00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk Show, we have Mike Davis from the Article 3 Project that joins us, and then David Sachs, who talks about Elon Musk and all of the terrific and important work that Elon is doing.
00:00:12.000Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:15.000Come to AmericaFest, Phoenix, Arizona, December 17th, December 18, December 19th, December 20 at amfest.com, A-M-F-E-S-T.com.
00:00:47.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:00:59.000Brought to you by Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage.
00:01:02.000For personalized loan services you can count on.
00:01:04.000Go to andrewandtodd.com, the wonderfulandrewandtodd.com.
00:01:12.000The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.
00:01:57.000And if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle until in God's good time, the new world with all its power and might step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
00:02:28.000Winston Churchill, we will never surrender.
00:02:31.000Email us freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.
00:02:36.000It has been illuminating for me to read the emails during the break.
00:02:43.000There's a lot of people that are cynical and no longer going to vote.
00:03:54.000He went over as the deputy general counsel of Twitter.
00:04:00.000And lo and behold, he was involved again in another hoax, this time to work with the FBI to de-platform the New York Post, one of America's oldest newspapers, for their accurate reporting on the Hunter laptop story right before the 2020 election, where it showed that President Biden, his son Hunter,
00:04:24.000his brother James were on the Chinese and Ukrainian payrolls, clear foreign corruption that no doubt would have affected the outcome of the 2020 election.
00:04:35.000So Jim Baker was at Twitter when they de-platformed, censored, not only censored, they made it where you couldn't even post a link of the New York Post story.
00:04:44.000It was the most egregious censorship imaginable.
00:04:47.000And then when Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, is trying to get to the bottom of this, his lawyers are supposed to be working for him.
00:04:55.000And instead, it appears this Jim Baker was working against him to hide this material that would have implicated Jim Baker in this scandal instead of doing his clients' work.
00:05:06.000So you may have an ethics violation with Jim Baker here, but Elon Musk correctly fired him.
00:05:12.000So have the new and updated Twitter files now been posted by Taibbi that were not intercepted by Baker?
00:05:19.000I haven't seen those yet, but I don't think they have, Charlie.
00:05:24.000So that'll be interesting to see kind of what they are.
00:05:36.000This weekend, Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss, who's helping him do this reporting, found out that the general counsel of Twitter, that would be the former FBI general counsel, James Baker, had been vetting the documents before Taibbi and Weiss could see them.
00:05:50.000In other words, removing the ones that might incriminate him or the feds.
00:05:55.000So, Mike, this is the most important aspect of the Twitter file story, in my opinion, is how entrenched the federal government has been in Twitter and Facebook.
00:06:10.000Yeah, I mean, remember, it was these 51 former Intel agents who came out and said that this was a Russian disinformation campaign, the Hunter Biden laptop reporting by the New York Post.
00:06:25.000And it shows that there is so much corruption at the FBI, the Intel communities, and big tech.
00:06:31.000And we need a house cleaning at all of those places at the FBI, Maine Justice, Intel communities, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple.
00:06:39.000It seems like Elon's doing it at Twitter, but we shouldn't have to rely on a benevolent billionaire doing the right thing here against all odds in order to do this.
00:06:49.000The richest man in the world is up against headwinds exposing this.
00:06:53.000That shows you how powerful the left is and how entrenched they are with every institution in America.
00:07:00.000And so it's the ramifications of this go even beyond elections, but let's focus on that.
00:07:07.000How significant was the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story?
00:07:10.000I mean, I think it delegitimizes the entire 2020 election.
00:07:14.000Well, it shows, if you look at polling, if you ask focus groups in polling, if they would have changed their votes if they had known the laptop from hell, if they had known about that, if big tech and big government didn't collude to eliminate it from the American people's viewpoint before the election in 2020, it absolutely would have changed the outcome in the election.
00:09:11.000This is a massive scandal that's not going away.
00:09:14.000This is one of the biggest scandals we've had since Watergate.
00:09:17.000You have the FBI working with big tech to censor one of our oldest newspapers in America so they can throw the election for their preferred candidate.
00:10:07.000In the meantime, they're using the full force of the Justice Department, including the FBI, to go after every Trump supporter, every Trump advisor, even President Trump for non-crimes.
00:10:18.000And so we absolutely have two systems of justice in America, one for the left and one for the rest of us.
00:10:25.000And until we start getting smart and serious about winning elections, winning election season, this is going to keep happening.
00:10:40.000Our great country was founded on the principle that all men are created equal.
00:10:45.000But far too many of our nation's colleges and universities, including those Ivy League schools, continue to insist on using race as a factor of admission.
00:10:53.000The Supreme Court is deciding a case on this right now.
00:10:56.000But there's a unique American college that does not discriminate based on race.
00:11:02.000Hillsdale was founded in 1844 to educate all people, irrespective of nationality, color, or sex.
00:11:07.000It continues the policy today, admitting students on their strength of their character, ability, and intentions, not their heritage or background.
00:11:15.000My friend Larry Arn, the president of Hillsdale College, recently published an article explaining Hillsdale's colorblind policies and its related refusal of government funding, even indirectly inform a federal student aid.
00:11:26.000Read it for yourself at charlie4hillsdale.com.
00:11:29.000After you read it, you may want to support Hillsdale with a year-end gift.
00:11:32.000So go please read Dr. Larry Arn's article at charlie4hillsdale.com, charlie4hillsdale.com.
00:11:41.000Mike, let me ask you, there is a rather underreported story here, which is the Supreme Court wrestles with Republican bid to transform U.S. elections.
00:11:52.000I'm not sure how read up you are on this, but it is a Supreme Court.
00:11:57.000Let me get the exact name of the Supreme Court case.
00:11:59.000It is about whether or not state legislatures are going to be able to have any say.
00:12:06.000I'm not sure what the name of the case is.
00:12:07.000Are you familiar with what I'm talking about?
00:12:34.000So elections clause and electors clause.
00:12:36.000That is set in the Constitution for the state legislatures.
00:12:42.000Democrats don't like that because Republicans control a majority of state legislative seats and state legislative houses around the country.
00:12:52.000And so they want to have their Democrat-appointed state Supreme Court justices and their Democrat-appointed commissioners around the country redraw house races, redraw house seats after redistricting or determine that the election rules, like for example, using COVID to unconstitutionally change election laws around the country and go to all-male ballots or just change the rules generally.
00:13:18.000In order to change the election rules for federal elections, it has to be done by the state legislatures or Congress, and that's it.
00:13:26.000And so that's what this court, that's what this case is finally going to decide.
00:15:35.000They're supposed to have backbones of steel so they can make the tough decisions because they need to keep the political branches in check under our Constitution.
00:15:44.000I just, it's just so interesting because on these kind of what should be nine-nothing cases, Democrats just you have this immovable block of Katangi Brown Jackson, of um, so do my or Kagan.
00:17:28.000Government funds are available to reward companies with two or more employees who stayed open during COVID.
00:17:33.000This is not a loan, and you do not have to pay it back.
00:17:36.000This program is very complicated, but nobody knows it better than the CPAs and tax experts at covidtaxrelief.org.
00:17:44.000That is covidtaxrelief.org, and you pay nothing up front.
00:17:47.000They do all the work and share a percentage of the cash that they get you.
00:17:51.000Businesses of all types, including nonprofits and churches, can qualify, including those who took PPP loans, even if you had increases in sales.
00:17:59.000You did the tough thing for your employees during COVID.
00:18:01.000Let covidtaxrelief.org help get you up to $26,000 per employee.
00:18:47.000What is your take kind of just on Elon's courage to take over Twitter?
00:18:52.000And at least in the immediate, it seems as if success and momentum.
00:18:56.000Yeah, well, you remember that the week before Thanksgiving, you saw all these media pundits and commentators.
00:19:04.000They were all tearfully saying their goodbyes on Twitter.
00:19:06.000They were predicting the site's imminent demise.
00:19:09.000Apparently, the servers would basically melt down because of neglect.
00:19:13.000All this was triggered because Elon first did a riff at the company, and then he offered the remaining employees a voluntary three-month severance, 50% more than he had to, a generous severance, if they didn't want us to return to the office and work hard.
00:19:28.000And simply for doing that, again, there was this total meltdown and hysteria and predictions that Twitter would imminently go down.
00:19:40.000And we're now a few weeks later and the site's running just fine.
00:19:43.000In fact, it seems to be running better and it's faster.
00:19:53.000And so, I mean, Elon hasn't structurally changed a lot yet.
00:19:58.000But what he has done is liberated the platform, which of course makes the mainstream media and kind of the censorship bureau extremely upset.
00:20:07.000But just from a purely, and this is just somewhat subjective, I just think the platform is a lot more fun right now.
00:20:14.000And because the internet has just become an overly censored, very serious place.
00:20:20.000You can't make it, it's just now Twitter is now a place for legitimate content distribution.
00:20:24.000And Elon, I want to get your insight into this why he's doing this.
00:20:28.000I think he's doing it because it's the right thing, but it also isn't making him any friends or favors with the American ruling class.
00:20:36.000Why is he leaking all these Twitter file documents?
00:20:38.000I mean, Elon very well could have just pressed control, alt, delete and got rid of them.
00:20:44.000He's going right up against the most entrenched power sources in our country.
00:21:14.000He wants to restore free speech to Twitter.
00:21:20.000And I think fundamentally he just believes in fair play.
00:21:22.000He just thinks that the rules need to apply to everyone equally.
00:21:26.000And I think that on a very basic level of values, he was offended by the idea that Twitter's former management would suppress a perfectly true story by a reasonably respected publication, the New York Post, in cahoots with operatives from one political party and the security state.
00:21:49.000So I think that he feels like bringing transparency to what went wrong is part of the reset here.
00:21:56.000But ultimately, I think this is just about his belief in free speech, transparency, and fair play, because there's nothing in it for him except restoring those values to social media.
00:22:08.000Ironically, I don't get the appearance that he's purely focused on making this a very profitable company.
00:22:18.000But ironically, I actually think it's going to become one because he's so mission-driven, because there really isn't a place where free speech and heterodox ideas are able to exist online, where all the kind of quote-unquote cool kids are able to discuss and have online conversation.
00:22:36.000I mean, I don't want to get too speculative here, but I mean, Elon has either joked or been very serious.
00:22:41.000You're never more serious than when you're joking, that he's worried that he's going to get suicided.
00:22:46.000I mean, he's said that a couple of times that he's not suicidal and that he needs to increase his security.
00:22:52.000But what he's really getting at is, and this should just be alarming for any onlooker, is you have to worry about your personal safety because you want people to speak freely.
00:23:02.000He's offending a lot of powerful people right now by exposing what happened.
00:23:08.000Remember, we had the Son or Biden story came out the month before the election in 2020, and a lot of powerful people told us that that story was Russian disinformation and hacking.
00:23:22.000And as it turns out, it was a perfectly accurate story.
00:23:26.000And yet, Twitter and other big tech platforms in cahoots, and at the behest of the Democratic Party, as well as these sort of current and former deep state operatives, they suppressed that story.
00:23:38.000I mean, you literally could not post a link to that New York Post story.
00:23:43.000So, not only did the New York Post get shut out of their account, I remember the Trump campaign spokeswoman Kaylee McInerney, she got shut out of her account for just talking about it.
00:23:54.000And then, if you were just an average Twitter user, it literally would not post your tweet if you tried to link to that New York Post story.
00:24:00.000So, this was a comprehensive attempt at suppression the month before the election.
00:24:08.000Again, at the behest of Biden's campaign.
00:24:12.000I mean, I don't know how you justify that.
00:24:14.000I don't know what the possible justification for that could be.
00:24:18.000I mean, that is election interference, isn't it?
00:24:21.000The justification is these people are so evil.
00:24:24.000This is how we would, this is how we, this is what we do to the Third Reich.
00:24:26.000That's that's what that is what they say to themselves internally on their Slack channels.
00:24:34.000So, in order to protect democracy, in their view, they have to engage in the very kind of election interference that they accuse the Russians of.
00:24:43.000But it wasn't the Russians, it was them.
00:24:50.000So, in any event, I think, you know, look, Elon was joking around in a Twitter space.
00:24:54.000I don't think that, you know, I don't think that he's worried about his safety that way, but it was sort of a joke.
00:25:03.000But there's no question that he is threatening to expose powerful people.
00:25:07.000And you look at the media reaction to this.
00:25:10.000The media, you know, always prides itself and congratulates itself on bringing transparency and supposedly exposing the lies of powerful people.
00:25:21.000But in this case, the lies that are being exposed are their own.
00:25:24.000I mean, it was their own participation in this cover-up.
00:25:29.000You know, they basically ran with this idea, this phony idea that the story was Russian disinformation.
00:26:28.000I do want to talk about FTX, but I have one final question here just on the Elon thing, which is, you know, somebody asked me the other day, they said, Charlie, what does a courageous person look like?
00:26:35.000I said, Elon Musk looks like a courageous person.
00:26:38.000I mean, it's just he is putting so many business contracts, government contracts seemingly at risk to allow, you know, some sort of liberation of conversation.
00:27:01.000You know, like I said, there's nothing in it for him.
00:27:03.000I mean, all he's doing is not only putting himself and Twitter at risk with a lot of powerful people, he's also putting his other companies at risk.
00:27:13.000You're already seeing threats made by various senators that Tesla needs to be investigated or SpaceX based on what he's doing at Twitter.
00:27:31.000I mean, Charlie, if you made a list of issues that, you know, that you would like check the box on in order to be what you would consider a conservative, I don't think Elon would qualify on the vast majority of them.
00:27:43.000You know, this is not being motivated by a partisan bias or an ideological bias.
00:27:49.000He just believes in free speech and he believes in fair play and transparency.
00:27:54.000And I think that the way that this platform was previously run for the benefit of one side in the debate and one political party was offensive to those ideals.
00:28:06.000And I think it's a great thing for democracy.
00:28:09.000I think it'll ultimately be a good thing for Twitter.
00:28:12.000By the way, I mean, in terms of making Twitter a better, more profitable company, he's going to bring back a lot of product innovation.
00:28:18.000So this isn't only about speech policy.
00:28:21.000It's also about restoring innovation to the company because the company has been incredibly, you know, uninnovative for years.
00:28:29.000And I think he's going to fix that problem.
00:28:31.000And that's what's going to make it a much better business.
00:28:32.000And he's already talked about a lot of the new features he's going to bring.
00:28:35.000So it's not only about speech that's going to make Twitter, I think, a more interesting, dynamic platform.
00:28:41.000But back to the point about speech, this really is just about core American values.
00:28:46.000I mean, the First Amendment is first for a reason.
00:28:49.000Our freedom of speech is enshrined in that.
00:28:52.000But the power structure found a loophole to the First Amendment.
00:28:55.000That loophole is that private actors are, they're free to limit people's speech.
00:29:00.000And unfortunately, the town square got privatized.
00:29:03.000It's really the town square is now in the hands of a handful of big tech companies.
00:29:08.000That is where speech occurs, is on these giant social networks that, and they're run by, you know, a small number of sort of executives.
00:29:19.000And so if those executives get together and decide to cancel people or deplatforming, deplatform them, they can really take away their free speech rights.
00:29:27.000So this is really about whether we in the United States are going to have an effective First Amendment anymore.
00:29:35.000And I think that Elon is really pushing back on this idea that Twitter executives, or really, I think he's setting an example for executives of all these big tech companies, whether they are simply going to indulge in their own political and partisan biases and suppress the side of the debate that they personally don't agree with, or whether they're going to set the example of being neutral and staying out of these debates themselves and simply providing the forum for them to take place.
00:30:02.000And I think that, you know, this is ultimately the battle that Elon's taken on.
00:30:08.000David is an amazingly smart and successful tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist, understands this intimately, as you could tell.
00:30:15.000All right, David, I am by no means a crypto expert, but am I really supposed to believe that Sam Bankman-Fried didn't commit any crimes here?
00:30:26.000No, I mean, something like $8 billion of customer deposits have just mysteriously disappeared and no one knows where they've gone.
00:30:33.000So anytime you have that much money disappearing overnight, I think it's safe to assume there's some sort of criminal activity going on.
00:30:41.000But in this case, the way we actually know quite a bit about the fraud already.
00:30:46.000So Sam Bankman-Fried or SBF, as he's known, was the founder of a crypto exchange called FTX.
00:30:54.000At the same time, he ran a hedge fund called Alameda, which was his money and he controlled it.
00:31:01.000And essentially, he was siphoning off customer deposits from FTX to his hedge fund, Alameda, for his personal use, whether it was for making investments or whether it was making donations to political candidates or dark money or philanthropies that he believed in.
00:31:21.000There was this massive siphoning off of customer funds to his own entity, again, for his personal use.
00:31:29.000And I think it's a pretty huge financial fraud that we're still in the early stages of unraveling.
00:31:36.000So, some of the kind of billionaire finance intelligentsia have come out, if I'm not mistaken, Ackman, I think Paul Tudor-Jones, I could be wrong.
00:31:47.000We'll get some of the names here in the chat.
00:31:48.000Have come out and they say they believe him and that he really hasn't done anything wrong.
00:31:53.000And it seems like the PR tour to win over those kinds of people that are the thought leaders that are managing tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars is working.
00:32:08.000I think it's Madoff-like in this sense that apparently FTX or Alameda lost $3 billion last year, and the crypto crash didn't even start until this year.
00:32:20.000So they were already in the hole by a significant amount of money during the bull market.
00:32:26.000And that tells me that something was really wrong there.
00:32:30.000And so the Madoff aspect here was that if customers ever withdrew more money from the site, then they had new deposits coming in, they would not be able to pay off those customer deposits.
00:32:42.000So, and so, in a sense, this was all just a matter of time in terms of it unraveling.
00:32:48.000Because, again, as soon as they would get some sort of event happening, let's say a crypto crash, which is what happened, and you had more customer withdrawals than new net new deposits, the whole thing was going to unravel.
00:33:00.000So, it was a, it was Ponzi-like in that respect.
00:33:04.000But, but, you know, the difference between this and Madoff, the differences are really curious as well, which is that Madoff was a pretty low-key guy.
00:33:14.000Like, nobody knew who he was until he was exposed as running this giant Ponzi scheme.
00:33:21.000I mean, to be certain, he seemed to live a pretty good life, but he wasn't putting himself on the cover of magazines.
00:33:27.000Whereas SBF really put himself forward as the sort of the white knight of the crypto industry, the sort of benevolent crypto king.
00:33:37.000He cultivated media relationships, he courted a lot of press, and he courted a lot of regulators.
00:33:45.000You know, he was taking photographs with people like Maxine Waters, who runs the House Finance Committee.
00:33:52.000He was supposedly, he was reportedly in the back rooms of the SEC helping to write their crypto regulations.
00:33:59.000So, you know, the regulators not only missed this and failed to exercise oversight over this growing fraud that he was perpetrating, but they actually let the fox in the hen house and they were crafting legislation with him and rules with him.
00:34:17.000And that's what I think has really caught not just the crypto world, but sort of the larger finance world and the larger venture community really off guard about this.
00:34:28.000Is that, again, SBF really created this image of being this extremely benevolent person.
00:34:35.000You know, he was always touting this effective altruism that he supposedly believed in.
00:34:40.000You know, this idea that he was going to make many billions of dollars, but he was also going to give it all away.
00:34:45.000And so therefore, we should trust him.
00:34:47.000And so there were many participants, unwitting participants, I think, in the scam.
00:35:10.000And so I think that's the aspect of it that's a little different than Madoff's.
00:35:14.000Thing is so synthetic of a caricature, like the messy hair never wearing a suit, kind of just the aloof thing, it's just the whole thing is just the Kermit, the Kermit, the Frog voice.
00:35:25.000You know yeah no, just to add another layer to this, the.
00:35:28.000I think one of the things that's really interesting about it is the way that Sblf self-diagnosed this and he said, you know in one of these interviews that he did, he said this is the, the woke game that we, we dumb Westerners, play.