The Charlie Kirk Show - Should Donald Trump Destroy the Filibuster?

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

President Trump has called to eliminate the Senate filibuster to end the government shutdown and restore food stamps. Good idea, or bad idea? Mikey, Andrew, and Blake react, then are joined by Michael Knowles to discuss the raise in leftwing violence and JD Vance's comments on his wife's religion that continue to go viral. 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.

My name is Charlie Kirk. I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic. My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth. If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're going to end up miserable. But if the most important thing is doing good, you will end up purposeful. College is a scam, everybody. You've got to stop sending your kids to college. You should get married as young as possible and have as much.

many kids as possible. Go start a turning point USA College Chapter. Go start a turning point you would say high school chapter. Go find out how your church can get involved. Sign up and become an activist. I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade. Most important decision I ever made in my life and I encourage you to do the same. Here I am.

Lord, use me. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold. 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. Andrew Colvin here. I'm a little bit remote today, but I am joined, of course, by Blake Neff, our not-so-secret weapon and Mikey McCoy in the studio,

holding it down. Hello, gentlemen. Welcome. Welcome. How we deal in? How are we doing? Hey, Mike, it's good to see you again, man. Yeah, thank you guys. It's nice to be back.

I know a lot's happened since I've been gone. And so I'll just say what happened in Utah was the worst day of my life and following the worst seven weeks of my life, Blake and Andrew. And I just, it's still really traumatic and difficult to talk about. I haven't really been able to. And so I just wanted to thank you and Blake. I wanted to thank you guys. Thank you.

Well, you're doing great, Mikey. Blake, you're doing great. Everybody's doing great. I want to say that our team is doing heroically, actually. When you see what we accomplished this week in Ole Miss, in Oxford, Mississippi. And then, by the way, guys, we had our first, the kickoff of our high school tour, which is our Club America tour. We had over 500 students come out for that in Nevada.

I'm just really proud of the team. We're doing heroic work, and this has been honestly a tremendous, tremendous week that it just shows the spirit that Charlie implanted into so many of the people that run Turning Point and that are still part of Turning Point. And we're going from strength to strength in so many ways. So, you know, Mikey, from us to you,

you're doing a phenomenal job, genuinely. Thank you. Yeah, man. So, Blake, why don't you kick things off and just set the table on this filibuster discussion that's happening right now? So last night, Trump sent a shot across the bow. Yes. So we'll get in that first very quickly. I do want to flog something because Charlie would be angry at us if we didn't.

There are elections next Tuesday in New Jersey and in Virginia. They are tough races. They are races, to be honest. We are unlikely to win. but we are going to try to win them. We talked with Cliff Maloney the other day. He said there were about, I think, 80,000 unreturned Republican mail ballots in New Jersey. So if you're one of those people in New Jersey who has one of those ballots and hasn't returned it, shut off this show, fill it out, and turn it in right now.

In Virginia, the last state of early vote is tomorrow. So if you're in Virginia and you're allowed to early vote and you haven't yet, shut off this show, go to your county courthouse or wherever you're allowed to early vote. and do it now. Thank you very much. We're going to flog that next Monday and we'll be broadcasting the election results on Tuesday. All right. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Well, hey, I just want to throw this up, Blake. Throw the 329. This is the recent polling. We got Cheryl is up by one point according to the latest polls. This is from Emerson College. And Jack Chitterelli, so it's 49 to 48. We got about 3% undecided. but remember there's a there's two little pieces of information i want you guys to to hold deep in your

hearts as you go out there and you seize the momentum independence are backing chittarelli by plus nine and here's another one if they if you are asked who do you support uh they'll say it one way but if when voters are asked who do they think their neighbors are voting for guess what chitterrelli's up by six which is a very interesting way to poll this because Sometimes people will say, oh, of course, I'm going Democrat to a pollster. But when they ask who do you think your friends and your families and your coworkers, your neighbors are voting for, to see Chittarelli up six is a very, very promising sign. So keep the faith in New Jersey.

All right. So anyway, the filibuster thing. So this just came up last night. And this morning, it's flaring up. It's coming thanks to President Trump. We have the ongoing government shutdown. It's still going. And we're possibly hitting a crisis point tomorrow because,

Snap benefits are set to expire. Lots of stuff to be said about that. But President Trump's response, so last night on truth social, he said this. He had a pretty long post. I'm not going to read the whole thing. But he was saying, you know, Democrats have gone off the deep end. They have Trump derangement syndrome. They have trillions of dollars.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he says, it is now time for Republicans to play their Trump card, all caps, and go for what is called the nuclear option. Get rid of the filibuster and get rid of. it now. Never have the Democrats fought so hard to do something because they knew the tremendous strength that terminating the filibuster would give them. They want to substantially expand, pack the U.S. Supreme Court, make Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico states, goes on and on. It's actually quite the long thing. And then he doubled down on that. This morning, he made a post that

said, because of the fact the Democrats have gone stone cold crazy. The choice is clear. initiate the nuclear option, get rid of the filibuster, and make America great again. Now, I would guess the Senate is probably unlikely to go for that, but Trump has a lot of power to pressure people. And I think it's an interesting debate. We were talking about this, you know, should it be gone for? And my impulse, and what I would tell Charlie, when we would discuss this, is if you're going to get rid of the filibuster, you've got to do it basically as a day one. thing. They should have done it the day Trump took office because you need to maximize what you get out of it. And then you go in because there's all these things we want to do that we can't do because you need 60 votes to do it. Change our immigration laws. Change environmental laws.

So it's easier to build things in America. You know, change our budgeting process. Do maybe entitlement reforms. All these numbers of things you'd want to do. And it would be a huge misfire, I think, if we were to get rid of the filibuster, get rid of the 60 vote barrier. And all we get out of it is we end a shutdown and we resume SNAP benefits. And then if Democrats take office after 2028, God forbid, but it's a possibility, then they come in and they're getting that day one no filibuster thing where they get to run wild. And I think that would be my concern and probably Charlie's concern if he was here to talk about it with us. How about you guys? Well, I feel like, I feel a little bit conflicted because I think the one main thing that would be worth ending the filibuster for is immigration.

reform, either an immigration moratorium or at least a dramatic reduction in a replacing of our current model with something that was more merit-based and more interested in what does America get out of it. I think immigration is the first, second, third, and fourth, and fifth most important issue in our country. I think it's all about the future of America. So if you're going to do it, you've got to have the guts to do that. I don't think it's worth blowing up the filibuster to yeah just turn snap benefits back on or get the government going i mean i think we are in a winning position when it comes to the government shutdown we as uh the republican party have we have uh tried to open the government multiple multiple times the democrats have have blocked it time and again they have

even tried to pass a clean bill to turn snap benefits back on for people so this is the newest you know flashpoint is the are these snap benefits but here's the deal if we do this there will come a time, and we've just got to be perfectly honest about it, where they will make Puerto Rico a state, and that's two more Democrat senators. They will probably try and make Washington, D.C. a state. That's two more senators on top of that. So you could be staring down the barrel of a situation where if you take this away, then we might not ever have a majority in the U.S. Senate again. I mean, we could. Now, J.D. Vance said at our turning point event at Old Miss, like, we shouldn't be afraid to do stuff just because we know that the Democrat Party is going to do it.

Well, this is one instance that at least in the previous iteration, we had Kirsten Sinema and we had Joe Manchin that blocked the nuclear option from being on the table for the Democrats, and that probably saved the Republic. So I feel very, very conflicted. Obviously, it's tempting to do. Anytime a party's in power, it's tempting to do. but I think we have to be very, very cautious about doing this. And we've seen that Mike Johnson has come out against blowing up the filibuster. So I don't know if you have final thoughts there, Blake, but it's a hornet's nest. That's for sure. You always just anytime there's a lot of things Republicans have wanted to do, and anytime you're going to do something politically, you have to think what will happen next.

You always want to think the medium-term consequences of what you will do. And this is one of the biggest ones of all where you have to think that out. So be careful what you wish for is what we would say. This is Speaker Johnson coming out against President Trump's tweets. Let's call him truths in anger, totally understandable. And it's 31 days into a government shutdown. The Democrats have not shown any desire to negotiate in good faith. So we understand where it's coming from.

Play cut 3.30. What you're seeing is an expression of the president's anger at the situation. He is as angry as I am and the American people are about this madness. Do your basic job. I'm going to say this again. We have put zero, zero Republican policy priorities on the CR. It is Biden-level policies and spending. They have no excuse at all, not to support it.

They have no excuse to put all this pain on the American people, except that for what we've just articulated and repeated here every day. All right. So, Blake, this is obviously Speaker Johnson trying to do a little damage control. But I think Trump is dead serious. I think he's fed up. He's throwing his hands up in the air and he wants to do this. He is.

He is. But I think you think about how Trump likes to approach things. Trump generally is a guy who's very much what is immediately in front of me. He's a guy who wants wins. He's a, you don't want to say, he's a guy who's a guy who's, looking directly in front of him. And so he's thinking, I have a problem now, what could resolve that problem now? And people say like, oh, well, the filibuster keeps us in doing this. And he'd say, let's get rid of it. And we're getting a lot of, you know, emails from different

directions. And I want to flag, one person said, for example, we got an email from Greg here who says, nuke the filibuster, fix everything, then put it back. But also, we have one saying, when Dems take control, first thing on their list will be to end the filibuster. So why don't we just do it? So a few thoughts there. First of all, Democrats had power under Biden, and they did not manage to get rid of the filibuster. They had Joe Manchin didn't want to vote to do it. Kristen Sinema didn't want to vote to do it. Now, both of those people are gone.

So that would be an argument. Maybe next time they will get rid of it. On the other hand, you might also see next time there could be a different Democrat who decides they enjoy the power from being the most right-wing Democrat. That gave them a lot of influence. That gave them a lot of play in Washington. There's always the temptation to be that. So it's always been harder to kill the filibuster than people expect.

I've been around, for 20 years, people have been telling me the Democrats will nuke the filibuster the next time they're in power. And they haven't done it yet. So there's that factor. The other thing about, you know, that get rid of it and put it back. And we're looking at this is the power of norms. This is the power of tradition. The truth is, once the filibuster is destroyed, it will be gone.

That's the way of it. Yet there is this power it exerts as long as it exists. So you can't really get rid of it. and then put it back, because it could just be voted away again. What has kept it in place is the fact that it is in place. And so if you're going to approach a matter of getting rid of the filibuster, of making it a 50-vote thing instead of a 60-vote thing, you do have to think about the timing of it,

what really will justify you getting rid of it. And I'd say the only, in my opinion, strong argument in favor of this is at least if you're doing this, you're probably, to bring back snap, you're probably doing it for something that most Americans generally approve of. Whereas if you're nuking the filibuster to push a very strong right-wing priority that maybe isn't polling 80-20, that could produce some political blowback. But the reason, that's why you want to do it at the start of your term, too. You do your most aggressive, most ambitious stuff right at the outset. Whereas if we're getting rid of it now, we're unlikely to pass any of those big immigration reform things we want to do because they'll be all nervous.

They won't want to do big ambitious stuff during the midterm election year. Hey everybody, Andrew Colvette, executive producer of the Charlie Kirk Show. Charlie understood that to lead, he needed to learn. Hillsdale College was ready to teach him. While busy running his company, teaching America's youth, and raising a beautiful family, Charlie still found time to complete 31 Hillsdale College free online courses. He talked about it the last time he spoke on his podcast with Hillsdale's president, Dr. Larry Arne. Hillsdale is the cutting edge, and I mean it.

It is America's greatest college. You are a force of nature, Charlie Kirk. One of these days, I'm going to give you an honorary degree. That would be the honor of my life, but I got a lot more learning yet to do. And I say this, the Hillsdale courses have changed my life. Through Hillsdale College's free online courses, Charlie studied the Bible, the classics, the American founding, and through his relentless pursuit of truth, became not only a great American, but a good man. Charlie's gone, but his spirit of hard work and lifelong learning carry on.

Each of us can follow his example and pick up where he left off. So learn like Charlie did. for hillsdale.com. That's Charlie forhillsdale.com. Well, here's what I would say. Trump is not going to have the votes to get rid of the filibuster, right? I mean, let's just be honest. We've got four Republicans that have just gone against him on tariffs, right? It's going to die in the house. There's, there's, that's dead in the water anyways. But you're not going to, you're not going to get the filibuster nuked anyways. The question I have is more of a theoretical question. Would we be better off

without the filibuster, both ways. Here's my thought. The Democrats have more lasting change that they can accomplish with Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., becoming states. You can't undo that if that happens. You can't roll those things back, really. I mean, you could probably, but it's highly unlikely. I'd give it a 0.001% chance that once you create two states, you could undo the creation of states. I don't know what the legalities of that are.

Those are two lasting permanent changes that they could affect. within the body politics. So the question is, do we have similarly worthwhile changes that we could affect? Can we create East Washington, East Oregon? I don't know. But the point is the options at the disposal of the Democrats are far scarier than the options we have. Now, I do believe that immigration, it would be such a huge, huge change to the country, but I'm still not convinced that we have the votes for that. I guarantee you, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Rand Paul, these guys would still try and block a really robust immigration reform policy, even if we nuke the filibuster. I think here's my basic point, Blake.

If we got the GOP to a stronger position, then maybe I would consider it. But we do not have a strong enough GOP or anywhere close to a strong enough GOP to even begin entertaining nuking the filibuster, and we should keep our hands clean. There's zero reason to even consider that right now. My bias remains The Democrats are likely to eventually get rid of it But let them be the ones who smash that Pandora's box Because then they're the ones who have the disadvantage of They probably don't do it as their day one thing

They probably only do it part way through a term They do something extreme with it It creates political blowback Let them break it And then hopefully the next time we're in power We're able to have this day one post-filibuster agenda But I did want to highlight Sort of the big picture issue that's happened

which is because of the filibuster existing the way it has, and it's gotten more and more intense over the decades, it's sort of, it's messed up American politics because American politics is not supposed to have a 60-vote supermajority threshold to pass any legislation out of Congress. If you read the Federalist Papers, Madison says Congress is supposed to be the most powerful branch of government because they write the laws,

they allocate the funding, and that's kind of gone away because the Senate, is permanently paralyzed, and so we've gotten this imperial presidency, for example, because we need the executive branch to do everything. Like, for example, why, you know, we've talked about why the Civil Rights Act went so haywire and led to all this bureaucracy and HR hellscape, and it's because the executive branch is issuing regulatory guidances and, you know, interpretations of the law that Congress can never really check because Congress hardly passes any laws at all. Or we're paralyzed. We can't reform immigration law because Congress can't pass anything. We can't change

environmental laws that are clearly stale and need reform because you can't get these 60 vote thresholds on anything. And it's led to this thing where we have this sort of fake rubber stamp Congress that can't do anything, that can't assert itself on anything. And that's also why we have bad Republicans. We have all these bad Republicans who aren't, who can't be held to account for being frauds on immigration and all this other stuff because, well, can't pass this. We don't have 60 votes to do it if it's 50 votes you can actually really really put a republican's feet to the fire when they are not passing something that you need so get this blake i actually love where your heads at because it does create a paralysis within the legislative

body that has stripped it of its constitutionally designed power and the balance of power with the executive branch has been thrown out of whack so what do we get we get a lot of eos we get a lot of uh rule by fiat and that feels like a lot of us don't have representation when the other party's in power. But get this, without the 17th Amendment, because remember, the 17th Amendment made it so that Republican, or that, sorry, that senators in each state are elected by popular vote as opposed to selected by the state representatives. If we didn't have the 17th Amendment, guess how many Republicans we would have in the Senate?

Do you have an approximate guess? I mean, people do this, but it would just, it would change everything about American people. politics but we would have more that is true we would have we would have 70 right now 70 70 yeah that would have been 60 fate full our states for two senators each that'd be that'd be 68 for that and then two states was split we'd be at 70 Republican senators so uh whoever drafted the 17th amendment you Democrats should be thanking their lucky stars as that happened just to just absolutely insane all right without further ado I'm so excited to bring in Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles show, and just all around good American, good Catholic American, because that seems to be, I want to actually, I'm going to get into that with you, Michael.

A little J.D. Vance dust up about Usha, but we'll, we're going to start with the most important. Tell us what you did this week. You went before the U.S. Senate. It was a subcommittee hearing on the rise of political violence. It was hosted and chaired by Senator Eric Schmidt from the great state of Missouri. Tell us what, what that. that was all about Michael. It was a really important hearing. I was honored to be invited and to go testify. Chairman Schmidt called it, and at as timely a moment as you can imagine, he opened it, by the way, with a beautiful tribute to Charlie. And if people haven't gone to see the testimony, just even that opening, I think was really beautiful. And that was obviously the cause of the testimony because there's been a lot of political violence and it has been increasing. There was a Pew poll just came out. 85% of Americans think that political violence.

is getting worse in our country, when 85% of Americans agree on anything, I think you can you can acknowledge that it's happening. And so he said, all right, obviously this is a longstanding problem that has reached this horrific, tragic climax in Charlie's assassination and in the reaction to Charlie's assassination and the minimizing and the excusing and the justifying and even the celebrating at all levels of the American left. And so we need to figure out what's really going on here. So I felt it was important to go. The Democrats called their own minority witnesses. What was really disappointing is that half the Democrats on the panel didn't even show up. The ones who did show up asked, I thought, ridiculous questions. You know, they would just

bring up January 6th or whatever. They wouldn't even let us answer on the points of January 6th, I think because they know the answers would be devastating to them. And, and the, and then there was one moment in particular that I thought was really crazy because one of the guys on this subcommittee is Cory Booker. And Cory Booker has endorsed Jay Jones for Attorney General of Virginia, Jay Jones, who has called for Republicans to be killed and he's clarified he wasn't joking about that. So Cory Booker shows up late. He uses up all his time, just bloviating, saying it's really a both sides issue, but actually secretly it's entirely a right-wing issue. And anyway, we need to, we need to be more careful about our words. We need to take back our words when we say things we shouldn't have

said. We need to be introspective. The questioning then goes to Senator Blackburn on the other side of the room. I'm listening to her. And I say, okay, that's a good question. But I want to get back to something Senator Booker said, you know, if he's really serious about this, it seems like he's setting the stage to withdraw his endorsement from Jay Jones. He should do that now. I turn, Booker left the room. There's a Corey Booker-shaped hole in the wall. The whole thing on the Democrat side was completely disingenuous. It was crocodile tears. And The conclusion that I have to reach from that is the Democrats don't want to talk about political violence because, one, it's coming from the left. Even the Atlantic Magazine admits it. And two, because their base supports it. And I can't come to any conclusion other than the Democrats in government are more or less fine with the political violence too.

Well, I fear you're right, Michael. There's a clip here that from Jennifer Welch, who I confess I had no idea who she was until about a week ago. And she apparently has amassed quite a following as a podcaster. She's a former Bravo reality star that became a podcaster. And she says some pretty troubling things that lead me to believe that your conclusions reached after the subcommittee hearing are sadly more likely than not true. Play cut 283. So listen up Democratic establishment. You can either jump on board with this or we're coming after you in the same way that we come after Max. period. They're that are beholden to the same corporations that Donald Trump, that help Donald

Trump get elected. Kudos to Bernie, to AOC, to Zoron. And that woman out in somewhere middle America saying, Charlie Kirk, he was a racist, he was a piece of it. There are so many more of us than there are of them. And these Democrats that continue to play patty cake with corporations, nobody wants that nobody wants you so michael is she right that the democrat base does not want to moderate that they do not want to confront the demons in their own closet and their own activist militant base you know the polls as well as i after charlie's assassination ugov conducted surveys showed that people who identify as very liberal are eight times as likely as people who are very conservative and justify political violence let's throw that image up this

is 31, image 31, please. And I believe this is the poll you're looking at. And that crazy, we've shown it a number of times on this show, Michael, but this is to me the scariest graph that exists in American politics today, where you have 18 to 39 year old self-described progressives with that wild standout node, that blue left dot on the screen where, and you contrast that with the same age group among conservatives and they are among the most, if not the most peaceful of all the cohorts on this survey. Well, this is what's really scary.

This is kind of like the second part. So if you just look at all age groups, very liberal, eight times as likely to justify political violence is very conservative, then you zoom in on what you're showing and it breaks it down by young people, middle age people, older people. And if you look at the older people,

the liberals and the conservatives basically about the same. are a little more likely to support political violence, but it's almost the same. Moderates, the least likely of all. When you zoom back to the younger groups, something changes. First of all, the moderates and the conservatives flip. The young conservatives are much less likely than the young moderates to support political violence. They're the least likely of that age group. Then it's moderates. And then the young liberals spike in their support up to 26 percent for political violence. So not only is this a today a major problem on the left, it's getting worse because you're looking at the young people. It's a crystal ball for the future.

So I suspect Jennifer Welch is probably right about this. I like you had never heard of her and never seen her face before that viral clip. However, she's not just some fringe nobody. There are other interviews where she's sat down with Hakeem Jeffreys, Democrat leader in the House. In that interview, he lauds her, he praises her. And she says, oh, I've sat down with a bunch of your colleagues too. So, you know, this is not an aberration. I think every single data point we see, the public opinion polls, the statements of the

prominent liberals, all the way down to what we were discussing at the Senate testimony, which is the actual cases of political violence, they're coming from the left. What's so amazing about those data now is that even the Atlantic has to admit, okay, political violence is primarily a left-wing problem, not a right-wing problem today. That's using data sets that don't even count all the left-wing violence. Because if you look at all of these data sets and even the federal numbers, they're not counting the BLM riots that left dozens of people dead and billion dollars in property damage. That doesn't count as left-wing political violence. They're not counting all sorts of attacks on pro-lifers, the Tesla dealerships.

And then the incident that I was called to testify about was a campus event at University of Pittsburgh. Two Antifa operatives who are card-carrying members of Antifa show up, throw an explosive at cops, seriously injure. a female police officer. These are people who were claimed by the Torch Antifa network, Torch Antifa soliciting donations through a tax-exempt nonprofit organization for them. This is as clear ideological violence as you can possibly imagine. That incident was not counted as left-wing political violence. And so the only conclusion you can reach is that the left doesn't commit a lot of political

violence when you don't count the political violence the left commits. Interesting how that works. It just seems like, you know, the go-to grab bag option of the American left in 2025 is to just simply, you know, rig the results in your favor. This is Lane Schoenberger, Chief Investment Officer and founding partner of Y Reefi. It has been an honor and a privilege to partner with Turning Point 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 Reefi.

I'm going to tell you guys about YReFi.com. That is Y-R-E-F-Y-Y-F-Y-F-Y-R-E-F-Y-F-I-R-E-F-I-R-E-F-I-R-D-N-A-R-D-N-A-R-R-E-F-I-R-D-N-R-D-R-E-F-I-R-D-R-E-F-I-R-D-R-E-F-I-R-R-E-F-I-N. You can get them released from the loan. You can even skip a payment up to 12 times without penalty. It may not be available in all 50 states. Go to Y-R-R-R-R-E-F-Y-D-C-com. That is Y-R-R-E-F-Y-Y-E-F-Y-L-L-C. Let's face it, if you have distress or default to student loans, it can be overwhelming. Because of private student loan debt, so many people feel stuck.

Go to yreifi.com. That is y-refi.com. Private student loan debt relief, yrefi.com. Michael, you can't argue with this. I believe this is the article you're talking about. Throw up 337. Top Trump officials are moving on to military bases. Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Christy Noem, and others have taken over homes that until recently

housed senior military officials. So this is straight from the Atlantic, and it is no longer safe for members of the Trump administration to live out in the general public. They have to be housed in secure military bases for their own safety and for their family safety. This is what it's come to. What's crazy, that's actually not even the article I was referencing. There's another article that says left-wing terrorism is on the rise. That's the headline. I actually hadn't even seen this headline until you just showed it to me. The fact that we have civilians, we have people just working in our government, ordinary political order, who now have to move to secure locations for military leaders, it shows you that something really horrific has happened in this country,

as if the Rubicon has been crossed. I suspect that happened when the Democrats started prosecuting Trump, you know, the chief political opponent and the predecessor, when they started raiding his home, when they started going after all of their enemies and even justifying his assassination, which nearly happened in Butler, nearly happened again, actually, later on. It does feel like something just seismically has shifted in the political order, and it's a lot bigger than some one podcaster making nasty comments or, I don't know, one Democrat in Congress. It seems like this is a major shift of the whole left. Yeah, it feels like the whole tree has become rotten from the root.

And it does feel like there is a seismic shift. It's an ideological movement-wide shift. And you can see it about the way that they talk about President Trump, or they talk about Charlie, Nazi, fascist, bigot, racist, homophob, xenop, all of this language that has basically said, this movement is a bunch of Nazis, and what did we have to do with Hitler? We had to eventually, you know, take him out, right? And I think that's becoming more widely and widely accepted within the left-wing political

movement. Michael Nolz. Just listen to Joe Biden, get it from the horse's mouth. Is it the horse's mouth, some part of the horse? When you say that there's an existential threat to the country, as he said about Trump, existential threats are a justification for assassination. I think they knew exactly what they were doing. Yeah, I'm concerned you're right, Michael. And I want to give Michael his due.

He got a great moment. 264. Play it. Democrats have lied about the statistics on political violence. They've covered them up. They've shed what I think we have to reasonably conclude are crocodile tears. And they want to pretend that nothing's happened. Senator Booker came in.

He said we shouldn't cast any aspersions. We shouldn't say that the violence comes from one side or the other. He then launched into a diatribe about how the violence really comes from the right. And then before I had a chance to respond to that, he left the room. And I think it's particularly rich and hypocritical coming from someone like Senator Booker because Senator Booker continues to endorse a man who would be a top law enforcement official in a state who is called for the murder of Republicans and our children. But to your point, Martha, you know, looking at Old Miss tonight,

looking at this amazing show of unity from the vice president and from Erica Kirk, and looking at all of the students who are going to come out and support a healthy exchange and a good future for our country. They give me a lot more hope than the Democrats on Capitol, he'll do. Well said Michael Knowles. I want to bring in Blake and Mikey in the studio for this conversation.

This is really important stuff, actually, because it kind of went, I think, night one right after Old Miss, nobody really talked about it, Michael. But then the day after, the day after people are talking about that they think J.D. was so rude to his wife, Usha, and they can't believe

that he would want his wife to be. become a Christian. So let's play the clip from the old miss event, 286. Play it. Now, most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church. As I've told her and I've said publicly, and I'll say now in front of 10,000 of my closest friends, do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church? Yeah, I honestly, I do wish that because I believe in the Christian gospel and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way. so i wanted to bring in uh my you know obviously mike is the son of a pastor blake is a catholic you're a catholic uh we're all christians here is that rude to say that you hope your wife

would eventually one day see see the world and have faith like you do yeah i just i i think it's crazy because a christianity has proven you live a happier life charlie used to talk about it was the missing piece for everybody once you found that missing piece you lived the life that was there for you and he would argue about the necessity of God over the existence of one and so no more than you would wish someone who's an alcoholic to no longer be an alcoholic would you wish for them to find Christianity the missing peace that would bring them peace and happiness yeah it's I don't know I basically have nothing to add over what what Mikey said there it's it's very bizarre to say I guess like J.D. Vance wants what he thinks is best for his spouse whom he

he loves and you know someone has to come in and be that this has become quite a road this has become quite a controversy online i was looking so jd is reacting to a clip from was acy yn i never know how to say that guy's his twitter hander but you know a lefty on twitter on x and that thing has 10 million views like it's a lot of engagement michael what what is this just much to do about nothing i mean it's the the better than that go ahead It's much ado about something. It's just something good. I mean, I think we need to state it out the gate. What J.D. and Erica did was magnificent. The fact that Erica has the strength to do this is just superhuman, first of all. And then what the vice president did in the Q&A was magnificent. I know we're all admirers of the vice president here. He was pitch perfect. I would not have changed one syllable about any answer he gave. It was just a phenomenal. showing on all of these different matters and some questions that were a little bit hostile. And on this, I think you're seeing the poison of secularism and atheism in our culture

setting in people's reactions. Because it's not that they disagree with the vice president on religion. It's that they don't even seem to know what religion is. But JD understands what religion is and he has a living faith. And so as we've all said here, he wants what he believes to be good for his wife. He recognizes that religion is not just like a taste. You know, you like chocolate and I like vanilla. He recognizes that religion is a habit of virtue that inclines the will to give to God what he deserves. It's not a question of like or dislike. It's a question of truth or falsehood. And so he's being very respectful to people of other faiths, including his wife, of course, but many other people too. He's just saying, look, I have this view of religious truth. And I think that truth and goodness and

beauty and all these things go together. And so because I love my wife, and by extension, by the way, because I love other people, I want to share that with you. You know, that is the great commission. That is the gospel. That's like the whole point, guys. And the fact that people would attack him for it is one thing. The fact that they don't even understand what he's saying is so damning about our culture and how we think about the deepest questions. I think that's exactly right. Blake and Mikey, take us home at the end of this hour one. with Michael Knowles. The floor is your guys is. You have safe. The other thing that I love, too, not just the religious aspect of JD's speech, but also he's backstage and he just goes,

what was the thing that Charlie used to always say? Disagreements come to the front of the line. And I was like, yeah, yeah, that's it. And he goes, I'm going to do that tonight. And I just keep telling everybody, you can't even find a senator, a congressman, or any person on the right, who's a public speaker that would welcome disagreements to the front of the line, let alone the vice president of the United States who has much to lose. I hope it spreads because we've seen how much better JD has gotten from just being in the arena all the time, whether it's on the Sunday shows or doing something like this. And think how much better our politicians would be as a class if this was expected of all our senators, all our representatives. Make them be smart people who can answer

hostile questions on, you know, on the fly. We'll get better politicians, and that means better laws. Yeah, it really reminds me of Charlie. Like, I just, I see a little bit of Charlie and JD and how he does that. Michael Knowles, we thank you, my friend, making the time. Appreciate you. Good to be with you guys. Thanks. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.