The Case To Pardon Derek Chauvin ft. Ben Shapiro

Okay, everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show, Ben Shapiro joins us for the entire episode to speak about why we should pardon Derek Chauvin. This is an incredibly important episode.
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Go to noblegoldinvestments.com. So much of our politics was defined by that term woke.
Where did woke begin? Obviously, 30 or 40, 50, 60 years ago via the Frankfurt School critical theory. But there was a moment during COVID where it seemed as if the

entire society exploded. There was a moment that was caught on video that triggered what is now known as Floydapalooza.
We weren't allowed to think about it at the time. We were only allowed to feel.
We weren't allowed to ask very simple questions about what's really going on here. And as a result, the man in the video, Derek Chauvin, is now going to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Well, now further examination allows us to reanalyze this cultural flashpoint. And a very brave man when it comes to this particular topic, and a great man, Ben Shapiro, is willing to speak out and not just ask the question, but advocate for a pardon for Derek Chauvin.
Joining us now is Ben Shapiro, host of The Ben Shapiro Show, and also the website is pardonderrick.com, co-founder of The Daily Wire. Ben, welcome to the program.
Hey, Charlie. Thanks so much for having me.
Really appreciate it. So Ben, I'm going to just say the floor is yours.
For some people that have not been following this with great detail, this might make them kind of take a second, like a little pause in a second beat. Why are you advocating for Derek Chauvin's pardon? And what have you learned through the course of your research and your rigorous pursuit of the truth that has led you to this advocacy? Well, I think the reason that I'm advocating for the pardon is because Derek Chauvin is not guilty.
And I think that it's very important to explode narratives like the one that you were talking about, because those narratives live on in our memory as sort of flashpoints that people draw upon as evidence of narratives that are false. So the narrative that surrounded the Floyd Chauvin killing was the narrative that America was inherently racist.
Now, those allegations were never actually made a trial. There was never any allegation by prosecutors or by anyone that Derek Chauvin quote unquote killed George Floyd because George Floyd was black.
And yet that was the narrative that burst out all over the country that systemic American policing was racist, that America had to undergo a sort of racial cleansing process that allowed for $2 billion in rioting. In fact, a process that was so important that even if COVID was spreading around, you were allowed to take off your mask and shout in the streets for George Floyd, and you would somehow be free of COVID for doing all of these things.
We all remember this. It was really a quite terrible time in American history, and it was being excused by the entire left, all of the legacy media.
And in fact, if you didn't post the Black Square in favor of Black Lives Matter, you were basically non-personed in terms of sort of social media and the way that you were approached in all of these spaces. Now, the reality of this particular death is now known.
And we know pretty much everything there is to know about it. And there are a bunch of reasons why Derek Chauvin should be pardoned.
By the way, while in federal custody, he was stabbed recently 21 times by a fellow inmate. So it's quite dangerous for him.
The reason why we now know all of this is because we know from jurors that they were pressured, that they felt the pressure, that they were scared to rule in favor of Derek Chauvin. We now know, and we could see it at the time, the amount of public pressure that was brought in that particular case.
The mayor of Minneapolis was signing settlements with the family of George Floyd on behalf of the city in the middle of the trial. The governor of Minnesota at the time was of course Tim Walz, and Tim Walz was basically out there proclaiming the guilt of Derek Chauvin.
Joe Biden was running for president at the time of 2020, and he and the rest of the Democratic regime were talking about how Derek Chauvin was, how this was a key flashpoint in American history and how this was demonstrating sort of the apex moment of all of American racism contained in this particular incident. So first, the first clue that this was not true came, I think, from that, from the fact that it was deemed an incident of American racism and never did anyone ever make a claim.
There were not even federal hate crime charges. There was no claim that Derek Chauvin, quote unquote, killed George Floyd because he was racist.
Then you start to look more into the details of the actual death of George Floyd. Everything from the autopsy report, the original medical examiner autopsy report suggested that he had died, not of failure to breathe because of pressure put on him, but effectively of excited delirium, fentanyl overdose.
The idea in the actual autopsy report suggested that he had enough fentanyl in him, that if he had just found this body on a sidewalk, the medical examiner, then he would have immediately determined that he had died of fentanyl overdose. We know from the actual tape.
So there are sections of the tape that people thought they saw, the eight minutes or four minutes of the eight minute tape. And then there was a lot of tape before that.
So if you actually look at the incident in its entirety, what you found out is that George Floyd was in a car outside of a place of business where he had passed a counterfeit bill. And the police came and arrived.
And there's Derek Chauvin and the rest of the members of the officers who were there. And Derek Chauvin arrested George Floyd.
And it appears that George Floyd either ingested drugs that were on him or he was already high. The reason that he might have ingested drugs is because literally a few years before, we also have a videotape of George Floyd doing exactly that.
He was arrested and the officer had to force him to spit out the drugs. They arrest him.
They take him out of his vehicle. They put him into the vehicle of the police officers.
And a crowd is already gathering because this very often happens when there's a controversial police procedure that's happening. And George Floyd is put into the back of the police vehicle.
He doesn't want to get in. He's complaining.
He's saying that he's scared of being in the car, that he's claustrophobic and all the rest of this kind of stuff. He gets in and immediately upon entering the car, he starts shouting that he can't breathe.
Before he's on the ground, right? I can't breathe became sort of the matter of the moment, the phrase of the moment. People chanting, I can't breathe in homage to George Floyd.
He was saying he could not breathe from when he was in the car, suggesting either that it was untrue, that he could actually breathe. Because normally if you can talk, you can breathe, but or that he was already having difficulty breathing based on the fact that he had a very enlarged heart, that he had a lot of drugs in his system and that he was actually having a medical issue before he was actually taken out of the car, by the way, at his request, at his request.
He said, I don't want to be in the car. And so they said, OK, so they took him out of the car and they put him in prone position on the ground.
Now, the Minneapolis police training model includes the sort of position that Derek

Chauvin was using. This was introduced at trial.
Derek Chauvin had been taught this by the

Minneapolis police department. This is a normal procedure.
In fact, much of the tape of him on

George Floyd's quote unquote neck from a different angle is him on George Floyd's shoulder. This was

admitted by witnesses for the prosecution. At some of that time, he was on George Floyd's quote-unquote neck from a different angle is him on George Floyd's shoulder.
This was admitted by witnesses for the prosecution. At some of that time, he was on George Floyd's shoulder.
Now, at some point during that eight minutes, George Floyd went non-responsive. It seems to be unclear to Chauvin when he was non-responsive, but there is no medical evidence that, for example, there was damage to his trachea, which would cut off the air.
There was no bruising on his neck.

So the autopsy and medical reports suggested, again, that at best, there is certainly reasonable

doubt that he died because of the suppression technique specifically that Derek Chauvin

was using.

And so the entire trial was based on the supposition that simply by being put into the prone position

and then Derek Chauvin being on his shoulder and then partially, not with his full weight, partially on his neck to suppress him, that this led to George Floyd's death in the form of murder, not even in the form of manslaughter, not even accidental death. Second degree murder is what he was convicted of in state court.
The evidence does not match up with this. And we covered this extensively at the time.

And again, I was like everybody else when I first saw that tape. I think everybody, when they first

saw the tape, they said, this is ugly, right? It looks ugly because it turns out a lot of police

procedure actually looks quite ugly. And so you can find tweets from me at the time saying this

looks like bad policing by Derek Chauvin. So first of all, bad policing is not the same as second

degree murder. That's the first thing.
But second of all, as the evidence emerged, the medical

evidence emerged, the medical examiner's original report, new evidence that was emerging about

Here we go. That's the first thing.
But second of all, as the evidence emerged, the medical evidence emerged, the medical examiner's original report, new evidence that was emerging about his condition, new tape that was emerging, the backstory, all of it. As that emerged, it became clear that Derek Chauvin certainly was not guilty of second degree murder, which is what he was charged with.
There are all sorts of questions about the charges. As you recall, he was simultaneously charged with first and second degree murder.
Those are charges that are mutually exclusive, and yet they were both brought in an attempt to allow the jury to find a second degree murder if they weren't going to find a first degree murder. So there were all sorts of improprieties in the trial.
Even if you just want to take this from a legal level, the idea that Derek Chauvin had a fair trial is wrong. The idea that the jury was impartial is wrong.
The idea that there was evidence sufficient to suggest beyond a reasonable doubt that George Floyd was murdered in the second degree is wrong. We know for a fact that the entire narrative, which was drawn for the entire country, that America is systemically racist was rooted in an incident in which race was not even alleged.
I want to repeat that, everyone, to internalize that. The 1619 Project was largely accelerated out of this.

Robin DiAngelo's fame was born out of this.

We had police departments defunding the police.

In fact, you can look at a material increase in crime in both Minneapolis and across the country because of this one incident. Not just the riots.

We saw murder rates.

We saw arson.

We saw carjackings. We saw widespread gang violence because of one incident.
And so, Ben, I want to compliment you for your willingness to speak out on this because it wasn't just one injustice. This was the gateway drug towards mass anarchy in the streets and an unnecessary thousands of people dying on top of the baseline crime rate.
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So Ben, some people in the audience are probably saying, wait a second, I saw the video for myself. His knee was on the neck for nine minutes.
It's tattooed in my memory. You guys, Charlie and Ben are getting too cutesy here with trying to introduce data that isn't relevant.
Don't lie to me. This is what happened.
It was obviously police brutality. It wasn't some sort of legal conspiracy.
Ben, what would your response be to that? And also, when did you start to form the opinion that this was a railroaded via the justice system against Derek Chauvin? So when I started to change my opinion, and again, you can find tweets from me in May when this first broke talking about police brutality was watching the actual trial. So when I watched the actual trial, when I read the medical examiner's report, when I was watching the defense witnesses and the prosecution witnesses, by the way, when I was watching all that go down, it occurred to me, they do not have the evidence to convict this man beyond a reasonable doubt.
I mean, there's just not that that's just not the case. And then when after the trial, further evidence came out about the predilections of the jurors.
So, for example, one of the jurors was photographed at a protest commemorating the Dr. King's I Have a Dream speech during the summer of 2020.
This is Coleman Hughes reporting for the Free Press. At that protest, two of George Floyd's family members addressed the crowd.
And this juror was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of King and the words, get your knee off our necks in BLM. How is that a fair trial? In what world is that even remotely a fair trial? I think that the image of Chauvin on top of Floyd became such an iconic image that it's very difficult for people to imagine that anything else happened.
But there was tape both before and after the incident. There's medical examiners reports.
There's medical information about George Floyd and his prior status. And all of that makes an enormous difference.
Now, the majestic power of Chauvin in the suppression position with Floyd obviously is going to have an outsized power in the public memory. But that's exactly why I think it's really important for people to speak out.
And I think for the pardon to occur, because in order for there to be a rethinking of things like this, it is important to get people to even reexamine the issue. There's so many things people think that they saw that they never actually saw over the course of the last 10 years.
I mean, so many different things. And here I recall the supposed Charlottesville speech by President Trump, in which he supposedly said that that neo-Nazis were very fine people.
And then if you go back and actually watch the speech, he never said anything remotely like that. But that was emblazoned in people's memories because it was hit so hard and so often that many people still think that that is in fact true and that is in fact the case.
There are still people on the left, many people, who still believe that hands up, don't shoot. In the case of Michael Brown and Ferguson was true, that he held up his hands and then was shot by a police officer.
And so the reality is that the way the memory works is if people show you an image over and over and over and over, that's the only thing in your memory about the particular case. I'm not denying that the image is visually ugly.
I'm not denying that the tape doesn't, quote unquote, look good. What I am saying is that if you've ever done a police ride along or if you know police officers, guess what? Policing is a rough and difficult job that people who are rough and difficult have, it's a tough thing to do.
Policing is very, very difficult. You're in the worst situations with people at the worst moments of their lives.
And what that means is none of it looks good on tape. I mean, honestly, like do a ride along with a cop for one night and you will see a bunch of things that would not look good on tape.
Why? Because you're dealing with people who may be violent with police officers, who may be a threat, who may be high on drugs, who may not know what they're doing. And so simply taking an image out of context and then saying, because this image is ugly and because it exists, I'm going to ignore all other evidence.
That is not the way certainly our justice system is supposed to work. And that's the real key.
You don't have to believe that Derek Chauvin is quote unquote innocent in order to understand that he is not guilty. Those are not the same thing.
The standard of justice in the United States is that you have to be proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And Derek Chauvin in the public mind was not just convicted of second degree murder.
He was convicted in the public mind of first degree murder. And he was also convicted of a brutal American racism.
Again, I come back to this point. These things were not alleged.
And just as I think that it is very important that President Trump, for example, pardon pro-lifers, because the image in the public mind that has been created by the legacy media for decades on end is that pro-lifers are violently protesting outside abortion clinics, and therefore they have to be arrested. That's not true.
And so I think the pardon is important. Or the reason I think that it was important for President Trump, even if I disagree with him on some of the pardons on January 6th, to pardon nonviolent people on January 6th is because it is important to reexamine narratives if the narratives are overdrawn.
And again, you don't have to agree with me on every aspect of this case to understand that Derek Chauvin did not receive a free trial and that the major railroading that went on here was not just a railroading of Derek Chauvin. It was a railroading of our police broad writ, as you mentioned.
And it was also a railroading of America in general, because this turned into the launching point for a years long effort to characterize America as deeply and irredeemably racist. There's another element to this as well, which you touched on briefly.
There's so much. Not just suspicion, there's something wrong with the original shift from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner report.
The original county report said something completely different than the later report. And our friend from Alpha News, Liz Collin, has been on this since the very beginning, and she deserves a lot of credit, Liz Collin.
But there is evidence to suggest that the Hennepin County Medical Examiner was pressured in actually the report that was being issued. Floyd had a lethal dose of fentanyl in his system, as shown by his autopsy, and there's evidence that he quickly ingested drugs, as you mentioned, to hide them from the cops.
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Ben, just mentioned briefly here, the autopsy was totally coerced strong-armed usually we look at autopsy say well there's no way politics could get in the way of a medical examination report but it shows here that there was such a thrust there was a willingness to reach a conclusion that america's racist during this political season remember trump was president during president during this. There was political pressure.
Speak about the political pressure in the medical examination process. Well, I mean, we know for a fact that there are people who are involved in this case, medical examiners and others, who are actually the subject of death threats.
If you became a public figure in the Derek Chauvin case, the chances that you were going to be subjected to public pressure were incredibly high. There was only one major autopsy that was a complete documented autopsy of George Floyd.
And it was performed, as you say, by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner. A guy named Dr.
Andrew Baker was performed about 12 hours after he died. And that autopsy found zero evidence of asphyxia.
It found no life-threatening injuries. It found instead that Floyd died of cardiopulmonary arrest, meaning his heart and his lungs stopped working during, quote, law enforcement, subdual restraint, and neck compression.
Also, he had a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl in his blood, 11 milligrams per milliliter, along with a small amount of meth as well as morphine. He also had arteriosclerotic heart disease, described as multifocal, severe hypertensive heart disease, and cardiomegaly, which is an enlarged heart.
The second autopsy that was created was paid for by Floyd's family. It was incomplete.
They didn't have access to Floyd's toxicology report. They didn't have access to his tissue samples.
They didn't have access to his organs, at least some of his organs. And one of the two medical examiners who's brought in, Dr.
Michael Bodden, who's brought in to suggest that it was the cops who actually killed him, he got an enormous number of things wrong in the past. He was a person who was hired to perform an unofficial autopsy on Michael Brown, who we mentioned earlier.
Michael Brown, of course, was the black man who was killed in a confrontation with police officer named Officer Brown over in Ferguson, Missouri. and the autopsy in that particular case, Biden declared that there was no evidence

of a struggle between Brown and Wilson,

which was not true because the cop had claimed correctly that michael brown reached into the car and fired a gun in in the car which is what prompted the actual shooting of michael brown and bodden got it wrong in that autopsy he was the person who they called in so you have the original autopsy says no asphyxia, no actual physical evidence of serious damage. And he died of cardiopulmonary arrest, which again, if you're just doing a basic analysis of, are you going to get excited when you, this is really one of the questions.
Are you going to get excited when you get arrested and you have drugs on you and then you swallow some of the drugs? My guess is you probably will. This causes very often what they call excited delirium.
If it spikes your blood pressure, if it spikes your heart rate, if you have massive pre-existing conditions, if you're a big deal with a lot of drugs in your system, and you're claiming you can't breathe before you even get on the ground, then how can you claim that it was the knee that caused the I can't breathe, as opposed to all of the other circumstances that were causing all of this? And again, just to put this in the most blunt terms, Chauvin did not crush Floyd's neck. He did not crush Floyd's neck.
That must be repeated. So Ben, explain to our audience then how on earth federal charges got involved here and therefore the President Trump wrinkle and angle.
Because typically if there's a police situation where if the police acts improperly, usually the police officer will be handled by local authorities. There might be a DOJ investigation, albeit rare, but there were federal charges as well against Derek Chauvin.
What were they and why do you believe that Derek Chauvin deserves a pardon from the president of the United States? So the charges were brought under denial of civil rights. So these charges were brought and Chauvin basically pled them out because the supposition was that these sentences were largely set to run concurrently.
If it went to trial, he was one of the most highly publicized convicts in the history of the United States. If it went to trial, then he might end up with a longer sentence.
It was basically a plea bargain that he did with the federal government on denial of civil rights. The judge in that particular case said he didn't know why Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck until he died, but he will be punished and that Chauvin would have to pay restitution.
He ended up on the lower end of the expected sentence, which was between 20 and 25 years, which is why he took the plea agreement in the first place. Again, the kind of attempt to say that this is a separate charge, this is one of the problems very often in criminal law, is that you can stack a federal charge on top of a state charge.
The idea that this was a unique violation of civil rights as opposed to simply, even if you want to make the case it was a second degree murder, that this had to do with violation of civil rights.

This is the sort of accusation that it was, in fact, racially driven, even though no evidence

was presented to that real effect.

And so a pardon, would that get him out of jail?

Because there's also state charges as well.

So explain to our audience how that works.

So he would be transferred back to a state prison.

There have been arguments made that I don't find particularly salutary or convincing that if you were transferred from a federal prison to a state prison, this would be worse for him. That's certainly not what we've heard from his lawyers.
The reason that I say that is because he was already stabbed 21 times last year in a federal prison, actually. The idea here is, again, twofold.
If he is transferred, if the federal charges go away, if he's pardoned on the federal charges or a sentence commuted on the federal charges, he'll be transferred back to state prison. You can, in some instances, get time chalked up against you in a way, like you serve less time in state prison, probably get five years off his sentence for serving in state prison in a way that you don't with the federal charges.
So just on a practical level, he will do less time in prison if the federal charge goes away than he otherwise would. He's not going to be pardoned on the state charges, unfortunately, because again, the government of Minnesota is what the government of Minnesota is.
Only the governor of Minnesota, the famed oddity Tim Walls, has the power to pardon him on the state charges, which of course Tim Walls will never in a million years do. But he would get time off his sentence in state prison in a way that he would not in federal prison.
And again, it would, I think, create an impetus for reexamination of his case, I would hope at the state level at some point in the future. What do you think is a lesson for the audience and for us in times of hysteria to not repeat the same mistakes? Because in some ways, I wish I would have even spoken out even more during the trial but this was like top level verboten the Overton window has moved dramatically where now this is an acceptable a little bit boundary pushing but somewhat acceptable conversation to have what what is the takeaway for so many people here to make sure the next time the media is force feeding something like this and have we adjusted ben have we adjusted from some of the hysterias they've been trying to push towards us in the last couple of months or years i mean i do think that we've adjusted to some of hysterias i think that we you know are no longer willing to accept at face value many of the narratives that are put out by the legacy media on the other hand i think that there is a possibility of jumping to the wrong conclusion just based on sort of reactivity.
The legacy media will put out a piece of news and the right will immediately just say it's false immediately. And a lot of the time that's true.
But I think that the main lesson we should take away from Floyd is that the social media era rewards immediate reaction and response. That is what the social media era, if you're the first person to comment on something in any way, you're likely to get a lot of clicks.
And you're also likely to get it wrong. And so I think that the lesson from the George Floyd situation should be, as it usually is, why don't we wait for the evidence to come in? Before we jump to a conclusion about something that is highly publicized, why don't we wait for a little more evidence to come in and determine then whether or not the thing is true? Because it turns out that at first blush, things may look one way and it turns out that they are not that way at all.
We've seen this over and over and over from the legacy media, ranging from elements of war to elements of domestic policy, where if you just waited another three days, then you would know a lot more than you originally knew. I will say that I think the American people have started to do that more, particularly on racially charged cases.
We've seen just too many race hoaxes like Jussie Smollett for people to now take at face value any narrative that's put out. People are like, you know, I'm going to wait like 48 hours, 48 hours, and I'll have a lot more information.
If that had been done in this particular case, if people had waited for the medical autopsy to come out, if people had actually waited before immediately running to the streets to protest by the millions about American police brutality and racism, the world would have been a much different and better place.

So let's play cut 11. This was then former Vice President Biden before all that happened in 2020.
Very important here. He did not caution against violence.
Play cut 11. Well, in addressing the unrest, former Vice President Joe Biden initially did not caution against violence, but challenged white people to understand the everyday injustices black people suffer.
That is just one example of hundreds we could play. Ben, what happened next then? Remind the audience of the material increase in crime, in just arson, anarchy in the streets.
This was unfortunately one of the deadlier, more crime-ridden summers since the 1990s because of the misrepresentation of this incident. Ben.
So in order to truly understand what happened, you have to understand that the American crime rate had dropped steadily between 1994, which is when is when the crime bill was signed the much maligned crime bill and between 2013 the crime rate in virtually all of major america's major cities went down then 2014 you get what's called the ferguson effect a term coined by heather mcdonald which suggested that after the michael brown case which again was a completely false case the idea that michael brown was murdered by a white police officer you saw a move toward de-policing in cities where cops said, you know, I'm not going to go into a dangerous situation in which I have to face down somebody of a different race because I might end up on tape. And if I do my job, I'm spending the rest of my life in prison.
And that led to an increase of literally hundreds of murders over the course of the next few years. Then the crime rate seemed to even out over the course of the first Trump administration in many of these areas sort of leveled out.
And then in 2020, it absolutely skyrocketed because all over the country, there were city councils that were withdrawing funding. Police officers understood, they knew the math.
Police officers are human beings, as it turns out, and they know the math. If you go out and you do your job, and if you have to shoot a person who is not your race, if you're a white cop and you shoot a black person, and it turns out that it's under any disputed circumstances, or even in many cases in undisputed circumstances, you will become a target of such ire that you may find yourself in the dock.
You're just not going to do it. If there's a situation where bad things could happen to you, or you could just sit in your cop car, you're going to sit in your cop car and not do it.
And so what you see is a de-policing movement that comes not just from the top, but also from the bottom. And the spike in the crime rate in America's major cities was extraordinary in 2020, 2021.
You saw hundreds of additional murders in America's major cities. By the way, disproportionately of black young people, because it turns out that in order to actually crack down on the kinds of crime that are most likely to cause murder in the United States, namely crime that happens in America's major cities and very often includes gangs, you need cops on the streets doing their jobs.
When you remove cops from the streets and when you tell cops that if they do their jobs, they might end up in the dock, you're going to get a massive increase in the crime rate. That's precisely what you saw over subsequent years.
And that doesn't even include things like Chaz Chop in Seattle, where entire city of Seattle was basically taken over by Antifa rioters or the takeover of Portland completely by Antifa and the wrecking of a great American city, the destruction of San Francisco. All of these things happened on the back of the BLM moment when it turns out that the police became writ large, the great villains in the American national story.
And it turns out that without the cops, things get real bad real fast. Ben, stay right there.
I do want to talk about San Francisco, California, your former home, and Gavin Newsom made some news this last week. Hey, Charlie Kirk here.
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Let's play Cut 187. Gavin Newsom forgetting that he supported legalized racial discrimination.
Play Cut 187. By the way, you're talking to someone who's never supported a defund police movement.
No, I'm not saying, I know, but I was explicit. But also, You did support Prop 16 in 2020, which would have legalized racial prejudice, right? Prop 16 literally would.
I have to go back to my Prop 13. No, no, no.
Prop 16. I'm talking 960 SAT, so a little humility.
Hold on. You're the governor of the largest state in the country.
No, no, no. I saw your debate against DeSantis.
You're good at this stuff. You know what I'm talking about.
Prop 16 would have had legalized racial prejudice, which got defeated by 16 points despite all the institutions. So you're asking me what did wokeism look like? When California, when all the institutions, yourself included, with all due respect, embraced this insane ballot measure, guess what? Even the people of California didn't want racial discrimination remember California since 1996 has had Prop 209s.

There was city council meetings where they said the white people aren't allowed here,

right?

That's not good.

No, it's not good.

And so what ends up happening is a broader question of sensible, not racist suburban

moms that are like, wait a second, I have a eight-year-old white son.

Are you trying to say he's a racist?

Yeah.

And it creates a backlash that then bubbles up, right? I appreciate the perspective. Ben, you lived in California for some time.
You moved your entire company to a freer state. That is slippery Gavin Newsom.
What do you make of that? You could talk more broadly. It doesn't have to just be my conversation with him.
His podcast, his attempt to reinvent himself, to move to the middle. And what is the truth of how California has, let's just say, operated in the last decade? So first of all, Charlie, I thought you were spectacular with Gavin Newsom and he could not stand up to the scrutiny that you put him under.
So just congratulations on that. It was a great service to the country, frankly.
I mean, it's amazing to me when I hear Gavin Newsom talk about the wonders that he has wrought for the state of California. My family literally fled California because of people like Gavin Newsom and his awful rule in California.
Crime rates went up under Gavin Newsom. Homelessness went up under Gavin Newsom.
The economy went down under Gavin Newsom. It's very difficult to imagine a thing that Gavin Newsom did not help make worse in the state of California.
There was a massive decarceration movement that happened under both Gavin Newsom and his predecessor, Jerry Brown, an attempt to basically empty out prisons in California because of, quote unquote, over incarceration and because of prison crowding. And so one of the things that major cities and counties in California did was they actually stopped prosecuting misdemeanors entirely because they were so afraid of actually jailing people that they said, okay, if you shoplift under a certain amount, we just won't call it a misdemeanor

anymore. And so San Francisco became a place where you could basically just walk into a CVS,

fill up a couple of bags and walk out and know that even if you were arrested, that you were

then going to be released back into public charge pretty much the next day. And so police officers

stopped actually doing any of this stuff. Again, California is a great example of what happens

when a state is so governed by wokeism and dumb ideology that the state gets materially worse. And it's fun to watch Gavin Newsom now try to sort of fix his public profile.
He understands that in 2020, 2024, if he wanted to move in the Democratic Party, he had to move way to the left. And now he's recognizing that after President Trump's victory, that the Democratic Party, if it wishes to win in the future, is going to have to try to make some move toward the center.
The problem is that he has anchored his record so hard to the left. It's very difficult to see how he can stretch beyond that back to a center that he abandoned long ago.
Ben, I think you should go on the Gavin Newsom podcast. I think that you could prosecute the case in California far better than I did.
I try to make it macro. I have not lived in – let me put it this way.
I have not had the pleasure of walking by Sepulveda Boulevard and having to walk over homeless people in order to get to the office building. I have not had the firsthand experience, which he always – Gavin will always go to the argument from authority.
Oh, you don't understand California. We have the biggest this, the biggest that.

But they are spending down the inheritance of a prior generation.

And California should never lose population.

It's too beautiful.

It's too amazing.

It has all these assets, period.

Ben, your thoughts on that?

I mean, that's 100% true.

I talked about this on my show.

Just a few months ago, I went to visit L.A.

because we still have relatives out there.

And we went to dinner with a couple who are still living there

and did not leave the way that we did, despite my encouragement.

And right after dinner, we watched them get carjacked, like, pretty much right in front of us. We walked one way with our security.
They walked the other way. And another car pulled up right in front of them.
A bunch of guys jumped out of the car, grabbed them, stole their jewelry, took his keys and his wallet, and stole all of his stuff. I mean, like, right in front of him.
And it took the cops 15 minutes to get there. And this had been in the same year that he had also been assaulted by a homeless person and his wife threatened with a knife downtown.
I mean, like this is what California has become. So when I hear Gavin Newsom talk up the magic of California, if it were so magical, people wouldn't be leaving.
Again, people vote with their feet. And what you've seen is that all the red areas of the country are gaining population and all the blue areas of the country are radically losing population.
By the way, this is such a threat to the future of democratic rule in this country. I pointed this out before, and it's really important.
The 2020 census was done wrong. The Census Department acknowledged it was done wrong.
If the 2020 census had been done correctly, President Trump would have been able to win re-election without winning any, any of the blue wall states. He would have won the election based on pure population in the South.
Well, so Ben, I got a good project for you. If you read, I believe the census is the 14th Amendment.
It says the census must be done within 10 years, not in 10 years. I think President Trump can call a new census.
I think President Trump should call a new census. Why not? Get Howard Lutnick out there and call a new census.
Absolutely. He absolutely should because the reality is, and again, this was publicly acknowledged by Joe Biden's Commerce Department.
They publicly acknowledged that the Commerce Department had done it wrong and that, again, there were seats in Congress, by the way, not just the Electoral College, in Congress that were removed from Florida, from Texas, from Arizona, from a wide spate of states that President Trump won. And then there were states that lost population that were over-counted in the census, like New York, New Jersey, and California.
Well, like Minnesota. And as I say, Minnesota, all of these states lost population, but they didn't lose congressional seats or electoral votes the way that they should have in line with the census.
So listen, if that passes constitutional must constitutional muster and, you know, we should check that with the current solicitor general and AJ,

that is something absolutely the Trump administration should do because you want to talk about equal representation. That is not equal representation.

Ben, congratulations on all the success and thank you for speaking out on issues that other people

were ignoring. Hope to see you soon.
Thanks so much.

Thanks, Charlie.

Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much. Thanks, Charlie.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.