The Charlie Kirk Show - The Great Feminization of America

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

Where did wokeness come from? Helen Andrews has a theory: It all flows from America’s workplaces and institutions becoming majority-women, and bringing “feminizing” values with them.... She joins, and then Miranda Devine discusses her reporting exposing disturbing new facts about the Butler shooter Thomas Crooks. 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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Starting point is 00:00:00 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.
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Starting point is 00:00:46 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. I'm Andrew Colvettes, joined by Blake Neff. This hour, we have the great Helen Andrews on an article that she wrote for Compact Magazine called The Great Feminization. Helen, you wrote this fantastic article.
Starting point is 00:01:25 Blake actually flagged it for me. This premise, you said it was like a light bulb moment for you, and it went back to Larry Summers, who was, you know, obviously he was in the Obama administration. He's now being referenced in context of the Jeffrey Epstein files and the estate releasing these emails. So he's a known commodity, but it used to be the president of Harvard, and he was canceled. And this moment was, there was an article written about it, an essay that you referenced in your essay. that was this aha moment. What is that aha moment? So Larry Summers had to resign as president of Harvard, one of the most powerful positions in America, because he made some very un-PC remarks about women in science. Specifically, he said that we all can observe that women are underrepresented at the very high end of scientific achievement. If you look at the physics department of MIT or Harvard, there are more men there than women. And Larry Summers ventured to say,
Starting point is 00:02:27 that this was not because the head of the physics department at MIT is biased against women or hates women. It's simply because of first some differences in aptitude. There are more men at the extreme ends of the bell curve. So there are more male geniuses and also more male idiots. But also differences in preferences. Women tend to be even very bright, smart women who are at that end of the bell curve tend to gravitate to fields that involve caring or people or some kind of human angle. they are not attracted or disproportionately less likely to be attracted to really abstract fields like math or physics. All of this is well within the scientific mainstream. It corresponds to survey data that we have and just all the kind of social scientific data you could possibly want
Starting point is 00:03:12 backs up the idea that there are differences between men and women and specifically in the areas of what kinds of fields they're attracted to. But Larry Summers, as punishment for saying what everybody who actually studies this knows to be a fact was canceled. One of the first cancellations by a bunch of female scientists who were in the audience for the speech where he made those remarks. They said Larry Summers hates women. He's a misogynist. He's biased. And we are going to go gunning for his job. And they succeeded. They managed to get the president of Harvard forced out of his job for telling the truth. And the light bulb moment that I came across in an essay and later applied to other cancellations was that this type of cancellation
Starting point is 00:03:59 is just female social behavior. It is what groups of women, it's how groups of women interact, how groups of women tend to police norms, how they deal with conflict through ostracism rather than direct confrontation, through excluding people who are causing disruption rather than you know, having arguments based on facts. So these female social dynamics were being applied to Larry Summers and his cancellation. And it seemed to me from the perspective of post-wokeness, you know, a few years after Larry Summers left his job, that this kind of cancellation was popping up more and more and has been since the summer of 2020. And if that is a manifestation of female group dynamics in institutions and organizations where they haven't been seen before or haven't
Starting point is 00:04:50 prevailed before, then that seems like a really important social development that people need to be talking more and thinking more about. Yeah, I want to get at a specific thing. You kind of, you make a prediction in here. You talk about how fields change over time as they become more women. And so a classic field that was basically all men historically is law. Almost all lawyers were men, almost all judges were men. Now the majority of law students are women. I believe the majority of graduates are women and I think soon it might even be the majority of all practicing lawyers will be women and you lay out you know kind of predictions about what that will mean for America for the rule of law for how we approach this important topic and I guess do you want
Starting point is 00:05:33 to just repeat that for our audience well I know a lot of great female lawyers so nobody's saying that women can't be terrific lawyers but I always ground all of my observations about the feminization of law in things that I can see with my own eyes. So I'm not just speculating abstractly on how general female tendencies might play out. What I do instead is I look at types of law where women already predominate. One example would be the Title IX Courts for Sexual Assault on college campuses that we had. That was a whole new legal system that was basically designed, implemented, and controlled throughout by women. And what we saw was it was stacked against men.
Starting point is 00:06:17 forfeited a lot of really important due process protections for the accused. It threw them out because the people who designed the system tended to sympathize with women and tended not to sympathize with the men who were accused. Another example of an area of law that is highly feminized that might be a surprise to your listeners is immigration law. People don't know this, but a majority of immigration lawyers are female, over 60%, I believe. So immigration law is a very highly feminized type of legal practice. And that's one area of law where we all can observe. The letter of the law is still there.
Starting point is 00:07:00 We still have lots of laws on the books about citizenship and deportation and immigration and when people are allowed to be in this country and when they're not. but those laws are made a mockery of by a system that has been abused to within an inch of its life and why has it been so stretched to be to be almost meaningless because the lawyers have sympathy for these human stories we're in a situation where you can't enforce immigration law if it involves being mean to somebody or making somebody feel sad right like that's that's basically what a lot of immigration lawyers end up spending their day arguing so So feminized areas of law look like Title IX courts for sexual assault on college campuses, immigration law as we see it today. On law schools, a lot of law schools during 2020 and even still today went extremely woke where they shut down any kind of unwelcome conservative argument. They just said that's hate speech and I won't even consider it. So all of these manifestations of wokenness seem to manifest in areas of law where we're
Starting point is 00:08:10 women already predominate numerically, as they do. As you said, Blake, in law schools. Law schools have been majority females since 2016. So, well, law is an area that involves adhering to logic even when you don't want to, right? Like feminine modes of thought and male modes of thought are both great. Sometimes you want to be able to adhere strictly to logic and sometimes you want to be more flexible and look more at context. Law is one area where the logical mode has to prevail or else we don't have the rule of law anymore. Yeah. And I think that's one of the most interesting pieces of your article for me. It's because we think about, you know, the sort of great leaps forward for women happening in the distant past. But what you're saying is
Starting point is 00:08:54 that, yeah, law schools became majority female in 2016. In 1974, only 10% of New York Times reporters were female. The New York Times became majority female in 2018. And the female shares up to 55% medical schools became majority female in 2019. Women became a majority of college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019. Women became a majority of college instructors in 2023. The great feminization really occurred just a few years ago, and it's continuing on in many more fields. Hey, everybody.
Starting point is 00:09:30 This is Andrew Colvette, executive producer of the Charlie Kirk Show. Burna is proud to continue supporting Charlie Kirk's mission and the important work of Turning Point USA. because empowering Americans to defend their freedoms begins with protecting themselves, their families, and their communities. The Burna, less lethal launcher, looks like a firearm, but it isn't one. It fires powerful, chemical, irritant, and kinetic projectiles that can stop a threat in its tracks, giving you the time and space you need to get to safety.
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Starting point is 00:10:25 That's burnah.com. And see why tens of thousands of Americans are choosing Burna for peace of mind. And so, Helen, you basically directly link this great feminist. with the rise of wokeness. That's the key. Basically everything that you're seeing in the woke era is an outgrowth of these fields and American institutions become increasingly feminized. What do you see when you say the feminine versus the masculine?
Starting point is 00:10:58 Maybe explain what you mean by that. Sure. I think when people hear differences between men and women, a lot of times they jump straight to stereotypes, like that men are logical and women are emotional. And that's not really entirely what I'm talking about. More I'm talking about less individual differences between men and women and more group dynamics. This is a subject that has been extensively studied in the field of psychology. If you have a group of men in a room and a group of women in a room and you give them a task, how will these groups solve that task? How will their interactions proceed differently?
Starting point is 00:11:38 And it is a sort of observed fact about group dynamics that men tend to deal open with conflict. They tend to have hierarchy. There will be a pecking order that will establish itself very quickly. And they also tend to be very task oriented. Female groups, by contrast, are very averse to hierarchy. they tend to suppress any conflict. If you broach conflict within a female group, all of the rest of the women there will shut you down and say, whoa, you know, honey, don't make waves. They are also much less task oriented.
Starting point is 00:12:16 They're more focused on making sure everybody's involved in the decision. And that's what we saw a lot with wokeness. People were derailed or people derailed institutions from their purposes in order to fritter away their attention on various extraneous political differences. You know, another real, oh, go ahead. Oh, I was just reminded, you know, about that strategy of, you know, like how they all want to hear everyone's voice. And I was thinking back, in 2016, there was a Washington Post story about the late Obama
Starting point is 00:12:47 administration. And it was about, like, all the women's staffers in the White House, they felt that there wasn't, they weren't hearing enough of their views or something. Like, so they adopted a strategy. this is the Washington Post. They adopted a strategy called amplification, which is where when one of them, they thought made a key point,
Starting point is 00:13:05 all of them would just repeat the same point during the meeting. And all I can think of is how that would make the meeting so intolerable to be at. Yeah, you know, it's very common for men to sort of loathe meeting culture where, like, you know, death by a thousand meetings in organizations. Helen, you say that men are more designed for war, right? which there's there's a and women tend to be more more sort of their group dynamics about protecting
Starting point is 00:13:33 the young offspring which makes perfect sense but that tends to make men appeasers they're willing to get over conflicts because they need to ultimately find peace that's the whole point of wars you wage war and conflict and then you you reach peace at the other end how are we seeing this play out now in the ear of woke and it affects every institution i like to reference blake's example that we can no longer build boats. We can't do basic, you know, striving, excellent things as a country and as a culture anymore. And I can't help but think back to this task-oriented nature of men versus women. The floor is yours, Helen.
Starting point is 00:14:12 I was fascinated to learn that these same dynamics appear in primatology. That is, people who look at chimpanzees all day, observe that when two male chimpanzees have a conflict, they'll have a fight about it and reestablish which one of them is the aloft. alpha, and then they will move on. When two female chimpanzees have a conflict, they will leave and never speak to each other again, basically. So men are much better at resolving conflict and then moving on, whereas women tend to hold on to things and sort of not move on after conflict. And that's what we saw a lot during wokeness. People were targeted for behavior or for making statements that were on PC. And until, you know, pre-wokeness, the way you would deal with a situation like that
Starting point is 00:15:00 is you would have a debate. James Daymore would be at Google, and he would say, I think female underrepresentation in science is due to biological attributes and not bias. The way to deal with that is to have a conversation about whether he's correct or not. The way wokeness deals with that is by saying, I can't believe you just said that. I'm going to get you fired from your job. Wokeness was an inability to have any kind of open debate because the very existence of that debate seemed too much like conflict. And conflict had to be suppressed. And this was just it's so massively toxic for so many institutions since 2020. And the reason one, I think it's important to consider whether
Starting point is 00:15:52 wokeness is a product of demographic feminization is because if it is, that means wokeness is not over. A lot of people look around. They think Donald Trump won the election. Wokeness is finished. We can all move on. The vibe shift is here. But I think that if these,
Starting point is 00:16:11 if wokeness is just female patterns of behavior in institutions where women were not as well represented until recently, then that means it's here to stay and we need to deal with it head on. Well, I guess that's the natural follow-up is, if it's a natural byproduct of institutions being 50% or more female, is what are, one, I guess, what are the civilizational implications of that for the United States, for Europe, for, I guess, Earth?
Starting point is 00:16:41 And do you believe there's, I guess, a way to mitigate that downside, or is that just going to be the nature of things going forward? Because I guess to me, it's hard to imagine you're going to turf 60 million women out of the workplace. And that's why sort of the next obvious question after we established that wokeness is a product of feminization is, is feminization a naturally occurring phenomenon? This is the position that a lot of liberals take. They say, well, the field of law is becoming more and more feminized. Well, maybe women are just better.
Starting point is 00:17:14 maybe women are out competing men within the field of law. Maybe women are just better employees. And that's why our newsrooms and businesses are getting more and more feminized. And if I thought that was true, then I would say there's no solution to feminization because I believe in fairness and meritocracy. And if women really are just out competing men because they're better at stuff, then there's not a lot I can say in response to that. However, I think a lot of us would accept that in many cases, fields become more and more feminized. not because women are out competing men within that field, but because women are feminizing that field and making it more and more friendly to feminine preferences and patterns of behavior. Like if you're working at a business that is so HRified, that it's like, you know, the HR lady designed every aspect of your day-to-day office experience, she determined who advanced at that company, who got the best promotions and the best assignments, and everything was touchy-feely in a HR-Fi type of way, obviously a masculine man is not going to do well in that environment and he's not going to advance. But that's not because he's not competitive. It's not because he's
Starting point is 00:18:25 not good at his job. It's just because that kind of highly feminized organization is not friendly to his virtues and attributes. So I think when we consider how do we deal with feminization, if it's something we want to roll back, how should we go about it? That's the first place to look. Are there any institutions or organizations that are too feminized in this unnatural way? Helen Andrews, great peace and compact magazine, the great feminization. Thank you, Helen. President Trump walked into a catch-22 when taking office. Do nothing in America would be staring at a ticking debt bomb, the kind of crisis that could cripple our future. Instead, he's taken action with strong policies to slow the train and buy some time.
Starting point is 00:19:07 But the effects of past administration's spending are still working through the system. Experts predict dramatic price increases and market uncertainty. Trump is doing all he can, but no matter who's in office, protecting your retirement savings is ultimately up to you. And that's why many Americans are turning to real assets like gold and silver. Preserve gold is our go-to choice here at the Charlie Kirk Show. We use them because they make it easy to own physical gold and silver even inside your retirement accounts like an IRA or 401K. Now, hear from Charlie in his own words. Preserve gold is my go-to choice for all my precious metal needs.
Starting point is 00:19:42 They are the real deal, and I recommend them to my friends, family, and viewers. Get their free wealth protection guide now by texting Charlie to 50505. President Trump is fighting for America's future. Now it's your term to help protect yours. Excited to welcome Miranda Devine, the great Miranda Devine, columnist for the New York Post, author of the new book, The Big Guy. She is joining the Charlie Kirk Show. Miranda, welcome back.
Starting point is 00:20:10 It's good to see you. Thank you, Andrew. Great to talk to you as well. You had a bombshell article yesterday about the would-be assassin of President Trump. And you thread it in there a little piece about some of his fetishes. Maybe he was entertaining a furry fetish, referred to himself with they-them pronouns. Tell us more, Miranda Devine. Look, it's slim pickings. My source went through 17 different online platforms that he found that this would be assassin of the president, Thomas Crooks, had logged into or had accounts with. And one of them was this site called Deviant Art, which I had not heard of before, but apparently it's the biggest online hub for furry activity, the furry community, which of course is this kind of sexual fetish where people dress up as animals. or they like cartoon figures of sort of humanized animals that have sex or a nude. I think some of it's not sexual, but most of it seems to be. Anyway, it's weird. And so this guy, Thomas Crooks, had two accounts on this platform.
Starting point is 00:21:27 And he also on this platform used they, them pronouns. nouns. The only thing my source could find, you know, activity of Thomas Crooks that still existed on that platform or on the archive was an image of a sort of bizarre cartoon image of a very muscle-bound sort of man's body like a Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger type body with the head of a woman on top, you know, long hair and a female face. And with this puny little guy next to her in his underpants and who looked kind of like Thomas Crook sort of in a sort of a inferior position if you get my drift. So there's that.
Starting point is 00:22:14 And then the other stuff he had on this debby and art platform was violent. It was cartoon characters shooting each other in there and, you know, killing each other. So, I mean, that's all very strange. All of his utterances that are on YouTube and so on. increasingly, very weird that he flips from being very pro-Trump and anti-democrat, particularly anti, you know, the squad, Ilhan Omar and so on. And then he flips in the matter of a couple of months in January 2020 to the opposite. Go it does a 180 and now he's very anti-Trump, critical of Trump supporters and starts escalating
Starting point is 00:22:54 into this assassination rhetoric. Hey, Miranda, Blake here, and I guess the thing that came to mind with the article yesterday, so you mentioned the weird, furry art or just kind of strange art in general, but the article doesn't have any photos of that? I guess, is there a reason that choice was made, or is it no longer available and we only know by implication? No, I actually tweeted out one of the images, and then my colleague, Josh Christensen, did a follow-up today with all of the images from from the um from my uh my sources um research so all those violent cartoon figures um i think there's about three images of that and then the muscle bound um i can't remember
Starting point is 00:23:41 josh called it something something like muscle mummy or something um and we we published that today so that's in the new york post today so miranda there was a congressional report released in December 2024 that did not include a lot of this social media activity. Do we know why that this was not mentioned in that congressional report in December of 2024? You know, that's a really good point because this was something that really disturbed my source and set him to continue to investigate and also try to get this into the hands of people who would do something about it. He's very concerned that the public doesn't know why the assassination attempt happened and that it could escalate.
Starting point is 00:24:34 And, you know, if, I mean, we're told by the FBI currently that crooks acted alone. This is what Cash Patel has said just in a tweet online where he ran through all the inputs that the FBI put into the investigation, which I think is frankly quite meaningless. you know, we followed up 14,000 tips or we, you know, did 10,000 interviews, whatever they did. He had all the metrics, but, you know, that's the inputs. What's the outputs? What did, what came of all that effort? And all he does at the end is this conclusion that we've concluded that he acted alone. So my source just thinks there's something more to this. And so therefore he pursued it. And the fact that that congressional report had nothing about the,
Starting point is 00:25:23 online activity would be because the FBI didn't share that with them. The only sort of time that, I guess, the FBI under Christopher Ray, just in the two weeks after the Butler events, Christopher Ray, a week later, testified to Congress. He said, there's no, we've searched our database and there's nothing about Thomas Crooks before Butler, right? Very carefully that he said that. Now, I asked the FBI, when I was doing this story last week, a number of questions. And the most important one, I think, was, did you have any contact with Thomas Crooks? Did the FBI have any contact with Thomas Crooks before Butler? Did anyone, you know, report him to the FBI? Did you pay him a visit? Did you knock on his door? Did you,
Starting point is 00:26:17 were you aware of his online activity? Does he appear anywhere? And all I got back was no comment from the FBI. And, um, you know, they've not been forthcoming with Congress. Senator Ron Johnson has been really angry about this and angry about the fact that even the Trump FBI, 12 months after Butler in July of this year, um, has not complied with his oversight. request. He wants camera footage. He wants documents. He wants forensics, autopsy, etc. And he's just, he says he's been stonewalled by the FBI and the Secret Service. And I don't understand why that is. If it's as clear and simple as Cash Patel is telling us that, you know, just this lone gunman, acting alone, etc., why be secretive
Starting point is 00:27:13 about his online activity. Why did Deputy Director Paul Abate, who was raised Deputy Director at the FBI, why did he testify to Congress two weeks after Butler and say only half the story? He described Thomas Crook's online activity leading up to when he flipped and became anti-Trump, when he was anti-Semitic
Starting point is 00:27:38 and sort of expressing sort of far-right views. But Paula Bait didn't tell Congress, and I think this is lying by a mission, that in January of 2020, this kid flipped and became rabidly anti-Trump and started then with his violent assassination rhetoric. Why did Paula Bate leave that out? That was deliberate misleading of Congress. And the question is, why? And why does Cash Patel not be more forthcoming? And look, the president is not satisfied. His family is not satisfied. So I don't, it, something doesn't add up here. well there's a lot that doesn't add up i mean you've got the fact that christopher ray told congress on july
Starting point is 00:28:24 24th 2024 11 days after the shooting that the bureau did not have any prior information about the shooter and now they're saying no comment so you know why wouldn't they either just confirm what christopher ray said or add additional context right because and the other thing that doesn't add up the sort of big e on the i chart as it were miranda is that there's apparently zero social media footprint from this kid from 2020 to 2024? He just disappeared. Like we're supposed to conclude that a young man who was had 19 profiles apparently that you guys investigated and have data on that they all just went away. Yeah. It's very strange from August of 2020. Just after his most violent post or comment when he's talking about
Starting point is 00:29:14 assassinating political leaders and military leaders. He goes dark. He just disappears. The other thing that happened around that time after which he disappeared was he started to have communications with a figure called Willie Teppas, which I don't believe is his real name, but it's what he used when he interacted with Thomas Crooks. And Willie Teppas is a neo-Nazi involved with a Norwegian neo-Nazi group that has since been designated a terrorist organization by the State Department. They did that designation in June of 2024, a month before Butler. I'm not sure if, I mean, that's probably just a coincidence.
Starting point is 00:29:56 But Willie Tepis sort of seemed to encourage this violent rhetoric from Thomas Crooks. He would say things like, you know, Maoist phrases like, you can only achieve anything through the muzzle of a gun, a phrase that crooks love to repeat. And so shortly after that, Crooks goes dark. And I've been told by, you know, people in the intelligence agencies that there's no way that this Norwegian neo-Nazi terrorist would not have been on the radar of the CIA. And if that were the case, the CIA would inform the FBI.
Starting point is 00:30:41 FBI of any interactions that he had with an American citizen. And, you know, you can say, oh, all this stuff happened online. How would the FBI know? Well, again, I've talked to FBI people, including a very high-ranking former FBI agent, whose name appears as the alias that Thomas Cooks used on his PayPal account, Rod Swanson. He's a very senior former FBI guy, was in Vegas, was running. criminal investigations for the state of Nevada after he left the FBI and during the time of the Las Vegas mass shooting. That again is someone who's, you know, disappeared offline,
Starting point is 00:31:25 has no friends, another mystery, no motive found, similar to Thomas Crooks, although he's in his 60s. We're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries and today I want to point you to their podcast. It's called Culture and Christianity. the Alan Jackson podcast. What makes it unique is Pastor Allen's biblical perspective. He takes the truth from the Bible and applies it to issues we're facing today. Gender confusion, abortion, immigration, Doge, Trump and the White House, issues in the church. He doesn't just discuss the problems. In every episode, he gives practical things we can do to make a difference. His guests have incredible expertise and powerful testimonies. They've been great friends. And now you can hear
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Starting point is 00:32:36 All right, Miranda, so this Rod Swanson, I don't know if you want to chime in, Blake, But this Rod Swanson guy, I mean, he was a shooting instructor or something like this in Pennsylvania, which is obviously where Butler is located. Do we have any indication that these two might have run into each other at some point, that their paths might have crossed? I don't think so. I've talked to Rod Swanson. He seems authentic, legitimate person. I mean, as far as I can tell, he was genuinely, seemed to be genuinely surprised that I was calling and that I was asking. asking, that I told him about this PayPal account. And he was flummoxed. He said, why, you know, if that's, if I'm involved in this, why didn't the FBI contact him? I don't understand that either. Why would the FBI contact a person who is a former FBI agent whose name Thomas Crooks uses as an alias for his PayPal account? Now, my source initially, there's a character in Parks and
Starting point is 00:33:38 recreation called Ron Swanson. So my source initially thought maybe that's the person. But you know, I just, this is a very high IQ guy, Thomas Crooks. He's, we've seen his school report. His teachers have been quoted saying that he was highly intelligent. He was pretty precise. So maybe he did mean the guy from Parks and Rex. But when I look up the name Rod Swanson, and the actual name he used as the alias, and it turns out to be a former FBI agent who was involved in the investigation of the Las Vegas mass shooting, which bears some resemblance,
Starting point is 00:34:19 I immediately call him up, and he says, doesn't have a PayPal account, doesn't know how to set one up, doesn't, had never met Thomas Crooks. So Rod Swanson is this guy that was involved at a very high level, it sounds like, investigating the Las Vegas massacre shooting, which would strike me is something that a young online young man would be hyper aware of and kind of fascinated because, I mean, the conspiracy theories ran wild with that one
Starting point is 00:34:49 because we never really did find out what the motive was. We never got a real clear narrative. It seems to have been a shooting caused by pure boomer on Wii or something. Yeah. You could see his family members and you're like, okay, this guy might be weird enough to do mass shooting. We never got clear. He just, he didn't leave a manifesto and sometimes that's how it is. So to see this kid referencing another sort of very high profile event, I think, you know, Pozo told us it's like a guy having the name Bromer Simpson on.
Starting point is 00:35:21 Right. Yeah. I mean, that's possible. There's so many unanswered questions. I guess if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're going to sum this up for us, Miranda, we've got these weird online presence that just goes dark. He's referencing FBI investigators from Las Vegas mass. What questions remain and where do we go from here? I just clear up one thing about Rod Swanson. He was not investigating Las Vegas. He was at that point running criminal investigations for the state of Nevada. So he was peripherally involved talking to victims and so on, but wasn't investigating it. He seems like a decent guy. He said to me, it's inconceivable that the FBI didn't knock on the door of this kid.
Starting point is 00:36:04 So I think that's the big question is, did the FBI knock on the door, which everybody involved in law enforcement says would have had to have happened? Did they have some involvement with him because of this violent online rhetoric? How involved were they? And if they were involved, why aren't they telling us about it? Why is the Trump FBI just not commenting and going dark as well? Why aren't they giving us chapter and verse on what motivated this guy? Why is there so much secrecy in terms of the oversight by the Senate? Clay Higgins found a whole lot of other interesting and disturbing information. Like, for instance, that they cremated the body soon after.
Starting point is 00:36:55 I mean, another source has told me that the toxicology isn't comprehensive. as it should be. There's a lot of weird things, hosing the roof down, et cetera. I don't know why Cash Patel doesn't tell the American people exactly what's going on instead of just saying no comment. Yeah, there's a lot there. And I remember the cremation of the body too, which is very suspicious. None of the, I'll be honest. And I try to, listen, having been the subject of some conspiracy theories more recently, I view them all with suspicion now because, you know, I will just tell you there's like a thousand mistakes that get made in every assumption that leads to conspiracy theories. So I try to be very cautious, conservative when approaching these
Starting point is 00:37:48 things. But it's just, it does seem true that some of this stuff just seems just like there's massive gaping holes in this story. And you would think the FBI would be, especially with the turnover of administrations, they would be motivated to clear some of this up. I'm excited to see your future reporting, Miranda, because I know that you're going to remain on this now that you've caused quite a stir with this first offering here. Thanks so much, Andrew. And that's just the most important message, I think, of all of this is what you just said, is none of us want to engage in conspiracy theories. It drives people mad. You've experienced that yourself, so many rabbit holes that people plunge down when there's a vacuum of information, when there's a huge important story.
Starting point is 00:38:31 like this where the president has almost been assassinated and we have a vacuum of information, conspiracy theories rush in. So it's really incumbent on those people in charge to just be straightforward and open and honest to the furthest extent that they're able to while maintaining operational security or national security or whatever it is they're worried about. Yeah, well said. Miranda Devine, New York Post, author of The Big Guy. Thank you so much for your time, Miranda. I know you got a dash. Thank you. All right. God bless you. Blake, are you satisfied
Starting point is 00:39:06 with the Butler story? You are a very contrarian non-conspiratorial guy. I feel like the best argument I've heard is that Trump seems pretty satisfied with the explanations. She said they're not satisfied, nor is the family. Well, he's never like said that he's super disappointed with it or anything.
Starting point is 00:39:23 When they ask him about it, he mostly does just say like, ah, you know, they've told me this, blah, blah, blah. Like, I don't know. Like, there's always with big events there's always a desire to have you know bigger mode like bigger forces behind it and i think that leads people down a lot of rabbit holes and the vagus shooting is the most egregious example we had people running around with wild it was a joint isis antifa operation that was one i was a weird it's a weird it was a weird shooters are crazy it could just be some crazy guys people who do mass shootings are nuts
Starting point is 00:39:58 They often have idiosyncratic motives that don't make a lot of sense because if you're a person who's sane, you don't try to murder a bunch of people. And so when you dive deep into it, you often get baffling stuff. And, you know, I suspect there might be a thing they're hiding where they had contact with him where they should have known he was going to do it. But one of the things is just there's a lot of crazy people in America and not all of them are going to be arrested. Sounds true.
Starting point is 00:40:24 We'll see you tomorrow, guys. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.

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