way, I saw the best and worst of America in one lightning flash.

00:37:10.000 I saw someone who still believed that freedom of speech, a sort of candor about your spiritual and religious beliefs in dialogue with people who maybe flat out oppose them can still lead to a happy ending.

00:37:29.000 That faith lives on.

00:37:32.000 It was liberated from his body, but it spread everywhere.

00:37:36.000 And I think it's starting to reassemble itself after a period of darkness.

00:37:43.000 I mean, everybody was traumatized, whether they know it or not.

00:37:48.000 And some people aren't their best under trauma.

00:37:51.000 You know, they become very selfish or even kind of evil.

00:37:56.000 But there is a waking up to the fact that this was a good force.

00:38:05.000 It was almost too good for the world.

00:38:07.000 It was dispersed by hatred, envy, resentment, jealousy, perhaps.

00:38:15.000 I mean, you won't think.

00:38:17.000 I think it is the best thing about this horrible tragedy that I've brought up is Charlie truly was cut down at his absolute peak.

00:38:29.000 And so, in a sense, his peak does live on forever.

00:38:33.000 He's always as he was on that campus throughout the year 2025.

00:38:39.000 He was at his peak form in terms of argument.

00:38:42.000 He was at his peak form in terms of how well he lived his life.

00:38:47.000 He was getting better and better.

00:38:48.000 And as a husband, there's something very powerful about that.

00:38:53.000 And that's a lot of the power of martyrs is the way they can endure forever.

00:38:59.000 You never have to see them make mistakes or get old or lose their fastball.

00:39:03.000 They're always in that pristine form.

00:39:05.000 Yeah.

00:39:06.000 Blake helped write the eulogy that we published at tposa.com the day after.

00:39:14.000 And I still don't know how you wrote it, Blake.

00:39:20.000 When Charlie died, I basically was shell-shocked.

00:39:25.000 Like, the world didn't make sense.

00:39:27.000 I remember trying, you know, I was supposed to get out a statement, you know, about Charlie.

00:39:34.000 We had received word that he had he was gone, you know, because there was some confusion about that.

00:39:40.000 And I remember trying to write, you know, whatever it was I was supposed to write.

00:39:46.000 And President Trump ended up true socialing that Charlie was dead.

00:39:52.000 And I remember just being so relieved.

00:39:54.000 I mean, I couldn't put one foot in front of the other.

00:39:57.000 It was like, you know, it was like that scene out of Saving Private Ryan where it was just, you know, it's just, everything was moving in slow motion, but my body couldn't, I couldn't make it function.

00:40:06.000 So the fact that Blake in the middle of that night got the words out, but one of the things he said was that, you know, Charlie will never grow old.

00:40:15.000 You know, we'll never see him, you know, lose any of the grandeur and the glory of his youth.

00:40:23.000 And I guess in some ways, this far removed from it, I feel comforted in some ways that I always get to remember him that way, but I hate that I have to remember him too.

00:40:33.000 So it's a bittersweet feeling, but I know that he's gone and there's no bringing him back.

00:40:39.000 This is Lane Schoenberger, Chief Investment Officer and founding partner of YReFi.

00:40:44.000 It has been an honor and a privilege to partner with Turning Point and for Charlie to endorse us.

00:40:49.000 His endorsement means the world to us, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Turning Point for years to come.

00:40:56.000 Now, here Charlie, in his own words, tell you about YReFi.

00:40:59.000 I'm going to tell you guys about whyrefi.com.

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00:41:31.000 Let's face it, if you have distress or defaulted student loans, it can be overwhelming.

00:41:35.000 Because of private student loan debt, so many people feel stuck.

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00:41:48.000 Well, you know, I don't mean to be disputatious or niggling, but I don't think he was at his peak.

00:41:56.000 I think I actually agree with you on this.

00:41:59.000 I think he was ascending toward his peak.

00:42:01.000 He was on an obvious track.

00:42:03.000 He had momentum.

00:42:05.000 He was like a mountain climber who can suddenly see the top of the mountain, the top of Everest.

00:42:13.000 They've got their pack, and you know they're going to get there.

00:42:17.000 You know they're going to even get there or beyond.

00:42:20.000 And suddenly it's over.

00:42:23.000 What that, you know, that happens to poets, rock stars, saints, and a lot of people who die young and yet inspire us to pick up their pack and carry it.

00:42:35.000 And I think we're going to have to go where he was going.

00:42:39.000 I totally, I mean, a lot of people, you know, speculate, was Charlie going to be president?

00:42:44.000 Who knows?

00:42:46.000 He was the kind of guy.

00:42:48.000 What I love about him, what I love about him was that he seemed like he still had the ability to change.

00:42:54.000 He still had the ability to learn and to formulate new conclusions.

00:42:58.000 Hey, he might have gotten to age 35 and decided, I don't want to be the president of the United States.

00:43:04.000 I want to be X or I want to write a book or whatever it was.

00:43:09.000 I mean, though he was dedicated to action and the turning point, I think is most impressive to me in terms of getting stuff done.

00:43:18.000 Like turning point people wake up every day and they achieve goals that are small in the short term and huge in the long term.

00:43:27.000 And we're not a society like that anymore.

00:43:29.000 To see anybody be effective anymore, especially in a large-scale movement is astonishing, you know, and especially without tons of money.

00:43:38.000 But I think that, you know, he, I don't know what my original point was, actually.

00:43:46.000 I strayed a bit there, but I don't know how he would have ended up.

00:43:50.000 I only know that wherever he chose to go, he would have gotten there and he would have gotten there superbly.

00:43:58.000 What if he wasn't?

00:43:59.000 I mean, what if he'd really gone for becoming a college football coach?

00:44:03.000 That was what he used to do.

00:44:05.000 He always said if he got tired or gave up, he would just quit and coach college.

00:44:08.000 He would joke at our chat all the time.

00:44:10.000 He'd be like, fine, I give up.

00:44:12.000 I quit.

00:44:13.000 I retire.

00:44:13.000 He's like, I'm going to go coach college football.

00:44:14.000 It's a whole universe where people are like, did you know that that college football coach used to be a political operative?

00:44:20.000 Exactly.

00:44:22.000 Walter, you and Matt have a great show.

00:44:25.000 I want to make sure people know where to find it and how to follow you on that stuff.

00:44:29.000 We still have about six minutes here, but I really, really love your guys' content there.

00:44:34.000 So please, like, what are you doing with Matt and what should people know about what you're up to?

00:44:39.000 So Matt Taibbi is a muck-raking reporter from the left, really.

00:44:44.000 I think he was at his greatest fame during the Occupy Wall Street years as he basically took on high finance and showed they had committed crimes all through what we now call the financial crisis.

00:45:00.000 But like me, sometime around the first year of the Trump presidency, first Trump presidency, he started to see his colleagues fall for this ridiculous and unverifiable story of Trump being a Russian agent.

00:45:18.000 And it alienated him from his cohort, as it did me.

00:45:23.000 I was probably a little more to the right than Matt Taibbi or a little more to the center.

00:45:28.000 But we both found ourselves after a few years feeling deserted by our supposedly principled and supposedly conscientious colleagues.

00:45:40.000 And so we came together in a sense of both being stranded by not getting on the Russiagate train.

00:45:47.000 And what we try to do on our podcast, Matt's a huge sports fan, and is give you a sort of skybox, play-by-play, big picture narration of events as though they were a game.

00:46:04.000 Now we realize they're not a game, but we try to treat them as one with a lot of humor, with a lot of mischief and kind of pop cultural reference so that the heaviness of things doesn't destroy people.

00:46:21.000 It's important to keep a light spirit.

00:46:23.000 And when you talk about black pilling.

00:46:25.000 Happy war. 0.99

00:46:26.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:46:28.000 When you talk about blackpilling, you're talking about the thing that bothers me most in people who want good things to happen.

00:46:35.000 Despair is a sin.

00:46:37.000 And spreading despair is practically Practically, the sin that they tell us is the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit.

00:46:46.000 When you try to destroy someone's spirit with pessimism, with cynicism, and a little bit of that goes a long way.

00:46:54.000 But when you try to give them the feeling that nothing you can do, nothing you can say, and no one you can appeal to will ever help you, it's lost, and you're just living out the clock on this earth, feeling the pain and feeling the depression.

00:47:09.000 You may as well go kill yourself.

00:47:12.000 Well, that for me is that for me is the enemy in all respects.

00:47:18.000 Because as long as you have a lightness, as long as you have a flow, as long as you have sort of a light on in your heart and in your mind, there's a chance for change.

00:47:29.000 But that is absolute death.

00:47:31.000 And the black pill people who tell you, you know, you've been betrayed again, don't expect anything, and they think they're being grown up and they think they're being sophisticated. 0.77

00:47:40.000 But what they're really doing is sending you to an early grave.

00:47:43.000 And what they're really doing is opening the way for the true cynics, the psychopaths, the power mongers to own you forever and enslave you.

00:47:53.000 And so it's what Matt and I do is, if anything, an assault on the black pillars. 0.99

00:48:01.000 You can still laugh no matter how dark things get.

00:48:05.000 All right.

00:48:06.000 Well, before we go, if you had to recommend one of your books to people who are watching or listening to this, what would you say?

00:48:15.000 You know, funny, there's a book with a terrible cover right there called Mission to America.

00:48:19.000 Look at that terrible cover.

00:48:22.000 I mean, they didn't even have AI as an excuse.

00:48:25.000 And it's a story of, it's a story of two missionaries who grow up in what's basically a cult isolated in the mountains of Montana, which hasn't gotten out into the world for 100 years.

00:48:35.000 And it's become so inbred, literally genetically inbred, that they're sent out in a van to try to get female converts in America 2005.

00:48:47.000 And they leave their mountain valley, having never watched television, being as innocent as Martians practically, and they hit the road to bring people to their belief system.

00:49:00.000 And it's a story about faith.

00:49:02.000 It's a story about modernity versus, you know, the old ways.

00:49:07.000 And it's a story about vulnerability.

00:49:09.000 Because, I mean, the first time they sit down in a motel to turn on TV, they're there for 18 hours.

00:49:14.000 You know, they have no, they have no immunity to it.

00:49:17.000 So I try to show modern America from the point of view of people who aren't immune to its seductions and its, you know, its poisons and so on.

00:49:28.000 I love that.

00:49:29.000 The way you describe it.

00:49:30.000 I've been describing things a lot like this lately about we build up this immunity to things.

00:49:35.000 And next time I have you on, Walter, I want, I feel like since Trump came down those golden escalators, we as a country have been building immunities to the fake news, to the propaganda, to psyops, to color revolutions, to hoaxes.

00:49:52.000 And I would be super curious to have a conversation in depth about the immunities that we're growing now.

00:49:59.000 Because I think when we're talking about black pillow immunities, we're talking about this vacuum of this laws of the jungle. 1.00

00:50:06.000 We're sort of building immunities to that.

00:50:08.000 I have to believe good will win out, truth will win out.

00:50:10.000 But Walter, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk about.

00:50:12.000 Well, we know it will in the end.

00:50:15.000 It's the short term and the midterm that we're worried about.

00:50:17.000 I know, exactly.

00:50:18.000 The midterms, that's what we're worried about.

00:50:20.000 Walter, yeah, and I want to talk to you next time about your conversion to faith because you were not a theist and now you are.

00:50:29.000 And I would love to hear more about that.

00:50:31.000 Even in our calls, Walter, that we had after we met you at Megan's, you've hinted at it, but I haven't got the details.

00:50:39.000 Well, Walter Kern, the great Walter Kern, we'll have you back again as soon as you'll have us.

00:50:43.000 Thank you so much.

00:50:44.000 Thank you.

00:50:45.000 And thank you, Blake.

The Charlie Kirk Show - January 07, 2026

"Trust the Experts" Failed. What Now? ft. Walter Kirn

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Transcript