The Charlie Kirk Show - Iran: Peace At Last?

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

With the Memorial Day holiday over, is peace finally imminent in the Persian Gulf? The show talks to Sen. Bernie Moreno about the president's big choice between peace and renewed escalation, and why a deal to end the war is a way to get a huge win for President Trump's legacy and his 2024 agenda. Ken Paxton joins to rally voters for the Texas primary runoff, which he is poised to win despite $150 million in failed sabotage by the GOP establishment. Noah Rothman exposes how violence has been central to left-wing politics for a century. Steve Deace shows off his new book honoring America's 250th. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com!    Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of the Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you could protect your wealth with noble gold investments at noble gold investments.com. That is noble gold investments.com. All right, happy Tuesday, everybody. I hope you had a nice Memorial Day weekend. We are back. This is the Charlie Kirk Show. It is May 26th. I had a great Memorial Day weekend. Blake had a great memorial. It was awesome. Although if you're watching live, I'm wearing a hat because I went to Monument Valley and got scorched across the entire top of my head. Which is, which is, which is

amazing actually monument valley is a total treasure in this country up near the four corners area very remote but you got to wear that five hour drive um we got to get right into it here because it's a huge day the grassroots is rising up the base is rising up in texas and it is the last day to vote in the runoff between attorney general ken paxton and uh incumbent establishment john cornan And here to help us out is Ken Paxson himself. Mr. Attorney General, welcome back to the show, sir. Hey, so good to be back on a very important day for Texas, and I think for the entire nation,

to send the right message for Washington, which is, hey, we're done with the establishment telling us that we're going to keep a guy that doesn't do the things that Texans care about and does exactly what Washington wants them to do. Yeah, exactly, sir. So, first of all, let's get into the mechanics. Okay, today is the last day to vote. What are their action steps?

You know, you are turning point action endorsed, your President Trump endorsed. You are the movement conservative in the race. You are the base and the grassroots conservative. You're the fighter. Where do people listening right now in the state of Texas, what are their marching orders? Very simple. We have until 7 o'clock today. I wouldn't push it until the end because the lines will be longer at the end of the day.

It's, you know, just after 11 o'clock in Texas. So you have, what, eight hours to go vote? I would really encourage people to get out, vote today, take a friend, take a family member, call a couple of friends because voter turnout for a runoff is going to be relatively low. I think for the primary, it should be around 10 or 12 percent. For the runoff, it's probably maybe 5 or 6 percent, maybe 7. So your vote is leveraged 20 or 25 times if you're voting. And if you're bringing friends, we're going to win this election.

That's a really important point. So turnout is going to be on the lower side. That's just what happens here, which makes you in this audience, especially if you're in Texas right now, have an outsized impact. Okay. So you need to get up, make a plan, go vote today. We need to absolutely once and for all put an end to the establishments, hostile takeover of the base and of Texas. I mean, this is, let's just give the audience a little bit of an understanding here, Mr. General. how much money has been spent against you at this point?

And whose interests are vested in Senator Cornyn? This is almost, this is a very high percentage of money. It's probably close to $150 million at this point. We won't really know until it sells out, but it was about $100 million during the original primary in the last three months. They're probably in the 40 to 50 range. So lots of money coming from D.C. for the most part,

And the idea that they're used to being successful in. If you look at the last 40 or 50 years, other than Bill Cassidy, there's only been two other incumbents that I know that have lost from the US Senate during a prime event. It was Richard Lugar in 2012 because it was a small state and it was self-funded who beat him, Richard Murdoch. And then Mike Lee in a convention state, Utah, where money didn't matter, he was able to win. So it's very unusual because there's so much money coming in and they try to convince you from DC that your guy is just what you want. John Cornyn loves Donald Trump. John Thornton is for the border wall.

And the guy that he's running against is terrible. This is what they do with their $150 million. And voters go, well, you know, maybe this is all true. And that isn't going to work this time. Yeah, well, listen, he's been out all over Fox News this morning. I saw you were on Fox as well. This is not a, you know, but look, candidly, that's one of the few places that'll have him right now. The, and by the way, we do Fox and there's nothing, nothing there.

I'm just saying this is one of the few places that'll hear him out right now. Because base conservative movement shows like ours, like war room, it's not going to happen. Here, check this out. This is him on Fox, smearing you and saying that he can help the president. This is his final message to the voters. SOT 23. I know the president cares a lot about the congressional races that are right below the Senate race. And I won by 10 points in 2020.

So I think I could be the most help to the president and his agenda in the last two years of his term of office. and all the down-ballot races. And Ken Paxton will be an albatross. He could well lose, but even if he doesn't lose, he will win by such a razor-thin margin that it's likely to have a negative drag on the down-ballot races in Texas. So this is his new talking point today, sir,

that you are an albatross. Your response. Do you know who he said that about? He said that about Donald Trump in 2016, that Donald Trump is an albatross around the Republican's neck. So this is a talking point that he's been using against Donald Trump, and now he pulled it out for the race against me. And by the way, he didn't tell you that I won my last race by about 10 points.

And so what he's talking about is he's got this narrative going because he knows he doesn't have anything good to present to the voters. And so he says, look, I didn't do anything in my 42 years and office. I haven't accomplished one good thing, and no one's ever been able to tell me, by the way, in this entire campaign, the one good thing he did. And I've been asking that question since I got in the race 14 months ago. And I've asked it at every meeting, one person, thousand. And so he doesn't have a good talking point.

So what did he do? He says, look, I didn't do it. He doesn't say it this way. But I didn't do anything good for the voters. I don't take care of them. I vote against them a lot. I side with Joe Biden a lot. I'm not forced President Trump.

But I can win the election vote for me. Even though it's not true, it's not any difference than me running. The numbers don't indicate that he'll do any better. As a matter of fact, some polls have me doing better than him. So this is just a made-up talking point, and that's part of how he's used his money to try to convince voters of something that's not true. So Ken, I was looking up here since you said he said the same thing in 2016.

I thought, oh, let's check that if that was a paraphrase. No, literally verbatim. This is CNN in February 2016. Majority whip John Cornyn raised serious concerns about Donald Trump's surging presidential bid. Quote, we can't have a nominee be an albatross around the down-ballot races, Orton told CNN when asked if he had concerns.

That is a concern of mine. Unquote. That is remarkable. That is a total own. It was John, it was John forer and right about that? I mean, look, he didn't come back and admit that he was completely wrong on Donald Trump. As a matter of fact, he doubled down in 2024 and said, guess what? President Trump's day is over.

His day is over. And we need another nominee that can lead the party and do better in the general. watching. So again, he didn't use the Albatross word, but he said his day is done. And what I'm saying today is no, John, President Trump's day is not done. Your day is done. Yeah, it's obscene, too. I mean, he's, he's been weak on immigration. He's been weak on MAGA, America First. He's a total establishment crony, $150 million poured into this race that should have been used on other races, targeting you, smearing you is absolute proof in the pudding that we need to get these guys out of D.C. once and for all. They are not the right fit for Texas. John Cornyn's got to go. This is not in the bag,

though. People need to show up today. Go to, and you were tweeting this at this link out, boat, Texas.gov, find a polling place. Get behind Attorney General Paxson is your next senator from the great state of Texas. Senator, Mr. Attorney General, final 15 seconds to you, sir. Look, we have a chance to send a message. It's one of two. The first message is we're going to, we're going to accept what they tell us in Washington. We're going to keep their guy. Second message, no. We're going to start shaking things up.

We're going to send somebody to Washington and let you do something good for the state of Texas and for this country. Guys, the stakes could not be bigger in this race. This is a giant middle finger to you. $150 million they pumped into this race that should have been spent in North Carolina, Georgia, should have been spent in Michigan. Instead, they're trying to take out a good man that the grassroots loves, the base loves. Sir, we got to have your back. We got to get a let's let's go big.

I want to see a decisive victory defeating John Cornyn today in the state of Texas. I believe the Texans can do this. God bless you, sir. We got your back 100%. President Trump endorsed, turning point action endorsed. And I think more importantly than anything, grassroots endorsed. They got your back. You've got to show up at the polls.

This is a low turnout race. Your vote means more now than it ever has in Texas. So if you're listening in Texas, get out, make a plan, and bring your friends with them. Thank you, sir. We'll talk to you soon on the other side of hopefully a victorious day in Texas. How much are life liberty in the pursuit of happiness worth to you? This is the question America's founders had to answer. You see, for more than 150 years, America's 13 colonies governed themselves until Britain declared they had no right to self-rule.

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Hillsdale.edu slash revolution to locate a theater near you and buy tickets for revolutionary American. One more time, that's Hillsdale.edu slash revolution. All right. So it's a huge day in many respects. We just spoke with Attorney General Ken Paxson, the state of Texas, who is, he's taken down a Goliath. This is a David versus Goliath. $150 million spent on that primary, not even to beat a Democrat, to beat a Republican, a good Republican who has President Trump's endorsement, who has turning point actions endorsement. You just think about the conversations they might have after this because they probably told some people, you know, you're expected to.

pony up for this sure thing 100% and it's going to be a very awkward phone call. Yeah. I mean, so you set 150 million on fire for a primary that you lost. Just think about what we could have done with that. But this is such an important moment in our politics because these guys keep trying to claw their way back in. Okay. The neocon wing of the party is gone.

It needs to be in the dustbin of history. This, this is a party. We are, President Trump was elected on peace. That's why we got to get peace in a. Iran. We got to get this war, this conflict settled. He was elected on the border. John Corny's weak on that topic. Extraordinarily so. He's a total softy. Everything in John Corny's being has been, despite his voters, he doesn't care about what real Texans want, real base conservatives, grassroots conservatives wants, and he's doing the same old tired line from the establishment.

They're always unelectable. He's an albatross. No, you know who the albatross is? It's John Cornyn. In a midterm election, it's a base turnout election. That means if you get rid of the guy that gives the base enthusiasm they actually want to get behind, you're going to be an albatross to the rest of the down ballot elections. And that's absolutely true. So he's got it completely inverted. Meanwhile, this weekend, President Trump's skipping Don Jr's wedding where everybody's going back to D.C. We're all speculating that there's going to be a more kinetic warfare in Iran, that the war. The war, the war. The war, the war. was going to restart in a really aggressive way, more fighting. I was terrified of it, actually. We were debating we were going to come in on a Memorial Day weekend because a new strike had been set up. And no, ultimately, that's not what happened. We got news instead that there was a pending potential peace deal being negotiated

and that it was serious. Now, I was able to be a part of a on-background call with a bunch of different people in the media. It wasn't special or something. I was grateful to be invited to it. And it was really telling. So let me explain what I learned. I learned that this expression, no dust, no dollars.

Okay, what does that mean? It means a step by step process where if Iran makes good on something, then there will be a carrot as opposed to a stick. And if they restart, we saw this weekend that we did strike some of these small boats trying to lay mines in the straight. Now, what you need to understand is that we have a growing appreciation, understanding, confidence in the leadership structure that has emerged after our strikes and taking the head of the snake operations that happen in Iran. So we know kind of more now than we did before about who we're dealing with, who the hardliners are, who the moderates are. And what we're trying to do is empower the moderates over the hardline. That war has not been won internally, but it does appear that the moderates are ascended. So that's one thing we need to keep in mind here.

But something like the Strait of Hormuz mine land, that could be hardliners that still have power, still have some authority over some soldiers, dispatching them and going rogue and intentionally trying to blow up a peace deal. We have our own hardliners in America that are trying to blow up the peace deal, and that's the key here, Blake. We need to empower and celebrate people that are actually trying to drive peace. Because, listen, if you get the straight open, and gas prices go below three.

If you can get the nuclear dust, then we've accomplished our missions that we set up. And again, there's no pallets of cash. They wanted to make that extremely clear. This is not Obama 2.0. This is, we will give you a modicum of sanctions relief if you make good on allowing us to destroy the nuclear materials. We will give you more if you open the straight and keep it open. And so the more good faith that you operate in Iran, the more relief you will get on the sanctions.

This would be a slam. dunk not only for President Trump, but it would be a slam dunk for the country and looking towards the midterms. Peace will win. I think it would. I think we've seen there's been a lot of controversy over this. There's been a lot of anger over this. I think I go back to, you know, I go back to what I said when this first broke out. I was talking about how Charlie felt about these things. And I think the best way you can sell this to the public is If this is the last war we have to fight in the Middle East, if we can say we can come on,

we're like, we don't have this Iran thing hanging over our heads forever. We don't need to have tens of thousands of U.S. troops hanging around in the Middle East all the time because this could blow up at any point. If President Trump is able to get a deal where he can say, this looks like a durable, long-term peace, you know, we can have a few jets there, but we don't need these huge outlays. We don't need to be spending billions and billions of dollars. Every time some radical decides to go off and start a fuss there,

I think he can present that as a long-term win to the American people. And then that can even hopefully win over the people who feel betrayed by the war breaking out in the first place. Yeah, well, and that's the thing. I mean, listen, if you can get the nuclear material actually off the table, you can reopen the straight. I mean, those are our actual core objectives here. We did not set out necessarily to get regime change. I think that was a mistake by some of the hardliners on our side thinking that that was going to be automatic. Okay, we knew that it wasn't going to be automatic.

That regime is deeply entrenched. But if you can empower the moderates, if you can get the nuclear material, and this was the big breakthrough. This is why this big breakthrough is for the first time. Iranian officials are seriously talking in depth about how to get that out of their country, whether it's China that helps, whether it's America, whether it's some third party. they're actually understand that they need to give on that crucial topic and that's the breakthrough. If it comes true, we'll be very happy. If you're about to turn 65 and you're already on Medicare, this message is for you.

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Dial pound 250, pound 250 and say Charlie Kirk to make sure, you're in the best available plan. That's pound 250 and say Charlie Kirk or go to ask chapter.org slash Kirk. All right. Without further ado, we're going to bring in the great Senator Bernie Moreno. Senator, welcome back to the show. It's good to have you. No, thank you for having me and thank you for all you're doing. Well, thank you, sir. So I wanted to have you on because I saw you over the weekend and I thought you were hitting just the perfect note on X. You said President Trump just delivered another historic win for America and the world. After showing unmatched strength against Iran, he's now securing a major deal to open up the Strait of Hermuz, stabilize energy markets, and prevent around from having a nuclear weapon. Now, since you have put that out there on socials, there has been some back and forth, right?

We see that there was a skirmish in the strait that we actually struck some boats that were apparently attempting to lay some more mines. but we can't let that derail this overarching, this bigger project of getting peace with Iran. Sir, lay out the stakes for our audience here. How important is this? And, I mean, I feel like we are on the precipice. There was a background call with administration officials that I was on, and they said we're 90, 95 percent ironed out here. What do you want to see happen next? Well, first of all, I think it's important, especially for your listeners and the people who really care about the America First

movement. This is America first in action. This is about putting the interest of the American people above all else. This is not an endless war. This is not foreign interventionism. This is about a simple fact. Iran can never have a nuclear weapon because they'll use it. They will attack us with a nuclear weapon. President Trump had the courage to actually go in there and absolutely hammer them, destroyed their Navy, destroyed their air force, destroyed their industrial capacity. But of course, there's pieces left to do, which is open the straight, get that trade flowing back up and collect all of their nuclear dust. Now, we'll use a tool that allows us to release the frozen assets of Iran as they deliver that uranium dust back to us. But we're going to do this on our terms.

President Trump doesn't believe in deals that are in anywhere other than to the benefit of the United States. So what we got to do is not buy into the talking points of the left because, look, the Democrats are cheering, actively cheering for our country to fail, for our military to fail, for Iran to succeed. They have no idea what the deal is, and yet they comment about it. This is going to be a strong, great deal for the U.S. Your point is really well made there, especially with people commenting on the deal when they don't know the specifics of it. that was happening even before this kind of background call that I was on and, you know, people are trying to clear it up. I mean, nobody has seen the actual deal points. And by the way, nothing, there's no final deal. So things are still in flux. And one of the things that people in the

audience really need to understand is that getting these final points over the finish line is extremely difficult because they're trying to hide the location of this, you know, the sun, the new Ayatollah, if you will. So they, I mean, they're basically using carrier pigeons to get this stuff to him because they're so worried and rightly so that he'll be taken out. So but but this dynamic senator, there are hardliners even on the right, if you will, the neocon faction that that before this has even been made public, they're already screaming, they're wailing. They want us to to pursue regime change. They want us to reengage kinetic warfare. I'm like no, first of all, if we can get the dust, if we can reopen,

the straight of Hormuz, this is an absolute slam dunk for the American people. You're going to see gas prices fall below $3 a gallon heading into the midterm, sir. That to me is a huge, huge piece of this. What do you say to those hardline factions that want to see regime change? Look, we're going to get our mission accomplished. We're not going to go into an endless conflict. Our mission was to make certain that they don't have a nuclear weapon. If we accomplish that and we have the free flow of oil and the Strait of removes, we're done. Now, the other piece that's extremely important, important is we're going to turn the Abraham Accords. I should say we, by the way, President Trump is going to turn the Abraham Accords into a security

military cooperation that spans the entirety of the Middle East countries. And by the way, that may include Iran. I think some of these guys that have been knocking a deal, I think they live in a decade that's long past. We want peace and prosperity in the Middle East. We want to make certain that we pay attention to our own neighborhood, our own needs domestically and not get entangled there forever on some sort of social experiment. We saw that within Iraq and Afghanistan. President Trump's not going to do that.

Yeah, and I think this is, you're making an extraordinarily important point here, Senator, because a lot of people, they do this to Trump, they do this to Charlie, they want President Trump to be the image in their head that he, that he is, right? They sort of project onto him what they most like about, you know, his campaign or whatever. And they miss the fact that he's been calling for Iran not to have a nuclear weapon, you know, basically since the 80s. And Charlie, they do the same thing with Charlie. I'm going to play this clip because Charlie understood the president what makes him tick,

his instincts politically, better than most, if not all. And this was just before Midnight Hammer, I believe, or it could have been right after. But this was Charlie on with Jesse Waters right in that moment and explaining President Trump's actual military philosophy, SOT five. President Trump understands his base extraordinarily well. He knows that his base does not want another Iraq, he does not want Libya, does not want a civil war or bedlam where the United States is left carrying the bag. But also President Trump has been morally clear for a decade. Iran should not have a nuclear weapon.

And President Trump has the talent and the expertise to be able to thread that needle. President Trump can get that deal done while fulfilling the mandate that the voters gave him. So that is like the, the, the, the chief. Charlie Doctrine on the Trump Doctrine. He understands his base. He doesn't want a forever war. He doesn't want to quagmire. Sir, we can declare victory if we get that dust and the straight is open, even without regime change, even without, you know, sort of like, you know, settling the Iran issue forever. We still get what we want. We achieve our objectives in a very powerful, positive way. And we don't have to put boots on the ground. We get to go focus domestically. Am I missing? something here, sir. No, you're exactly right. And by the way, he's also President Trump able to envision a world in which Iran is part of a security and trade agreement in the middle of the least. Some of these guys, again, they can't fathom that because they have a very black and white view of the world. Look, our objective was simple. Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. The straight is

open. And we get gas prices down where they were historic lows, by the way. And then by the way, Also very important. If Kamala Harris had been elected president, we'd be talking about $10 gallon gas. They were cheering for gas prices that go up. We've got to keep that in mind. But President Trump's accomplishing historic things. He's not going to be pushed into a bad deal, unlike Obama. This is a very, very pro-America process here.

When this started, I think a good perspective to have. We've talked, Charlie didn't like the idea of regime change with Iran. He expressed a lot of worry about this. but we also thought the best outcome that we could have out of this is if President Trump is able to come home from negotiations and say this was not another Middle East War, this was the last Middle East War that America has to fight. Well, and listen, if you could deal with the nuclear problem, then that very well could be, right? Because that's the overarching threat, the missiles, the, the, the munition base that they had been stockpiling. I think I think point is this would be historic and the hardliners that are pushing this to be some sort of ground invasion or, you know, we're going to restart kinetic activities instead of pursuing peace, I think is totally insane. The president's instinct here are absolutely spot on.

He will be celebrated wildly by this show if he can achieve peace. And I know the same is true for you, Senator. We just have about 90 seconds left here, Senator. Can you give us a... Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. I was going to say my entire adult life, we've been dealing with a threat from Iran in the Middle East.

Imagine, I have a four-year-old grandbaby and two-year-old grandbabies. Imagine they live in America that there is no more threat from the Middle East and we have peace and prosperity there. That's an incredible historic accomplishment from President Trump. Yeah, well, absolutely.

And, Senator, just one word here, the last few moments we've got with you. you. We've got, you know, Senate, what is it, 11 days of work you guys accomplished in May is what you're going to, is what it's going to tally up to? What the heck is going on? Can we get the Save America Act pass? Like, is there any hope? What's the next step, sir? Well, look, we don't have the votes to do it. We have, we need some personnel change in the Senate. We need to get more America First Patriots in the Senate. That's what I'm hyper-focused on. But right now, we just don't have the votes to get it done. Well, all eyes are on Texas today with Senator,

hopefully the future Senator Ken Paxton, current Attorney General. So this is the last state to vote in the runoff there. So we're behind them. So thank you for being an America first fighter. Thank you for pushing and fighting for peace. Peace is the future. Peace is what this movement is really all about. So thank you, sir, for being one of the leaders in that.

God bless you. Thank you. Great conversation with Senator Bernie Moreno there. Pray for peace and pray for Paxton. Those are your two items on the docket today. And I want to just one note of warning, caution to the audience. You're going to be seeing a lot of propaganda flying back and forth about the details of the peace arrangement, potential peace deals, the way it's structured. Please take everything with a huge grain of salt.

All right. Take everything with a huge grain of salt. So, you know, I'm looking at the headlines. You know, Iran is saying they need $12 billion, you know, basically that's, you know, been tied up via sanctions. They want that upon signing the deal, and then 60 days later, they want the second half release. Here's what you need to know. There will be no money, no sanctions relief for Iran without actionable items that they have met. right so that they have obligations based on the framework of this deal they must meet them before

any of this sanctions relief is going to happen that much i know uh i was on a background call like i said that much was extraordinarily clear they have to work and do something first for any relief then they do something else in good faith there will be more potential relief all right you also have to be i just want to say this listen we don't necessarily get everything that we want in this deal all the time. That's not the way deals work. You've got to give something to get something often. Otherwise, we're just going to be stuck in a situation where we're bombing, you know, in perpetuity.

That's how we've gotten into other conflicts that we abhorred. So if you want an example, how did the Ukraine war explode with Russia? Well, one of the things was Russia was actually coming out and saying we would like to negotiate on some of these points, expansion of NATO, where you guys are putting missiles. we have a proposed framework deal that we could use as a starting point for negotiations and our attitude was never you know it wasn't we basically refused to talk we just said here's what you're going to do and you're going to accept it or or or or tough and then Russia decided to invade Ukraine and we were suddenly just now we're now we're on the hook we're spending

hundreds of billions of dollars on a war that could have been avoided and I think there's lessons in that if we had been willing to if we treated Russia seriously even if we said we don't like a lot of what you do, a lot of what you do is bad, but we don't want a giant war either. That all could have been avoided. And I think similarly with Iran, we can concede this is a backwards regime, it's a stupid regime, it's a regime that seems to despise its own people. But we also, it's not a country that we want to have 100,000 U.S. troops occupying. It's not a country that we want to spend another 25 years trying to remake into a Western-style democracy. So if we're going to be stuck living with them, how can we live with them?

Yeah, I totally agree. Ultimately, it gets to a point where we've done what we can do that's essentially the easy part. None of it's easy per se. But you can drop bombs and strike their manufacturing facilities. You can take out their military. You can put their Navy at the bottom of the sea. But what can they do? They can cling on to power.

Their people are not armed. They can intimidate, assault, murder their own people to the point where they're not willing to come out in the streets and overthrow them. And they can cause us a lot of problems in the strait. They can charge tolls. They can lay mines. They could essentially keep the world's energy supply hostage. Okay. So those are the dividing lines. If you are going to overthrow the regime, to Blake's point, you're committing to tens of thousands of U.S. troops being involved. You're committing to a ground force that will take out the regime. You're committing to funding and arming.

Here's the real truth. Militants. You don't know what you're committing to because it's another open-ended conflict. And if you had gone to people in 2002 and said, this is what your involvement in Afghanistan is going to entail when you send troops there. If you had gone to Bush in 2003

and said, this is what your commitment to Iraq is going to entail? Would you take it? I think they would say no, because it's very easy to tell people before you go in. This will be easy. It'll be in and out in a few months. And once you're in, as we've already seen, it's difficult to back out. And the same people who told you it'll be easy will tell you the next step will be really easy.

Well, they weren't right the first time. Yeah, I mean, listen, and you're absolutely spot on to look at the Russia deal. Listen, both sides get a say in a war, all right? There was a possibility that when we started striking Iran that the regime was going to be toppled instantly. That has proven to be untrue. They are more entrenched than we maybe hoped, all right? they were more able to cling to power than, for example, Israel told the president and his advisors. Israel painted a very rosy picture about what it would take to topple this regime.

Well, that hasn't happened. Okay, so when you see that that has not happened and you go back and you say, hey, let's redo our calculus here, what's possible, what's not, what are we willing to do, what are we not willing to do, then the math changes. The math right now is that they are going to cling to power one way or the other. for right now. Now we might get to the end of this. We might sign this deal and you get a little modicum of peace for a few weeks, a few months, and the people rise up and they take back their government. That could happen. Is it America's obligation? Beyond the nuclear weapon, which President Trump has made it,

his prerogative to make sure that they do not have a nuclear weapon, they do not have nuclear material, they are not enriching. If you can take that off the table and that straight can be open, this is a good deal. We should take it. We should decalue. We should declares. Claire victory, we should say our strategic objectives have been achieved, and we are going home to focus domestically because our nation needs that type of investment. Our people need that type of creativity and focus here domestically. If we have any hope in the midterms of fighting off a historical trend where the incumbent power loses during the midterms, we need to be focused here. We need $3 gas. We need $250 gas, all right? Affordability must be addressed. Home ownership must be

addressed. Getting the next generation to believe in America must be addressed. These are the issues. Family formation, making it affordable for families, unleashing the prosperity of this country for the next generation. That's how you win long term. That's how you deliver long term gains politically. You can't be distracted in quagmires in the Middle East. So cut your losses, accept your victories, declare victory, and get what you can and get out. And let the Iranian people deal with the regime. that should be the focus. Agree? I think so.

I think we're living out a lot of the warnings of people who said that we just need to get out of the Middle East because it's a very thankless area. It's a place where there's a lot of people invested in just endless conflict there. There's a lot of people who will always see this big victory just over that next hill, just over the next bombing run. and a lot of them are very persuasive people, but you just have to say, no, this has not been working out for the U.S. And America's gotten weaker every time we've done this. 20 years ago, we could go to war with Iraq,

and it just felt we're so strong. We can dominate everyone. We have unlimited resources. We did that with Afghanistan as well. And every time we've done this, we've gotten a little weaker. And now we just have to confront the fact, America is not this all-conquering super colossus. It's tough to do that with, you know,

powers throughout. the ages have found invading a huge country is extraordinarily challenging. So you've got to do what's reasonable and in our best interest. And that means get out, get home. Hey everyone. I'm genuinely excited to share something that has made a significant difference in my own life. And if you experience brain fog, low energy, frequent illnesses, or wake up feeling stiff and achy, you've got to try strong self. This was Charlie's favorite supplement and he took it every single day. He would talk about it on the show and even travel the country with it, which is what I do. So for me, strong cell helps keep my mind sharp and focused. It provides clean, natural energy

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manufacturing standards. So if you're tired of feeling tired, battling brain fog, or simply not feeling like yourself, check out Strong Cell today. Visit strongsell.com and use code Charlie for 20% off your order. That's strongsell.com promo code Charlie. Charlie always recommend in giving Strong Cell six to eight weeks to experience its full benefits. So Do yourself a favor. Get strong sell today and give it the time it needs to work its magic. And what better way as we come off Memorial Day weekend honoring our fallen heroes that have made this country great and possible? And as we move into the 250th celebration in through the summer in July 4th, then do celebrate July 4th with Steve Days, who's a great American.

He's got a new book out, Why Independence Day, America is great because God is good. Welcome back to the show, my friend. Good to see you guys. How are you? Congratulations on the book. This is the third in a trilogy of kids' books, which, you know, it's like, listen, we have these really prestigious, you know, academics on that have these really serious books. This, to me, is even more important because we got to teach the next generation about why they should love America, why they should have faith in America. It's more important than ever. Steve, why did you write this book? And what's it about?

So my publisher came to me a few years ago and said, hey, you know, after Russia's passing, he had these Rush Revere books that were very successful. Would you be willing to step into that space? And I'm like, listen, man, I can't shake the dust off of Russia's sandals. But then I got to thinking about it over the next day or two. And I thought, well, what if we did something even more unique? What if we looked at America's Christian heritage for children? And I proposed that as a trilogy. The publisher loved it. We launched the first one, Why Thanksgiving in 2022. It was a national bestseller.

We had Y Easter in 2024. And then the finale was always going to be for America's 250th, Why Independence Day. And then it's just a matter of what the subtitle was going to be. And so we decided to go with America is great because God is good. And you just see his providence, his hand of providence, all throughout our history. You see our founders refer to it. It's mentioned several times, moments and events that just could not.

not have happened without the hand of God intervening in human history. And we wanted to tell this story for our kids. I mean, really, the American story, the 250th birthday of America guys, it's an event 3,000 years in the making. Charlie used to point out, Deuteronomy was quoted more than any other book by our founding fathers. And so we go into all of that from Moses and Mount Sinai through Christ, through the Reformation, and all of this history that eventually led to this place, this special place now,

we're fighting to preserve called America. Yeah, you know, and I'm looking at the book because you sent a little advanced copy to me, so the PDF. So I'm looking at it right now, Steve. And the illustrations are great. I have little kids, so I can't wait to read them this. And it really helps you make the through line very directly and very obviously for the mind of a child explaining God's providential hand and how, like you said, this started 3,000 years ago. This started with God setting apart a people and a nation, how the pilgrims came to spread the gospel, really have a refuge here to freely express their Christian faith, and how that built the building blocks,

the foundation of the providential hand of God being so visible in our country. And I think it's beautiful. I can't wait to read it to my own kids. And I hope people at home understand the power of that. Why that's so important? Because maybe, Steve, this can be a question for you, explaining all that we're up against. You've got foreign influence campaigns. You've got a whole half of the country that seems to hate this place.

It seems to hate what it's about, what it was founded upon. And it hates the men who founded it and the ideas that founded it. Why now? Why is this more important than ever? Because of everything you just said. And we are at a generational nice edge. right now. And we are either going to pass these things on to the next generation, or they're going to be lost in this next generation. And if you just look at our history, there are events

that are just mathematically incalculable. The odds that the Puritans would go here across the channel and land in a place where it just so happened that they run into a guy named Squanto, who's an Indian, who was taught the Bible by English-speaking. you know, settlers over in, over in, in the old land, the old country. And he just happens to be there within close proximity to Massachusetts Bay Colony, pardon me, to help them understand this new world they were in and the tribes and, and all the customs they were landing into. The odds of that are incalculable, guys.

You see this all throughout our history. And it's why one of the terms our founders used the most was this term. Providence, which literally just means supernatural acts of God that are otherwise inexplicable. Yeah, and I'm just pulling some images here for the team so they can put them up here. I just love the way this thing is animated. And I mean, you know, and you give little Bible lessons here, which I love. You're talking about the founding of the country, something we actually talked about yesterday on our Memorial Day special a lot with the boys of 76 and 77 and O'Donnell, a historian,

great, great conversation we had with him. So please check that out. But you know, you're saying, since we have God's spirit in us now to teach us right from wrong, we don't need government rules as much as we used to. Sure, we still need things like the police to protect us because there are still bad people doing bad things. But we don't need a king to act like he's got, he's a God when we already know the one true God. I'm just, I'm flipping through the pages here.

And these are the type of lessons. Like you're explaining that we, the people are sovereign. You're explaining why, how God set up those structures of government, how they're sort of, well, they're not sort of. They are God-breathed. They are illuminated in the pages of scripture. And America is special because our form of government reflects God's design for his people. It's beautiful, Steve. Correct.

Amen. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. And, you know, when I was watching, I've got seen the new movie, A Great Awakening. about George Whitfield. Have you guys seen that yet? It's very well done. And one of the things that Ben Franklin says to the British ambassador, and it's funny, I thought that's a line right out of the children's book that I have coming out when I saw this about a month and a half ago, is he says to the British ambassador in a scene, well, they think now that they have God in their lives, and we've

had awakenings spiritually that they don't need a dreaded sovereign anymore. They don't need a king. They think that Jesus is king, Christ is king, and they're fine, just, you know, live in individually with him in charge. And I set up in my seat guys when I saw that in the theater because, again, that's right out of the page of my book that you just shared there, Andrew. And I think this is key to the understanding of how we came about as a people. This line's been attributed to many folks, I think it originated with William Penn, that if men were angels, they wouldn't need government. So we do need government. We're not angels, right? We are sinners. But we need government that is limited. Why do we need a government that is

limited because the people working in the government are sinners too. That's why. God is not a respecter of persons. The people working in that both the governed and the government are full of sinners. So we need just enough to restrain the sinful acts of the people and to provide justice when they do sin. This is what Paul means in Romans 13 to be an avenging angel against the evildoer. That's the purpose of government. But not so much now that you use your sinfulness to go back to the original sin and say, I am God, and government then becomes a God. It's the old Chesterton line. When government removes the God, the government becomes the God. Yeah, we see that completely on the progressive left. And we see it sometimes little elements

on the right, Steve, which is why getting back to foundational principles is so important right now. I mean, there's a point to being pragmatic in politics. I totally agree. We can be over ideological. But if you don't have these basics and these understand, and you don't instill them in your children at a very young age, this country is going to be in a world of hurt. We will not pass this great blessing that is America onto the next generation. You know, let's talk about, so your book, I mean, really undergirding that, your entire premise for writing it is we lost a great man in Rush Limbaugh too soon,

died of cancer, and it was heartbreaking. I know it broke Charlie's heart, and then we lost Charlie, another great man, and we lost him too soon. a powerful voice for young people. And there is this sense, you know, a lot of people like give into dooming and black pilling because we lost these two great men. And we need, we needed them. It feels like we needed them. But you're one of those guys that is stepping into that and doing the peace that you can. And that's all we're trying to do here by keeping the Charlie Kirk show alive is doing our peace and doing what we can through turning point. And maybe reflect on that,

just that dynamic, because there is a lot of people that see what's happened, that, you know, see what happened in the movement, the fracturing, the fraying at the edges, this foreign influence, whatever it is. Why are you stepping into the void, Steve? I think that number one, if your worldview begins with the assertion, that God supernaturally intervened his hand into human history to raise his dead son to life and that the last enemy death has been conquered, then I don't think you're permitted a despair-driven worldview. Despair is a dialect of hell. I don't think you're permitted nihilism. Listen, we love Gallo's humor on our show. We kid about being Vanta Black, but it's clearly to our audience

a joke, okay? I mean, ultimately that if you believe resurrection comes after Good Friday, then there's always hope. You think the world's dark now. How about, hey, we killed God, guys. It's a pretty dark world. It's as dark as it gets. It's been a lot darker than this. I mean, the story of the people that founded the country, the Puritans, who were they fleeing?

They were not fleeting Islamic infiltration like we're seeing in the West. They weren't fleeing, you know, pagan communist didn't even exist yet. Heck, during the post-Reformation era, where Catholic monarchs would persecute Protestants and Protestant monarchs would persecute Catholics. weren't even fleeing a Catholic monarch. They were fleeing a Protestant king who wanted to tell them what exactly they could and could not preach and what they could and could not say. John Bunyan wrote, you know, Pilgrim's Progress. He was in prison for over a decade by a Protestant king because he didn't want to have his sermons checklisted and approved by the Crown. It can get a lot

darker than things currently are. And so to me, there's always hope. And I'm not, you know, it's funny. I think I'm getting more offers and opportunities to do things because of the giant void that Charlie's murder left and others that I'm speaking to too. And we're all saying the same things to each other. There's like 15 of us that are getting asked to fill some of this space here. How do this one guy do all of this? We all still have our old jobs. We've got to do all the other stuff we were doing.

How'd this guy go do all this stuff that the 15 of us are now trying to all figure out amongst ourselves? But one of those things I just got invited to do, one of those things was, was to do a heritage tour with Speaker Mike Johnson last week in D.C. And I have to tell you, it's rare to say anything out of D.C. is inspiring, but going there and seeing a lot of this history to be in that prayer room that is halfway between the offices of the majority leader and the speaker, to see these marble statues, to see these paintings. And I shared a lot of them with our audience today. It refilled my tank. It reminded me of what it is that we're really fighting for here, that this really is the last best hope this nation is, as far as we know anyway, the last best hope for

this planet before Christ returns. And so I'm as fired up as I've been in a long time just by getting that personal reminder of the stakes here and why it is, why it is so volatile, it's because of what this country stands for and what happens to the rest of this planet if this country goes away. Yeah, that's beautifully said. And, you know, and J.D. Vance, said the same thing in the aftermath of when we lost Charlie. It's like we all just have to do the little piece that we can because Charlie was a giant and he did so much and he was tireless. He just had this engine where he just wouldn't stop going. He was always trying to squeeze out 30 more minutes of his day, squeeze out 5% more productivity again and again and again over years.

And that's how you get a Charlie Kirk. It was so it's so incredible to remark upon just because he even could fit in, he did even fit in the leisure. So he had his, he had his Sabbath that he would do on Saturdays. He still managed to watch the Cubs, watch the ducks. And yet he's still off maximizing his work time so effectively, always, always organizing something, always planning the next thing, always, he's just such a model of high effectiveness across one's life. Yeah.

And I think, I'm glad we'll always have that. Yeah. Well, and he, I think you're doing a great job too, Steve, of just being. courageous as well. And I think this time really calls for a lot of courage to call it out. There's a lot of voices, and we'll just keep it vague for now, because it's Tuesday after Memorial Day, and I want to feel the unifying spirit of it. But, you know, there's a lot of question of whether or not they're actually being effective. And I think they're being somewhat effective of discouraging us, of getting us divided. But I don't think they're nearly as effective as people

are concerned that they are. And I know that you have. agree with this on some level. Maybe spend the last minute of our talk remarking on that. One of the things I think we're going to find in this era is that you can build an audience that is a mile wide but an inch deep. And that that audience and influence are not necessarily the same thing, meaning that where are the people you are reaching? Is it where can you create a critical mass? And ultimately, you know, metrics can be faked, numbers can be faked. Ultimately, you are the merchandise you can move and the people you can mobilize because that's those are constants everything else is a variable and those are constants and and to me i i think that

a great tell if you're listening to the right content is does it bring you closer to god's word and make you want to be more christ-like and if the answer that question is yes then then get even then hug that content even closer and if the answer to that question is no then run away from as fast as you can. That's a great way to end it. Steve Day's, congratulations on your book. Thank you for your contribution and your courage. Let's stay the course. Pray for peace. Pray for Paxton in Texas. We've got things to do. Steve Days, be well, my friend. I'll talk to you soon. God bless. Charlie used to talk a lot about Angel Studios and what they were building. And as you know, I've been a long time fan of it for the same reason. So I wanted to share some of my

favorite films and shows on Angel, and I put them all into one easy-to-use watch list. This is content that's actually worth your time, not just noise or recycle talking points, but stories that go a level deeper and ask better questions. That's what stands out about Angel to me. They're willing to put out films and documentaries that don't just follow the usual script, especially when it comes to politics, culture, and the bigger conversations you and I should be having. So on my watch list, you'll find picks that lean into those topics, but there are also

solid options for family or just something meaningful to watch at the end of a stressful day. If you want to check it out, go to angel.com slash Charlie and take a look at the watch list I put together. Our next guest, we're having on Noah Rothman. He's a senior writer at National Review, and he's the author of Blood and Progress, a history of left-wing violence in America. It's brand new and obviously on a topic. You and I both care a great deal about.

Noah, are you there? I'm here. Welcome. Welcome to the show. So I should just say, the first seven pages of this are a retelling of an experience. We all are going to remember the rest of our lives, what happened with Charlie. And in particular, something about it that should never be memory hold. And people are doing their best to do it, which is the wave of, I'll just say, insane lies afterwards trying to spin what happened as an act of,

far right wing violence against Charlie from Lawrence Tribe, a former professor at Harvard, tried to argue that it was right wing violence. Heather Cox Richardson, one of the most popular substackers, she just said, oh, this is a,

this is Groyper type violence that did this. When we saw very quickly that all of the evidence rests with this being left-wing trans-motivated violence. But as your book gets into, uh, Noah, this is part of a very long-term pattern on the left that, there's sort of been a, for lack of a better word, a conspiracy to suppress that this is going on.

Can you elaborate on that thesis? Yeah, I think a conspiracy is a great word for it. And it's not as though there's a coordinated effort here. It's an unspoken set of interests that end up making mainstream media professionals and otherwise responsible communicators just subordinate everything they know about copycat violence, about responsible reporting to an ideological motivated desire to convince the rest of of the American people that the right, the American right, is uniquely violent and always responsible for big episodes of political violence in this country. We hear about it all the time.

We heard about it after Charlie Kirk. We heard about it after the assassination of Brian Thompson, United Health Care CEO. We hear about it whenever there's an attack on a knife facility. Three times last year, including one that involves sophisticated ambush tactics. We hear about it after the president is almost assassinated, not once, not twice, but thrice. Eventually, you have to wonder if this line has any substance, any merit to it. And that's what I investigate in this book. Not only that, but Blood and Progress, a century of left-wing violence in America, exposes the degree to which very recent scholarship has only begun to explore the waves of left-wing

political violence in this country in the 1920s, 1920s, 1910s, 1970s, 1980s. And today, and you begin to see a lot of similarities across these violent movements where individuals who engage in perhaps deluded thinking, but deluded thinking that is encouraged by influential, people in the orbit of very responsible institutional figures in this country that encourage this sort of thing and refuse to look at squarely in the face telling themselves that, oh, we don't have a violence problem. It's largely a myth. The right is the real problem in this country. And we have a clip that I just, I have to play. This is from CNN, saying exactly that.

Sot 25. While America's roots are soaked in bloodshed, violence in the country today is mostly from right-wing extremism. from Oklahoma City to Charlottesville to January 6th. There is simply no equivalent on the left. No one. Agree or disagree. How would you reply to that? Well, it's a refrain, and it's a refrain that serves not really to explore the issue, but to excuse ignoring it.

Increasingly, I feel like that's the only logic associated with issuing that reflexive reaction. Whenever there's an episode of left-wing violence in this country, obviously conclusively demonstrated by investigators and a law enforcement. And it's supported by some dubious statistical games that I think are being played with some of these databases that are used to justify this claim. The ADL, the Anti-Defamation League has one. The University of Cincinnati has another. And they're cited repeatedly, and if you explore them, the statistical breakdowns of right-wing violence include prison violence, gang violence, intra-family violence, sometimes somebody who spray paints a side of a church, right-wing violence, a homeless man who starts hurling racial slurs in a hotelier and attacks him, right-wing violence.

The data begins to look kind of corrupted, the more you look into it. And then there's this report authored for the Department of Homeland Security in 2021 that alleges that left-wing violence is not well-studied because there are intimidation campaigns marshaled against people who study it, reputational damage, the threat of physical harm for doing that kind of work, and as well, the fact that people who are participants in these often violent left-wing movements are themselves the authors of studies exploring the phenomenon. So it is a fatally subjective enterprise if it's not hopelessly corrupted.

And by telling these stories, and I don't break it down into statistics, this book does not contend that right-wing violence does not exist. That would be a child's argument, which I encounter all the time. But it does complicate the argument that is issued by the left and left-wing institutions like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which maintains left-wing. violence is a quote unquote myth and confronts them with the fact that the evidence they're relying on to make that claim is deficient if not corrupted uh i hope that left this this book blood in progress a century of left wing violence in america gets its hands into the right audiences

because if anything i just want them to confront the fact that they have been bandying about this notion not in order to correct the record but to avoid looking at the whole spectrum of political violence in this country and until we get our hands around the the whole problem, we're never going to solve it. So you mentioned that there's commonalities, that there was left wing violence in the tens and twenties. We saw another in the 60s and 70s. And you could say we've seen another surge of it, certainly since about 2019, 2020 or so

in the U.S. with BLM, yeah, mostly peaceful stuff. You mentioned there's commonalities between them. What are the common threads of a surge of left wing violence? So if you go back to the 1910s, 1920s, which is where I start, the 8,000. anarchist socialist wave of terror bombings, which the recent scholarship into it, only in this century,

all of the people who explore this phenomenon note that it's forgotten in much the same way that the nationalist movements that tried to assassinate Harry Truman and shot up Congress in the 1950s were forgotten or the Marxist terror cells

of the 70s were forgotten. But across the spectrum, you see some similarities like what they used to call propaganda of the deed, which is today more likely to be referred to as direct action. These are spectacular attacks that are designed in the minds of their perpetrators to galvanize a broader audience and ignite broader violence that will beget the revolution.

A lot of this is very revolutionary in nature and Marxian in nature. Small cell leaderless organizations, again, when that ice terror cell attacks, including one that involved about 10 members using fireworks to lure out their targets and overlapping fields of fire. Again, very sophisticated attack on law enforcement. But you usually see attacks on law enforcement when these waves of left-wing violence begin because they regard the state as much as an enemy and in league with the American right as they do the right-wing adversaries who they typically organize against. And lastly, the intellectual notion that systemic oppression licenses extra-legal violence, however they define it, it is a sort of permission structure that give themselves.

No, that reminds me when you say it like that of, you know, Hassan Piker, who went on with the New York Times and talking about social murder, right? That, you know, Brian Thompson was guilty of all this social murder, so he had it coming. And then you saw those nitwits outside of the Mamdani press conference or whatever, where they, you know, I forget the two ladies' names, but they were, you know, media credentialed. And they're literally two weeks later, they're talking about social murder, social murder.

All it is is this elaborate philosophy that they've baked up to justify murder, to justify violence, to justify extra, you know, sort of, means, proactive means. You see this is the Antifa handbook, right? Dr. Antifa at Rutgers University, where the whole thing is a handbook of how do you preemptively attack people you politically disagree with. This is fundamental to their worldview. Yeah. And it's meeting out real violence, real bloodshed in response to a highly theoretical, metaphorical violence that, again, that they talk themselves into. Those two ladies, three ladies, one of whom was less talkative than the others, were very illustrative of this phenomenon, right? It was a ghoulish

display. They competed with one another to be more offensive, to be more inhuman. And literally, I used that word, because they were utterly devoid of human empathy and compassion. And then what is the point of this whole thing? It was Lena Weissbrot, was her name, who said, listen, we're the most subservient cowed population in the history of this planet. We would have had a revolution by now if you shared my apprehensions and my anxieties. And I'm sure she's right. The thing is, most people don't. So in the leftist mind, They have to invent these causes and then meet out real vicious violence in order to demonstrate to you that the God can bleed, that we can destroy this holy immoral system if we just all take a sledgehammer to its foundations. It's what they want. And this book elaborates on why. Well, let's play a clip of Charlie saying exactly that. It's not 28.

This is all they have is violence. At the core of the left, at the core of a liberal is someone that would use the sword if they had it. They are very violent people at their core. They always have it. They can't debate. They can't have conversation. So they'll resort to these tactics. Charlie always understood the left fundamentally. And you make an argument in your book that they're willing to endure a certain amount of this violence.

I want to show you this new poll that poster Rich Beres sent me over the weekend. He's doing some polling about the left. and he was freaked out. He was like, man, they're getting more radical. So you can see this. 59.4% of those polled basically say they're Democratic socialists. 21% say unsure. 12% say traditional liberal.

And 6.2 just say we're socialist. So the question then becomes, is the Democrat Party becomes more radical, Noah. Should we just sort of anticipate that they are comfortable with more and more violence? because I don't want to overprescribe and say they're all comfortable with assassination. I know that's not true. But there's certainly some that are.

And there's even more that are comfortable with overt acts of disruption, chaos, political violence, vandalism. That seems to be pretty darn mainstream on the left now. How much are they, like right now, if you took a snapshot of the Democrat Party or the progressive movement in the United States, how much violence are they comfortable with? I go into the polling in the book, and it depends obviously on the survey and the sample and the time that the survey is taken. But there are trends that indicate that increasing numbers of Democrat-affiliating voters in this country tell pollsters, not just to themselves, are willing to tell pollsters that they do support some level of violence in order to suppress speech they don't like, for example, or to forget positive social change as they see it.

I think the vast majority of responsible Democrats do not. not support violence in the streets. That said, there is an element within the Democratic Party that is attracted to people power. When they see people on the street, mobs, vast numbers of protesters, they see in that a reflection of what they regard as romantic zeal, enthusiasm for their political project. And then they subordinate all they know, all their caution just goes out the window in order to embrace those groups and channel and harness that energy into what they believe will be positive social change. So they did that with Occupy Wall Street. Even if you ask any member of Occupy Wall Street if they had any use for Democrats, they would tell you, throw them all

into the East River. We don't need them. It didn't matter. Even if they were engaged in lawless acts of violence, attacking federal facilities, attacking law enforcement, shielding perpetrators of violence and rape from law enforcement, all that was just pushed aside in order to try to harness this energy. They did the exact same thing 10 years later with the George Floyd. protests, seeing in that some measure of political enthusiasm that could get them over the hump, get them past the election with Trump, and to a certain extent succeeded, but also traded in a lot of responsible governance to ingratiate themselves with a movement that anybody should have known at the time was potentially violent and certainly not sympathetic to the broadest

number of Americans. But they just have this attachment to the enthusiasm in the streets that can be harnessed and controlled by the worst demagogues in this country. They just subordinate everything they know. That sounds like they're just willing to sell their soul to the devil if they can think they can win an election. And it's so infuriating, Noah, that I just, I think of like the

double thing that must go on where a lot of these people can hear a report on CNN or you know, whatever they call MSNBC or whatever that'll say. We've checked the numbers and political violence is overwhelmingly a right-wing phenomenon. And yet at the same time, you know, I know. I think everybody knows. Even members of the left will sometimes

essentially gloat about this, that it's never, an event on a campus is never going to be canceled because of right-wing violence, but it will because left-wing violence, they barricade the building, they set things on fire, they terrorize people, and as we know, they are capable of committing murder. Similarly, with, after the George Floyd stuff, no one's ever worried an entire neighborhood is going to get torched by right-wing violence, but it's happened with left-wing violence. We've never had an urban takeover. We had a left-wing radicals took over downtown Seattle

for what, a month. Summer of Love, yeah, that's exactly, the chas, chop, whatever you want to call it. It's one thing after another, and I guess, how does this double thing work? Are they just compartmentalizing this as not real violence? And I should also mention the courthouse siege in Portland. You can have left-wing agitators basically besiege a federal building for weeks on end. And the politicians defend it. There's no equivalent of this on the right in America. It happens all the time. We've gotten almost used to it.

The violence in Portland and places in Los Angeles, for example, descends almost nightly on these cities. It's kind of regarded as like a quirky feature of the urban scene. And it is just the decay of modern social life. It's the breakdown of elementary governance. And yes, you're right. There is no equivalent when it comes to the threat environment. The threat environment is so pronounced that proactive action like, shutting down events has become common currency.

And it's not something that has an equivalency on the right. But there is, you know, there's a taboo here that I can work with. When the left says, well, the right is uniquely violence. Implicit in violent. Implicit in that is the notion that political violence is bad, right? Because they wouldn't be accusing you of it if it was good. So there's an element there that reasonably understands that the American people writ large are not attracted to political violence, abhor political violence,

regarding as a threat to the social fabric. That's good. That social stigma is valuable. I want to encourage that, but I want to encourage it by also taking a look at what rightling violence looks like these days, the degree to which it mirrors some of the black block tactics that we see, again, nightly displayed in cities in which demonstrators, professional agitators and organizers who dress in uniform somehow have respirators and gas masks delivered to them by shady, shady actors, just pop up. up out of nowhere and get unloaded out of a U-Haul this happens with disturbing frequency.

And by putting this all these events together in this book, Blood and Progress, I hope that we can create a portrait that compels the American left to look at this phenomenon because it has been delineated in such as in this fashion. They get away with it by analyzing each event of left-wing political violence in isolation, never drawing the threads that any logical inference would allow them to draw. and then telling themselves that the right wing has a monopoly on political violence in this country. By establishing the timeline as I have,

I hope, and with 80 pages of notes, I dare you, defy you to go check my work. I hope someone does. I'm creating a roadmap here for individuals who want to confront the left with their tacit and complicit acceptance of a rising tide of political violence on their side with everything they have allowed to flourish.

When it's put all together like that, it's a pretty damning portrait, I think. I think it is. And by the way, I love the title of your book because it's sort of a play on the lefts and the SPLCs, their favorite sort of boogeyman, blood and soil. And you're like, how about blood in progress?

Because now you guys have to own it. And I think it was a really important timing with this book, Noah. So thank you for writing it. And thank you for putting together the thesis statement that they're going to have to contend with now, that the left is a movement very prone, especially in our moment,

and throughout history to political violence. Thank you, Noah. God bless me. Thank you, guys. It's an honor to be here. I appreciate it. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust,

go to charliekirk.com.