The Charlie Kirk Show - Remembering "Dilbert" Creator Scott Adams

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

In the 1990s, Scott Adams famously satirized white collar cubicle culture with Dilbert. Over the past decade, he became famous for his astute analysis of the Trump phenomenon and wider society. The show team memorializes him with some favorite comic strips and talks about his deathbed acceptance of Christianity. John Carney assesses President Trump's tariff policies and what the Supreme Court might rule on them tomorrow. 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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The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers. All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show. It is January 13th, 2026. We are here in studio. I'm Andrew Colvin, executive producer of this show, joined by Blake Neff, the one and only, Blake Neff.

And today we mourn the loss of another great American, and that is Scott Adams. I just saw that J.D. Vance actually just tweeted something moments before we came on the air. Scott Adams was a true American original and a great out. ally to the president of the United States and the entire administration. My prayers go to Scott and all of you who loved him. We lost one of the good ones, but we'll never forget him. And yeah, it's a sad day. A lot of newspaper comic artists are not going to get a tribute like that. I don't think. Do you remember when Charles Schultz died? I do. But, but just vaguely. Yeah, that was the peanuts guy. Yeah, of course. He was a great American icon, but that's the only one I can really think of. That's comfortable. Yeah, I mean, so Scott Adams, of course, created Dilbert in, 1989 and he it was incredible because you know obviously we were too young to kind of understand you know i was too young blake wasn't even born yet uh you know it was too young to understand the this rise of corporate culture or workplace cubicle culture and he gave voice through this

comic to the quiet frustrations of working men and women that were working their way up Frustrations, but also it was deeply funny. It was deeply funny. It was the hapless engineer protagonist, as it was described, a bunch of dysfunctional colleagues. And, you know, it was a cultural phenomenon. It became a cultural phenomenon that people would talk about at the workplace or at the water cooler or when they're getting coffee at work. And that's why he ultimately created coffee with Scott Adams.

It was originally called Real Coffee with Scott Adams. And it became a phenomenon that many people tuned into daily. And to just get a dose of his, you know, his contrarian thinking. He had a unique blend of insight, humor, wit, and an optimism. He was an optimist. He genuinely was. And he was one of the first people to sort of take President Trump seriously, one of the first mainstream people to take President Trump seriously. And he paid politically for that. And he paid in his career for that as well. A lot of papers around the country ended up removing Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoon from. their papers. Yeah, and they, you know, and here's what they'll do. By the way, this is what they're going to do is the same thing that they do with Charlie is they're going to cherry pick a few things that Scott maybe said or take it out of context. They're going to like remove all the other context and say that Scott Adams was this bad person or whatever. No, Scott Adams was a great American. What he was, he was a man in the arena, just like Charlie. Where, oh, if you go out there and say things, oh, there's a risk. Someone might not like what you say. You might be inarticulate at some point. It's just disgusting. I want us to throw out. This is one of my favorites. Let's put up 249. This is just, you didn't have comics like this before, or not comics, cartoons. Go ahead and read it for us.

So it's the point you heard boss talking to Dilbert. My boss says we need some Unic programmers. I think he means Unix, not Unix. I already, and I already know Unix. If the company nurse drops by, tell her I said, never mind. The company nurse. I don't think you would have seen, you would not have seen a comic strip like, I keep saying, yeah, a comic strip like that in, uh, it was, it was cathartic.

It was, it was syndicated worldwide, by the way. That's what's amazing about it. It's syndicated worldwide. So it was a phenomenon of the workplace that emerged in the 80s and 90s, probably in the 70s. And what people also probably don't know about Scott is he authored a bunch of bestselling books on persuasion, persuasion, systems thinking, personal success. It's just really great. I actually talked to Scott on the phone. I never met him in person.

I talked to him on the phone a couple times. I was on the phone with Scott and Charlie, believe it or not. We were talking about maybe getting him on the show, how we could work together. Nothing ended up coming of those conversations. But, you know, Scott did honor Charlie when Charlie was killed. And we have that clip. He did. We have that clip.

Let's make sure we have the right one here because there were a few. Yeah. So this was, he was on Tucker's program shortly after and he was commenting on it. So this is, I can't imagine Adams ever thought he would outlive Charlie, but this is what he had to say. Clip 239. When Charlie Kirk died, you could almost feel this massive energy being released. You know, he sort of controlled it. But when it was released, you know, his mortal coil was no more.

I feel like that energy just went into people. And suddenly tens of millions. of people simultaneously said, what can I do? What can I do right now? That's different. People don't say, I'm going to stop everything. Tell me what to do. I'm going to go to church. A lot of people did. I'm going to say stuff on social media. I'm going to hunt down the people who said bad things and cancel them. But I'm going to do something. We're going to figure out how to start another chapter of, you know, T.P. USA. And all of that's happening. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down, you know, the vigils, et cetera. If anything, the energy, it might be growing. And I've never seen anything

like it. In my life, I've never seen the Republicans turn into their own machine. And now it is a And what's most important, I think, as well, is that Scott was wrestling with his own mortality towards the end. You know, C.S. Lewis would talk about how a soldier in a foxhole, actually, you know, because he was reflecting on World War I, he was a veteran of World War I, and he was doing a lot of his writings and his thinking in World War II. And he said that it can be a blessing to be faced with your own mortality and to understand that you, as a soldier, you might die and to confront the Almighty and to make peace. And Scott was sort of that soldier on a field in a cultural sense, in a media sense, and he was staring down the sickness.

He had metastatic prostate cancer that spread to his bones. Yeah, and so he was dealing with the fact that he knew he was probably going to die. He said it, I'm going to die. We're all going to die. Yes, but imminently, right? And so that could be a real blessing. And so Scott was wrestling with his own mortality and was never a believer, was never a Christian. He had great respect for Christians, but he was not himself.

And so we have two clips where he himself was describing this, 236. Many of my Christian friends and Christian followers say to me, Scott, do you still have time? You should convert to Christianity. And I usually just let that sit because that's not an argument I want to have. I've not been a believer. But I also have respect for any Christian who goes another way to try to convert me. Because how would I believe you have believe your own religion? religion if you're not trying to convert me.

So I have great respect for people who care enough that they want me to convert and then go out of the way to try to convince me. So you're going to hear for the first time today that it is my plan to convert. That's a very Scott Adams way to do it. It's such an I'm a tech autist kind of guy. Exactly. It's like an engineer, you know, doing it. in only the way he can.

And my word to everybody that's like, you know, that might think that, you know, this isn't, that's not an authentic way to convert. I would just say everybody's different. God makes us in mysterious ways. I actually, the last DM I sent to Scott was the parable of the workers in the vineyard. And we wanted to read this really quick. For the kingdom of heaven is like the land owner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard.

He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard. about nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, you also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right. So they went. He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. About five in the afternoon, he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, why have you been standing here all day doing nothing? Because no one has hired us, they answered.

He said to them, you also go and work in my vineyard. When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going to the first. the workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius so when those came who were hired first they expected to receive more but each one of them also received a denarius when they received it they began to grumble against the landowner these who were hired last worked only one hour they said and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of work for the heat of the day but he answered to them i am not being unfair to you friend didn't you agree to work for a denarius take your pay and go i want to give the one who has hired last the same as I gave you. I want to remind you about a pharmacy we trust and recommend, especially right now when it feels like everyone's getting sick. Flu cases are up, viruses are going around.

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Disgrace. But I'm telling you, this is the exact same playbook. Parasites. Can you take the enemies of the people? The banner off the bottom there for a second so people can see it. Yeah. So Scott, yeah, Scott Adams, disgraced Dilbert creator dies at 68. Dilbert was pulled from wide circulation after Adam's racist rant in 2023. It's such a garbage thing to do to somebody. And, you know, this is what they did with Charlie. It's the same exact playbook where, you know, they take something that Charlie said out of context about black pilots or Martin Luther King. And they strip it of all of the buildup, all of the context.

It's just hateful garbage. And then they use it to smear somebody, even in death. You know, somebody retweeted my tweet on it on X and basically, or quote tweeted it and said, you know you can tell a lot about the way some you know a group of people by who they lionize and who who their heroes are and i'm like you can tell a lot about somebody that even in death they refused to be gracious and kind or at least neutral or just keep your mouth shut so people magazine shame on you absolute disgrace we got someone who sent in their favorite dilbert they had a they have a dilbert strip uh hanging in their cubicle yeah and it's dilbert talking to

the point to hear'd boss, may I talk to you after the mandatory meeting? Whoa, whoa, I didn't give you approval to attend that meeting. The meeting is mandatory. Approval is mandatory too. Okay, whatever. May I go to the mandatory meeting? All requests must be in writing. It's mandatory. If people start bending the rules before long, murder will be legal, and then it shows him talking to his co-worker afterwards. That was the best mandatory meeting I've ever been to. They handed out free cash. shut up. It was funny. It was good.

I was never like really that into cartoons, but I was really into like, you know. It was one of, it was, I read like three of them and that was one of them. Yeah. Well, there's not a lot. A lot of them are really bad. Do they still exist, I guess? Do newspapers still exist? They do.

They do exist, Blake. Yeah. There are newspapers. Listen, I want to, I just want to remember that, that Scott took a. great personal toll for this. And, and, you know, I, I, the, the way the verse ends with the parable of the workers in the vineyard is that, you know, the first will be last and the last will be first. And so Scott, Scott came to his faith almost at the end, almost as like Pascal's wager.

And maybe Blake, if you want to describe that for the audience who doesn't know. Oh, yeah. So he does, then there's another clip where he's more forthright about it even that. So Blaise Pascal was a French math. who laid out an argument that basically you should embrace theism, you should embrace Christianity, because the rewards of eternal life are great, and if you're wrong,

you're just worm food, so you lose nothing. Now the funny thing is, is Pascal, a very logical man himself, did not convert for that reason. He had a religious experience one night, like just had a divine vision, and he was a super Christian after that. But it's an argument that has a lot of, it's debated a lot, certainly

among, you know, computer programmer types. Well, this is exactly what Scott Adams. is. He's sort of an engineering brain, a contrarian thinker. And so he did sort of wrestle with the risk reward analysis. And some people might say, that's not authentic. I think it was the most authentic way Scott could approach faith that he struggled to embrace his whole life. And so I would just say, welcome, welcome to the fold. You know, we're honored to have you, Scott, and, you know, may you rest in peace. And we expect to see you someday. And I hope you say hi to Charlie for us up there. He was the man in the arena.

That's all those attacks on him. You think of that Theodore Roosevelt quote. I know Charlie was a fan of it. It's not the critic who counts. It's the man who is marred by dust and sweat and blood who strives valiantly. That's the man who matters. And that's what he was doing. He could be attacked by people because he bothered to say something that was relevant and controversial, period.

Yep. Exactly. And, you know, I think it was Matt Walsh who said, you know, especially in the aftermath of Charlie's death. and he was reflecting on all the attacks against Charlie from the left or whatever. And he basically was just like, may we all experience, may our enemies rejoice when we die, because that means we were truly effective. And the fact that they just, like, the pettiness of it, I think just makes them look disgraced Dilbert creator. I think it makes them look disgraceful.

The only party disgraced in this instance is people, all right? That is it. The fact that you could just say Dilbert creator, Scott Adams dies at 68. Why couldn't you just go with that? Guess not. In famous cartoonist. Famous cultural commentator. Well, yeah.

I mean, like, for real. And obviously he means a lot to a lot of people. We're mourning him. The whole, you know, of X is mourning him. The vice president is sending out tweets. There's going to, I feel we're actually underselling this just because it's been a long time. And what really made him super notable with our faction is in 2015, 2016, he was one of the

first guys to really take Trump serious. as a as a political candidate who would lay out an argument okay what Trump is doing when he's on stage where it's unpredictable and silly and he's he's saying stuff that seems outlandish he's actually doing something powerfully persuasive to people and he could win the election doing this and he was just saying this back when everyone else on television was saying oh he's just a dumb clown it's never going to go anywhere he was saying no you guys are wrong about this and he put his well he put his reputation where his mouth was and he was proved right Trump actually did win that election.

Yeah, well said. I think you're right. And there is kind of this cast of like OG MAGA originals, like the Mike Cernovich's, the Jack Posobics, the Charlie Kirk's, the Scott Adams, the people that saw early on. I don't even know that he was a Trump supporter. He was just actually willing to say, this guy is effective at what he does. And it's going to be persuasive to people.

It was that master persuader line he used. I remember that one. Yeah. Well, no, absolutely. And, you know, his wife read a statement this morning, and they did a coffee with Scott Adams, you know, after his passing. We had heard that he went to hospice, but his wife confirmed that, you know, he was of sound mind and that, you know, that he did accept Jesus Christ. And so, you know, God bless Scott. And thank you for your contribution.

We honor you on this show because we honor brave men and women that stand up for what's right, that are the men in the real. the arena that do take the slings and arrows for the rest of us charlie was one of these men scott was one of these men and you know it it's really it's really sad to lose two great americans in such quick order it really is and that was the first thought i had when i saw the news this morning that it it breaks my heart that we've lost another one it really does because listen people are going to come and they're going to fill fill the ranks you know i'm loving the you know some of these people Nick Shirley that are coming and doing great things. And we want more.

We need more in this space. We need more sane actors, more rational actors, more persuasive actors, and good faith actors. And Scott was one of those people that. And talented ones too, because he wasn't just a political guy. He was a hugely, he had something funny and interesting to say. And millions of people are going to remember him for that. And that's a good thing to aspire to as well. Yeah, absolutely.

This is Lane Schoenberger. chief investment officer and founding partner of Y-R-R-R-R-R-Fi. It has been an honor and a privilege to partner with TurningPoint and for Charlie to endorse us. His endorsement means the world to us, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Turning Point for years to come. Now, hear Charlie in his own words tell you about Y-R-R-R-R-E-F-Y-F-I. I'm going to tell you guys about YREFI.com. That is YR-R-E-F-Y-F-Y. Why-R-E-F-Y-I is incredible. Private Student Loan debt in America total is $300 billion. Why-ReFi is refunded private student loans. You can finally take control of your student loan situation with a plan that works for your monthly budget. Go to why refi.com. That is why refi.com. Do you have a co-barrower? Why refi can get them released from the loan. You're going to skip a payment up to 12 times without penalty. It may not be available in all 50 states. Go to Y-refi.com.com. That is y-R-E-F-Y-F-Y.com.

Let's face it, if you have distress or default to student loans, it can be overwhelming. Because of private-sit-loan debt, so many people feel stuck. Go to Y-R-R-E-F-Y-F-Y.com. Private student loan debt relief, Y-refi.com. Our team that runs our merch has been, like, begging me to do this. So I'm going to do this. The Charlie Kirk Show Store.com. You can also just go to Charliekirk.com and link.

to it but the charlie kirk show store.com we have a new vintage collection of some of charlie's original t-shirts that he had made when we started the show and there's been a lot of people that email us and ask for all of this stuff so i wanted to make sure i did that because they've been asking me for like three or four days and i keep forgetting so charlie kirk show store the charlie kirk show store or just go to charlie kirk.com and we have it on the main page you can link over to it but we have the vintage collection god is real be better work hard harder, Patriot. We have the bracelets that Charlie would wear, the, you know, be better, work harder there. And it's all the original stuff. So please check it out and support the team here.

Would love for you to do that. And another thing I wanted to address, Blake and I were talking about in the break, a lot of you have emailed us at freedom at charliecirk.com wanting the entire catalog of past Charlie Kirk shows. We are working on that. We're going to get it up. And I don't have a timeline yet or when we can get that done, but we are working on it. Please rest assured. We want to make it really easy for you all to just access all the old episodes of Charlie directly. And so we are working on that. Please be rest assured. And we've got there's there's projects at the turning point side to get a bunch of Charlie's content also like AI searchable. And until then, I would just know if you want to find something now, all of our old live streams are

on Rumble. It can be annoying to scroll through them. But you can find them. And you can see our episodes have a pretty formulaic date listing. So if you go to, if you search Charlie Kirk Show on Rumble with that date format, you can probably find that old episode very easily. Yeah. So again, the Charlie Kirk Show store.com. Check it out there. Great work from the team, by the way, getting all those up. And it's a lot of work that the merch team does. And I'm really proud of it. Okay. Without further ado, we have John Carney. He's the economist editor, I believe. I got that right. I was doing Breitbart Economics Editor. There you go. From Brightbart News.

He has been fantastic on specifically tariffs, but there's other economic news we want to get to, but we'll start there. So, John, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show. It's great to have you. Yeah, thanks for having me back. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, Trump has this 25% tariff announcement for anybody doing business with Iran. Simultaneously, there is a SCOTUS ruling that we're eagerly awaiting probably. tomorrow or whether or not he's even lawfully legally able to do this. Give us the update, please.

So, yeah, we're waiting, and it could come tomorrow. The Supreme Court never tells us in advance what decisions are going to announce. We think they want to get to this one pretty quickly. A lot of people thought it was going to be the end of last week or this, it could be on Wednesday or Thursday, or it could be any time in the next couple weeks. One of the things that Trump's recent tariff announcement does, though, it shows how important tariffs can be to foreign policy. And this is one of the arguments for why the president should be able to impose tariffs on countries, because it is really important to our attempt to try to contain Iran and to use the U.S.'s consumer market, which everybody in the world wants access to, to, to do.

discipline the rest of the world. If you're going to do business with Iran, you're going to have to pay a lot higher tariff to sell your stuff into the U.S. I think that's, it actually really does strengthen his position that this is a core part of, of a president's ability to deal with the rest of the world, a core foreign policy power. Yeah, it strikes me, John, is this kind of like Trump's this, this maverick, he's creative with the way he approaches foreign policy. And he, He implements these new techniques. They're not new, but certainly in modern American, especially presidential history, he's using them in ways others haven't really done before.

And he's being more public about it. He's being more brash about it. And because he's been creative with how he's wielded tariffs, he's now getting punished for it. They're coming after him saying, well, now we want to take that away from you because you're doing it in a way that we hadn't thought about before. And so we just want to punish Trump. But to your point, what happens if the Supreme Court rules against the Trump administration in this particular case. I've seen some reports that we have to pay back upwards of $300 billion

in tariff revenue. Is this even feasible? Is this possible? Is this going to happen? I don't think the Supreme Court is likely to order the U.S. government to pay back hundreds of billions in tariffs, which is one of the reasons, look, I listened to the oral arguments. The justices were super skeptical about whether or not Trump really does have the statutory because as you point out, there's not a lot of precedent for this. The law that they're using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act is, people call it AEPA, has never been used to impose tariffs. Ironically, everybody agrees that the president could sanction a country. You could even embargo countries. You can say you can't sell anything. But apparently their theory is that you

can completely shut off a country from access to the U.S. market, but you can't charge a a 10% tariff for them to be able to sell into the U.S. market. That seems wrong to me, but the Supreme Court was skeptical that Trump has this much authority. I don't think they rule that it all has to be paid back from the U.S. Treasury. I think what they're most likely to do is come to some sort of compromise where they say, yes, the president can impose some tariffs, but they might make up a time limit. It's called the Emergency Powers Act, so maybe they say an emergency can't last forever. you have a year. So that would mean we could keep all the tariffs we have, and it gives the Trump

administration some time to, there's a lot of other statutes that allow the president to impose tariffs. So if these ones get struck down or get time limited, I think President Trump can come back with other ways of going of erecting tariffs. And frankly, I think the U.S. Senate and the House should, if the Supreme Court decides this, should actually just completely reverse it and say, no, we think the president does need this power. Yeah, but wasn't there, I mean, pushback even from the Republican side of the aisle, there was Rand Paul, I believe Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski. The question then becomes, you know, you've kind of got these tricky Republicans in the Senate that we're not,

so we talk about this when we're, you know, discussing nuking the filibuster, for example. You've still got Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell. That puts you at 49. You're not even at that 50-50 mark so J.D. Vance can cast a tie-breaking vote. You've got to get one of those tricky senators on board. And then you got Tom Tillis. Who knows what's happening with him right now? He's causing a stink with the Fed. So traditionally, you had a lot of Democrats who would vote in favor of tariffs and supported tariffs. There may still be some hiding out there. The question is whether or not their Trump derangement syndrome has overtaken what you. used to be their loyalty to the, you know, to American labor and to the working class. Maybe it has and maybe they cannot as a Democrat bring themselves to vote for a, you know, a tariff authority for Trump. But they should.

It's good for working Americans. And Democrats constantly claim that's who they're protecting. And so, you know, the fact that they won't, that would be a revealing moment, frankly. Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree, John. And you've got core consumer prices rise less than expected. So core CPI is less than expected. You've got a, what was it, a 4.9 number that we got, the revision for Q3.

And now, you know, even got the Atlanta Fed saying that we're expecting 5.3% GDP growth in Q4, potentially. That's their estimate. It might be high, whatever. But like the point is, it seems like the economic indicators are all going in the right direction right now. Part of the reason that is, is because the doomsdayers about tariffs have been proven wrong again and again and again. Yeah, no, absolutely have been proven wrong. Look, unemployment fell. Inflation is much lower than anybody expected. The economy is growing at rates much faster than

anybody expected. I think that everybody's got this wrong when they said that the terrorists were going to somehow derail the economy or push up prices. The opposite has happened. We're having an investment boom in America. The news is good. The Trump administration needs to get that news out there. But frankly, I think it's going to get out. to the American people because you just need to drive by a gas station and see that the Biden inflation crisis is in our rearview mirror. And what's ahead, what's in our front, what's in front of us is very good. Think about it. Every single dollar you spend is either supporting your values or working against them. In today's economy, where you spend your money, it really matters.

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I'm just checking out by the way, Charlie Kirkstore.com will also get you there. And I love this one. We have this, I'm just humbled by God's Grace picture. I didn't even know we had that. And it's Charlie after we won in November, kind of holding his hands to his face. It's beautiful. Anyways. So. Also other Charlie stuff. One of our team members, Danny sent us the speaking of tariffs, Charlie being really irate about Chinese made baseballs. That's right.

There is nothing more American than baseball. Baseballs should not be made in China, period. Tariff imported baseballs and make them all in America. Made in China on a baseball is a disgrace. Facts. Facts, one of his best takes. John Carney,

you're with us here. We're reacting to all the news here. There's a lot of economic news. It is Breitbart economics editor. John, so this, this, you know, the chicken littles, the sky is falling economists, they have been proven wrong, but they're still going after it. They keep saying, there's reports this morning saying that, you know, his, his Fed approach has already been proven wrong. Can you describe this story, you know, so Judge Janine, I call her Judge Janine still. So she's got charges or she's indicting Jerome Powell, some of these corruption allegations about

the federal building that he's been constructing for years. They call him Too Late Powell. Give us the lowdown here with Jerome. So what happened is Jerome Powell did something unprecedented on Sunday night. He posted a video in which he said that he has received subpoenas from the Justice Department. And he went far beyond denying having done anything wrong with the renovation of what people are calling the FedMahall, this $2.5 billion renovation to their headquarters. And he went beyond denying misleading a Senate panel when he testified about it.

He actually accused the Trump administration of using this inquiry into these matters to trying to subvert the independence of the Federal Reserve. He has no evidence of that at all. And in fact, the president immediately said, no, that we're not doing that. Judge Janine Piro, who is the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said, that's not what's happening. What happened was we had a bunch of questions about the renovation. We tried to get the Fed to answer them. They wouldn't answer the questions, which is outrageous for any part of the government to not answer inquiries from the Department of Justice.

And so we had to issue subpoenas. She pointed out they haven't indicted anyone. What they are doing is just seeking answers to questions. Powell escalated this into a crisis. And then you had the legacy media freak out, act like Donald, you know, again, sort of Trump derangement syndrome, assuming the worst possible interpretation of this, that Donald Trump was using the Justice Department to go after Powell to try to seize control of the Fed. None of that is happening.

And in fact, that's one of the reasons the markets have reacted to this so calmly because people aren't seeing this as a power grab by Trump. They're seeing it as actually a very aggressive move by Powell. Look, Powell is out of office as chairman in May. Trump doesn't need to go after anybody. He gets to appoint the next guy. So the idea that Trump would use the Justice Department to pursue Powell now doesn't really make any sense. And that doesn't appear to be what happened. Yeah. So Trump, thank you for that explanation. That's actually really clarifying. Trump is touring a Ford factory right now. He's kind of touting domestic manufacturing. So we hear this number a lot, John, about how many trillions of dollars of investment, foreign direct

investment, businesses investing in the United States again. Scott Besson has said that we, 2025 was setting the table. 2026 is the banquet and the feast. How true is that going to be? what can we expect, what are you looking at as far as growth rates in 2026? Because I'm thinking about midterms. So I want to know, are we going to make the deadline? Are people going to feel it financially before the midterms? I do think they will. In fact, if you look at the growth rate, we have 3.8 and 4.1, 3.8 in the second quarter,

4.1 in the second or the third. Now, and now it looks like we may be growing. Again, Atlanta Fed, as you mentioned, says above 5%. That seems probably an overestimation to me, but we're certainly growing at a very rapid rate. The American people will feel this. One of the, probably the biggest way they'll feel this is in their wages going up much faster than inflation. That's great because it means people have more purchasing power. It means that things that they need to buy become more affordable.

We're also seeing the price of energy, particularly gas. gasoline come down dramatically. That will also help a lot going into the midterms. It is one of the gasoline is one of those things that people really get upset about. I think the relief on the energy side will actually, and then that filters into all sorts of products you buy. So I think that will indeed actually help us grow really rapidly going into this new year. We sort of have this momentum built up from 2025, 2025, 2006 looks like it's going to be even strong. longer. John Carney, great work as always. We'll see what happens with SCOTUS on the tariff

rulings, but it's good to hear that President Trump and the Trump administration have other outs, other levers they can pull to kind of exert their tariff agenda because I think it's actually really important from a foreign policy, also a domestic policy standpoint. Thank you for adding a lot of light, a lot of clarity. Thank you, John Carney. Thanks for having me, guys. Absolutely. We'll have you back on again soon because I think this issue is not going away anytime soon. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.