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The Charlie Kirk Show
How Our Corrupt, Miserable, and Malevolent Activist Media Came to Be with Brent Bozell
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Thank you for listening to this Podcast
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1 production now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast 1, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
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Hey, everybody. We are all repulsed by the activist fake news media. What they do to our country is so sinister and malevolent. I mean, if you look at some of the press coverage that has been happening in the last couple months, we went from President Trump wasn't doing enough to try to stop the virus, something that no president has ever been tasked with trying to stop to stop a viral infection, to if we go all the way back to the impeachment coverage, how the press was propagandizing us about how President Trump committed a crime that he did not commit. If you do not trust the media, you are gonna love this conversation today. It was actually an evergreen conversation that was back in the archives of the Charlie Kirk Show. We never aired it. It was a conversation I had with my dear friend, Brent Bozell. Brent Bozell runs the media Research center, mrc.org I believe is their website and we'll post it in the show description. Brent is a dear friend and a true American patriot. We talked about the fake news media and their mistreatment of President Trump. You guys are really going to enjoy this episode of how do the media get this way? Why are they so backwards? And are they more activists than journalists? And we already know the answer to that question. So I encourage you to email me your questions. Freedom. Charliekirk.com, freedomarliekirk.com Check out TurningPoint USA. Go to tpusa.com, tpusa.com, listen to our sister episode, which is our Ask me anything episode, AMA episode. And we have a packed schedule of first class interviews. We have Senator Ted Cruz coming up later this week, other massive guests. We have lots of thoughts that I want to share with you, but you guys are gonna love this episode about how and why the media deceives us, how you're able to spot that disinformation, and how the propaganda campaign is ruining the fabric of our country. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
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Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
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I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit has love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point usa.
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We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here. Welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show. I'm here with my friend Brent Bozell.
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B
How are you, sir? Good.
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Who is the founder and CEO of Media Research center, which is one of the most phenomenal organizations out there that is exposing left wing bias, fake news, as the President calls it. Brent, welcome to the show.
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B
Thank you for having me.
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A
Of course. So I've never seen the media this bad and I'm only 26. They are a propaganda machine for all things on the American left in the Democrat Party. You've been doing this for quite some time. Has it ever been as bad as it is today?
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B
You know, I'll answer it this way. About three or four years ago, I got a letter from one of our supporters who said, brent, in the last four years I've given you a million dollars and I'm reading a fund appeal letter from you that says the media are more liberal than ever before. He said, how well is my investment in you working? And it was a very good point he was making. But my answer was, it doesn't matter how liberal the media are. What matters is whether or not they're believed. They could be Marxists, but if they're not believed, they're not going to have an impact. Now that's a great point, but three years ago, I couldn't predict, couldn't have predicted where we are today. This is no longer a news media that we're talking about. This is a jihad. This is the radical left that is using the power of journalism in an attempt to destroy not just the president, but the conservative movement.
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That's exactly right.
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B
You know, somebody, I was debating somebody the other night and they were going on and on and on about how awful Trump was. And I said, now stop, stop for a second. Stop just for a second. Tell me this. The day Trump leaves office, let's say if he's defeated next year or if he retires in 2024, whatever the year is, how are you going to behave? How is the left going to behave? Is the left going to say, oh, now, Kumbaya, now we're going to like, get along.
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Just cheerful now. Everything's great.
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Yeah. God, love.
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Oh, yeah, we love the NRA now. Nra, great. Pro life. Terrific. Exactly. Media Research Center. You guys can move into the West Wing.
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B
Free enterprise. Love ya. No, you know, it's going to be, I think it's gonna be worse.
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A
That's a terrific point.
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It's gonna be scorched Earth against those who supported Donald Trump. So, to your question, have we ever seen anything like it? No, not nothing like it at all. This isn't a news media anymore. Look, there are two kinds of biases that we talk about. One is the bias by commission where you attempt to spin a story. The other one is by omission. We just don't report a story. You're seeing both of them, and you're seeing them in a. In a. In a way that was unthinkable two years ago. When the President is presiding over the greatest expansion of the economy, he says, ever.
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Close to ever, at the very least in our memory.
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Yeah. When you see the stock, I told the vice president two nights ago, isn't this interesting? The President was just impeached, and the market went up 150 points, and it went up another 130 yesterday. I mean, when you have that kind of a world, and yet the media won't report it, they won't say anything good about this president, all the successes he's had. When he says fake media, I used to think that's a little bit, you know, fake news is a little bit rough. This whole Russia collusion thing was one big exercise in fake news. He was absolutely right. No, they're out to destroy this man, and they're going to use this thing called news media. There's nothing that is news here. And where media are concerned, they're a
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disgrace, and they're propagandists through and through. But you make a great point. They want to destroy the conservative infrastructure. They don't want to just destroy him. They want to destroy the donors, they want to destroy the activists. They want to destroy the organizations that are supporting him and will be there post Trump, because they hate what we stand for, and they see us as a hindrance towards what they want to accomplish.
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You know, more and more, I'm seeing them seeing the world this way. They look at the European model, and then they look at the American model. In the European model, you put virtue over freedom. In the American one, it's freedom over virtue. They look at the European one, and they like it because they like defining virtue their way.
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They want to be the moral referees.
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Yes. Virtue is a world where government cares for the people, and they like that. And therefore, when freedom is second, the Constitution now takes second place to it. Which is why, Charlie, they don't care about the Second Amendment. They think it's a virtuous thing to take away your guns. This is why they don't believe in the First Amendment. They believe it's a virtuous thing to censor you. Now, you've seen it. You go on college campuses, you see what they're trying to do. When you go on television, you see what they're trying to do. Social media, they're not actively. I was speaking to the President's son a couple of weeks ago. He said, they're actively censoring us. Now they're going to be censoring the President. This is a good thing. They want to tear America down.
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They also value power over freedom. Everything the left tries to do is in a pursuit of power. And so the President has been under relentless assault. And everyone in the conservative movement understands the stakes of this. I think that the movement's more united than ever before. The President has done a remarkable job implementing conservative policy. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, the judges. I also think he's, as Newt Gingrich says, the most effective anti leftist president I think we've ever seen.
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B
And, well, I tell you why, Charlie. He. Ronald Reagan took the conservative movement to great places while destroying the Soviet Union. The greatest president ever, I think. But Ronald Reagan was always moving the ball forward, forward, forward, compromising when he had to. But that was just to rest and pick up the ball and move forward some more when he left, starting with Bush 41 and then going on to Bush 43. But the entire Republican infrastructure was one of compromise, moving backwards, backwards.
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It was the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party, George Romney and the Rockefellers.
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But the attitude was that if we give in as little as possible, then that's a victory. It was always a Pyrrhic victory because it's a retreat. So Republicans have been, and conservatives, frankly, have been retreating since 1988, up until Donald J. Trump showed up. He said, we're going forward again. And he declared war on the institutions, beginning with the media. He understood that the media were enemy number one. You know, there are three reasons why the media can't stand him. One, they created him.
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That's such a good point. He's a phenomenon of their making.
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He's their Frankenstein. Oh, no, that's the first one. And they really do feel guilty about that. Them. Secondly, he stopped the leftist march that was going to happen that they thought was inevitable. Oh, yeah, the first woman ever was going to follow, the first black ever and institutionalize socialism.
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Instead of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, you would have had Elizabeth Warren and.
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Oh, think about it, think about it.
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Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, versus the two you would have had. You would have a 35 year old Sotomayor and a 32 year old Kagan.
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Every, every judicial decision from the high court would go against freedom, everyone.
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And so Janice gone, everything it would be.
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And looking forward, there'd be no hope for anything. So that, you know, you know, if there's any. Is there anything that needed to be adjudicated between the executive and the legislative, they would want.
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That's right.
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They would want the courts to take care of it because it's gonna go their way. That's how activists, they were. Okay, so Trump put an end to that. But the third thing was before they could declare war on him, he declared war on them. He started this fight, which I love.
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He just said from his opening statement, he goes down that escalator. And the media, they thought this was gonna be a joke. And then they said, wait a second, why is he talking about us?
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I got a feeling, I just have this vision that, you know, he's coming down the escalator and he says, screw you, cnn, you know, and so it.
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Yes.
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And he has been at war with them ever since. And this is why they despise him so much. Because he had the guts. He had the guts for the first time to say, you're the enemy, you're radical left wingers and you're part of the problem, and I'm coming after you too. And he has been moving the ball forward, forward, forward. My one piece of advice to young people is this. If there's one takeaway from Donald Trump, it is moving forward. Being on offense, you compromise. When you've gone as far as you can, you've moved the ball forward and you're ready to go forward again. As soon as you get some reinforcements, you keep moving forward, forward, forward. This president, look at his negotiations worldwide. He doesn't stop. He doesn't stop. Look what he's done. Everybody said, oh, you're going to destroy America with these trade negotiations. Look what he won. Victory after another. And by the way, the whole world is going to, they're going to benefit from this.
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And he's been relentless.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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And so, Brent, not to put you on the spot, I only do this because I think our listeners would enjoy this. You were not a Trump supporter originally. I was a cruise guy. And I know you were, you were as well.
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I was a cruise guy at the start. Yeah.
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And he's convinced you of the policies and the fruit that he's the fruit that essentially this tree has been able to produce.
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Oh, yeah. I wrote this in my book.
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That's what I want you to talk about.
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Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, when I met with him, the first time I met him, I was prepared not to like him. I didn't want to like him because I was a Cruise supporter. But this is before he announced and he asked me to come up and meet with him and to talk about the race. And I was smitten by the guy. I spent an hour with him. He was the opposite of everything I thought he was going to be. He was quiet, he was solicitous, he was intelligent, asking probing questions, very, very confident. But the Braca dosha wasn't there. It was. I left that place saying, this guy's going places. This guy is going places. I urged him to run. He asked me if I thought he should run, And I said, Mr. Trump, you're never going to win. I love how everybody says, I knew he was going to win. I told him he wasn't going to win, but I told him he should run one, that I thought he should get the skeletons out, because everybody has skeletons. Just get them out. The second one is he had to scratch the itch. He'd been talking about this for many years. He had to do it. And thirdly, if he didn't win, I would hope that my President Cruz would then bring him on to have a Trump commission to fire everybody in Washington. Wouldn't you love it? You know, you're fired, you're fired, you're fired 500,000 times that. That was my wish at the time. But look, you know, I was one of so many conservatives who did question his conservative credential. I had every right to. He had a career support supporting liberal positions and Democrats and Planned Parenthood and Hillary Clinton. So I had a right, as many people did, to question it. Well, look what's happened. This man. Something happened. I don't know what happened. All I know is that he has been an unrelenting champion for conservatives, meaning conservatives now need to be unrelenting supporters of president.
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Yes. And the movement is more unified than ever before going into this 2020 election.
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Impeach, impeach, impeach. I love it. I love it. There's no. By the way, think about the politics of perception here. Okay? So he's been impeached for obstruction of Congress. If I had been running his administration, I would have said, Mr. President, do you want to get reelected, get impeached for obstructing Congress because America hates Congress.
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I.
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They're supporters in single digits. You're obstructing that the best point, you're
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obstructing the most hated institution.
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I mean, they're mosquitoes on the windshield of life. Just get rid of them. Get them out of the.
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Of course you're obstructing Congress. I would obstruct Congress.
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I mean, the worst thing you could do is he worked with Congress. This is what the public wants to see done. No, you're right.
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That's why they elected him. That's a power.
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This is why the market.
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They elected him to obstruct.
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This is why the market went up 150 points the day that he was impeached.
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Yes.
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The public is saying, go, Trump, go.
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And he.
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Excuse me, one thing.
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Go ahead.
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The Democrats don't know what the hell to do now. They don't know what to do with this impeachment.
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Well, what's so funny is they thought it was going to be a funeral and that. Remember Bill Clinton during his impeachment? We found this clip on the Charlie Kirk Show. We found the actual tape of it where his chef said that Bill Clinton would lock himself in the room and just order cake. Do you remember? You probably remember this. He would just order endless streams of cake. I remember, I saw it in a documentary like eight years ago, and our amazing team dug it up. But the chef is like, yeah, President Clinton used to always call and ask for big things of cake and come back, the whole thing would be eaten. He's acting so somber in this. And Trump's doing rallies with thousands of people.
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Rush, Rush Limbaugh. Once, when he had his TV show, one of the best things he ever did was capture this video of Bill Clinton at Ron Brown's funeral. Where, where, when Ron Brown was his, his cabinet member was killed or killed overseas and it was a bad thing. But at the funeral, the video catches Clinton walking at the service outside. He's laughing and he's, you know, just chuckling and talking to somebody and having a great old time at this funeral. Then somebody nudges him and points to the camera and he looks to the camera and just like, you wouldn't believe it. He just, in a second, he has a tear coming out of his eye and he's just rubbing and it's just like that. How did you do this? I mean, I mean, I mean, no actor could do it as well as you do it. No, this is all of them wearing black, for the love of God. You know, they're wearing black today. They're wearing black today. They don't know what to do with this. Damn impeachment. Well, they're holding it. And they know. They know that this is a keg of dynamite against them.
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What I love about this is Pelosi's like, well, if you don't succumb to our demands, we won't send this to you and McConnell again. I've had my. You and I both criticize McConnell over the years. I think he's gotten better. He says, okay, wait, so we don't succumb to your demands, so he's not impeached?
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Yeah.
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Great negotiating power, Nancy.
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I thought McConnell's speech was just very good. Extraordinary. I mean, he, he took this and he showed the American people exactly what, what is the color of the skin of the far left. He, the people, the, the public knows more than ever just how dishonest and dishonorable the, the far left has become. I hope that this is a message to liberals, not to leftists, but to liberals, you know, to the Joe Lieberman wing of the Democratic Party.
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A
Alan Dershowitz wing.
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Yeah, I mean, they were, you know, Alan Dershowitz who says, you know, very, very strongly. The conservatives aren't my enemy, leftists are.
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Yes, that's right.
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He, he came from the liberal wing that you debated and you debated fiercely, fiercely. And you might have nothing in common, except they were honorable people and you could debate them on. You cannot debate this radical left at all because they're not honest.
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And it comes from the university is where it comes from. This sort of lack of dialogue. Only one way to look at things. If you disagree, we must disassemble you altogether. And that's what we're fighting at Turning Point every single day.
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So people ask, so why are the media so left wing? The answer is because the radical left gravitates to three institutions. The news media, the entertainment media, and academia. Because they see in those three institutions the ability to change minds and to use the institutions to change minds. You know, you can't do that when you're working at IBM. You're not changing minds when you're working at Exxon, but you are when you're teaching at Stanford. You are when you're on NBC News. You are when you're a rock star at a concert. And that's how they, they project it. But they all work in tandem. Look at the average person in the news media today has no idea about free enterprise. They've never held a job, they've never hired a person, they've never run a company. They went from college or university to J School to journalism. And so they don't know the real world. We almost have it as a throwaway line that they're in Manhattan and Washington and, and Beverly Hills and they need to go over flyover country and visit America. No, no, no. That's very, very true. They don't understand the virtues of middle America. They don't understand.
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And even worse than that, it's almost like they have built in contempt for them, too.
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What do you think? What do you think about the rallies you put on? What do you think about you? What do you think they see in Ben Shapiro? It is contempt, but something else. It's fear. It's fear because they believe they should have the power to step on you like a bug. And in fact, what you have started is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And it's going to continue getting bigger. And they understand it. They see the threat. This is why it's existential. This is why this is a fight to the death right now. And this is going to go past Donald Trump. Conservatives have to understand what the stakes are. The stakes are everything.
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A
Because we only got two minutes and then you got to hit the stage. You think Donald Trump gets reelected?
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B
Yeah. I have thought for the longest time that this was going to be flip a coin, but I'm seeing the radical left that cannot stop itself because it is being run by people who just aren't very realistic about life. And nothing that Congress does is acceptable to them. And so they push them. They push them. And at the end of the day, you're not going to have, whether it's Elizabeth Warren or whoever it might be, is not going to be able to moderate. So I think if the President does things correctly and the President himself doesn't go off the rails, if he runs this thing correctly, I think he could destroy the other side.
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I think it could be 84 or 72 all over again. Brent, thank you so much.
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Hey, good luck to you.
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A
Good luck. What a great episode that was. I encourage you guys to check out our organization, TurningPoint USA, at tpusa.com, tpusa.com, turningPoint USA is the largest conservative student organization fighting for freedom and liberty on campuses all across the country. Please email me your questions. Freedomarliekirk.com, freedomarliekirk.com, give us those five star reviews. And if you screenshot us you doing that, we will send you a signed copy of the MAGA doctrine. If you're the first 15 people to do that, listen to our sister episode where I answer your questions and also please consider supporting our show. Go to charliekirk.com support we are doing 12 to 14 podcasts a week with your help. Thank you guys so much for listening. More coming this week. Stay tuned. Make sure you hit that subscribe button that helps us surge in the charts and beat the New York Times. Take your friend's phone and subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show. Might be the best thing that ever happened to them. God bless. Thanks so much.