A Surprise Christmas Gift for the Economy?

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Speaker 5 All right, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show. Hour two is underway, and President Trump got an early Christmas present with some amazing economic news that came out this morning.

Speaker 5 So, here to unpack that with us is former Trump economic advisor, and now he's with Unleash Prosperity.

Speaker 5 And that's, of course, Stephen Moore, a longtime guest on this show and good friend of charlie's stephen welcome back to the show on a scale of one to ten

Speaker 4 how good was this news that broke this morning 4.3 uh growth q3 for gdp it's a really good number it's a solid number i'd put it an eight or a nine uh trump wants five percent growth we're not quite there yet although we could get there incidentally once you get uh above three and a half percent economic growth then the economy grows faster than the debt grows and so the burden you know because I know everyone listening to the show is concerned about our, you know, massive debt.

Speaker 4 And one way of lowering that debt is to grow our way out of it. So look, I'm super bullish on this U.S.
economy. It's been a really good 2025.

Speaker 4 I don't care what the polls are showing, that all of the indicators show a very strong growth year.

Speaker 4 And I think we're going to see a speed up in 2026 because a lot of people will come up to me on the street and say, hey, Steve Moore, I know you helped write that beautiful bill.

Speaker 4 Why aren't I seeing it?

Speaker 4 And I tell people, well, because it hasn't taken effect yet for tens of millions of Americans on January 1st, when they get their first paycheck for the month of January, they're going to start to see less money withheld from their paycheck, which is exactly what Americans want to see.

Speaker 5 Awesome. Okay, well, let's play some of the reactions from the news media here.
189.

Speaker 6 Third quarter numbers, we're looking for 3.3%.

Speaker 6 Zoom, Zoom, Zoom. 4.3%.

Speaker 6 4.3%.

Speaker 6 That is a nice jump. And I know many may question data gathering, but on the surface, this would be the strongest quarter going back to the third quarter of 2023 when it was 4.7.

Speaker 6 This is strong. 3.5 on consumption blows away the 2.7 we were expecting.
That would be the best since the last quarter of 24 on the price index. Here's some not good news.
3.8% on the price index.

Speaker 6 That's much higher than 2.7 we were looking for.

Speaker 5 All right, so we hit the first part, you know, where we beat the GDP forecast by over a point potentially. But what is he talking about with this price index, Steve?

Speaker 4 Well, I'm not exactly sure, quite honestly, because we got a really blockbuster number on inflation earlier the week, or late last week, I guess it was, where the inflation rate fell to 2.7%.

Speaker 4 And if you

Speaker 4 look at the last couple of months, inflation is headed down to 2% or less.

Speaker 4 And as you know the fed target rate which is the rate we should shoot at is about two percent uh inflation so we're headed in that direction i i think uh the numbers just look overall really strong right now to me.

Speaker 4 I don't quite understand why, if you look at the opinion polls, about half Americans think the economy is not doing well and even more so. And I don't get that because it is, you know, it is well.

Speaker 4 Now, a lot of people just say it's doing poorly because they hate Trump, right? You know, you get 40% of Americans, no matter how good things are, they're going to say things are bad.

Speaker 4 But it's going to be harder and harder, in my opinion, as we move into 2026 and these good numbers continue to roll in. It's harder for the left to sustain that narrative that it's not a good economy.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think they're calling it, the line I've seen is calling it the vibe session. It's the numbers seem good, but the sense among a lot of people is it's bad.

Speaker 7 Could it be specifically that the situation is very tough for young people just entering the workforce? I know the hiring for entry-level jobs this year was very rough for people just out of college.

Speaker 7 Is that diverging more than usual from the fate of other workers in the economy?

Speaker 4 Well, let me say a couple of things about that. I'm smiling when you say that because I graduated from college in late 1982.
So I'm an old farm, you know, I'm a baby boomer.

Speaker 4 Just to put these things in perspective, when I graduated from college, the inflation rate was not 3%.

Speaker 4 It was 9%.

Speaker 4 The unemployment rate was not, you know, 4%, it was 8%,

Speaker 4 and the mortgage rate was not 5%, it was like 14%.

Speaker 4 So for young people to say, oh, gee, this isn't a very good economy, they can't put this in any kind of perspective.

Speaker 4 Now, I think the one thing that where I would like to see improvement on is on the housing front, because I have two sons that are in their early 30s and they're doing fine with their careers, but they cannot afford to buy a house.

Speaker 4 And that's a result of a lot of things we could get get into it. But it is true that housing is very expensive right now.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 what is driving that then, Stephen, the housing market? If you talk to J.D. Vance, if you listen to what he's saying, he's saying it's a supply and demand issue.

Speaker 5 We've just been letting in too many people. The foreign population's too high, illegals, that sort of thing.

Speaker 5 Is that really what's driving it?

Speaker 5 Are there core drivers of the housing affordability issue?

Speaker 4 No, I don't think it's kind of scapegoating to say it's due to immigrants because actually immigrants build housing.

Speaker 4 They don't just take up housing. I think the real issue here is a couple of things.
One is states and localities around the country have put in all sorts of restrictions on building new housing.

Speaker 4 And so, you know, if you don't have an increase in supply, then the price of something is going to go up. So we've got to get rid of these restrictions.

Speaker 4 In fact, in many of the blue cities and suburbs, you can't build new housing. And that's a big problem.

Speaker 4 The other thing that is going on here is that people are locked into their homes.

Speaker 4 So we charge a capital gains tax if you sell your home and you make a, if you buy, if you sell the home for more than you bought it for.

Speaker 4 Well, that's almost all Americans because the value of housing has been going up. And so what people do to avoid paying that very, very significant tax is they don't sell their home.

Speaker 4 And so people are locked into their houses. So what I propose to Donald Trump is get rid of the capital gains tax on housing when it's sold.

Speaker 4 And if you do that, you'll have an increase in supply and prices will down.

Speaker 5 Well, I got to take issue just a little bit. It is a supply and demand issue.

Speaker 5 And if we have more people in the country, then I get that a lot of the laborers that are building houses are immigrants, but I mean, they are going to have to live somewhere.

Speaker 5 So there is a dynamic there that

Speaker 4 we've been taking, you know, for the last 30 years, we've taken tens of millions of immigrants in, and housing has actually been low cost. So there's, but look, I take your point.

Speaker 4 You know, Trump, Biden let in, we don't know exactly how many, a lot of illegal immigrants. I'm very pro-legal immigration, but I'm very much against the illegal immigration.

Speaker 4 And so I think you have a point there.

Speaker 5 Yeah, fair enough. All right.
So let's go. This is Kevin Hassett.
Charlie loved Kevin Hassett because it was like this breath of fresh air and optimism when he would come on the show.

Speaker 5 Let's hear what he's having to say, 193.

Speaker 3 President Trump's trade agenda is working. And so we got about, you know, one and a half percent of the growth on 4.3 because we reduced the trade deficit.

Speaker 3 We went back and we looked at every Bloomberg forecast for the main numbers since September and found that on average we outperformed the forecast 94% of the time.

Speaker 3 So if 94% of Wall Street economists are getting the macro trends wrong, they need to start to think about, hey, you know, maybe Trump's policies are actually way better than we thought.

Speaker 3 And maybe the fake news that says all these terrible things about Trump policies should reconsider. and

Speaker 3 grab their pencil and redo their economics.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 Stephen, it begs the question, I have two questions for you.

Speaker 5 Why are these economists getting so much wrong? Is it just TDS?

Speaker 5 And then I want to talk about tariffs, you know, because that seems to be the big hot-button question. You can take it in whatever order you want, Stephen.

Speaker 4 So, yeah,

Speaker 4 it's absolutely true that Trump Derangement Syndrome is a pathological disorder in this country. And

Speaker 4 it does

Speaker 4 change people's perceptions of what's happening in the economy, especially academics and professional economists who keep lowballing the numbers and they keep getting them wrong. You know, as

Speaker 4 my friend Kevin Hassett just said, 94% of the time they're wrong. Maybe they should start thinking that

Speaker 4 their assessments and their models are completely off base. They got the inflation numbers wrong.
They got the job numbers wrong. They got the trade deficit numbers wrong.

Speaker 4 In fact, I'm writing a column on this right now as we speak about, you know, these professional economists probably should turn their PhDs back in and say, we don't know what we're talking about, because they are consistently wrong.

Speaker 5 I think economists are simply struggling to catch up with the new paradigm, and they underestimate the amount of leverage America has as the market

Speaker 5 that everybody wants to play into and sell into.

Speaker 5 But Trump's flipping the economic models on their heads.

Speaker 8 President Trump walked into a catch-22 when taking office. Do nothing, and America would be staring at a ticking debt bomb, the kind of crisis that could cripple our future.

Speaker 8 Instead, he's taken action with strong policies to slow the trend and buy us some time.

Speaker 8 But the effects of past administration spending are still working through the system, and experts predict dramatic price increases and market uncertainty.

Speaker 8 Trump is doing all he can, but no matter who's in office, protecting your retirement savings is ultimately up to you. And that's why many Americans are turning to real assets like gold and silver.

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Speaker 5 All right, Stephen Moore, I gotta ask you a softball question. Well, it's not softball.
It's a really hard question, actually.

Speaker 4 What is your favorite Christmas movie and why oh love actually is one of my favorite modern ones and then and then i'd have to go with miracle on 34th street oh wow you just got an email endorsing that one

Speaker 4 miracle on 34th street you guys are so young you probably never even seen it i know

Speaker 5 i saw the remake they did a 90s oh you gotta go out you gotta look at the old the old one oh i've seen it i've seen it might see i grew up in a house that was full of like john wayne movies and world war ii movies and the black and white we got one we got a uh caleb said their favorite was Muppet's Christmas Carol I need to see that one I don't think I ever have

Speaker 5 see I like the old school like the English like the more English and like you know gloomy the better so you know let's let's let's deal with this tariff question one last time here or Blake you've got an email right

Speaker 7 no yeah we've got it we got an email from someone I think on the vibe session topic why are people downbeat and he says it's food stephen go to the grocery store and tell me the economy is great okay biden Oh, get in the, get in.

Speaker 7 What's your response to that?

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.
No, look, I get that all the time, even from my wife.

Speaker 4 My wife says, well, you know, she goes to the grocery store. She comes back really angry about, you know, the price of steak used to cost, you know, $12 and now it's $20, $25.
So I get it.

Speaker 4 I feel your pain, folks. But if you look overall at the economy, by the way, beef prices are way up.
Guess what? Pork chops are way down in price. There's a lot of things.

Speaker 4 Cell phones are down in price.

Speaker 4 Airlines are down in price. price.

Speaker 4 Motels and hotels are down in price. Televisions are down in price.
So overall, the inflation rate is heading in the right direction.

Speaker 4 But I understand people are angry when they come back from the grocery store.

Speaker 4 And I can tell you this, though, that we're going to start to see declining grocery prices as not declining prices, but this is the other thing. Trump keeps saying I'm going to bring prices down.

Speaker 4 What he meant to say is I'm going to bring the rate of inflation down. We don't want to see deflation.
That's even worse for the economy than inflation.

Speaker 4 We want to stabilize the prices, as my friend Steve Forbes would say, and create a sound, stable dollar. And that's exactly what Trump is doing.

Speaker 5 Well, we are seeing energy prices drop.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah, gasoline. Amazing.

Speaker 5 I mean, gas is under $25.99 a gallon. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 There's a, I think in Cincinnati, it's at like $2.50 a gallon.

Speaker 5 Might be one of the lower parts of the country, Kentucky. By the way,

Speaker 4 you know what state has the highest gas price?

Speaker 5 California. Yeah, by

Speaker 4 five bucks a gallon there.

Speaker 5 Well, yeah, it's a little lower than that, but

Speaker 5 it's very structural. California has,

Speaker 5 you basically can only refine

Speaker 5 the fuel for cars over here, and they won't build new refineries. And so, you know,

Speaker 5 it's a whole issue, yeah. But there's a serious point.

Speaker 4 But there's a serious point here.

Speaker 4 If you look at the 10 states that have the highest cost of living, nine of them are blue states because liberal Democrats cause shortages of everything because of their stupid policies high taxes high regulations and therefore the price rises so if you want lower prices folks move to a red state like florida like texas like alabama like utah that's where prices are low yeah well i mean listen i i i'm sympathetic to people that want to stay in their home in the blue states right we don't have people having to leave the the locusts that keep infiltrating blake uh you had one more question on on that or did i miss anything oh no no no it was just that one there oh i guess we could ask him what he thinks of the on housing, what he thinks of like 50-year mortgage topics or whatever.

Speaker 5 There's various satellites.

Speaker 4 I'm not a big fan of that. I think, you know,

Speaker 4 stretching out the mortgage

Speaker 4 is a dumb thing to do.

Speaker 4 Look, I know Trump's heart is in the right place on that, but the best way to bring the price of housing down is to bring the mortgage rate down.

Speaker 4 And the way you bring the mortgage rate down is to bring the inflation rate down, which Trump is doing.

Speaker 4 Mortgage rates will continue to fall as prices stabilize yeah hey real quick we have two minutes left here steven you were uh you knew charlie for a long time when did you first meet charlie kirk so i mean i was thinking about that the other day and you know he he i met him when he was way before you guys did i think he was 18 or 19 years old really just getting started and my friend gary rabine who was very close to charlie had an event with charlie with charlie and i think he was just starting i think as i said just just uh you know about 18 or 19 years old and i remember this who is this naughty nose kid?

Speaker 4 He was very ambitious. And I don't say that in a negative way, in a positive way.
He knew what he wanted to do. He knew he wanted to be a leader.

Speaker 4 And what he started doing is like reading Out Laugh or reading Larry Cudlow, reading Steve Moore, and educating himself.

Speaker 4 And by the way, you can educate yourself way more by reading the stuff that we write than the crap that they teach in college on economics because most of it is wrong.

Speaker 4 That's the reason 94% of the professional economists got it wrong. But

Speaker 4 I just saw his evolution over the next

Speaker 4 11 or 12 years. And every time I saw him, he just got better and better and better and better.

Speaker 4 And boy, I mean, it's just such a sad thing because I really believe Charlie Kirk was on path to someday be president of the United States. I really believe that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and you guys, I'll never, one of my kind of lasting memories of this show with Charlie at the helm was.

Speaker 5 Every time you'd come on, Steve, and we'd have this whole topic prepped, and it would be, you know, Charlie, we're going to talk about this, and this economic new number came in, and what Trump's going to do, or whatever.

Speaker 5 And then you guys would just like talk about Chicago the whole time.

Speaker 4 Well, he and I both love the Chicago. By the way, how about those Bears? They

Speaker 4 pulled off a miracle in Soldier's Field

Speaker 4 this weekend, so we're proud of it. Oh, I know.

Speaker 5 The same night, Stephen, it was the Bears won in that overtime game against the Packers, and the Ducks. Don't remind me.

Speaker 4 Well, you know what? That really was a a miracle. The odds of the Bears winning that game with two minutes left was one in 200.

Speaker 5 One in 200.

Speaker 5 Miracles really can't happen. It's a Christmas miracle.
Stephen Moore, thank you from Unleashed Prosperity. Thank you, my friend.
Merry Christmas.

Speaker 9 This is Lane Schoenberger, Chief Investment Officer and Founding Partner of YReFi. It has been an honor and a privilege to partner with Turning Point.
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Speaker 5 All right, next up here is Batia Ungar Sargon. She is the host of Batia with an exclamation mark on NewsNation.
Bhatia, you have,

Speaker 5 we were talking on the phone. You've been watching everything that happened at Amfest from afar.
And

Speaker 5 you were so complimentary to me and to Turning Point about the event because I think maybe you were surprised by it a little bit.

Speaker 5 You were a little nervous, a little trepidation going in when you saw the speaker list. And then tell us what your 30,000 foot view, what was the vibe for you watching from afar?

Speaker 10 First of all, thank you so much for having me, Andrew. I have to say, I'm like unexpectedly getting a little bit emotional because it's my first time on since Charlie was taking away.

Speaker 10 I didn't realize.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 10 He meant so much to me. Actually, there's a woman on my street whose car has,

Speaker 10 we live in Brooklyn, South Brooklyn. So it's, you know, not, you know, hipster Brooklyn, but her car is just festooned with stickers about Charlie.

Speaker 10 And I was literally staking out the car because I didn't know whose it belonged to. And I just wanted to thank her.
And the first time I saw her getting out of the car, I just ran over to her.

Speaker 10 We just had the most amazing conversation about what he meant to this country. And so thank you so much for having me.
I think about him every single day.

Speaker 10 I thought that the America Fest you put on was incredible.

Speaker 10 Incredible. It was so important because

Speaker 10 you allowed the debate to be be aired.

Speaker 10 And I think we get really attached to our positions in this country. And then we get really attached to the idea that, you know, we have to convince people that we're right.

Speaker 10 And we forget that the most important thing is, I think, what Charlie really stood for, which was the view that more unites us than divides us as Americans. And that you have to have the conversation.

Speaker 10 You have to trust your fellow Americans. And you have to bring that love that that he had, even to people that don't agree with you.

Speaker 10 I think like that is the thing that we really lost was that spectacle of him going to those college campuses and talking to people whose views I know he thought were bad and wrong and dangerous, but you could still see the love that he brought to them.

Speaker 10 And that's my New Year's resolution is to be more like that.

Speaker 10 Even especially when I'm talking about the things that matter to me the most. And I just felt felt that you really, you and Erica made that happen.

Speaker 10 You aired the debate and everybody could see it for themselves. And because this is the greatest country on earth and the American people are the most incredible people on planet Earth.

Speaker 10 It reminded me to just trust that process of seeing the debate and hearing the debate and listening to both sides. So I just, I watched every minute of it.
I was glued to it. And I'm so proud of you.

Speaker 10 And just, again, like to see Charlie's legacy being carried on in such a fulsome way was really moving to me and really powerful.

Speaker 5 Wow. Well, thank you.
Thank you for saying that, Batia. It means a lot.
And I know Blake, Blake's in studio there in Phoenix. And, you know,

Speaker 5 we both sort of watched everything play out. We saw the online chatter.
And, you know,

Speaker 5 the elephant in the room is sort of this foreign policy debate, the Israel debate, but also this debate. Ben kind of kicked things off on night one,

Speaker 5 calling out some of the people that he had grievances with, and then they ended up taking the stage later, some of them at least, and kind of throwing it back.

Speaker 5 So it, like you said, it was this debate, this airing of the family business, as Erica called it.

Speaker 5 But then we led up to, and Blake, feel free if you want to chime in on that, on that point. Before I move on, because I do have a question for Batia.
No, no, tell us. Let's get into it.

Speaker 5 Let's get into it. All right.
So you on your show had some words for, I mean, directed at JD Vance, and I want to give you a chance to kind of talk about that. Let's go ahead and play 209.

Speaker 11 For those already anointing the vice president as the GOP nominee for 2028, you might want to slow your role.

Speaker 11 Leadership is about having principles and standing up for them, no matter the blowback, not being afraid of offending actual Nazis.

Speaker 5 All right, so that seems to be the

Speaker 5 cliff. I see you smiling there.
So I am obviously Team JD. I think he's an amazing leader.
I thought his speech at Amfest was morally clear. He condemned anti-Semitism.

Speaker 5 He condemned racism, DEI, anti-white racism, anti-Asian racism. And it felt like to me, being there, it was kind of like dad's in the room, settle down, kids.
Here's the North Star.

Speaker 5 Here's where we're going. You, we, by the way, we certainly are not trying to anoint JD Vance, anything.

Speaker 5 It was sort of this, if you're in turning point circles, Charlie was talking about that we have JD's back a thousand percent and he hopes he runs. And if he runs, we've got his back.

Speaker 5 You know, so it was kind of this thing that's been said out loud 48 times. I think Erica was just kind of like, let's just say it out loud, you know, let's just do it here.

Speaker 5 But from your perspective, why did you say what you said? And, you know, what is it going to take to kind of get you to come around on the JD Vance conversation?

Speaker 10 I want to believe. I'm so honored to be able to have this conversation with you.
Like, you have no idea what it means to me to be here with you in the room.

Speaker 10 Um, on so many issues, I think JD is spot on. You know, my top issues, I would say, is I think what President Trump represented, which was, you know, being pro-worker, pro-labor.

Speaker 10 Um, the dignity of working-class Americans is like my number one issue, which entails you know, getting to immigration zero right away for as long as it takes, you know, in order to make sure that Americans have access to the American dream before we start giving it to everybody else.

Speaker 10 On foreign policy, I'm aware that I guess the 50% of the turning point straw poll was. Like, I see Israel as a great ally among great allies.
Our interests are frequently aligned, but not always.

Speaker 10 Sometimes the Israelis, I think, overstep.

Speaker 10 And I've been, you know, glad to see President Trump have a really strong idea of when our interests are aligned and when they diverge and choosing American interests when he needs to.

Speaker 10 You know, so on all of that stuff, I feel like

Speaker 10 very much on the same page. Certainly don't want to go back to the like rhino pre-Trump version of the GOP.

Speaker 10 I think that would be a huge mistake and a huge betrayal of the American working class, which is like where my allegiances lie as a Jewish American.

Speaker 10 But I will say that I think there have been podcasters out there who have been saying things that make me as an American and as a Jew feel like I'm questioning whether this movement wants me.

Speaker 10 For example,

Speaker 10 platforming people who think that Hitler was not

Speaker 10 the villain of World War II.

Speaker 10 That's just going to make every Jewish person, like somebody, a podcaster agreeing with that point of view the way that Tucker Carlson seemed to is going to make every Jewish person feel like, wait a minute, is that actually a question?

Speaker 10 And so when JD says, well, I'm, you know, close to Tucker Carlson, I disagree with him about a lot of things, but I'm not going to be clear about what those things are.

Speaker 10 That leaves people thinking, Well, you know, is that one of the things or not?

Speaker 5 Yeah, and Blake, I want to get you in on this conversation because you obviously have a really long conversation relationship with Tucker. But I want to show that you mentioned the straw poll.

Speaker 5 Go ahead and throw 178 up on the screen. It shows 53.4%

Speaker 5 consider Israel an ally, 33.3% are top ally. Only 13.3% say that Israel is not an ally of the United States.
So, despite all of the hand-wringing, all the loud voices online, we still are at 87%

Speaker 5 of Amfest attendees consider Israel either our top ally or an ally. And maybe what you're seeing in the shift in the dialogue is more to

Speaker 5 one ally of many as opposed to our top ally. Maybe that's the shift you've seen in the Trump era.
Blake,

Speaker 5 I want to give you a chance to respond just because of your relationship relationship with the people.

Speaker 10 Yeah, so a few things.

Speaker 7 I totally understand where you're coming through, specifically on some of that. Yeah, the Hitler stuff, that's popped up more.
I will say I've been hearing stuff like that,

Speaker 7 honestly, my entire adult life. It bubbles up.
I think there is an element where some people find it interesting in a transgressive sense or something.

Speaker 7 And I'd want to say, I hope it has no modern political manifestations, but it does, it does pop up with a degree that if I were a Jewish American, I think I would find it disturbing as more disturbing as you do.

Speaker 7 I don't get why some people think in this particular political moment, re-litigating an 80-year-old war's morality is of great importance, but some people like that.

Speaker 7 I will say I'm some of the people who are. Wait,

Speaker 10 can I just jump in for a second? Sure, sure, sure. Like, when you when you um first of all, I think it's not just Jewish Americans.

Speaker 10 I think every American should feel worried about this question of whether Hitler was truly the

Speaker 5 same.

Speaker 10 But I mean, beyond that, when you say you're like, I don't know why somebody would bring that up, but you know, like,

Speaker 10 I know why they would bring it up because they, they, they could, you know what I'm saying? Like, that's fair.

Speaker 7 That's fair.

Speaker 5 There's, there is,

Speaker 7 it's unfortunate. I do think that pattern is real for certainly at least some of the people doing it.

Speaker 7 Big picture, I recognize Vice President Vance and everyone in this coalition. We have a tough challenge.
We asked, we were doing one of our exclusives interviews. I think it was when we had

Speaker 7 Megan, I think it was actually when we had Michael Knowles on, and we just asked the crowd, raise your hands, do you agree more with Ben Shapiro or more with Tucker? And it was about 50-50.

Speaker 7 Ultimately, what we've been saying is we have to be able to build a coalition that is forward.

Speaker 7 And what I liked with Vice President Vance was he's saying we are going to define this movement by positive things, by positive affirmations.

Speaker 7 And those are going to be good affirmations that that make us a superior alternative to the left and i think if vice president vance is setting a positive example and if he's taking on a leadership role that shows that positive example he can shape the movement in a good direction that is good on policy good on unifying rhetoric and

Speaker 7 Instead of having to go around playing place and disavowing people,

Speaker 7 what you are avowing is going to make people into something better. And I think that's an example Charlie himself tried to set while he was with us.

Speaker 10 I was truly humbled by how right Andrew and Charlie and you Blake were about how you set up the whole America Fest. I just came away feeling like it could not have gone better.

Speaker 10 And that was because of the disparity between me and the views that I heard there.

Speaker 8 Hey everybody, this is Andrew Colvett, executive producer of The Charlie Kirk Show.

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Speaker 5 I have to ask, I think this is going to be the hardest question that Batia has to to navigate. As a Jewish woman, what is your favorite Christmas movie?

Speaker 5 Or is there like, is there like a Hanukkah movie? I don't even know.

Speaker 10 Okay, I just, every year, I watch all of the Christmas rom-coms. And the thing about them is, is that they're all exactly the same and they're all equally delightful and delicious.

Speaker 10 So I couldn't even tell you which is the best one because I can just watch all the rom-coms again and again.

Speaker 5 Is it

Speaker 5 traditional?

Speaker 7 I know Jewish Americans often eat Chinese Chinese on Christmas. Are there traditional movies they watch that are like emphatically not Christmas movies or something?

Speaker 10 Well, the big Lebowski is often on the list for sure.

Speaker 5 The doodabuds.

Speaker 10 You know, I'm an Orthodox Jew, so the traditions of like secular liberal Jews, I'm not as familiar with them.

Speaker 10 You know, to us, Christmas is...

Speaker 10 It's funny because one of the things is, you know, like there's certain texts that you're supposed to study and that you're not supposed to study on Christmas due to like, so, you know, there's that conversation as well.

Speaker 5 But I'm not sure. This is way more complicated than I realized.
This was a hard question. The JD Vance question is easy.
All right. I accidentally opened up a whole can of worms.

Speaker 5 Asking a Jewish woman what her favorite Christmas movie is. It's not a fair question.
It's not a fair question. I apologize.
Bacchi did wonderful with it, though.

Speaker 5 Christmas rom-coms, what are those even? Is it like

Speaker 7 love actually is one? Love actually.

Speaker 5 Love actually. Hold on, what's the one with

Speaker 5 one with John Cusack and the British gal, where

Speaker 5 they meet and then they try and find each other again?

Speaker 5 I'm forgetting.

Speaker 5 That's another Christmas movie, kind of.

Speaker 10 There's a really good movie called The Family Stone.

Speaker 5 Oh, see, you and I have wildly different movie tastes about you.

Speaker 5 This is spinning out of control. We need to bring it back, write it back in.
All right, so here's my pointed question for actually why you came.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 you've got guys like Steve Bannon. He calls himself a a Zionist.
You've got Matt Gates, who just did the interview with Tucker Carlson. He calls himself pro-Israel.
You've got a lot.

Speaker 5 Megan Kelly has been traditionally extremely pro-Israel. Their biggest beef is that they feel, and by the way, Charlie had this conversation with Megan,

Speaker 5 you know, just before he was assassinated, actually.

Speaker 5 It was just this feeling from like the Gentile friends of the Jewish people and Israel that there is a moral blackmail campaign where the pressure just feels like, you know, if you're only with us 80% of the way, we're not going to be happy and

Speaker 5 we're going to call you names.

Speaker 5 I do find it counterproductive. I'm not saying everybody's guilty of it.
I'm literally about to send a video to Dennis Prager wishing him a Merry Christmas because he loves Christmas.

Speaker 5 You know, I love you completely, even when I disagree with you. But that, that's, so what is that dynamic? And what do you do about that?

Speaker 5 Do you feel like the response after October 7th is driving away friends of Israel?

Speaker 10 I'm going to give an analogy. Okay.

Speaker 10 I am a person who feels that we should not be funding the Ukraine war. Okay.
I've thought that from the beginning.

Speaker 10 Two weeks in, Putin was like: if you all just recognize the status quo and ratify it, that Crimea belongs to Russia, which he had already taken eight years earlier, you know, that the Donbass is independent, which there was a civil war there, and that Ukraine is not part of NATO, I'll withdraw immediately.

Speaker 10 I thought we should have pushed for that. I, you know, we had gas prices were insane at the time.

Speaker 10 I just didn't understand why, you know, a few hundred kilometers in Eastern Europe was the responsibility of the American working class to bear.

Speaker 10 Now, if you hold that view, which I do,

Speaker 10 you will get letters, snail mail, delivered to your home with death threats from people who are pro-Ukraine. The entire Ukraine lobby will come after you.
They will impugn your character.

Speaker 10 They will call you a Putin puppet. Doesn't matter how many times you say Putin is a thug and and a murderer, which is what I believe.

Speaker 10 The people who feel very strongly about this issue will do everything they can to get you to shut up. And you know what, Andrew? That is their job.
I don't hold that against them.

Speaker 10 And the idea that that would make me embrace Russia as the good guys because the Ukrainians are behaving insane at the extremes,

Speaker 10 that's insane because I don't answer to the inverse of what the most extreme people in a lobby are doing. I answer to my God.
I have to face myself in the mirror.

Speaker 10 So, you know, and the fact that there are these loons at the extreme of the Ukraine lobby, that doesn't even influence how I think about Zelensky or the Ukrainian people or the vast majority of the people who think we should be funding the war in Ukraine.

Speaker 10 I have a policy difference that makes me very unpopular with a very big group of people, and the extremes of them are extreme in their opposition to me and think I should be dead for having my view.

Speaker 10 The idea that I would allow that to influence my view would make me an unserious person. So, do I think there are people in the Israel lobby who embarrass me because they are extreme? Sure.

Speaker 10 Do I think Israel itself has in some ways behaved badly, especially vis-à-vis our president, the greatest friend the Jewish people have ever had? Yes. Does that,

Speaker 10 if somebody allows that to determine whether they interview Holocaust survivors,

Speaker 10 if anybody telling you that that is an excuse to become anti-Semitic, I think is not a morally serious person. That is a person who is not answering to their God.

Speaker 10 That is a person who is answering to the inverse of the algorithm. And I look down on that.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and I know that you think some of the reaction has been counterproductive. So I just wanted to give you an opportunity to say that.
And listen, I am going to convince you on J.D. Vance.

Speaker 5 It's just going to happen. I know.
And I'm going to take a bow, and the internet's going to know because J.D. Vance is a good man.
And I know you want to believe. And I know

Speaker 5 you're waiting for the signal to proceed.

Speaker 5 We're going to get you there, Batia.

Speaker 5 Thank you for joining on this 23rd of December, two days before our Christian Christmas.

Speaker 8 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.