Should Donald Trump Destroy the Filibuster?

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Speaker 4 All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show. Andrew Colvett here.

Speaker 4 I'm a little bit remote today, but I am joined, of course, by Blake Neff, our not-so-secret weapon, and Mikey McCoy in the studio holding it down. Hello, gentlemen.
Welcome, welcome.

Speaker 5 How we doing? Hey, Andrew.

Speaker 4 How are we doing? Hey, Mike, it's good to see you again, man.

Speaker 5 Yeah, thank you, guys.

Speaker 5 It's nice to be back.

Speaker 5 I know a lot's happened since I've been gone. And so I'll just say

Speaker 5 what happened in Utah was the worst day of my life and following the worst seven weeks of my life, of our lives, Blake and Andrew. And I just, it's still really

Speaker 5 dramatic and difficult to talk about.

Speaker 5 I haven't really been able to. and so I just wanted to thank you and Blake.

Speaker 3 Um,

Speaker 5 I wanted to thank you.

Speaker 5 Thank you.

Speaker 4 Well, you're doing great, Mikey. Blake, you're doing great.
Everybody's doing great. I want to say that our team is doing heroically, actually.
When you see what we accomplished this week in

Speaker 4 Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. And then, by the way, guys, we had our first the kickoff of our high school tour, which is our Club America tour.
We had over 500 students come out for that in Nevada.

Speaker 4 I'm just really proud of the team. We're doing heroic work, and this has been honestly a tremendous, tremendous week that

Speaker 4 it just shows

Speaker 4 the spirit that Charlie implanted into so many of the people that run Turning Point and that are still a part of Turning Point. And we're going from strength to strength in so many ways.

Speaker 4 So, you know, Mikey,

Speaker 4 from us to you, you're doing a phenomenal job, genuinely.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 4 Yeah, man.

Speaker 4 So, Blake, why don't you kick things off and just set the table on this filibuster discussion that's happening right now? So, last night,

Speaker 4 Trump sent a shot across the bow.

Speaker 6 Yes, so we'll get into that. First, very quickly, I do want to flog something because Charlie would be angry at us if we didn't.
There are elections next Tuesday in New Jersey and in Virginia.

Speaker 6 They are tough races. They are races, to be honest.
We are unlikely to win, but we are going to try to win them. We talked with Cliff Maloney the other day.

Speaker 6 He said there were about, I think, think, 80,000 unreturned Republican male ballots in New Jersey.

Speaker 6 So if you're one of those people in New Jersey who has one of those ballots and hasn't returned it, shut off this show, fill it out, and turn it in right now in Virginia.

Speaker 6 The last day to early vote is tomorrow.

Speaker 6 So if you're in Virginia and you're allowed to early vote and you haven't yet, shut off this show, go to your county courthouse or wherever you're allowed to early vote and do it now.

Speaker 3 Thank you very much.

Speaker 6 We're going to flog that next Monday and we'll be broadcasting the election results on Tuesday.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 6 Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Speaker 4 Well, hey, I just want to throw this up, Blake.

Speaker 4 The 329. This is the recent polling.
We got

Speaker 4 Cheryl is up by

Speaker 4 one point according to the latest polls. This is from Emerson College.
And Jack Chitterelli, so it's 49 to 48. We got about 3% undecided, but remember,

Speaker 4 there's two little pieces of information I want you guys to hold deep in your hearts as you go out there and you seize the momentum. Independents are backing Chitterelli by plus nine.

Speaker 4 And here's another one.

Speaker 4 If you are asked, who do you support,

Speaker 4 they'll say it one way. But when voters are asked who do they think their neighbors are voting for,

Speaker 4 guess what? Chittarelli's up by six, which is a very interesting way to poll this because sometimes people will say, oh, of course I'm going Democrat to a pollster. But when they ask

Speaker 4 who do you think your friends and your families and your coworkers, your neighbors are voting for, to see Chittarelli up six is a very, very promising sign. So keep the faith in New Jersey.

Speaker 6 All right. So anyway, the filibuster thing.
So this just came up last night and this morning.

Speaker 6 It's flaring up. It's coming thanks to President Trump.
We have the ongoing government shutdown.

Speaker 6 It's still going, and we're possibly hitting a crisis point tomorrow because SNAP benefits are set to expire. Lots of stuff to be said about that.

Speaker 6 But President Trump's response, so last night on Truth Social, he said this. He had a pretty long post.
I'm not going to read the whole thing, but he was saying,

Speaker 6 you know, Democrats have gone off the deep end. They have Trump derangement syndrome.
They have trillions of dollars, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 6 And then he says, it is time, now time for Republicans to play their Trump card, all caps, and go for what is called the nuclear option. Get rid of the filibuster and get rid of it now.

Speaker 6 Never have the Democrats fought so hard to do something because they knew the tremendous strength that terminating the filibuster would give them. They want to substantially expand, pack the U.S.

Speaker 6 Supreme Court, make Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico states.

Speaker 6 Goes on and on. It's actually quite the long thing.
And then he doubled down on that

Speaker 6 this morning.

Speaker 6 He made a post that said: because of the fact the Democrats have gone stone cold crazy, the choice is clear: initiate the nuclear option, get rid of the filibuster, and make America great again.

Speaker 3 Now,

Speaker 6 I would guess the Senate is probably unlikely to go for that, but Trump has a lot of power to pressure people.

Speaker 6 And I think it's an interesting debate. We were talking about this.
You know, should it be gone for? And

Speaker 6 my impulse, and what I would tell Charlie when we would discuss this, is if you're going to get rid of the filibuster, you've got to do it basically as a day one thing.

Speaker 6 They should have done it the day Trump took office because you need to maximize what you get out of it.

Speaker 6 And then you go in because there's all these things we want to do that we can't do because you need 60 votes to do it. Change our immigration laws.

Speaker 6 Change environmental laws so it's easier to build things in America.

Speaker 6 You know change change our budgeting process, do maybe entitlement reforms, all these numbers of things you'd want to do.

Speaker 6 And it would be a huge misfire, I think, if we were to get rid of the filibuster, get rid of the 60-vote barrier, and all we get out of it is we end a shutdown and we resume snap benefits.

Speaker 6 And then if Democrats take office after 2028, God forbid, but it's a possibility, then they come in and they're getting that day one no filibuster thing where they get to run wild.

Speaker 6 And I think that would be my concern and probably Charlie's concern if he was here to talk about it with us. How about you guys?

Speaker 4 Well, I feel like I feel a bit conflicted because I think the one main thing that would be worth ending the filibuster for is immigration reform.

Speaker 4 Either an immigration moratorium or at least a dramatic reduction and a replacing of our current model with something that was more merit-based and more interested in what does America get out of it?

Speaker 4 I think immigration is the first, second, and third, and fourth, and fifth most important issue in our country. I think it's all about the future of America.

Speaker 4 So if you're going to do it, you got to have the guts to do that. I don't think it's worth blowing up the filibuster to...

Speaker 4 Yeah, just turn SNAP benefits back on or get the government going. I mean, I think we are in a winning position when it comes to the government shutdown.

Speaker 4 We, as the Republican Party, we have tried to open the government multiple, multiple times. The Democrats have blocked it time and again.

Speaker 4 They have even tried to pass a clean bill to turn snap benefits back on for people. So this is the newest flashpoint is the snap benefits.
But here's the deal. If we do this, there will come a time,

Speaker 4 and we've just got to be perfectly honest about it, where they will make Puerto Rico a state. And that's two more

Speaker 4 Democrat senators. They will probably try and make Washington, D.C.
a state. That's two more senators on top of that.

Speaker 4 So you could be staring down the barrel of a situation where if you take this away,

Speaker 4 then we might not ever have a majority in the U.S. Senate again.
I mean, we could. Now, J.D.

Speaker 4 Vance said at our turning point event at Old Miss, like, we shouldn't be afraid to do stuff just because we know that the Democrat Party is going to to do it.

Speaker 4 Well, this is one instance that at least in the previous iteration, we had Kirsten Sinema and we had Joe Manchin that blocked the nuclear option from being on the table for the Democrats, and that probably saved the Republic.

Speaker 4 So I feel very, very conflicted. Obviously, it's tempting to do.
Anytime a party's in power, it's tempting to do. But I think we have to be very, very

Speaker 4 cautious. about doing this.
And we've seen that Mike Johnson has come out against blowing up the filibuster. So I don't know if you have final thoughts there, Blake, but

Speaker 4 it's a hornet's nest. That's for sure.

Speaker 6 You always just, anytime, there's a lot of things Republicans have wanted to do. And anytime you're going to do something politically, you have to think what will happen next.

Speaker 6 You always want to think the medium-term consequences of what you will do. And this is one of the biggest ones of all where you have to think that out.

Speaker 6 So, be careful what you wish for, is what we would say.

Speaker 4 This is Speaker Johnson

Speaker 4 coming out against President Trump's tweets.

Speaker 4 Let's call them truths in anger. Totally understandable.
It's 31 days into a government shutdown. The Democrats have not shown any desire to negotiate in good faith.

Speaker 4 So we understand where it's coming from. Play cut 330.

Speaker 7 What you're seeing is an expression of the president's anger at the situation. He is as angry as I am and the American people are about this madness.
Do your basic job. I'm going to say this again.

Speaker 7 We have put zero,

Speaker 7 zero Republican policy priorities on this ER. It is Biden-level policies and spending.
They have no excuse at all not to support it. They have no excuse to put all this

Speaker 7 pain on the American people, except that for what we've just articulated and repeated here every day.

Speaker 4 All right, so Blake, this is obviously Speaker Johnson trying to do a little damage control, but I think Trump is dead serious. I think he's fed up.

Speaker 4 He's thrown his hands up in the air and he wants to do this.

Speaker 6 He is. He is.
But I think you think about how Trump likes to approach things. Trump generally is a guy who's very much what is immediately in front of me.
He's a guy who want he wants wins. He's

Speaker 6 you don't want to say he's a guy who's looking directly in front of him. And so he's thinking, I have a problem now.
What could resolve that problem now?

Speaker 6 And people say like, oh, well, the filibuster keeps us from doing this. And he'd say, let's get rid of it.
And we're getting a lot of emails from different directions.

Speaker 6 And I want to flag, you know, one person said, for example, we got an email email from Greg here who says, nuke the filibuster, fix everything, then put it back.

Speaker 5 But also, we have one saying, when Dems take control, first thing on their list will be to end the filibuster.

Speaker 6 So why don't we just do it? So a few thoughts there. First of all,

Speaker 6 Democrats had power under Biden, and they did not manage to get rid of the filibuster. They had...

Speaker 6 Joe Manchin didn't want to vote to do it. Kirsten Sinema didn't want to vote to do it.
Now, both of those people are gone. So that would be an argument.
Maybe next time they will get rid of it.

Speaker 6 On the other hand, you might also see next time there could be a a different Democrat who decides they enjoy the power from being the most right-wing Democrat.

Speaker 6 That gave them a lot of influence. That gave them a lot of play in Washington.
There's always the temptation to be that. So it's always been harder to kill the filibuster than people expect.

Speaker 6 I've been around for 20 years. People have been telling me the Democrats will nuke the filibuster the next time they're in power, and they haven't done it yet.
So there's that factor.

Speaker 6 The other thing about, you know, that get rid of it and put it back. And we're looking at, this is the power of norms.
This is the power of tradition.

Speaker 6 the truth is once the filibuster is destroyed it will be gone that's the way of it yet there is this power it exerts as long as it exists so you can't really get rid of it and then put it back because it could just be voted away again What has kept it in place is the fact that it is in place.

Speaker 6 And so if you're going to approach the matter of getting rid of the filibuster, of making it a 50-vote thing instead of a 60-vote thing, you do have to think about the timing of it.

Speaker 6 What really will justify you getting rid rid of it?

Speaker 6 And I'd say the only, in my opinion, strong argument in favor of this is at least if you're doing this, you're probably, to bring back SNAP, you're probably doing it for something that most Americans generally approve of.

Speaker 6 Whereas if you're nuking the filibuster to push

Speaker 6 a very strong right-wing priority that maybe isn't polling 80-20, that could produce some political blowback. But the reason, that's why you want to do it at the start of your term, too.

Speaker 6 You do your most aggressive, most ambitious stuff right at the outset.

Speaker 6 Whereas if we're getting rid of it now, we're unlikely to pass any of those big immigration reform things we want to do because they'll be all nervous.

Speaker 6 They won't want to do big, ambitious stuff during the midterm election year.

Speaker 8 Hey, everybody, Andrew Colvett, executive producer of The Charlie Kirk Show. Charlie understood that to lead, he needed to learn.
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Speaker 4 Well, here's what I would say. Trump is not going to have the votes to get rid of the filibuster, right? I mean, let's just be honest.

Speaker 4 We've got four Republicans that have just gone against him on tariffs, right? It's going to die in the House.

Speaker 4 It's dead in the water anyways. But

Speaker 4 you're not going to get the filibuster nuked, anyways. The question I have is more of a theoretical question.
Would we be better off without the filibuster? Both ways. Here's my thought.

Speaker 4 The Democrats have more lasting change that they can accomplish with Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. becoming states.
You can't undo that if that happens.

Speaker 4 You can't roll those things back, really. I mean, you could probably, but it's highly unlikely.
I'd give it a 0.001% chance that once you create two states, you could undo the creation of states.

Speaker 4 I don't know what the legalities of that are. Those are two lasting, permanent changes that they could affect within the body politics.

Speaker 4 So the question is, do we have similarly worthwhile changes that we could affect? Could we create East Washington, East Oregon? I don't know. But the point is,

Speaker 4 the options at the disposal of the Democrats are far scarier than the options we have.

Speaker 4 Now, I do believe that immigration, it would be such a huge, huge change to the country, but I'm still not convinced that we have the votes for that.

Speaker 4 I guarantee you, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Rand Paul, these guys would still try and block a really robust immigration reform policy, even if we nuked the filibuster.

Speaker 4 I think here's my basic point, Blake.

Speaker 4 If we got the GOP to a stronger position, then maybe I would consider it. But we do not have a strong enough GOP.

Speaker 4 or anywhere close to a strong enough GOP to even begin entertaining nuking the filibuster, and we should keep our hands clean. There's zero reason to even consider that right now.
That's my bias.

Speaker 6 My bias remains: the Democrats are likely to eventually get rid of it, but let them be the ones who smash that Pandora's box, because then they're the ones who have the disadvantage.

Speaker 6 They probably don't do it as their day one thing. They probably only do it partway through a term.
They do something extreme with it. It creates political blowback.

Speaker 6 Let them break it, and then hopefully the next time we're in power, we're able to have this day one post-filibuster agenda.

Speaker 6 But I did want to highlight sort of the big picture issue that's happened, which is because of the filibuster existing the way it has, and it's gotten more and more intense over the decades, it's sort of, it's messed up American politics because American politics is not supposed to have a 60-vote supermajority threshold to pass any legislation out of Congress.

Speaker 6 If you read the Federalist Papers, Madison says Congress is supposed to be the most powerful branch of government because they write the laws, they allocate the funding, and that's kind of gone away because the Senate is permanently paralyzed.

Speaker 6 And so we've gotten this imperial presidency, for example, because we need the executive branch to do everything.

Speaker 6 Like, for example, why, you know, we've talked about why the Civil Rights Act went so haywire and led to all this bureaucracy and HR hellscape. And it's because...

Speaker 6 The executive branch is issuing regulatory guidances and, you know, interpretations of the law that Congress can never really really check because Congress hardly passes any laws at all.

Speaker 6 Or we're paralyzed. We can't reform immigration law because Congress can't pass anything.

Speaker 6 We can't change environmental laws that are clearly stale and need reform because you can't get these 60 vote thresholds on anything.

Speaker 6 And it's led to this thing where we have this sort of fake rubber stamp Congress that can't do anything, that can't assert itself on anything. And that's also why we have bad Republicans.

Speaker 6 We have all these bad Republicans who aren't, who can't be held to account for being frauds on immigration and all this other stuff because, well, can't pass this. We don't have 60 votes to do it.

Speaker 6 If it's 50 votes, you can actually really, really put a Republican's feet to the fire when they are not passing something that you need.

Speaker 4 So get this, Blake. I actually love where your head's at because it does create a paralysis within the legislative body that has stripped it of its constitutionally designed power.

Speaker 4 And the balance of power with the executive branch has been thrown out of whack. So what do we get? We get a lot of EOs.
We get a lot of rule by fiat.

Speaker 4 And that feels like a lot of us don't have representation when the other party's in power.

Speaker 4 But get this, without the 17th Amendment, because remember, the 17th Amendment made it so that Republicans or that, sorry, that senators in each state are elected by popular vote as opposed to selected by the state representatives.

Speaker 4 If we didn't have the 17th Amendment, guess how many Republicans we would have in the Senate? Do you have an approximate guess?

Speaker 6 I mean,

Speaker 6 people do this, but it would change everything about American politics. But we would have more.
That is true.

Speaker 4 We would have 70 right now.

Speaker 4 70.

Speaker 4 Man, that would have been 60 fate full R states for two senators each.

Speaker 4 That'd be 68 for that. And then two states would split.
We'd be at 70 Republican senators. So whoever drafted the 17th Amendment, Democrats should be thanking their lucky stars that that happened.

Speaker 4 Just absolutely insane.

Speaker 4 All right, without further ado, I'm so excited to bring in Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles Show, and just all-around good, good American, good Catholic American, because that seems to be, I want to actually get into that with you, Michael.

Speaker 4 A little J.D. Vance dust up about Usha, but we're going to start with the most important.
Tell us what you did this week. You went before the U.S.
Senate.

Speaker 4 It was a subcommittee hearing on the rise of political violence. It was hosted and chaired by Senator Eric Schmidt from the great state of Missouri.
Tell us what that was all about, Michael.

Speaker 3 It was a really important hearing. I was honored to be invited and to go testify.

Speaker 3 Chairman Schmidt called it, and at as timely a moment as you could imagine, he opened it, by the way, with a beautiful tribute to Charlie. And

Speaker 3 if people haven't gone to see the testimony, just even that opening, I think was really beautiful.

Speaker 3 And that was obviously the cause of the testimony, because there's been a lot of political violence and it has been increasing. There was a Pew Poll just came out.

Speaker 3 85% of Americans think that political violence is getting worse in our country. When 85% of Americans agree on anything, I think you can acknowledge that it's happening.

Speaker 3 And so he said, all right, obviously, this is a long-standing problem that has reached this horrific, tragic climax in Charlie's assassination.

Speaker 3 and in the reaction to Charlie's assassination and the minimizing and the excusing and the justifying and even the celebrating at all levels of the American left.

Speaker 3 And so we need to figure out what's really going on here. So I felt it was important to go.
The Democrats called their own minority witnesses.

Speaker 3 What was really disappointing is that half the Democrats on the panel didn't even show up. The ones who did show up asked...
I thought, ridiculous questions.

Speaker 3 You know, they would just bring up January 6th or whatever. They wouldn't even let us answer on the points of January 6th,

Speaker 3 I think, because they know the answers would be devastating to them.

Speaker 3 And then there was one moment in particular that I thought was really crazy, because one of the guys on this subcommittee is Corey Booker.

Speaker 3 And Corey Booker has endorsed Jay Jones for Attorney General of Virginia, Jay Jones, who has called for Republicans to be killed. And he's clarified, he wasn't joking about that.

Speaker 3 So Corey Booker shows up late. He uses up all his time just bloviating, saying it's really a both sides issue, but actually secretly it's entirely a right-wing issue.
And anyway,

Speaker 3 we need to be more careful about our words. We need to take back our words when we say things we shouldn't have said.
We need to be introspective.

Speaker 3 The questioning then goes to Senator Blackburn on the other side of the room.

Speaker 3 I'm listening to her, and I say, okay, well, that's a good question, but I want to get back to something Senator Booker said.

Speaker 3 You know, if he's really serious about this, it seems like he's setting the stage to withdraw his endorsement from Jay Jones.

Speaker 3 He should do that now. I turn.

Speaker 3 Booker left the room. There's a Corey Booker-shaped hole in the wall.
The whole thing on the Democrat side was completely disingenuous. It was crocodile tears.

Speaker 3 And the conclusion that I have to reach from that is the Democrats don't want to talk about political violence because, one, it's coming from the left, even the Atlantic magazine admits it, and two, because their base supports it.

Speaker 3 And I can't come to any conclusion other than the Democrats in government are more or less fine with the political violence, too.

Speaker 4 Well, I fear you're right, Michael. There's a clip here that from Jennifer Welch,

Speaker 4 who I confess I had no idea who she was until about a week ago. And she apparently has amassed quite a following as a podcaster.
She's a former Bravo reality star that became a podcaster.

Speaker 4 And she says some pretty troubling things that lead me to believe that your conclusions reached after this subcommittee hearing are sadly more likely than not true. Play cut 283.

Speaker 10 So listen up, Democratic establishment.

Speaker 10 You can either jump on board with this

Speaker 10 or we're coming after you in the the same way that we come after MAGA.

Speaker 3 Period.

Speaker 10 They're that are beholden to the same corporations that Donald Trump, that helped Donald Trump get elected. Kudos to Bernie, to AOC, to Zoron.
And that woman out in somewhere middle America saying,

Speaker 10 Charlie Kirk, he was a racist. He was a piece of.

Speaker 10 There are so many more of us than there are of them. And these Democrats that continue to play patty cake with corporations, nobody wants that.
Nobody wants you.

Speaker 4 So, Michael, is she right that the Democrat base does not want to moderate, that they do not want to confront the demons in their own closet and their own activist, militant base?

Speaker 3 You know the polls as well as I.

Speaker 3 After Charlie's assassination, YouGov conducted surveys showed that people who identify as very liberal are eight times as likely as people who are very conservative to justify political violence.

Speaker 4 Let's throw that image up. This is 31, image 31, please.
And I believe this is the poll you're looking at. And that crazy, we've shown it

Speaker 4 a number of times on this show, Michael, but this is to me the scariest graph that exists in American politics today, where you have 18 to 39-year-old self-described progressives with that wild

Speaker 3 standout node, that blue left dot on the screen, where you and you contrast that with the same age group among conservatives, and they are among the most if not the most peaceful of all the cohorts on this survey well this is what's really scary this is kind of like the second part so if you just look at all age groups very liberal eight times as likely to justify political violence is very conservative then you zoom in on what you're showing and it breaks it down by young people middle-aged people older people and if you look at the older people the liberals and the conservatives basically about the same.

Speaker 3 Liberals are a little more likely to support political violence, but it's almost the same. Moderates, the least likely of all.
When you zoom back to the younger groups,

Speaker 3 something changes. First of all, the moderates and the conservatives flip.
The young conservatives are much less likely than the young moderates to support political violence.

Speaker 3 They're the least likely of that age group. Then it's moderates, and then the young liberals spike in their support up to 26% for political violence.

Speaker 3 So not only is this today a major problem on the left, it's getting worse because you're looking at the young people, it's a crystal ball for the future.

Speaker 3 So I suspect Jennifer Welch is probably right about this. I, like you, had never heard of her or never seen her face before, that viral clip.
However, she's not just some fringe nobody.

Speaker 3 There are other interviews where she's sat down with Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat leader in the House.

Speaker 3 In that interview, he lauds her, he praises her, and she says, oh, I've sat down with a bunch of your colleagues too. So, you know, this is not an aberration.

Speaker 3 I think every single data point we see, the public opinion polls, the statements of the prominent liberals, all the way down to what we were discussing at the Senate testimony, which is the actual cases of political violence, they're coming from the left.

Speaker 3 What's so amazing about those data now is that even the Atlantic has to admit, okay, political violence is primarily a left-wing problem, not a right-wing problem today. That's using data sets.

Speaker 3 that don't even count all the left-wing violence.

Speaker 3 Because if you look at all of these data sets and even the federal numbers, they're not counting the BLM riots that left dozens of people dead and billion dollars in property damage.

Speaker 3 That doesn't count as left-wing political violence. They're not counting all sorts of attacks on

Speaker 3 Tesla attacks. The Tesla dealerships.
And then the incident that I was called to testify about was a campus event at University of Pittsburgh.

Speaker 3 Two Antifa operatives who are card-carrying members of Antifa show up, throw an explosive at cops, seriously injure a female police officer.

Speaker 3 These are people who were claimed by the Torch Antifa network, Torch Antifa, soliciting donations through a tax-exempt nonprofit organization for them.

Speaker 3 This is as clear ideological violence as you can possibly imagine.

Speaker 3 That incident was not counted as left-wing political violence.

Speaker 3 And so the only conclusion you can reach is that the left doesn't commit a lot of political violence when you don't count the political violence the left commits.

Speaker 4 Interesting. Interesting how that works.
It just seems like the go-to grab bag option of the American left in 2025 is to just simply

Speaker 4 rig the results in your favor.

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Speaker 4 Michael, you can't argue with this. I believe this is the article you're talking about.
Throw up 337. Top Trump officials are moving onto military bases.

Speaker 4 Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Christy Noam, and others have taken over homes that until recently housed senior military officials.

Speaker 4 So this is straight from the the Atlantic and it is no longer safe for members of the Trump administration to live out in the general public.

Speaker 4 They have to be housed in secure military bases for their own safety and for their family's safety. This is what it's come to.

Speaker 3 What's crazy, that's actually not even the article I was referencing. There's another article that says left-wing terrorism is on the rise.
That's the headline.

Speaker 3 I actually hadn't even seen this headline until you just showed it to me.

Speaker 3 The fact that we have civilians, we have people just working in our government uh ordinary political order who now have to move to secure locations for military leaders it it shows you that that something really horrific has happened in this country as if the rubicon has been crossed i i suspect that happened when the democrats started prosecuting Trump, you know, the chief political opponent and the predecessor, when they started raiding his home, when they started going after all of their enemies and even justifying his assassination, which nearly happened in Butler, nearly happened again, actually, later on.

Speaker 3 It does feel like something just seismically has shifted in the political order, and it's a lot bigger than some one podcaster making nasty comments or, I don't know, one Democrat in Congress.

Speaker 3 It seems like this is a major shift of the whole left.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it feels like the whole tree has become rotten from the root. And

Speaker 4 it does feel like there is a seismic shift. It's an ideological movement-wide shift.
And you could see it about the way that they talk about President Trump or they talk about Charlie.

Speaker 4 Nazi, fascist, bigot, racist, homophobe, xenophobe. All of this language that has basically said this movement is a bunch of Nazis.
And what did we have to do with Hitler?

Speaker 4 We had to eventually, you know, take him out. Right.
And I think that's becoming more widely and widely accepted within the left-wing political movement. Michael Knowles.

Speaker 3 Just listen to Joe Biden. Get it from the horse's mouth.
Is it the horse's mouth? Some part of the horse.

Speaker 3 When you say that there's an existential threat to the country, as he said about Trump, existential threats are a justification for assassination. I think they knew exactly what they were doing.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'm concerned you're right, Michael. And I want to give Michael his due.
He got a great moment. 264.

Speaker 3 Play it. Democrats have lied about the statistics on political violence.
They've covered them up.

Speaker 3 They've shed what I think we have to reasonably conclude are crocodile tears, and they want to pretend that nothing's happened. Senator Booker came in.
He said, we shouldn't cast any aspersions.

Speaker 3 We shouldn't say that the violence comes from one side or the other. He then launched into a diatribe about how the violence really comes from the right.

Speaker 3 And then before I had a chance to respond to that, he left the room.

Speaker 3 And I think it's particularly rich and hypocritical coming from someone like Senator Booker, because Senator Booker continues to endorse a man who would be a top law enforcement official in a state who has called for the murder of Republicans and our children.

Speaker 3 But to your point, Martha, you know, looking at Ole Mist tonight, looking at this amazing show of unity from the vice president and from Erica Kirk, and looking at all of the students who are going to come out and support a healthy exchange and a good future for our country, they give me a lot more hope than the Democrats on Capitol Hill do.

Speaker 4 Well said, Michael Knowles. I want to bring in Blake and Mikey in the studio for this conversation.

Speaker 4 This is really important stuff, actually, because it kind of went, I think night one, right after Ole Miss, Miss, nobody really talked about it, Michael.

Speaker 4 But then the day after, the day after, people are talking about that, they think JD was so rude to his wife, Usha, and

Speaker 4 they can't believe that he would want his wife to become a Christian. So let's play the clip from the Old Miss event, 286.
Play it.

Speaker 12 Now, most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church.

Speaker 12 As I've told her, and I've said publicly, and I'll say now in front of 10,000 of my closest friends, do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by by the same thing that I was moved in by church?

Speaker 12 Yeah, I honestly, I do wish that because I believe in the Christian gospel and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.

Speaker 4 So I wanted to bring in Mike. Obviously, Mikey is the son of a pastor.
Blake is a Catholic. You're a Catholic.

Speaker 4 We're all Christians here. Is that rude?

Speaker 4 To say that you hope your wife would eventually one day see the world and have faith like you do?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I just,

Speaker 5 I think it's crazy because Christianity has proven you live a happier life. Charlie used to talk about it as the missing piece for everybody.

Speaker 5 Once you found that missing piece, you lived the life that was there for you. And he would argue about the necessity of God over the existence of one.

Speaker 5 And so, no more than you would wish someone who's an alcoholic to no longer be an alcoholic, would you wish for them to find Christianity, the missing piece that would bring them peace and happiness?

Speaker 6 Yeah, it's,

Speaker 6 I don't know, I basically have nothing to add over what what Mikey said there. It's very bizarre to say, I guess, like, JD Vance wants what he thinks is best for his spouse, whom he loves.

Speaker 6 And, you know, someone has to come in and do that.

Speaker 4 This has become quite a controversy online. I was looking.
So, JD is reacting to a clip

Speaker 4 from

Speaker 4 A-C-Y-N. I never know how to say that guy's Twitter handle, but a lefty on Twitter on X.
And that thing has 10 million views. Like, it's a lot of engagement.
Michael,

Speaker 4 is this just much ado about nothing? I mean, is the...

Speaker 3 No, it's better than that.

Speaker 4 Go ahead.

Speaker 3 It's much ado about something. It's just something good.
I mean, I think we need to state it out the gate. What JD and Erica did was magnificent.

Speaker 3 The fact that Erica has the strength to do this is just superhuman, first of all. And then what the vice president did in the Q ⁇ A was magnificent.

Speaker 3 I know we're all admirers of the vice president here. He was pitch perfect.
I would not have changed one syllable about any answer he gave.

Speaker 3 It was just a phenomenal showing on all of these different matters and some questions that were a little bit hostile.

Speaker 3 And on this, I think you've seen the poison of secularism and atheism in our culture setting in in people's reactions.

Speaker 3 Because it's not that they disagree with the vice president on religion, it's that they don't even seem to know what religion is. But

Speaker 3 JD understands what religion is, and he has a living faith. And so

Speaker 3 as we've all said here,

Speaker 3 he wants what he believes to be good for his wife. He recognizes that religion is not just like a taste, you know, you like chocolate and I like vanilla.

Speaker 3 He recognizes that religion is a habit of virtue that inclines the will to give to God what he deserves.

Speaker 3 It's not a question of like or dislike. It's a question of truth or falsehood.
And so he's being very respectful to people of other faiths, including his wife, of course, but many other people too.

Speaker 3 He's just saying, look, I have this view of religious truth, and I think that truth and goodness and beauty and all these things go together.

Speaker 3 And so because I love my wife, and by extension, by the way, because I love other people, I want to share that with you. You know, that is the great commission.

Speaker 10 That is the gospel.

Speaker 3 That's like the whole point, guys. And the fact that people would attack him for it is one thing.

Speaker 3 The fact that they don't even understand what he's saying is so damning about our culture and how we think about the deepest questions.

Speaker 4 I think that's exactly right. Blake and Mikey, take us home at the end of this hour one with Michael Knowles.
The floor is your guys's.

Speaker 5 You have to say that. Yeah, the other thing that I love too, not just the religious aspect of JD's speech, but also he's backstage and he just goes, what was the thing that Charlie used to always say?

Speaker 5 Disagreements come to the front of the line. And I was like, yeah, yeah, that's it.
And he goes, I'm going to do that tonight.

Speaker 5 And I just keep telling everybody, you can't even find a senator, a congressman, or any person on the right who's a public speaker that would welcome disagreements to the front of the line, let alone the vice president of the United States who has much to lose.

Speaker 6 I hope it spreads because we've seen how much better JD has gotten from just being in the arena all the time, whether it's on the Sunday shows or doing something like this.

Speaker 6 And think how much better our politicians would be as a class if this was expected of.

Speaker 3 all our senators, all our representatives.

Speaker 6 Make them be smart people who can answer hostile questions on, you know, on the fly. We'll get better politicians, and that means better laws.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it really reminds me of Charlie. Like, I just see a little bit of Charlie and JD and how he does that.

Speaker 4 Michael Knowles, we thank you, my friend, for making the time. Appreciate you.

Speaker 1 Good to be with you guys. Thanks.

Speaker 6 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.