Sen. Josh Hawley (R-AZ) joins us to talk about Ukraine, the Senate, and why the people in D.C. are so focused on what's happening abroad, but not what s happening immediately here.
00:00:04.000We talk about Ukraine, the Senate, why the people in D.C. are so focused on what's happening abroad, but not what's happening immediately here, that and more.
00:00:13.000Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:38.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:09.000But I just hope that we get somebody, we Republicans, get somebody who is strong, who is going to hold the line.
00:02:16.000And, you know, listen, I mean, this is just not a time, in my view, to be rolled by the Democrats and to allow them to have the agenda here.
00:02:24.000And I think we've got to be strong on impeachment.
00:02:31.000And we've got to be strong on doing the oversight of the administration because right now, I mean, they're getting away with crazy stuff because the Senate's doing nothing.
00:04:17.000And actually, because, as I understand it, all the budget numbers.
00:04:22.000By not funding Ukraine, and I'm not for an additional cent to Ukraine, but actually by not putting any in this bill, it actually cuts some of the funding that I did not vote for, but that's out there already because it doesn't allow it to roll forward.
00:04:34.000So I'm just like, listen, if I have a chance to get on the record again saying that I'm going to cut Ukraine funding and to, frankly, have all of my Republican colleagues also have to vote for new Ukraine funding, I'm like, I'm here for that.
00:04:46.000So now that since there's bedlam in the speakership, the money's dried up then for Ukraine, as it is right now.
00:05:07.000Yeah, I'd say that's there may be, I think there's 10 of us maybe, Charlie, maybe 12 who have voted against Ukraine funding, but that's it.
00:05:15.000So just help me understand some of the inside baseball.
00:05:18.000What is the philosophy, outside of private conversations, what is the talking point when you have the private Senate lunches, when you talk to the old bulls from the South, right?
00:05:27.000You know, the 78-year-old senators from Arkansas or whatever, not to name any names.
00:07:11.000But then also what's drove me nuts about this, and you know this, you represent the great state of Missouri and regular Americans can't afford homes, borders wide open, drugs are in the streets, or we have a crisis of masculinity, which your terrific book, Manhood, addresses.
00:07:40.000Is there a changing attitude, though, where at least some people are saying, maybe let's start to pursue peace or maybe this is, I mean, or is the gusto as much as it was since the beginning?
00:07:53.000I do think what I do hear from my colleagues is a dawning recognition that, wait a minute, we actually don't have any idea where this money's going.
00:08:02.000And we have this now, this memo leaked out of the State Department in the White House just a couple of days ago that says actually the administration is really worried about corruption in Ukraine.
00:08:11.000It's like, duh, I mean, everybody's worried about corruption in Ukraine.
00:08:38.000Can you tell us kind of what was the sales pitch?
00:08:41.000The sales pitch was: we can't win this war without the United States, and you're the only thing that is standing between us and the Russians.
00:09:12.000He's like, if you quit doing this, like, I mean, I don't know what we would do.
00:09:15.000And literally, you think about it, it's like we are turning them into a vassal state where we are propping up their government, not just the war piece of it, their government with our own taxpayer money.
00:09:27.000And to your point, our roads and bridges are crumbling, our border's in crisis, and yet it's like, oh, here's another $100 billion for Ukraine.
00:09:33.000We're also, we're going to post a $1.92 trillion deficit, a deficit of $2 trillion.
00:09:39.000And yeah, I want to keep on explaining.
00:09:41.000I'm trying, and I haven't figured it out, but whoever figures it out will be a very successful author.
00:09:46.000The psychology of a Washington, D.C. politician that cares so much about the foreign and really has contempt for the immediate.
00:09:55.000And I don't know where that comes from.
00:12:32.000Any thoughts on what we were talking about?
00:12:34.000This idea that has infected DC of just like the foreign calamity kind of usurps or trumps the immediate catastrophe.
00:12:45.000Because it's just insulting on like a soul level when I see our country be invaded on the southern border and the distant gets prioritized.
00:12:53.000Yeah, I just think that some of it, frankly, there's a little bit of an imperial mindset that I think is still at work in D.C., which is this idea that we are the world's policemen, that America's prestige comes from policing the world.
00:13:05.000And there's also a Cold War mentality hangover.
00:13:07.000I mean, Charlie, there's a lot of talk about China in D.C., but we're not actually doing anything to stand up to China, whether it's taking our jobs away, ripping off our technology, running rampant in the Pacific their imperialism.
00:13:21.000And I think that's because Europe still is where people say, oh, no, that's where the focus needs to be.
00:13:26.000And I just think there's a certain amount of kind of like D.C. prestige from being a foreign policy expert who has to talk about our alliances.
00:13:33.000Yeah, it's like you get to be the keynote at the Council of Foreign Relations.
00:13:37.000Like, that's not what's going to move the dial for the country.
00:13:41.000No, it feels as if, I know this sounds bad, but it's like a bunch of seventh graders playing risk, is what the U.S. Senate has become.
00:13:48.000It's like these are real lives and real people suffering.
00:13:51.000And it's also, I think, unfair and unrealistic when, Senator, if you hear, we're going to keep funding this until the Russians leave Ukraine, including Crimea.
00:14:01.000That's irresponsible for a lawmaker to say.
00:14:04.000I mean, the administration, the Biden administration, has told senators, I mean, just a week ago, they told senators that there's not going to be a military victory in Ukraine.
00:14:42.000My question to the Biden administration is: so, if this is in stalemate, you're saying we have to spend $100 billion a year to keep it in stalemate.
00:15:42.000Next day, the U.S. Senate sends out a memo where they say they're very worried that America first national policy, it's like almost maybe one had something to do with the other, they were pretty upset.
00:15:52.000But I have hoped the American people are rejecting this at a rapid rate.
00:16:42.000But we need to spend some more money on Ukraine.
00:16:44.000I mean, at a certain point, it's like, do you think, and this is kind of the talking point, are people getting rich off of this war, contractors?
00:17:16.000We spend a lot of time on this because, as you can tell, it's a passionate topic for me because I have, from a generational standpoint, and you could definitely sympathize with this, you know, I'm about to be 30.
00:17:26.000I could pinpoint four years of my life where America was out at war.
00:19:26.000It would just say, listen, Texas, Arizona, you name it, and we should all want to enforce those laws, allow the states to do it, give them the resources to do it, including deportations, and in the Biden administration's attempt to punish the states who are enforcing our laws.
00:19:39.000So the border is another one that really perplexes me.
00:19:43.000So I would say that if an up or down vote, almost every Republican would vote for some border security.
00:19:50.000Maybe you'd have a little bit of a weak-needed approach here, like, oh, can we have H1B1 garbage attached or whatever?
00:19:58.000But the Democrat one, this is really, I think, a revealing issue because not only the lack of concern, but the outright insulting Orwellian kind of what I call hallway chatter that I hear from some of your colleagues, where hallway chatter, they, you know, ask a question, the gaggle.
00:20:28.000And if you want proof that it's not secure, you can, of course, see with your own eyes by just looking at what's happening at the border.
00:20:34.000But it also, and I say this to my Democrat colleagues, why don't you come with me to my state, which is not a border state geographically, but is a border state morally in the sense that the drugs that are pouring across our border, Charlie, are coming into every school in the state of Missouri.
00:20:49.000And I'm tired of hearing from parents that their kids are exposed to fentanyl, to meth, opioids.
00:21:17.000Okay, so walk through the actual, what we know, because Mayorkis, who, you know, is too busy trying not to have Cubans come into the country, the one group that probably should declare asylum, the one group in the entire hemisphere.
00:21:29.000He's like, nope, no more Cubans, which he's Cuban himself.
00:21:31.000Let's walk through actually how, who makes the fentanyl, the process, how it makes its way from Guadalajara all the way to Joplin.
00:22:12.000If you've ever seen Ozark, that's a important wrinkle.
00:22:15.000So we have a lot of networks that move right across our state.
00:22:20.000So the drugs just pour into the state.
00:22:22.000But we've also found now that human trafficking, the number of migrant children who are being moved across the border, who are now in sex trafficking in this country, who are now in child labor in this country, and the Biden administration has watched this happen.
00:22:36.000We're talking like 300,000 children moved across the border into trafficking in this country, and they're just standing by and letting it.
00:22:44.000Yeah, so that's such an unbelievable number.
00:22:48.000So it's a fact the Biden regime has stopped DNA testing at the border, which takes 40 seconds.
00:22:56.000Swab, swab, put in there, related, not related, like some sort of DNA match, right?
00:23:03.000When you ask any senator, Democrat, what could their answer be against DNA testing?
00:23:24.000No, listen, and the inability to acknowledge the fact, which is we have the biggest human trafficking crisis in American history the last three years under this administration, children, and I mean children, kids being exploited, being worked and paid nothing, being sold into sex slavery.
00:23:44.000And this administration is facilitating it.
00:23:50.000And any legal challenge with the judges don't seem that moved by this.
00:23:55.000And that's what's really been frustrating, right?
00:23:57.000I mean, it took, I don't know, Trump drank out of the wrong cup in the first 60 days of presidency and some judge in Guam issued an injunction, right?
00:24:19.000Well, I mean, listen, the real thing on like Title 42, for instance, which had the border closed, Biden could absolutely close the border if he wanted to.
00:24:29.000There are numerous lawful grounds for him to do so.
00:26:12.000This illegal rapes four girls or something and ties them up in like a whole network of them.
00:26:19.000So, Senator, there's another element to this, which is, you know, if you were to ask an American, okay, who do you think is coming across the border?
00:26:27.000You know, they'd say, okay, it's someone from Honduras.
00:26:30.000And it's now coming to light that this is a lot of men fighting age, not exactly your archetype of people fleeing violence, but it's also from all over the world.
00:26:39.000Is it true that people either on the terror watch list or countries that are akin are crossing the border?
00:26:47.000Well, yeah, I mean, we just know, for instance, take China, which is not exactly a geographic neighbor to us.
00:26:53.000We have had reports, and I say reports, confirmed.
00:26:56.000I mean, we have had the administration confirm that busloads of Chinese citizens who we know are Chinese Communist Party members have come across the southern border.
00:27:05.000Why are they coming across the southern border?
00:27:58.000And we're going to actually, if there's a valid deportation, they can carry it out.
00:28:02.000So this is the kind of common sense thing I think we need right now when the federal government won't enforce our own law.
00:28:08.000And to be clear, this isn't the state's making new law for the nation.
00:28:11.000This is enforcing the laws we have that Biden won't do.
00:28:14.000What is creating a sense of deep resentment against the Senate and against our leaders, not you, you're in high standing with our audience, is they see lawlessness on the border, but they see like Soviet totalitarianism against Trump, 500 years in federal prison, the J6 defendants, which is completely outrageous.
00:28:34.000We can call it two tiers of justice, but it really is anarcho-tyranny.
00:28:38.000Which is if you're in the streets of this city, you could do whatever you want, right?
00:28:41.000You could burn, loot, murder, as we saw in Philadelphia, and you'd get reparations in certain cities for this.
00:28:48.000But if you want to enter the country, it gets subsidized by the federal government.
00:28:55.000And it's very deliberately political, Charlie, because what else is going on?
00:28:58.000If you're a parent who went to a school board meeting and said, I don't want my kid taught CRT, you're a domestic terrorist.
00:29:04.000If you are a pro-We're just talking about being pro-life, if you go to an abortion clinic and peacefully demonstrate, you may well get an FBI SWAT team on your door.
00:29:50.000Have we ever had an administration in American history where the president and the White House are asking for political speech of normal people to be censored?
00:30:27.000We can make a difference standing for life by giving free ultrasounds with our friends at pre-born.
00:30:32.000In a Dobbs world, states decide about abortion, and so many liberal states are taking extreme stands, even allowing abortion up to literally the second before a baby is born.
00:30:43.000And in California, the demand for abortions has increased 400% in part because the state is inviting women and girls to come to California for the sole purpose of aborting their baby.
00:31:49.000What have you learned from your bookstops, people you've talked to since publishing the book on this topic?
00:31:54.000I think one of the things I've learned is just how many young men, Charlie, feel so isolated and they feel like they are under siege.
00:32:01.000So I've had so many young guys in particular come to me and say, thank you just for talking about manhood because we're not supposed to talk about it.
00:32:09.000We feel like we don't have any role models, any guides, anybody's showing us the way.
00:32:14.000So many men don't have fathers, you know, as you know.
00:32:17.000I mean, they tragedy this all the time.
00:32:34.000This idea that all men are too strong, a strong man's a bad thing, false.
00:32:38.000We need stronger men who are good men, and we need men to step up.
00:32:42.000So legislatively, what do you think could be done banning pornography, age limits on pornography?
00:32:48.000You've spoken out against this, and the media tries to ridicule you and come after you, which is, I mean, you think about what draws ire from the media saying bad things about the moral poison of modernity.
00:33:22.000And, you know, Charlie, for my older boys who are not on social media yet, but I know they're getting that age when their friends are all on it.
00:33:50.000We need to elect good people to Congress and the president, everywhere.
00:33:53.000But really, if we're going to change the country, we need men to start stepping up as men and providing and protecting and taking responsibility.
00:34:02.000According to Hill.com, and we see this with our Turning Point USA groups, Gen Z men are the most conservative young men have been in 50 years.
00:34:10.000I think because they see what the left is offering.
00:34:13.000The left is finally being totally honest about what they believe, that men are inherently toxic.
00:34:17.000There really is no such thing as man or woman.
00:34:19.000The best thing a man can do is to declare himself non-binary, to spend the rest of his life with his parents, to do and say nothing offensive according to them, and just do as they're told.
00:34:30.000You know, sit down, watch some porn, order some stuff, do as you're told.
00:34:34.000I think men look at that, young men, and they're like, this is my future?
00:35:12.000Do you think that there's an agenda outright that some people want men to become metrosexual versions of their former selves?
00:35:18.000Oh, I mean, just look at what our kids are taught in schools.
00:35:20.000I mean, and that's not just by happenstance.
00:35:22.000You look at the curriculum where kids are taught now from a young age that A, there is no male and female, and B, that men are responsible for everything from climate change to gun violence to rape culture to fill in the blank, you know, and men, It's all men.
00:35:39.000It's masculinity, traditional masculinity, inherently toxic.
00:35:42.000That is absolutely an agenda that the left has openly embraced for decades.
00:35:47.000And we're seeing the results of that now with staggering numbers of young men committing suicide, suffering from depression, addicted to alcohol, drugs, you name it.
00:35:56.000So if you want to keep going down that road, then just keep doing what the left has been doing.
00:36:00.000But I think most rational people realize we have got to change course and we've got to give men a clarion call to step up and do something with their lives.
00:36:09.000Genesis 12 moment: leave your father's home and go on an adventure.