The Charlie Kirk Show - April 07, 2025


What Tariffs Mean + DOGE in the Ivy League

Topics
tariffs and politics
Hosted by
Charlie Kirk
Mentioned
Ed Brown Alex Shea Donald Trump Hillary Clinton Andrew Del Rey Todd Avakian Turning Point USA Francis Fukuyama Stephen Miller David Graeber Linda McMahon Scott Besson Dennis Black Susie Wiles Ruff Greens McKinsey Cornell Graber Levi
The Man Who Stopped the Trans Juggernaut: Live with Matt Walsh at the Pastors Summit Rejecting Tariffs, or Rejecting Uncertainty?

Episode Stats


Length

34 minutes

Words per minute

166.73

Word count

5,830

Sentence count

494

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The 30,000-foot view of how Bill Clinton started this trade debacle. Today's guest is Alex Shea from Brown University, who asked the questions at the Brown University. We talk about the mistakes Bill Clinton made in the 1990's and early 2000's, why free trade is a bad idea, and why we need to go back to the basics.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, Tan the Charlie Kirk show.
00:00:01.000 We take the 30,000 foot view of how Bill Clinton started this trade debacle.
00:00:05.000 One of my favorite interviews we've done in a while with Alex Shea, where he asked the questions at Brown University.
00:00:10.000 He tries to doge his university.
00:00:12.000 It is an amazing conversation with Alex Shea from Brown University.
00:00:19.000 And if you send your kid to one of these Ivies, I'll tell you what, it's really something else. 1.00
00:00:24.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:27.000 That is freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:29.000 Become a member today, members.charliekirk.com.
00:00:33.000 That is members.charliekirk.com.
00:00:36.000 You can email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com, and get involved with the most important organization in the country, Turning Point USA, at tpusa.com.
00:00:46.000 That is tpusa.com.
00:00:49.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:49.000 Here we go.
00:00:51.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:52.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
00:00:54.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:00:58.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:01:01.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:01:02.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:01:03.000 His spirit, his love of this country.
00:01:05.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:11.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:20.000 That's why we are here.
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00:01:49.000 News is moving so quickly.
00:01:51.000 It is moving at such an accelerated pace right now.
00:01:54.000 That it is difficult to keep up.
00:01:55.000 It is moving so quick we have to basically have five different chats open of different responses from foreign nations regarding tariff threats, regarding reciprocity.
00:02:08.000 So there is a lot going on here.
00:02:10.000 But instead of going into all the details, because that's just going to change by every five minutes, I think we need to take a step back and reset the foundational framework to reset a 30,000-foot view of exactly what's going on here.
00:02:23.000 President Donald Trump has been railing against bad trade deals for the last 30 or 40 years.
00:02:31.000 President Donald Trump, as a businessman, identified trade deficits.
00:02:35.000 And the way trade is supposed to be constituted is we do what we do best and you do what you do best and we will barter.
00:02:44.000 By doing so, you will make us wealthier and we will trade and we will both be able to have a flourishing future.
00:02:50.000 What ended up happening in the 1990s and early 2000s, in the 1990s there were three critical mistakes made by Bill Clinton.
00:02:57.000 The entrance of China into the World Trade Organization, the NAFTA, and also the repeal of the idea of investment bank and commercial banks.
00:03:08.000 That's a whole separate issue for another time, but the conflation of investment and commercial banks allowed the cheap flow of money to go into the capital markets in a way that that specific deregulation I think actually led us through the 2008 financial crisis and the lords of easy money leading us closer and closer to fiscal and financial apocalypse.
00:03:29.000 Now, free trade did make the stock market go up.
00:03:32.000 Nobody is doubting that.
00:03:35.000 Unlimited, unfettered free trade did make the 10% do very well.
00:03:40.000 I am part of the 10%.
00:03:41.000 I can say this as somebody who is part of the evil 10% of the country. 0.98
00:03:47.000 When you are on the upper part of the socioeconomic ladder, specifically if you do work that does not involve your hands but only involves your brain, that does not involve your body but only involves your brain, free trade is traditionally a great idea because we became an information economy and a consumer economy and not an industrial one.
00:04:09.000 We thought because we were entering into a technological revolution, because that we were entering into a brave new world of unfettered, unapologetic free trade, that we would no longer need to make stuff.
00:04:21.000 In fact, that is what the third world does. 1.00
00:04:23.000 The idea was that the third world will make our products for us and that we will be able to become wealthier. 0.99
00:04:31.000 Francis Fukuyama famously wrote a book called The End of History.
00:04:36.000 The assumption was permanent U.S. dominance.
00:04:39.000 It was a post-Cold War mentality.
00:04:42.000 It was that neoliberalism is the end of history.
00:04:46.000 Fukuyama wrote in The End of History that this will be the end of war, that neoliberalism was the apex of civilization.
00:04:53.000 Neoliberalism was, of course, invade the world, invite the world.
00:04:56.000 The idea of the Western liberal order will be able to be spread to all corners of the world, and we will end the eschaton.
00:05:04.000 The eschaton, of course, is a Christian view of when Christ rules Earth for a thousand-year reign.
00:05:12.000 Immunitizing the eschaton is what the free traders thought they were going to get.
00:05:16.000 In fact, I remember growing up, I was in sixth grade at MacArthur Middle School, right there on Palatine Road, right where I grew up.
00:05:25.000 And I remember we would watch, they had these morning news bits.
00:05:30.000 I forgot the name of it.
00:05:31.000 Maybe Blake would know.
00:05:33.000 It was...
00:05:33.000 Like five to ten minutes long.
00:05:35.000 It was like mandatory must-runs.
00:05:37.000 I remember one of them.
00:05:39.000 I'll think of it.
00:05:40.000 I bet I could find it in a break.
00:05:42.000 Anyway, it was the news clips.
00:05:44.000 In one of them, they said, can you find a single thing when you're walking through a parking lot at Walmart and ask people what they bought that was made in America?
00:05:53.000 And the answer was no.
00:05:54.000 And, of course, all my sixth grade classmates were like, that's wrong, that's wrong.
00:05:58.000 And I remember the teacher would interject.
00:06:01.000 And I wouldn't even say the teacher was liberal.
00:06:03.000 The teacher was neoliberal.
00:06:05.000 And the teacher would interject and say, no, this is a good thing.
00:06:10.000 This made us wealthier.
00:06:12.000 We don't have to do that work.
00:06:14.000 We are liberated.
00:06:15.000 In fact, what we were told, what I was told growing up, is that free trade would then make it where the Russians will be wearing Levi jeans, eating McDonald's, taking selfies.
00:06:29.000 Well, at the time, just listening to iPads, iPods.
00:06:32.000 And it's not even that it's a bad thing for other things to be made in other countries.
00:06:37.000 Of course not.
00:06:38.000 We want a competition.
00:06:40.000 We want markets.
00:06:41.000 We do not want no trade.
00:06:43.000 Instead, it is when nothing is made in America, or next to nothing, when it's such a small percentage.
00:06:49.000 When making something in America, almost people look differently at you.
00:06:53.000 Why would you do that?
00:06:54.000 Now, we also must be fair.
00:06:56.000 We have to be fair in our analysis.
00:06:58.000 Partially, but not mainly, partially as to why the corporate class decided to move these jobs overseas is that unions got very greedy in the 1970s and 1980s.
00:07:09.000 This is a lesser appreciated component of this analysis is unions thought that they were too big for their bridges.
00:07:16.000 They were like, what are you going to like leave?
00:07:19.000 Literally some of the labor unions would look at the corporate class and say, we want a 40% increase in wages.
00:07:26.000 We want more days off.
00:07:28.000 And the corporate class decided to get back at the unions.
00:07:32.000 became less competitive.
00:07:34.000 Now, again, a lot of the Trump coalition is union labor.
00:07:39.000 However, as Blake astutely pointed out, find one part of the American economy that is mass That isn't totally awful.
00:07:47.000 It's really hard to find.
00:07:49.000 In the fact where mass unionization, especially public sector unionization, public sector teacher unions, Public sector janitorial unions, public sector government unions.
00:08:00.000 I think that there's a place, for example, a carpenter's union.
00:08:04.000 They're very good at training.
00:08:05.000 They're very good at apprenticeship.
00:08:07.000 However, there needs to be a balance between capital and labor.
00:08:11.000 And what happened, of course, is the capital, the corporate class, having no allegiance to the United States of America and the fact that unions overreached and unions got cocky.
00:08:21.000 They looked at the corporate class in the eye and said, we're American labor.
00:08:25.000 What, are you going to really go and make that trinket in China?
00:08:28.000 And the McKinsey type said, yep, that's exactly what we're going to do, actually.
00:08:32.000 And it was made easier by this decision.
00:08:35.000 Understand what President Donald Trump is doing is fixing and remedying the mistakes of past.
00:08:41.000 If you had to go look at what is the original sin as to why we are in the place that we are in, there are many places, there are many decisions, but the one where we actually have it on tape, rarely do you have the original sin on tape.
00:08:55.000 And it was televised on C-SPAN.
00:08:57.000 And that is when we decided to make what was then a third world and maybe a second world country to have entrance into the World Trade Organization.
00:09:08.000 This was a glide path.
00:09:11.000 We did not do this to try and make us have greater harmony with China.
00:09:15.000 In fact, you could make an argument that our relations with China were probably better before China went into the World Trade Organization.
00:09:22.000 The free trade zealots told us that trade will bring us peace.
00:09:26.000 In fact, it turns out that mass trade with China brought us closer and closer to conflict.
00:09:33.000 President Donald Trump is fixing this problem from Bill Clinton.
00:09:37.000 Play cut 121.
00:09:38.000 The WTO agreement will move China in the right direction.
00:09:42.000 It will advance the goals America has worked for in China for the past three decades.
00:09:48.000 And, of course, it will advance our own economic interests.
00:09:52.000 Economically, this agreement is the equivalent of a one-way street.
00:09:57.000 It requires China to open its markets with a fifth of the world's population, potentially the biggest markets in the world, to both our products and services in unprecedented new ways.
00:10:09.000 All we do is to agree to maintain the present access, which China enjoys.
00:10:14.000 Chinese tariffs from telecommunications products to automobiles to agriculture will fall by half or more over just five years.
00:10:22.000 For the first time, our companies will be able to sell and distribute products in China made by workers here in America without being forced to relocate manufacturing to China, sell through the Chinese government, or transfer valuable technology for the first time.
00:10:39.000 We'll be able to export products without exporting jobs.
00:10:46.000 There's still joint technology transfers.
00:10:51.000 We are not allowed to sell our products in China.
00:10:53.000 Our technology companies are not allowed to sell in the interior of China.
00:10:59.000 Charlie Kirk here, and this new year, it's going to be exciting.
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00:11:59.000 President Trump's daily tracker of approval rating went up last week after the application of tariffs.
00:12:05.000 It's so fascinating to me.
00:12:07.000 I feel as if I live in two different realities.
00:12:11.000 And I say this, by the way, as someone who is very invested in the stock market.
00:12:15.000 Thankfully, I have a great person and team that helps manage that stuff.
00:12:20.000 I was only down a couple percent.
00:12:21.000 Well, a lot of other people were down a lot more.
00:12:23.000 You could have hedges, buy the VIX, you can have buffers, all that stuff.
00:12:27.000 But I feel as if I live in two different realities.
00:12:31.000 I was walking around Arizona.
00:12:35.000 A certain part of Phoenix, Arizona this weekend, and a very wealthy guy came up, and he was very worried.
00:12:40.000 He came up to me, Charlie, what does Trump think with these tariffs?
00:12:42.000 What do you think?
00:12:44.000 I said, look, everything I'm going to tell you privately, I also say publicly, I have no inside information.
00:12:48.000 And if I did, I certainly wouldn't just share it with you.
00:12:51.000 Very worried.
00:12:51.000 He said, you know, my portfolio's down, my market's down.
00:12:53.000 Kind of almost freaking out.
00:12:56.000 And then in the other's reality, when I went out to dinner with my wife, a guy comes up to me.
00:13:04.000 And he says, Charlie, I'm a welder.
00:13:05.000 This is the greatest week I've ever seen in politics.
00:13:08.000 I said, what do you mean?
00:13:10.000 He said, finally, someone is giving the middle finger to the corporate class and they're going to defend those of us that work for a living.
00:13:19.000 Us blue-collar workers have a fighter in the White House and we've been waiting for it.
00:13:24.000 Now, I'm not even saying one is right and one is wrong.
00:13:26.000 They both are very valued constituencies.
00:13:28.000 One is the capital class and one is the labor.
00:13:30.000 And properly understood and properly balanced, You have hopefully some brokered equilibrium between capital and labor.
00:13:40.000 Understand, the top 10%, which I am part of and many of the audience are part of, own about 88% of the equities.
00:13:46.000 Now, it's a little deceiving because a lot of teachers and a lot of janitors and a lot of people that have 401ks, they might get blended into a major wealth management fund.
00:14:01.000 Nobody is happy with what's going on with the stock market.
00:14:04.000 But again, 10% of Americans own 88% of equities.
00:14:07.000 The next 40% own 12% of the stock market.
00:14:10.000 And the bottom 50% has debt.
00:14:12.000 They have credit card bills.
00:14:13.000 They rent their homes.
00:14:14.000 And they have auto loans.
00:14:16.000 And they've been screaming and crying for some relief.
00:14:22.000 What's even worse is if Trump didn't do anything about this.
00:14:26.000 And I'm not even talking about economically because this is a risk.
00:14:29.000 This is a gamble.
00:14:30.000 We must be honest with this.
00:14:32.000 This is an economic gamble.
00:14:34.000 There is a risk associated with it.
00:14:36.000 I think it's going to work out.
00:14:37.000 I trust Stephen Miller, and I trust Susie Wiles, and I trust Scott Besson, and I trust J.D. Vance, and of course, most importantly, I trust President Trump.
00:14:45.000 But there is a risk.
00:14:47.000 There is a gamble involved in all of this.
00:14:49.000 But the greater risk would be if you run on tariffs and you don't apply them.
00:14:55.000 That would be the end of democracy as we know it.
00:14:59.000 That means you could pander to a constituency endlessly to just go get their votes and you don't do it.
00:15:07.000 That, to be perfectly honest with you, is far more horrifying and terrifying to the health of our politics than the stock market going down.
00:15:17.000 And I know the stock market right now going down is hurting a lot of people.
00:15:22.000 And look, this could go terribly wrong.
00:15:24.000 Europe and China are gonna be the main countries.
00:15:26.000 That will most likely escalate.
00:15:27.000 There could be a de-dollarization.
00:15:28.000 A lot of our wealth in this country is built on the fact that we are the world's reserve currency.
00:15:35.000 This is a high wire.
00:15:37.000 This is a live wire act.
00:15:38.000 One that I support.
00:15:41.000 The markets knew this was coming and Trump gave plenty of notice and still we are seeing a sell-off.
00:15:47.000 But I think back to that blue-collar guy that came up to me.
00:15:51.000 Said this is the best week of politics I've ever seen.
00:15:54.000 And the contrast.
00:15:55.000 The people that own in the market think this is terrible.
00:15:59.000 The people that have built the country think this is wonderful.
00:16:02.000 I would like to have them both think something is wonderful.
00:16:07.000 However, if you look at the last five years, Wall Street has done very, very well.
00:16:12.000 Main Street has not done very well the last five years.
00:16:16.000 Been crushed by inflation, being crushed by consumer debt.
00:16:19.000 They don't own homes.
00:16:20.000 And they have been screaming at their politicians, please...
00:16:24.000 Listen to us.
00:16:25.000 Please do something for us.
00:16:27.000 And that is what Donald Trump embodied, which is why, regardless of what Trump said or how they attacked him, the working class continued to rise up in record numbers.
00:16:39.000 And now President Trump is delivering it.
00:16:41.000 He is the promise keeper president.
00:16:42.000 We've seen that on the border.
00:16:45.000 The idea of these tariffs is to smoke out behavior targeted at American exports.
00:16:50.000 And some of it is direct tariffs, but it's not only that.
00:16:54.000 There's a lot of howling going on right now, and some of it is understandable.
00:16:57.000 A lot of countries got used to the existing system.
00:17:01.000 Well, Trump is starting our thousand mile journey with a great big leap.
00:17:06.000 But most importantly is he's fulfilling the promises that he made.
00:17:12.000 And you want to see a much more dramatic, horrifying political moment if President Trump would have just said, ha, just kidding, just like ever the politician.
00:17:22.000 I say one thing and do another.
00:17:23.000 Instead, it's promises made, promises kept.
00:17:25.000 Hey, Charlie Kirk here.
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00:18:29.000 Okay, this is an amazing story.
00:18:31.000 So I have a new obsession, which is I believe the fight of the 21st century is going to be a fight against the bureaucracy.
00:18:39.000 Not just the bureaucracy and government, but bureaucracy in general.
00:18:43.000 Very similar to how men, as they get older, middle-aged men, develop an intractable, seemingly irreversible beer belly, middle fat.
00:18:53.000 It seems as if government, churches, charities, companies, and of course colleges develop that kind of mid-level management, job justification, paper shuffling, desk worker.
00:19:08.000 Industry. In fact, bureaucrat literally means desk worker from its original French.
00:19:13.000 Doge exists to try to get rid of the bureaucracy.
00:19:16.000 What do you do here is the lethal weapon against bureaucracy.
00:19:23.000 The question of what do you do here might be the most effective weapon against bloat that I have seen.
00:19:33.000 Well, we have a very special guest, someone that goes to Brown University, so obviously he's very smart, and he decided to do something I love.
00:19:41.000 His name is Alex Shea.
00:19:43.000 I believe that's how you say it.
00:19:44.000 He's Brown University class of 2027, software engineer and a journalist.
00:19:48.000 So what he decided to do, he's a sophomore at Brown University, which is incredibly liberal, as you know.
00:19:54.000 He decided to email 3,800 Brown staff members with a very simple question.
00:20:02.000 Describe what tasks you performed in the past week.
00:20:05.000 Shay said he got about 20 responses to his email, including one of them was F off.
00:20:10.000 Shay created a website called Bloat at Brown, where he listed off every employee at the school and used AI to rate their jobs in terms of legality, redundancy, and so-called BS.
00:20:21.000 Shea has pointed out that Brown still has dozens if not hundreds of obvious DEI jobs and direct defiance to President Trump's executive order.
00:20:29.000 So why should Brown keep on getting taxpayer money?
00:20:31.000 So Alex Shea is a customer.
00:20:33.000 Alex Shea is allowed to ask questions.
00:20:35.000 Alex Shea pays a ton of money for Brown to educate him.
00:20:39.000 But when Alex Shea starts to ask the people that he employs...
00:20:43.000 What do you do here?
00:20:44.000 He gets reprimanded.
00:20:46.000 And Alex Shea joins us now.
00:20:47.000 Alex, welcome to the program.
00:20:48.000 Tell us all about this hilarious yet very important project.
00:20:53.000 Alex, please.
00:20:54.000 Hi, Charlie.
00:20:55.000 So you got that right.
00:20:56.000 About three weeks ago, two weeks ago, something like that, I sent this email to all of Brown's administrators.
00:21:03.000 And it's essentially just a press request.
00:21:05.000 That's what it is.
00:21:06.000 I'm acting in my capacity as a journalist for the Brown Spectator.
00:21:10.000 And I'm trying to get...
00:21:11.000 A read on what's going on at Brown University.
00:21:15.000 What are all these people doing?
00:21:16.000 And this was even before, like a few days ago, the Trump administration just announced that they're going to take away Brown's federal funding because of DEI and antisemitism.
00:21:25.000 But this is even before that.
00:21:27.000 Because Brown, get this. 1.00
00:21:29.000 Brown costs $93,000 a year for one year of college.
00:21:34.000 And I know that you say college is always a scam, Charlie, but it's seeming more and more like that these days.
00:21:39.000 Because where does all this money go?
00:21:41.000 No, that's an excellent question.
00:21:43.000 And it's pretty much like you said, 3,805 non-faculty staff members.
00:21:48.000 These are not professors who are teaching the classes.
00:21:51.000 These are people who sit at desks and they push around papers and nobody exactly knows what they do because they won't tell me.
00:21:57.000 No, I just, first of all, I love this.
00:22:04.000 And I want to just say as a macro point, when high IQ driven That's fair to say.
00:22:22.000 And so you have a you have yet you have a you score jobs for BS jobs that waste money.
00:22:28.000 So basically, you are the customer at Brown for $93,000 a year.
00:22:33.000 You're a journalist, you're trying to figure out what the heck are we paying all this money for in Providence, Rhode Island, you are the client.
00:22:40.000 Brown employs more than 4,400 employees but fewer than 1,000 are instructors of any kind.
00:22:48.000 So that means 75% of jobs at Brown are not instructors.
00:22:52.000 What BS jobs have you found at Brown University?
00:22:56.000 Well, that's a great question.
00:22:58.000 So at our website right now, bloats.brownspectator.com, we have about 49 people that are dedicated to DEI roles.
00:23:05.000 And again, these are the people that just cost Brown $510 million from the Trump administration because they're refusing to comply with the directives about DEI.
00:23:16.000 But just in general, it's like there are multiple people, Charlie, that are dedicated to ad sales for the Alumni Magazine.
00:23:22.000 I didn't even know that the Alumni Magazine I think?
00:23:38.000 general. But the funny thing is that I couldn't find that many articles that were written by these seven-time full-time staffers because they make freelancers and students write the actual articles.
00:23:46.000 So it's just bloat like that in the alumni magazine, in all of these various offices that as a student, I wouldn't even think...
00:23:55.000 To think that we had such a thing, that these offices existed, because...
00:23:59.000 They don't really interact with students.
00:24:00.000 They're pretty much just behind the scenes.
00:24:02.000 But they're raising the cost of tuition that are making schools like Brown, like again, they always say that the Ivy League is supposed to be an economic ladder, you know, that poor kids can go to the Ivy League schools and they'll turn out successful in life.
00:24:18.000 But that is really being put to the test by this enormous price tag and sort of disregard for financial planning of any sort.
00:24:29.000 Alex, you have, there's two components here I want to make sure we cover.
00:24:32.000 First, I want to go through these five categories because I think it's hilarious and so astute.
00:24:35.000 And then I want to talk about the disciplinary inaction.
00:24:38.000 And then I have a third point that I do want to make.
00:24:40.000 So you have these five buckets, if you will, that you have distilled of trying to organize what these people do.
00:24:47.000 I want you to go through them.
00:24:48.000 You have flunky, you have goon, duct taper, box ticker, and taskmaster.
00:24:55.000 Explain. Right.
00:24:56.000 So, Charlie, I know that you're a conservative, but these categories were actually jumped up by David Graeber, who is an anthropologist, and he's hardly conservative.
00:25:04.000 He's a left anarchist.
00:25:06.000 But I think this is sort of one of the issues, really, that should be apolitical, that people at both ends of the political spectrum should see, is that there are a lot of these people with sort of confusing jobs.
00:25:15.000 And just to run through them, the flunkies are people like administrative assistants.
00:25:20.000 There are a lot of assistance for these mid-level bureaucrats.
00:25:24.000 Why all of these mid-level bureaucrats need assistance, again, is unclear.
00:25:28.000 Are they really that busy?
00:25:30.000 Maybe they are, but maybe.
00:25:32.000 Graber says is that the bureaucrats are just there to make them feel more important.
00:25:36.000 And that also seems like a very plausible explanation.
00:25:39.000 Again, we can't know for sure unless we hear from them.
00:25:42.000 And that's why we sent that email.
00:25:44.000 Goons are those... 1.00
00:25:45.000 Who sort of fight people on behalf of the university, deceive people.
00:25:48.000 Everybody in the communications office, essentially.
00:25:51.000 I know the type.
00:25:53.000 Keep going.
00:25:55.000 Yes. And in particular, the Brown spokesperson has been putting a lot of misinformation out about me in the press because he's been saying that this site is using confidential information.
00:26:09.000 He's been telling that to all the reporters.
00:26:11.000 And that's not true, but we can get into that later.
00:26:15.000 But your title, your job description, that's not confidential.
00:26:18.000 The duct tapers are the third category.
00:26:21.000 These are sort of people.
00:26:23.000 Think about...
00:26:26.000 All the IT staff that is dedicated to maintaining an upkeep of all these various data systems.
00:26:33.000 At Brown, the Wi-Fi goes out all the time.
00:26:36.000 The IT systems are not great.
00:26:39.000 Instead of just having an end-to-end solution that is a well-designed system, they just have a whole lot of IT staff just sitting around.
00:26:50.000 Fixing things when it breaks.
00:26:52.000 Duct taping it, so to say, instead of just designing it well in the first place.
00:26:56.000 Box stickers are essentially people, compliance officers...
00:27:00.000 DEI officers that just go around and they just essentially check boxes to see, are you doing this?
00:27:07.000 Are you doing this?
00:27:08.000 You don't really add any value.
00:27:09.000 They're just making sure that everybody else toes the line.
00:27:12.000 And then the taskmasters are just these mid-level administrators that just boss around the lower-level administrators and give them tasks.
00:27:21.000 Maybe they're writing memos.
00:27:23.000 Maybe they're drafting strategic action plans.
00:27:27.000 How would this benefit students?
00:27:28.000 I don't know, but I'm sure they think that they are very, very important.
00:27:33.000 And so, this is one of my favorite distillations.
00:27:39.000 I want all of you to think about when you send your kid to college.
00:27:42.000 So, Ed Brown, just to repeat.
00:27:45.000 4,400 employees at Brown.
00:27:47.000 1,000 of them are instructors of any kind.
00:27:49.000 And that's even being generous because that includes teacher's assistants.
00:27:51.000 1,000 is a generous number.
00:27:54.000 So there are 3,400 people that are either flunkies, goons, ductabers, box tickers, or taskmasters for $93,000 a year.
00:28:05.000 And look, this would be even more hilarious if it wasn't tragic.
00:28:09.000 And by the way, Alex, you are a great example as to why they do not want the Ivy League to be based in merit, why they don't want Asians or whites to come to the Ivy League. 0.65
00:28:19.000 They just want people...
00:28:20.000 You ask too many questions!
00:28:22.000 You're way too disagreeable for them.
00:28:23.000 You're like, actually, no, what do you do here?
00:28:25.000 What is this?
00:28:26.000 And you're kind of doing your own micro-doge.
00:28:29.000 One thing I want to make sure I express.
00:28:31.000 If anyone out there...
00:28:32.000 I know someone at Harvard.
00:28:34.000 I want this...
00:28:34.000 You should start a whole movement of this.
00:28:36.000 We should have one at Harvard.
00:28:38.000 We should have one at Princeton.
00:28:39.000 We should have one at Yale.
00:28:40.000 We should have one at Stanford where students just start mass emailing the entire faculty and saying, I go to school here and I pay $100,000 a year.
00:28:50.000 What did you accomplish last week?
00:28:52.000 And start organizing the entire faculty database at the school that you are going into debt for to justify why they exist.
00:29:01.000 This could start a mass movement.
00:29:03.000 And by the way, I'm gonna also push Linda McMahon and the Trump administration to demand this info as well.
00:29:08.000 What do you do here?
00:29:10.000 And organize everybody in those five categories.
00:29:14.000 Private student loan debt in the U.S. totals about $300 billion.
00:29:17.000 Give YRefi a try at YRefi.com, Y-R-E-F-Y.com.
00:29:21.000 May not be available in all 50 states.
00:29:24.000 Just call 888-YRefi34, log on to YRefi.com.
00:29:27.000 Bad credit is accepted.
00:29:29.000 YRefi offers a three-minute rate check without any credit impact.
00:29:32.000 Many clients aren't even able to make the minimum monthly payment on their private student loans when they first contact YRefi.
00:29:38.000 Go to YRefi.com.
00:29:40.000 That is Y-R-E-F-Y.com.
00:29:44.000 So you guys can get out at YRefi.com.
00:30:15.000 Alex Shea continues with us.
00:30:16.000 So you've done this.
00:30:17.000 So let me just make sure.
00:30:18.000 You email all these faculty.
00:30:20.000 You ask these questions.
00:30:21.000 How has the university responded to you?
00:30:23.000 The university that you are paying, Alex Shea.
00:30:26.000 Right. So this has been reported pretty widely at this point.
00:30:28.000 And I'm backed by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
00:30:32.000 And they put out a blog post that pretty much outlies the entire situation.
00:30:36.000 But according to what FIRE is saying is Brown is pursuing a preliminary review against me for four different charges.
00:30:44.000 They're saying it's emotional and psychological harm.
00:30:47.000 They're saying violation of operational rules.
00:30:50.000 They're saying misrepresentation.
00:30:53.000 Because I said I'm a reporter for the Brown Spectator and that's not recognized by the Student Activities Office.
00:30:59.000 That must mean it's misrepresentation.
00:31:01.000 And the last charge is invasion of privacy.
00:31:04.000 Again, for publishing people's names and job titles that Brown himself publishes on the internet.
00:31:09.000 And so again, it's not really clear.
00:31:12.000 How that's confidential.
00:31:13.000 Now, in Rhode Island, where Brown is, is we have a state law, even, that called the Student Journalist Freedom of Expression Act, which protects student journalism, like is in my case.
00:31:23.000 I think this is really just evidence of double standards that Brown has.
00:31:29.000 I don't know if your audience knows this, Charlie, but Charlie Kirk is also banned from Brown University's campus.
00:31:35.000 This was because of an incident that happened.
00:31:36.000 a few years ago where Brown told him he couldn't film.
00:31:40.000 And so Charlie Kirk came to our campus and he wasn't filming.
00:31:45.000 He was compliant with all these rules.
00:31:46.000 But some other students were filming him and those got posted online and And that was deemed to be in violation of Brown's filming policy.
00:31:54.000 And so now Charlie is unfortunately banned from Brown's campus.
00:32:00.000 Take this into account.
00:32:01.000 What Brown has been doing with these pro-Palestinian protesters.
00:32:04.000 In 2023, a group of like about 30 of them were just trespassing in an administrative building.
00:32:11.000 Again, what I'm doing is speech.
00:32:12.000 What they're doing is trespassing.
00:32:14.000 And they actually got arrested and charged with that.
00:32:16.000 And then Brown just decided to drop the charges because they didn't want to inflame tensions or something like that.
00:32:21.000 Then when there was the encampment, the people who were in the encampment, they struck a deal with the Brown administration that they wouldn't be held to the normal disciplinary proceedings and that expulsion and suspension would be off the table for all of them.
00:32:37.000 And again, I think this just shows that there is a clear double standard here about how people are treated.
00:32:42.000 I mean, like myself and Charlie, it's just speech.
00:32:45.000 It's freedom of speech.
00:32:46.000 But when people get into disruptive actions and...
00:32:50.000 Breaking actual laws?
00:32:51.000 As long as they're on the left, they're pretty much protected.
00:32:54.000 Yeah, so just to be clear, instead of asking the people that you employ what they do all day long, if you would host, I don't know, like a Students for Justice of Palestine encampment in the middle of Brown's campus, then that's perfectly fine.
00:33:08.000 They would settle with you.
00:33:09.000 But going around and asking bloated bureaucrats that are duct taper, box tickers... 1.00
00:33:17.000 Alex, one minute remaining.
00:33:22.000 Would you say that Brown is a place where, I don't want to, again, scam is kind of my thing, college scam, but how would you describe Brown now after this experience to the country, to the nation?
00:33:34.000 How would you categorize it?
00:33:36.000 I think it's elitist.
00:33:37.000 That's the way that I would sum it up, is that they're coming after people who espouse more...
00:33:42.000 Right-leaning libertarians and conservatives, they don't come after the far left, the pro-Palestine people who are breaking actual rules.
00:33:49.000 And also just think about the price tag, $93,000 a year.
00:33:53.000 Financial aid is not going to cut it for a lot of people.
00:33:55.000 And so people just can't go to Brown.
00:33:57.000 And so this is elitism, plain and simple.
00:33:59.000 They only want to be accessible to people that are on the coast, that can afford this price tag and have those trendy, progressive elite.
00:34:11.000 the bloats.
00:34:13.000 That's not acceptable at a place like Brown University.
00:34:15.000 Alex, you're a good man.
00:34:17.000 You're going to succeed in whatever you want to do.
00:34:18.000 And if you ever want to go work for the real Doge, I'll be happy to write you a letter of recommendation.
00:34:22.000 We need super geniuses and hyper patriots like yourself that can ask the right questions.
00:34:27.000 And I want to just repeat this.
00:34:29.000 I hope you find counterparts at...
00:34:31.000 Cornell, yes, Dartmouth, Blake, but I'm sure they're not as bad.
00:34:35.000 Columbia, there should be doges of every single major Ivy League school, every school in the country.
00:34:40.000 And boy, I hope Brown, metaphorically, metaphorically, has to be, let's just say, go through a transformational process.
00:34:50.000 I'll be kinder.
00:34:51.000 Alex, thanks so much.
00:34:52.000 God bless you, man.
00:34:53.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:34:54.000 Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:34:57.000 Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.