The Charlie Kirk Show - When Liberals Become "Left-ugees"

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 A very comprehensive episode with Michael Schellenberger.

00:00:03.000 We talk about San Francisco, nuclear energy, the Twitter files, Five Eyes, John Brennan, and the religion of the woke.

00:00:09.000 It's an excellent, thoughtful conversation that I think you'll enjoy.

00:00:12.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

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00:00:28.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:29.000 Here we go.

00:00:30.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:32.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:34.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:37.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:41.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:42.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:43.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:00:45.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

00:00:50.000 Turning point USA. 0.65

00:00:51.000 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.

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00:01:29.000 Really excited for this hour.

00:01:30.000 Someone who I have a great deal of respect for.

00:01:33.000 It is Michael Schellenberger, and he joins us for this hour.

00:01:37.000 Michael, thank you for taking the time.

00:01:38.000 Welcome to the program.

00:01:39.000 Nice to meet you, Charlie.

00:01:41.000 So, Michael, absolutely.

00:01:43.000 There's a lot I want to talk to you about.

00:01:44.000 And I want to start just by kind of your story, your background, your journey.

00:01:49.000 You call yourself a left UG.

00:01:52.000 Did I get that right?

00:01:53.000 You also published San Francisco.

00:01:55.000 Tell us all about it.

00:01:56.000 Sure.

00:01:57.000 Well, I'm a child of the radical left, honestly, the very progressive left.

00:02:04.000 I mostly was involved as a young man with various progressive Latin American movements, very, very, very progressive.

00:02:16.000 I worked on environmental causes in the first part of my career.

00:02:21.000 Worked for a lot of different progressive causes.

00:02:24.000 And but then, you know, we started working on climate change in the late 90s and early 2000s.

00:02:28.000 And it quickly became clear that renewables had a bunch of problems.

00:02:33.000 The biggest one was environmental problems in that, you know, if you use renewable, if you use solar or wind, you have to use somewhere between three and six hundred times more land than you do for natural gas or nuclear.

00:02:48.000 And there was all this resistance from environmental from conservationists to renewables projects.

00:02:56.000 And I looked into them more.

00:02:58.000 And over a period of time, people asked why I didn't take a closer look at nuclear.

00:03:03.000 So I became very interested in nuclear power and particularly why were progressives against it?

00:03:10.000 Why were people who cared about the environment against it when it has, you know, really its main benefits are mostly environmental.

00:03:17.000 So that really started me on a journey, culminated in a 2020 book called Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

00:03:26.000 And then after that, I wrote, wanted to do a book on homelessness, and then that became San Francisco.

00:03:33.000 Well, that is awesome.

00:03:34.000 I actually have a kind of a wonky, nerdy question on nuclear.

00:03:38.000 So I've been consuming a lot of information, and RFK is against nuclear power.

00:03:44.000 And I'm not going to ask you to, but the one objection I don't know how to respond to is he says that nuclear can't get insurance protection.

00:03:52.000 Have the insurance companies won't show.

00:03:53.000 Have you ran into this objection before?

00:03:56.000 And I know that's kind of a wonky way to start the interview.

00:03:58.000 I'm just super curious how someone who studied this would respond.

00:04:02.000 Yeah, it's not true.

00:04:04.000 I mean, they do pay insurance.

00:04:07.000 The utilities that own nuclear plants pay insurance on them.

00:04:11.000 There are liability limits in the same way that doctors and other people that do professions where you need to put limits on how much a jury can award somebody.

00:04:22.000 So you're seeing this right now.

00:04:25.000 I mean, just to give one example, I mean, see the award given to against Trump in New York, this huge bill, what a 350 million or some crazy amount.

00:04:37.000 That's the kind of abuse that people wanted to protect against in the case of nuclear because they were worried that people would come up with these really inflated sums.

00:04:47.000 So you have limits on liability.

00:04:50.000 And it's and then in those limits, then the operators of the nuclear plants have to buy insurance.

00:04:56.000 But it's just a myth to say that they can't be, that they're not, they are insured.

00:05:01.000 They're insured by private companies.

00:05:03.000 And so it's really what they're saying is that they couldn't insure them without these liability limits.

00:05:09.000 And you can say the same thing of a lot of things, including airlines, doctors, hospitals, just things that have, you know, would not be able to happen if you didn't have some sort of risk sharing.

00:05:22.000 So then what without, you know, spoiling, I'm going to read the book, by the way.

00:05:26.000 I love it because I think climate alarmism is insane.

00:05:30.000 Why do progressive environmentalists oppose nuclear power?

00:05:34.000 Well, that's a really that's so that was for me is such an interesting question.

00:05:39.000 I mean, I think for most environmentalists, it's just that we were conditioned to think that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear weapons.

00:05:50.000 And the left has tended to be against nuclear weapons.

00:05:53.000 And that's a whole other story.

00:05:55.000 But people that saw Oppenheimer, the movie, have some sense of it.

00:06:00.000 So a lot of it's based on fear.

00:06:03.000 A lot of it's, but it also, it's, it's also stems from a kind of, you know, really radical environmental idea of how to restructure society in the name of renewables.

00:06:17.000 I mean, it's important to remember that there's a deeper desire among anti-nuclear folks that traditionally wanted to move to renewables before there was climate change that anybody was worried about, before anybody was really concerned about it.

00:06:31.000 Environmentalists advocated renewables because they required small-scale living.

00:06:37.000 They required massively reducing energy consumption.

00:06:40.000 I mean, basically, they require going back to a pre-industrial period.

00:06:46.000 So renewables were what we had when we in a pre-industrial period before industrial capitalism.

00:06:53.000 And there's a lot of reasons to think that renewables could never, this is my view, could not power a modern industrial society like ours, and they end up being parasitical.

00:07:04.000 So if you're a very radical degrowth, anti-industrial, anti-capitalist, so-called environmentalist, then they've traditionally been against things that would allow for abundant energy.

00:07:19.000 And you can see, you know, the consequence really requires, you know, undoing industrial civilization to do a lot of renewables.

00:07:27.000 What's happening in Germany right now is that Germany just lost its big chemical manufacturing facility operated by BASF, one of the big chemical companies.

00:07:36.000 It lost it to China.

00:07:38.000 So it had, so it's now moved to China and Germany's in the process of deindustrializing.

00:07:43.000 That's a, you know, that's really in some ways an outcome of what the degrowth, yes, anti-energy, anti-nuclear German greens have always wanted. 0.59

00:07:53.000 Do you think that is at the root of a lot of it?

00:07:55.000 Is it's more about deindustrialization than it is about genuine concern for the environment?

00:08:02.000 Definitely.

00:08:02.000 This is, it's a, it's really a anti, this is a theme of my work and my interest is how a lot of what is really how you go from a kind of new deal liberalism, which is pro-growth, it's pro-industry, it's pro-heavy industry.

00:08:18.000 It's actually pro-nuclear in the early 60s.

00:08:23.000 How do you go from that to basically its opposite, which is anti-growth, de-civilization?

00:08:30.000 It's really the move from, you know, the greatest generation and the silent generation to the baby boomers. 0.87

00:08:37.000 And it becomes very anti-civilization.

00:08:39.000 And so you see with all of these movements that we've been tracking, they share a view that Western civilization is wrong and that it should be undone, basically.

00:08:52.000 And so one way you do that is through energy.

00:08:54.000 You deprive civilization of abundant, cheap energy, since that's one of the core prerequisites to having modern civilization.

00:09:03.000 But you also see it in these other anti-civilization movements against law and order, against police, wanting to shut down psychiatric hospitals, wanting to allow people to camp anywhere on the streets that they like.

00:09:18.000 That's the second book on homelessness.

00:09:20.000 Homelessness is not some sort of natural response to high rents that liberals had said.

00:09:26.000 It's really an anti-civilization.

00:09:28.000 It's a consequence of anti-civilization policies, civilization at the heart of which is cities.

00:09:34.000 So this has been very interesting to me is the understanding of how the left turned against civilization when for so many years and decades, there were Democrats and liberals who were very pro-civilization.

00:09:47.000 So Michael, help me understand when did, how did this change in your opinion?

00:09:52.000 What thinkers, what movements made the left go from a pro-industry, pro-Western civilization to one that wants mass deindustrialization and de-civilization?

00:10:03.000 Yeah.

00:10:04.000 Well, that's, so that's a, I mean, that's, it's just that question for me is the most or one of the most important questions that I want to, that I'm trying to answer in my work.

00:10:15.000 And there's a, so it's a long story, but let's just talk about the cultural roots of it.

00:10:21.000 There's certainly financial motivations which are important.

00:10:26.000 There's a kind of class element to this, you know, where I think there's a sort of way in which these institutions that progressives and liberals control are undermining civilization in ways that actually end up being good for them at a class level.

00:10:42.000 But fundamentally, I think it comes from nihilism and a response to nihilism, which is itself mostly a consequence of secularization, which is this long-standing process of declining belief in traditional religions and traditional gods and traditional sense of afterlife of the soul.

00:11:03.000 Nihilism is sort of this idea that we're just like other animals, that when we die, we become worm food and that's it.

00:11:10.000 There's no soul that lives on afterlife.

00:11:13.000 And that turns out to be extremely difficult philosophy for most people.

00:11:20.000 Not everybody.

00:11:21.000 Some people can really embrace it, but a lot of people have a hard time with it.

00:11:24.000 And so they end up subconsciously constructing new religions.

00:11:30.000 And the first two big new religions that people created were fascism and communism.

00:11:37.000 You know, they both were defeated, obviously, in different periods, one in 1945 and the other one in took another 40-some years.

00:11:47.000 And then what you get with what we call wokeism or this very identity-based leftism is a kind of new religion.

00:11:56.000 And so you see it particularly on race, climate change, and gender, really the creation of new religious categories that are very similar to older Judeo-Christian categories that provide meaning and a moral framework for people that actually then drive how people think about these other issues.

00:12:19.000 So climate change goes from being, you know, a manageable pollution-based problem.

00:12:25.000 We just need some better technology, just need to move from coal to nuclear and natural gas.

00:12:30.000 Ends up being, no, no, it's this apocalyptic threat.

00:12:34.000 It requires this radical change to how we live our lives.

00:12:39.000 Or you see something like police violence.

00:12:42.000 You know, you have a problem that a couple dozen people are killed every year by, you know, unarmed people by police violence.

00:12:49.000 It's been going down.

00:12:50.000 It's best dealt with through better training for police.

00:12:53.000 No, it's got to be this, you know, radical, you know, change of the criminal justice system where you fire the police, you defund the police.

00:13:03.000 And then with gender, this idea that, oh, you, that some people are born with what are basically souls that are a different gender.

00:13:11.000 The gender becomes a kind of replacement soul for secular people. 0.86

00:13:16.000 And this idea that I'm going to behave like God, it's God himself and change my body in order to express this inner soul.

00:13:24.000 This is a concept, by the way, that Abigail Schreier introduced me.

00:13:30.000 So there's sort of a, and there's other issues like homelessness has its own dynamic, but at least with race, climate change, and gender, you basically get a kind of new secular woke religion that has an alternative apocalypse.

00:13:46.000 With the race, you have a kind of different racial hierarchy and morality. 0.70

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00:15:08.000 So if you look at woke, and I'm certainly not the only person to point this out, but if you look at what we call wokeism on particularly climate change, race, and gender, it really constitutes a kind of replacement religion to Judeo-Christianity.

00:15:24.000 So you have an alternative idea of the apocalypse in climate change.

00:15:29.000 With race, you have an alternative moral hierarchy whereby the historically most oppressed people are now more moral, or at least their ancestors or rather their descendants are more moral than people who were ostensibly less victimized in the past.

00:15:47.000 And then with gender, you kind of get this new godlike role for individuals and their doctors to basically change the body to conform to a sort of new soul, which is this idea that people have a gender that's different from their biological sex.

00:16:06.000 And in each of them, they're very interesting because each of these cases, you really end up with consequences that are doing the opposite of what the people who are espousing those ideas claim they want.

00:16:18.000 So we see with Black Lives Matter, you end up with about 3,000 more Black folks that lost their lives between 2020 and 2023, just with an increase of Black homicides, largely stemming from both the emboldenment of criminals and also the withdrawal of police. 0.83

00:16:37.000 You know, with climate change, you get this opposition to natural gas and nuclear, which results in more carbon emissions and pollution.

00:16:46.000 And then with gender, you actually get what trans and LGBT activists had warned against, which is conversion therapy, an effort to convert gay and lesbian young people, not all, but certainly some.

00:17:01.000 There's also a lot of folks on the autism spectrum that get trans, but you see an effort to change the biological sex of many gay and lesbian youth.

00:17:12.000 So I'm very interested in this phenomenon of the ways in which progressives, as they take over institutions, actually do the opposite of what they claim they want to do.

00:17:22.000 And they end up reinforcing, they end up increasing pollution, worsening racism, and harming gays and lesbians.

00:17:31.000 And so you can see, or with homelessness, a similar thing.

00:17:34.000 You see in this effort to help the homeless, you end up enabling addiction, which is the root cause in many situations of the homelessness.

00:17:42.000 And so that's always fascinated me as just as a, you know, it's obviously a political, it's a social problem because they're creating problems, but it's also intellectually very interesting and a problem, I think, problems we have to get to the bottom of if we're to if we're to fix them.

00:18:00.000 And so just to kind of to close this part part of the conversation out, you say it's inherently nihilistic.

00:18:00.000 Yeah.

00:18:06.000 I totally agree.

00:18:08.000 And so that means the goal is destruction, not building, not flourishing or prosperity.

00:18:15.000 Is that truly the predominant view of the now powerful progressive movement?

00:18:24.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that I think that, I mean, if you just look at the consequences, you know, we've lost all these good police.

00:18:32.000 We see crime going up.

00:18:33.000 We see the downtown San Francisco has just been devastated.

00:18:37.000 People don't like being downtown San Francisco.

00:18:39.000 It's not what it was.

00:18:41.000 You see the destruction of people's bodies in the name of so-called gender medicine. 0.80

00:18:46.000 And you see the ravaging of natural landscapes by so-called renewables and also a reversion to coal and wood in response to more expensive natural gas due to so-called climate protests.

00:19:00.000 They say in every instance that they're trying to create some positive utopia, but it's even on that point, it's pretty thin, you know, and not just because the consequences are horrible, but I just think it's become very, very negative.

00:19:16.000 The nihilism.

00:19:17.000 So, that really the intense focus.

00:19:20.000 I mean, remember, Martin Luther King had an I Have a Dream speech, and it was about racial neutrality, basically.

00:19:29.000 What you get with Ibram Kendi is anti-racism.

00:19:33.000 It's this sort of obsession, this exaggeration, and really racism itself, kind of, you know, people call it reverse racism, but certainly racism is racism.

00:19:44.000 So, yeah, I think that it's fair to say it's nihilism, but then the response to it becomes this ideology and then the ideology is just making up stories to justify what are at bottom nihilistic practices: the destruction of bodies, the destruction of natural landscapes, the destruction of cities.

00:20:02.000 Those are, I think, the three big consequences of woke ideology.

00:20:08.000 Check out San Francisco and also the one I'm going to read first: Apocalypse Never.

00:20:12.000 Michael, I'll walk our audience through the bombshell story you had recently about five eyes, the CIA, and all the different elements there, please.

00:20:22.000 Well, sure.

00:20:23.000 There's actually multiple stories here, and there's some complexity, but basically, what we reported is that the former CIA director under Barack Obama basically weaponized the Five Eyes.

00:20:41.000 Those are the English-speaking intelligence-sharing countries that we work with: UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

00:20:49.000 We work with those other countries.

00:20:51.000 We basically mobilized those other countries to so-called bump or reverse target Trump associates.

00:20:58.000 Deliberately had a list of 26 Trump associates that they asked foreign intelligence agencies to basically entrap in suggesting that they were involved in something nefarious or they had some information from the Russians.

00:21:16.000 And the story had already, we knew that the FBI created an investigation of President Trump and that it should not have done that.

00:21:25.000 That was the results of the Durham investigation that came out last year, the Special Justice Department Special Counsel.

00:21:32.000 What we really didn't have until our reporting on this was just that there was this deliberate effort that was started by Brennan to go and bump these folks.

00:21:42.000 There's some complexity here because we also think there was another effort that may have been unrelated or was trying to influence the Brennan process, which was the Clinton campaign, trying to allege some Russian interference and connections to Trump.

00:21:59.000 But I think that's the most explosive thing: it looks, you know, according to our sources, and I think there's a good strong amount of evidence for it now, is that the effort to link, you know, to falsely link then-candidate Trump to the Russians came right out of the CIA, which is illegal and a grotesque abuse of power.

00:22:20.000 I can't really think of anything in U.S. history.

00:22:24.000 People, after I've said this, will say, oh, I can come up with some other examples, but proven cases of U.S. history where the intelligence community was weaponized against a presidential candidate.

00:22:33.000 It's quite shocking.

00:22:35.000 And then there were three other stories that we did related to it, which was that, in fact, the intelligence showed that the Russians favored Hillary over Trump, and that Brennan, again, the former CIA director, changed the intelligence assessment to say the opposite, to say that the Russians favored Trump.

00:22:59.000 And then finally, that there is this report.

00:23:02.000 There's a 50-page report that the House Intelligence Committee, which is called HIPSI, but the House Intelligence Committee nonetheless has a 50-page report where they evaluated the intelligence, the raw intelligence data that was used to create that 2017 intelligence community assessment that falsely claimed that the Russians favored Trump over Hillary.

00:23:23.000 That report still exists.

00:23:24.000 It has not been released.

00:23:26.000 It seems to be related with a larger binding, a larger binder of materials, which likely includes the original intelligence or some of the original intelligence.

00:23:36.000 And so the government is sitting on, I mean, that's sort of the final punchline: is that there's the government has this report and it has this binder of materials.

00:23:45.000 And the Trump folks say that they declassified them and wanted them out.

00:23:49.000 But at the very last minute, we were told that Trump's CIA director really slow walked it and prevented both the report and the binders from getting out.

00:24:01.000 There's also been some speculation that the FBI was trying to get that binder, and that's part of the reason they raided Mar-a-Lago.

00:24:08.000 There were some differences of opinion about that.

00:24:10.000 But nonetheless, a huge story about the weaponization of our intelligence community against a presidential candidate.

00:24:19.000 And then this ongoing issue is that there's some very important information out there for us to get to the bottom, you know, that would help us to get to the bottom of the Russia collusion hoax that we don't have and we really should have access to.

00:24:30.000 Do we know for certain that Donald Trump had a binder of these documents declassified at Mar-a-Lago?

00:24:36.000 Do we know for certain?

00:24:37.000 We don't know that.

00:24:39.000 As far as I've, there are some people that say that.

00:24:42.000 There's other people that say that's not true.

00:24:44.000 So, and it doesn't depend on their sympathy to Trump who's saying that.

00:24:49.000 So I don't know.

00:24:51.000 It's a big mystery.

00:24:52.000 It's one that I'm dying to get answered.

00:24:54.000 Yeah, I mean, it would theoretically connect some dots as to why you raid somebody's home.

00:25:00.000 So that would be interesting and how they concocted this whole document nonsense.

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00:25:49.000 So, Michael, there's some other stories I want to get to, but any other closing thoughts on the five eyes saga?

00:25:55.000 And I guess my other question I have is: how did they block it so successfully?

00:25:59.000 Do we have an understanding of that?

00:26:02.000 Can you add some context there?

00:26:04.000 Well, I mean, the person that people really believe played the pivotal role in blocking this was Gina Haspel.

00:26:11.000 And it's notable that, so she was Trump's FBI, sorry, CIA director.

00:26:17.000 He appointed her, but she was head of the London field office when the Trump collusion hoax was allegedly begun by the director, Obama's director of the CIA.

00:26:32.000 And so there's a lot of speculation that she knew about that operation, participated in it, gave the green light to it since there was British operatives that apparently targeted or reverse targeted those Trump associates.

00:26:46.000 I think she has a lot of, you know, there's a lot of questions that she should, you know, should be required to answer about this because we're looking at, you know, both an illegal effort to spy on and entrap the people associated with the Trump campaign in what clearly appears to be an effort to spread disinformation and discredit him.

00:27:10.000 And then you also have an ongoing cover-up of what was actually going on.

00:27:14.000 And so I don't think that I think we need to get to the bottom of it.

00:27:18.000 I mean, you may know more because you talked to President Trump.

00:27:22.000 Maybe you know what's going on with the Mar-a-Lago raid.

00:27:27.000 They're playing it very close to the chest.

00:27:29.000 So we're trying to figure it all out.

00:27:34.000 I want to now talk.

00:27:35.000 We mentioned briefly that San Francisco situation, but that reminds me of Twitter and you're reporting on the Twitter files.

00:27:42.000 Can you just kind of tell our audience about your involvement, what you helped report on in regards to that major story?

00:27:48.000 Sure.

00:27:49.000 So people probably know that Elon Musk bought Twitter and took it over in November of 2022.

00:27:57.000 And then in December 2023, he invited in two journalists, Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss.

00:28:06.000 And Barry Weiss is a friend of mine, and she invited me to then join her.

00:28:11.000 And so I went in under her with her support.

00:28:15.000 And the three of us did a story about how Twitter made the decision to deplatform President Trump.

00:28:24.000 And the most important thing to know about that is that Twitter employees, Twitter staff themselves did not think that Trump had violated the company's terms of service.

00:28:35.000 And so they were there sort of making up some reason to get him off the platform for their own political reasons.

00:28:42.000 And so many people were demanding it that it occur.

00:28:46.000 And of course, January 6th is this whole other story, but that was the obviously that was the, or maybe not obviously, people won't remember, but that was the justification that was given for deplatforming the president, but they didn't have any justification.

00:28:57.000 That was what the Twitter files proved.

00:28:59.000 And then I did a Twitter files on the Hunter Biden laptop, where we discovered a number of very incredible things.

00:29:07.000 First, Twitter staff did not think that Trump had violated or that the, sorry, that the Hunter Biden laptop was in violation of terms of service.

00:29:15.000 The New York Post article should not have been censored according to Twitter's own rules.

00:29:19.000 That was important.

00:29:21.000 But we also discovered that there was clearly an operation being run either directly by the FBI or by former FBI people, although I think it's almost certainly involved the FBI, where the FBI was going to Facebook and Twitter and all the social media companies warning of some sort of hack and leak operation of the Russians of something relating to Hunter Biden.

00:29:46.000 And the Aspen Institute, which is a heavily U.S. government-funded think tank, held these workshops to like basically train and brainwash journalists in how not to cover the Hunter Biden.

00:29:59.000 Like a dry run.

00:30:01.000 Can I interrupt you, Michael?

00:30:03.000 I've heard this tabletop exercises.

00:30:06.000 What actually occurred here?

00:30:08.000 Do you have the details?

00:30:09.000 I'm super curious about the meat of what occurred at these Aspen Institute trial runs.

00:30:14.000 Yeah, and I'll just say up front, I'm not totally sure.

00:30:17.000 The whole thing gave me the creeps as soon as I saw it.

00:30:22.000 I mean, basically, it's occurring, I think it's August, it occurs, you know, which is two months before the release of the Hunter Biden laptop.

00:30:31.000 FBI, meanwhile, that summer is also warning of something related to Hunter Biden's laptop.

00:30:36.000 Keep in mind, FBI had Hunter Biden's laptop, and they knew it was his laptop since the previous December.

00:30:44.000 So these, they held a Zoom workshop to do a tabletop exercise to basically train all of the major journalists who covered this at all New York Times, Washington Post, the networks, NPR, and the social media platforms.

00:31:00.000 And I mean, I don't know how else to describe it.

00:31:02.000 I mean, it was like a brainwashing exercise where they were like, what would happen if this thing happens?

00:31:06.000 Well, we should not cover it, basically, or rather, we should cover it and cast doubt on it and basically spread disinformation.

00:31:16.000 I mean, that was what they were planning to do.

00:31:18.000 Spread Russian, you know, spread disinformation that somehow it was related to the Russians.

00:31:26.000 I still have really serious questions about who these journalists are and why they're so terrible, either terrible at their jobs or have some other motivation.

00:31:36.000 Unspeakably morally corrupt.

00:31:38.000 It looks bad because they're all very uniform.

00:31:42.000 And I mean, I think this is part of what's so chilling about it is that there's a, there's a, they're all sort of feels like they're all kind of following orders and maybe they're not actually following anybody's orders.

00:31:54.000 They're just trying to get along.

00:31:56.000 But this is a group of journalists that had just been fully in the Russia collusion hoax.

00:32:01.000 They're very partisan Democrats.

00:32:03.000 They're very counterpopulist.

00:32:06.000 You know, they have many ties to the intelligence community, some of which I don't think are being fully disclosed.

00:32:14.000 So I found the whole thing very creepy and disturbing.

00:32:18.000 And then, and then you may know also that Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan and said, you know, we were being by the way.

00:32:24.000 They were cautioned ahead of time.

00:32:25.000 They did a house visit.

00:32:27.000 Yeah.

00:32:27.000 So it looks like a pre-bunking operation is what they call it to spread disinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop so that when it finally showed up on the scene, the media and the social media would en masse discredit it.

00:32:42.000 And the censorship by Twitter of the New York Post article, which was 100% accurate, that censorship contributed to the disinformation.

00:32:52.000 So this is a very important example where the censorship, it couldn't stop the information from getting out there, but it sort of contaminated the story.

00:33:01.000 And so then, of course, then the famously, there's 51 former CIA and other intelligence community people who then came out and said, oh, this has all the hallmarks of a Russian information operation.

00:33:13.000 So there was, it just appears as though there was a deliberate effort to spread disinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop.

00:33:21.000 And that's that for me in some ways then opened up this broader interest of mine in studying abuses of power because it's just not something I had ever studied before.

00:33:31.000 Yeah.

00:33:32.000 And just it's just chilling and wondering, Michael, do you have any assurances that that's not also?

00:33:38.000 I mean, I guess with Twitter right now, because of Elon, no, but the general social media ecosystem, what's to prevent these Intel agencies from doing this again?

00:33:45.000 Were lessons actually learned and internalized?

00:33:48.000 Well, they, you know, these, there's, I will say, I think it's, I think it's been very important for Congressman Jim Jordan to have this weaponization committee.

00:33:59.000 I've testified in front of it a couple of times with my call, with my friend Matt Taibbi.

00:34:04.000 I think it was very important to put pressure on the censorship industrial complex and to expose it and drag it into the light and to name names.

00:34:13.000 So I do think it had an impact.

00:34:15.000 You start to see some of the leaders of the censorship and industrial complex sort of say, oh, maybe we went too far.

00:34:20.000 We're seeing a little bit of that.

00:34:22.000 But it's a little bit like that gif of Homer Simpson slipping back into the bushes, where you get the sense that these guys could easily pop back out.

00:34:32.000 Just saw the NEW YORK Times over the weekend acknowledge that the CIA has these bases in Ukraine and that they were somehow I don't even they don't really specify how were involved in the Russia collusion uh hoax intell, so-called intelligence.

00:34:47.000 So you know these guys.

00:34:49.000 They're they're, these are very powerful individuals.

00:34:52.000 They're very smart, they're very well educated.

00:34:55.000 They're very arrogant, they're very entitled.

00:34:58.000 They think that they should decide what we're able to say and read and write online. 0.76

00:35:04.000 They really believe that.

00:35:05.000 They think that if they think they have to control the information environment in order to prevent, you know, populists like Donald Trump from destroying NATO and undermining the Western Alliance.

00:35:18.000 And they're the guardians of it and they should decide what messages and information is destabilizing.

00:35:26.000 I mean, it's anathema to what the founding fathers of our country wanted when they created the First Amendment.

00:35:32.000 But these are the people that are really at the heads of these agencies.

00:35:35.000 And to some extent, they reflect the culture of those agencies.

00:35:40.000 We're always trying to figure out how much of this is just cultural.

00:35:43.000 Like even with this current controversy around Google's AI, how much of it's coming from the staff, the very woke staff internally, and how much of it's being demanded by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

00:35:57.000 And the short answer is usually a mix of both.

00:36:00.000 And in fact, some of this, this over, this inappropriate amounts of intelligence community involvement in social media or in the bumping, it's all a kind of arrogance.

00:36:13.000 It's all coming from a kind of entitlement, the sense in which they in their, because of their position, are somehow entitled to interfere in the election and interfere in the media.

00:36:24.000 And I think it's gross.

00:36:26.000 And we have to actually call it out not just as illegal, which it is, and as secretive, which it is, making it a conspiracy by definition, but there's something pathological in it.

00:36:37.000 Like there's something wrong with you if you want to shut other people up rather than to let them speak.

00:36:43.000 And you don't have to listen to them.

00:36:45.000 But I think there's something pathological in wanting to intervene in the ways that these guys have been trying to intervene in elections and intervene in the media.

00:36:53.000 I think it's important to point that out, that there's a kind of narcissism, antisocial, you know, one can sociopathy in it that leads individual people to engage in those inappropriate behaviors.

00:37:09.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

00:37:10.000 What an unbelievable start to 2024.

00:37:12.000 We had last month saving babies with pre-born by providing ultrasounds.

00:37:16.000 And we're doing again this year what we did last year.

00:37:18.000 We're going to stand for life because remaining silent in the face of the most radically pro-death administration is not an option.

00:37:23.000 As Sir Edmund Burke said, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing, and we're not going to do nothing.

00:37:29.000 Your gift to pre-born will give a girl the truth about what's happening in her body so that she can make the right choice.

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00:37:47.000 And will also save moms from a lifetime of pain and regret.

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00:37:53.000 That's 833-850-2229.

00:37:56.000 Or click on the pre-born banner at charliekirk.com.

00:37:59.000 That is charliekirk.com and click on the pre-born banner.

00:38:02.000 Also, save moms from a lifetime of pain and regret.

00:38:04.000 I'm a donor of this organization.

00:38:05.000 They're terrific.

00:38:06.000 Go to charliekirk.com, click on the pre-born banner.

00:38:11.000 Michael, let's continue on another story here.

00:38:13.000 We mentioned it.

00:38:14.000 Tell about your book, San Francisco, please.

00:38:16.000 Sure.

00:38:17.000 So this is a book I did in 2020 and 2021.

00:38:21.000 Came out in 2021.

00:38:23.000 And it's basically about homelessness.

00:38:26.000 I also address crime and other problems of social disorder.

00:38:31.000 And the book basically argues that, once again, this sort of woke progressive ideology is anti-civilization.

00:38:41.000 It enables untreated mental illness and addiction.

00:38:48.000 That's really what is at the heart of so-called homelessness.

00:38:51.000 We certainly need more housing.

00:38:52.000 Housing is too expensive.

00:38:53.000 I'm a big advocate of housing, but that's not why people living on the streets are there because they've, you know, their addiction has led them to basically lie, steal, and cheat from family and friends and end up on the street where they're maintaining their addictions.

00:39:07.000 And so the question is, why do progressives not do anything about it?

00:39:10.000 And why do they enable it?

00:39:12.000 And, you know, why don't, I mean, it's not good for people with addiction.

00:39:16.000 People with addiction need an intervention.

00:39:18.000 If they can't get it from family and friends, then they need it from law enforcement to mandate some kind of rehabilitation.

00:39:25.000 And we used to have that.

00:39:27.000 And the short answer is, yeah, it's this idea that you can divide the world into victims and oppressors.

00:39:33.000 And to victims, everything should be given and nothing required.

00:39:36.000 People sometimes ask me why is San Francisco so tyrannical about things like COVID masks and vaccines, but then so relaxed about letting people smoke fentanyl on the sidewalk.

00:39:48.000 And it's completely understandable when you understand that one of those things is aimed at everybody, including the so-called oppressors, and the other is for victims.

00:39:59.000 So the idea is that if you're a victim of structural oppression and trauma and racism and whatever, that everything should be given to you, including hard drugs and the means to use them and cash, even though it's awful.

00:40:16.000 If someone that's addicted to fentanyl should not be given cash and the means to use fentanyl, it's just, they're going to die.

00:40:23.000 You know, that's what's happening.

00:40:25.000 75,000 deaths from fentanyl.

00:40:27.000 But the ideology is so powerful.

00:40:29.000 I mean, if you think about how powerful the ideology of communism or Nazism were, this ideology of wokeism is basically saying it's okay to let this mentally ill woman have her legs rot on the street. 0.91

00:40:43.000 This is a true story.

00:40:45.000 Or it's better to let this man lie on the street with a broken hip.

00:40:49.000 It's a true story.

00:40:49.000 I discovered the man.

00:40:51.000 They are saying it's better for that than for us to have the police or somebody intervene and require that they come off the street, even though they're breaking the law.

00:41:02.000 So it just gives you a sense of how radical it really is, the homeless and the so-called homelessness agenda.

00:41:08.000 All the other parts of the homelessness problem, the lack of funding for psychiatric hospitals, the lack of shelters, basic clean shelter, all stem from this very inappropriate victimhood ideology.

00:41:24.000 And so, yeah, I mean, that's at the heart of it.

00:41:27.000 It's the same victimhood ideology that leads you to defund the police, basically.

00:41:31.000 It's de-civilization.

00:41:32.000 It's against law and order.

00:41:34.000 When you look across all these issues, you go cheap energy, law and order, free speech, meritocracy.

00:41:44.000 These are things that liberal democratic civilization require, you know, and if you, you know, or if you want liberal democracy, you also need equal justice under the law.

00:41:53.000 You can't have different applications of the law depending on your race, except for now that's being advocated. 0.96

00:41:59.000 So you really see that what runs through it all is a kind of opposition to civilization.

00:42:06.000 And that's what should be so troubling to us.

00:42:09.000 You know, if you're getting rid of the pillars of civilization, then it's just a matter of time before you lose civilization itself.

00:42:14.000 Do you see any evidence that the leaders of San Francisco are adjusting or caring enough to try to restore it back to its once place as a respectable, beautiful city?

00:42:26.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:42:26.000 There's definitely a reaction.

00:42:29.000 In fact, the mayor of San Francisco just came out in favor of modifying this previous ballot initiative that effectively decriminalized three grams of hard drugs and shoplifting in the same initiative.

00:42:44.000 Something I'm embarrassed to say I voted for along with millions of other Californians.

00:42:48.000 Passed in 2014 is called Prop 47.

00:42:51.000 She came out for changing it so that we can crack down on open-air fentanyl, drug dealing, mandate, drug treatment to people.

00:43:01.000 And so there is a backlash and a response.

00:43:04.000 It's not clear if it'll be enough.

00:43:07.000 That initiative, for example, to get to change this, it may not get on the ballot because for lack of funding.

00:43:15.000 You know, part of the problem is a lot more conservative and moderate people have left California.

00:43:19.000 And so now you're left with even more progressive folks.

00:43:22.000 So it's hard to say what will happen, but certainly I think that there's certainly been a backlash to what's happening there.

00:43:31.000 It is definitely central to where the woke mind virus lives and hosts itself.

00:43:37.000 Michael, you're welcome back anytime.

00:43:38.000 Excellent work.

00:43:39.000 Thank you so much.

00:43:40.000 Thanks, Charlie.

00:43:41.000 Appreciate you.

00:43:41.000 Thanks so much for listening.

00:43:42.000 Everybody, email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:43:46.000 Thank you so much for listening.

00:43:48.000 God bless.

00:43:49.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - February 29, 2024

When Liberals Become "Left-ugees"

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