Krystal and Saagar discuss confusing new details on the Charlie Kirk assassination.
Transcript
Morning everybody. Happy Tuesday. Have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have Crystal? Indeed we do. Lot to get to this morning. So we've got the very latest with regard to the investigation into Charlie Kirk's assassin. We're also going to break down this fight between Candace Owens and Bill Aman over whether or not pressure was applied to Charlie Kirk towards the end of his life with regard to Israel. There's a lot to get to there. Um, also we don't want to miss other news that is breaking the world. Trump blew up another Venezuela boat yesterday as we seemingly edge even closer to a regime change operation there. Um he also apparently had a heads up about that Israeli strike on Qatar though they're denying it but Israeli officials leaked to Barack Ravid and it is very likely as we said on that day that Trump would have a heads up with regard to that. So we'll break that down for you. Um this also happens as uh the Gaza City ground invasion has begun. So lots to get to there. We're also going to take a look at um we didn't get to this yesterday because we talked too much today. We will get to it. Zoron picking up some new endorsers and um actually we had some news as well. Andrew Cuomo now trying to distance himself from his previous positions on Israel which pretty interesting turn of events and I've got a monologue today. I'm going to be taking a look at the rise of the Black Pill killers. So, um, putting together some of the recent school shootings and what we know about, uh, Tyler Robinson and asking if this is a broader societal phenomenon that we now are going to be dealing with, which is quite terrifying, frankly. I'm looking forward to that. Thank you to everybody who's been supporting the show. Really means a lot in crazy times like this. So, let's go ahead and get uh, as Crystal said, to the Cash Patel latest clown show uh, that we have seen on display. It's absolutely shocking honestly to even see the way that this man is conducting himself in public and uh it would all be a joke if it not only was he's not the top law enforcement officer in the entire country but his public statements remember can all be used at trial should Tyler Robinson contest his innocence at trial. Defense lawyers and others potentially taking advantage of all of the misstatements and some of the timeline and other things that Cash Patel has now laid out that make absolutely no sense. So, here is the latest from attorney g from sorry, the FBI director Cash Patel in a Fox News interview yesterday, which was totally all over the map. Let's take a listen. All right, FBI director Cash Patel joins us now. I can't imagine, Mr. Director, how busy you've been, especially uh Charlie Kirk isn't just a impactful person. He's your friend. So, I understand that. But having said that, people are looking to you to find out is how big this investigation is going to be. Can you tell us the latest? Absolutely. It's so good to be with you and you're right. My personal feelings and relationship with Charlie, I have a job to do for the American people and I've committed to do it for President Trump. So yeah, that's uh the first statement that we have here from uh Mr. Patel. But the most important stuff that really starts to uh actually break down are some of the misstatements in particular about the investigation. You'll remember that if you look at this quote unofficial timeline and more that's been laid out by the government, there really is a lot of stuff, Crystal, which doesn't make sense. So, for example, we have things about the screwdriver and whether Tyler Robinson was able to assemble the rifle uh up on the roof, disassemble it, take it down while jumping off, reassemble it, stash it in the woods before it's eventually found. This is also comporting with claims of finding DNA evidence on the said towel, but we don't actually see the towel. We've looked at the video in which it was uh wrapped up. Remember also, you know, the official narrative is about driving in changing clothes. We don't have photos specifically about what those clothes look like. I could go on. I mean, there's so many more uh that he has laid out here and he is completely unable to lay that out um in answer some of these questions. Take a listen to that. on the ground um on the around 5:00 p.m. local on September 11th was walk the entire crime scene, including the foots the sub suspect himself took. And what we learned was there was evidence, DNA evidence that could be collected and had been collected, including a screwdriver that was found on the rooftop. Also, we went over to the scene in the wooded area where the firearm was discarded and the firearm had a towel wrapped around it. And I can report today that the DNA hits from the towel that was wrapped around the firearm and the DNA on the screwdriver are positively processed for the suspect in custody. Remember about that screwdriver, the fact that it was then reassembled or it was found assembled in the woods remains highly relevant. Another reason why that initial thing about the cash Patel and his personal relationship with Charlie Kirk is that any defense lawyer could say that there was a personal matter and potentially corrupted the investigation. It is a bit complicated because as of right now it's not a federal case. It is handle being handled largely by Utah authorities although they are looking for potential ways for it to go federal. But all of this matters in a court of law. the fact that the timeline does not match up with the uh I mean just doesn't pass basic muster for you know the idea is that you were ch you had an outfit of which we have not yet seen and allegedly is which the suspect is identified. This reassembly is a major question for the investigation. The charging documents have not yet been made public. So we're not yet clear to the official timeline that will be contested in a court of law. And we haven't even yet got to the alleged note that uh Robinson confessed to. Anything you want to say before we play that? Just on the screwdriver. Um so what cashell is saying there is screwdriver was found on the roof. Um presumably you know where the killer was stationed when he took that fatal shot. Um the reason why there's a lot of questions around this is because they released that video of him jumping off the roof where look it's blurry. It's difficult to tell exactly what's going on there, but you can't visibly see the firearm. So, was it disassembled? And then if the screwdriver was on the roof, but the gun is found reassembled and was how did he do that? Um, so that's those are some of the some of the pieces, you know, that raise question marks that the government's going to have to fill in of exactly, okay, what was he wearing? Where was he wearing? How did he change? How did he assemble? How did he reassemble? Where was the gun? You know, presumably the gun was in that backpack in the stairwell photos. All of those sorts of things they will have to answer. And any, you know, good defense attorney is going to be asking these same questions and trying to poke holes in that narrative. And I said this yesterday, but I really like go and watch the OJ documentary if you want to know how this is done and how an effective defense attorney can pick apart a government's narrative. To your point about the personal relationship, you know, another thing that they'll be arguing is that this was uh politicized from the beginning, from the beginning. They wanted to pin this on Tyler Robbins, that they were looking to do it. that the even this the open discussion here of the DNA evidence could be problematic because that type of evidence has to be introduced with an expert. It's not a yes or no it's it's his DNA or not. It's a probabilistic question. So even things like that um can end up coming back to bite you when you're in a court of law. Now I suspect that they probably are going to have sufficient evidence to be able to convince a jury of his peers, but it's worth raising the question. is also an indication just that Cash doesn't know what the hell he's doing. He doesn't have any idea the way that he could be screwing over their case here. He shouldn't be involved in evidence collection. You know, he's he is is not the person to be doing that, but he wants to make himself look like he's doing something like he's on the scene, like he's an important part of this so that he can save his own job. As we, you know, discussed yesterday, he is under fire and the knives are out for him within the administration. There are two separate things. First of all, Tyler Robinson's def, you know, potential defense. he's not cooperating with authorities. Dan Bonino said that he's currently placed on suicide watch. So, obviously, we're all going to be watching that very carefully. There's that, but there's also, look, this was a highly public figure uh for whom the questions around the assassination all should be answered specifically if you don't want conspiracy and other questions to arise and especially if it's going to become a political flagship. And that's especially why this is important here with Cash Patel's latest claim that a note was found in which Tyler Robinson allegedly confessed that he had murdered Charlie Kirk. However, he now says that that note did not exist, but that they can prove it does ex or it it did exist, but they can prove that uh it used to exist even though it does no longer exist right now. See, I'm getting tripped up because his own language is so unclear. Impossible to even discern what he's actually saying. We're about to show you. We will play it here for yourself. And here you can here's your takeaway. Let's take a listen. The written note we believe what did exist and we have evidence to show what was in that note which is um and I'm going to uh summarize basically saying I the suspect wrote a note saying I have the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take it. That note was written before the shooting. um evidence of existence we now have learned existed before the shooting was in the location um in the suspect and partner's home. But we have since learned that the note, even though it has been destroyed, we have found forensic evidence of the note. And we have confirmed what that note says because of our aggressive interview posture at the FBI. Our aggressive interview posture at the FBI. Interview with whom? Where was the note? Who? What are you saying? Did you conduct an interview with the trans boyfriend uh with a roommate with members of the discord? Where did these messages come from? How was such note, you know, given forward? And you're putting this forward before any of the charging documents. I mean, this is the problem with not just the podcaster FBI, but it really is just the rank incompetence and also just wanting stardom in appearing on Fox News for Nobody asked you to go on Fox News for 15 minutes. Nobody, absolutely nobody in the world said that you needed to do that. Uh you are corrupting a law enforcement investigation, dramatically confusing the public and potentially influencing the defense of a killer or alleged killer who we all want to see brought to justice. So everywhere that every single way that you square it, it's nuts. And again, it just fits not only with the incompetence, but with a lot of the misstatements which really could come back to haunt them at trial. The latest one also is on Discord. So, there's a new claim from the FBI that Tyler Robinson actually did confess. Potentially, this is what Cash meant. We don't know because nobody even asked him that he allegedly confessed to the murder of Charlie Kirk while he was in this Discord chat. Here are the details that they said yesterday, but they haven't released said messages. So, take a listen. About 2 hours before he was turned into authorities. This according to the Washington Post, we are working to independently confirm this as well, but the Washington Post says that Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old suspect charged in Charlie Kirk's murder, confessed, and I want to read this. According to the Washington Post, writing on Discord, that social media chat group uh that the FBI says he used, quote, "Hey guys, I have bad news for you all. It was me at UVU yesterday. I'm sorry for all of this." This coming from the Washington Post. Now, this comes as DOJ officials began late last week and over the weekend looking at the potential for at least one federal charge. No guarantee they'll get there. A department spokesperson declined comment, but a source familiar said investigators are not ruling anything out at this time, especially his online gaming presence, his chats, as we just mentioned. Who was he talking to? The reason why this is very confusing is remember Discord initially put out a statement that the statements made by the Utah governor that he had helped plan Tyler Robinson allegedly helped plan the assassination of Charlie Kirk on Discord. Discord put out statements that those messages don't exist. Discord has since put out a statement Crystal and said that these messages do appear to be consistent with the account that was linked to Tyler Robinson some 2 hours before he turned himself in. But again, it remains very unclear what the previous messages that they alluded to even are. And to the full statement, the transcript and all of that has not yet been released. So, well, look, I want to be clear. We're not alleging conspiracy or any of that. I want to be absolutely clear about that. What we are showing is the rank incompetence here by the FBI, the lack of communication, the raising of questions here legitimately about Cash Patel and the FBI's own handling of this investigation and the relevance that that means for law enforcement matters and obviously what is a heinous assassination, but also one that is potentially going to be used, as we'll get to just in a little bit, for political purposes. And so that's why the facts on this stuff really matter. And you know, if we look at these history of these investigations, every single one is more questions than answers. The uh Trump assassination, we don't know a goddamn thing about him. Case closed by Cash Patel, by the way, and his FBI. Uh I will remind everybody about Vegas. I mean, I'm sorry. There is not a goddamn thing about the Steven Paddock case that makes a lick of sense. If he had been alive and they had to prosecute him, good luck. Uh yeah, I mean, things like saying that no video or whatever existed in a Vegas casino. Really? I mean, I could go on forever really in in a lot of these investigations all the way back to Waco and and everything. So, what I'm telling you is not that there is some grand conspiracy necessarily, but that the screw-ups, the explanations, etc., have always been a breeding ground for people to, I think, legitimately say what the hell is going on here and especially if it's going to be used for political weaponization purposes. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, when I was scrolling yesterday on Twitter, practically every post was some new theory of like, "Oh, look at this guy over here. Look at this video. Look at how he moves his arm. This is the real killer." I mean, like a hundred different theories that I saw. So, this is already going on. So when you have the government which first the Utah governor said that there were discord messages that you know where he was effectively planning the shooting. Then Discord comes out and says that doesn't happen. Yep. Then Cash Patel says there was a note but the note was destroyed but we have evidence of the note but we got evidence of the note like through aggressive interview techniques which by the way again a lawyer what are they going to say? Well you got this information under duress. like what are we talking about here? You know, did you like basically torture this person into giving some sort of a false confession? All of these things are going to breed a lot of speculation and that is exactly what we see unfolding. If I had to guess as to what the hell they're talking about here and how all these wires got crossed, my guess, which is just a guess because you cannot tell from their statements what the hell they're talking about, is that there was apparently allegedly some sort of a note, that there was discussion about that note, not from Tyler, but from some of the people that he was, you know, maybe the roommates or whoever, some associates with him. There was some discussion of that note on Discord. Somebody got rid of the note and the, you know, the the revelations about these messages on Discord were um something that the FBI was able to get through their aggressive interview. Posh, if I had to try to square this mess, that would be my guess as to what's going on. And that could account for like the confusion of what the governor originally said about there being discord messages about what he was going to do and why he was going to do it. Maybe those didn't come from him. They came from other people in the circle who had seen this note, who were talking about the note. That's the best that I can figure out of what's going on here. But incredibly unclear. Absolutely. You know, incredibly unclear. And it's entirely possible that that's what I just said is not remotely even what they're talking about. Exactly right. We need to see the charging documents. People need to stop going on on uh Twitter and Fox News trying to I mean, Cash, let's be honest, what's he trying to do? He's trying to reclaim his reputation because everybody knows he's a clown in the way that he's acting. He's going on Fox News because of Trump. He wants Trump to see him on there and Trump to feel like he's doing a good job. I mean, the problem is he can't deliver on that ability of like seeming like he's competent and in command here. And Steve Bannon reacted exactly to this. Uh a huge portion of the right going after Cash Patel. Now, I think very justifiably, let's take a listen. I'm told that the reason that the video and what Michael uh Savage says and others about jumping off the roof is that he's got a gun in his hand and he drops the gun to the ground, the rifle. That's that's what when you when you confront him on that video, it said, "Oh, you guys are missing it." He actually has the rifle. He hasn't taken it apart. He drops the rifle down and then goes hides it. Maybe it is. It's just too fuzzy. I don't know. But the timeline makes no sense. Now they're putting out video that they got the guy walking around in shorts in the um you know cuz he had two costumes walking around two two sets of clothes walking around in the neighborhoods yet CNN played today again CNN played the doorbell video we saw the other day where he's walking stifflegged like he's got a rifle or a part of a barrel or something in his pants. He's very stifflegged. They played it again. So clearly that has not been refuted by the authorities. This is why this morning, first off, over the weekend, shifting this now not to a single murder, but actually to an investigation of a conspiracy. And as President Trump says, many investigations. He talked the other day about Soros in a um in an investigation, the source involvement, all of it. I think you're going to see a much more sophisticated, much broader investigation into this. 2,000 times I watched that video, I missed it cuz I'm still missing it. And maybe it's accurate, but I don't understand the doorbell. I got to The car wasn't impounded. You haven't uh rolled up any of the Discord chat. It seems like we're being spoonfed a narrative. There you go. I think uh you know, lazing raising some legitimate questions here. Let's put this up here. Uh this is uh something that was posted by Steve Bannon. Uh just recapping some of the questions. Brief recap. Again, you know, this is not all 100% correct. I'm just showing it to you because this is what was posted by Steve Bannon as to the level of questions and other things that are now being raised about the FBI and the director's leadership. So, the main takeaway for all of this is really in my opinion rank incompetence. And you know, yes, Crystal, as you said, that's potentially explainable many of the things that they have said, but that's not how things need to work uh at the highest level of American law enforcement in a court of law. Just don't say anything. Bingo. Exactly. I mean, if you you know, if you watch the governor, um, who has been much more like, even he has said some things that aren't true, but he's getting his information from law enforcement at the end of the day, he'll get asked questions where I said, I I can't say anything. I can't get into that for the integrity of the investment. Okay, great. Okay. You know, I mean, listen, as a journalist, I would like as much disclosure as possible, but what Cash Mattel is doing is not disclosure. It's it's actually muddling and confusing um the picture of of what we know here. But yeah, I mean Steve Bannon reposted, we can put that back up on the screen. Steve Bannon reposted this and said, and this is the short list um of questions that we have. They haven't recovered the bullet. We're talking about specifically uh the the bullet, the single shot that murdered Charlie Kirk. They haven't presented any video photographic evidence of the alleged shooter with the gun. The closest we get is actually that TMZ released doorbell camera where you see him walking stiff leg like he's got a gun down his pants, but you don't actually see the weapon. Alleged shooter did not confess to law enforcement, which was something we were that was very fuzzy at the beginning. It seemed like he was cooperating. We're all surprised to learn that he was not actually cooperating with law enforcement. They haven't presented any pictures or videos of the alle shooter changing his clothes on the roof, which is contradicted by the photos that have been released. They don't have any physical evidence of quote unquote the note where the alleged shooter allegedly claimed he would have a chance to take out Charlie Kirk. TPUSA staff contaminated the crime scene, removed the camera sitting be directly behind Charlie immediately after the shooting. Where is that footage? I don't know if you guys have seen this, but this is this appears to be true. Pretty shortly after the shooting, you see images of them breaking down the the tent and reclaiming the merch and all of that. Well, that's an active crime scene. like it's, you know, seems like you would have that cordoned off and you would want to preserve every aspect of that crime scene, but pretty quickly you see um staff able to come in and take down the tent. Discord disputes the FBI's claim the alleged shooter discussed any plans to assassinate Charlie Kirk. If true, they'd have data to back this up. We might end up seeing all of this eventually. I hope we do. So far, the evidence that's actually been presented is hardly convincing. This I think was put out before Discord did confirm that there were these messages not planning the shooting but apparently confessing to the shooting. So um in any case that's that's the picture as best as we have it right now. That's that's all we can really present to you. And uh the reason why again that we've said that why the questions and all the for example if we think back to the 1960s if you think about uh Oliver Stone and actually a really emergence of the anti-war left in the 1960s it was always underrated how much the Kennedy assassination I'm not comparing the two what I'm saying is that it was a clear throughine that Stone has always drawn from that assassination and kind of the age of innocence ending to the eventual military adventurism of what ended end up happening in Vietnam. 9/11 remains the same. Look, I mean, it took years years into the war in Iraq and Afghanistan for the secret pages about Saudi Arabia to be released from the 9/11 Commission. Uh the 9/11 Commission report itself. This is a joke. I mean, everybody knows that. And then no, no one's saying Israel did it. Okay? What we're saying is there's a lot of sketchy that remains completely unanswered around that entire thing. I mean, I remember last year new video from 1998 of an a Saudi embassy worker casing out the US capital that gets released. It takes 23 years for that to get released. But that's well after the consequences. So the point is that if it's going to lead to extraordinary action, I would hope that one of the things that actually happens is that all information gets released. So at the very least then all Americans can judge these things for themselves. Hey, if you like that video, hit the like button or leave a comment below. It really helps get the show to more people. And if you'd like to get the full show ad free and in your inbox every morning, you can sign up at breakingpoints.com. That's right. Get the full show. Help support the future of independent media at breakingpoints.com.
Tucker Carlson LIVE: America After Charlie Kirk Tucker Carlson Streamed live on Sep 16, 2025 The Tucker Carlson Show
Megyn Kelly, Scott Adams, Cenk Uygur, and Fr. Josiah Trenham join us for a live broadcast on America in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination—examining his influence on politics and what comes next for our nation.
Transcript
Introduction
Hey, I'm Tucker Carlson. Last week, within... just really minutes after Charlie Kirk was shot at that event in Utah, a kind of proxy war broke out over his memory. Who gets to own it, who gets to use it? While the rest of us were still reeling in shock, trying to figure out what happened, a ton of people appeared online, not just in this country, to take tell you exactly what happened, exactly what it meant, and exactly what we should do next. And you can see why with this level of emotion, rage and grief in the air, it's pretty wise to leverage that much energy. It's almost like nuclear power. It can be used for... good or bad, and a lot of people wanted to use it, there's no question about that. So they begin telling you, Charlie died for this. He lived for this and he died for that. So... the crazier reaches of the left, it was, Charlie was a Nazi. And the lesson is Nazis get killed. It makes sense. He was a bad guy who got what he deserved. And a lot of them said that out loud. Certain parts of the right immediately told you that. Actually this was about something completely different. You know, Charlie died for Israel. Many began to say the Prime Minister of Israel... said that and so did a lot of other people. Charlie was a defender of Israel, which he was, by the way, and therefore he died for that cause. But none of these explanations, all self serving, are really satisfactory. They don't capture who Charlie Kirk was, and on some basic level, they're dishonest... Charlie was not a Nazi. He was not killed because he was a Nazi. Yes, he was a defender of Israel. He didn't die for Israel However, why did he die? What was his life about? What was the... sin, the core sin that Charlie Kirk committed against somebody, power that got him killed in the end? And the answer is right in front of us, certainly those of us who knew him... Charlie's life was defined by his Christian faith, not his spirituality, but his belief in Jesus, his life as a Christian. Everything in his life flowed from those beliefs. Everything, everything he did, said and believed... came from the fact that he was above all a Christian. And that is and was and in fact has always been deeply provocative and offensive to the rest of the world. And why is that? It's worth thinking about it for just a second. Christianity doesn't seem like the kind of religion that provoke people to anger and violence. In fact, it seems just the opposite. It's the world's most profoundly nonviolent religion, maybe the world's only truly nonviolent religion... A religion based on a Man who Christians believe was also God, who, as he was being led away to be tortured to death... on made up charges, scolded one of his disciples for fighting back. This is a religion committed to love above all and to living in peace and harmony. Truly, it's a universalist religion that believes that every person... has a shot at heaven. It's not exclusionary at all. And so you would think it would make sense that if you're a government or if you're in power, that you'd want a lot of Christians living in your country because they're not going to cause massive problems. Not a lot of... sincere Christians are fomenting insurrection at any given moment. Pretty much none. Most of the time they're tidy. They get married, they love their children. They pay their taxes. They're commanded to pay their taxes... So why wouldn't you want a nation full of Christians? Why wouldn't you encourage... this religious belief, even if it wasn't yours? Why would you hate it? Well, there are a couple of reasons. There are a couple of things about Christianity, and these were evident throughout Charlie's public life, that are... deeply provocative to the people in power. And the first is the insistence that Christianity comes with inherently... that you are not God, you are not God, and neither are your leaders. God is God, and all of us stand before him in the end to be judged, and all of us will be found lacking. Christians believe the only way to heaven is through Jesus. That's the only way. But all of us, whether we believe in Jesus or not, are fallen. We are sinners, we are less than we ought to be. We are not gods, and neither are the people who lead us. And this has a lot of implications, the first being if you're not God, you don't get to do whatever you want... There are limits. There are rules that you didn't write that you have to abide by. That's not a judgment, that's a statement of fact... Some call it natural law. It's been the basis of every functioning society since the beginning of time. But the basis of our society is the Christian understanding of justice, which flows... from that belief. You are not God. God is. He writes the most basic rules, you abide by them, period. That's the basis of our law. That's the basis of Western law. That is a threat, a challenge... to people who would ignore the limits on their behavior, very much including our leaders and very much including the most powerful people... in our society, whether they're elected or not... Nobody wants to be told you're not allowed to do something. And Christianity inherently... tells people that, doesn't judge them, it just states it clearly. No, you do not have the power to kill, except possibly in self defense. But you can't just go killing people. And you can't go killing people because. And this is the second thing about Christianity that tends to set the teeth of the powerful on edge. Christianity insists... that every human being is created by God. Every single one. And that means that every human being has a soul, a distinct, unique soul created by God. It is once again the only true universalist faith... there is. And the New Testament is the story of this, an under read collection of books that is not the story of the Old Testament. It is very much the story of the New Testament. In the New Testament, all people are God's chosen. Every single one. And the story itself makes that point. The founder of most Christian churches in the early near east was a former... Pharisee, a Jew who was in charge of killing Christians... until he famously met Jesus on the road to Damascus. His name was Saul, it became Paul... And he is the most prolific author in the New Testament and the basis of a lot of Christian theology. And his life tells the story. People... can change no matter what they look like, no matter what they previously believed, no matter where they're from, no matter what language they speak, because they are created by God. And every person, every single person, whether you like them or their relatives or the way they look or not, has that chance because all were created by God and all were loved by God. That is the basis of Christianity. That's the Christian story. And so a sincere Christian proceeds with that belief. There is no tribalism in Christianity. There is no identity politics. It's the opposite. You may prefer to be with people who look like you, that's fine. But God doesn't prefer to be with people who look like you. God prefers to be with all people because he created all people... He's the God of the universe, not just... of the people you like. And that again... has massive implications for the way that sincere Christians live and for the way that Charlie Kirk lived his life. And the first is if... other people have souls, if they, like you, were created by God, then they have freedom of conscience. You can tell them what they ought to think, but you can't make them. You can tell them what they ought to say, but you can't force them. Christianity does not convert by the sword. It can't. It requires... free will. And it requires free will because it respects... the individual conscience emanating from the distinct soul of every human being. And that is why in the west, which is based on Christianity, our civilization is a Christian civilization, tattered though it currently is. collective punishment. Hurting people for the sins of their relatives is unthinkable. It's a crime because each person... will stand alone as he was made before God. And every person is equal before God... fundamentally doesn't mean each person is equal in his ability. It doesn't mean each person is equal in the choices he makes. Of course not. But it means that every person is a human being with a divine spark inside. That is the core assumption of Christianity. And it was obvious when you watch Charlie Kirk, that he believed that. Charlie's been famously quoted for the last couple of days saying he abhors anti Semitism. That is absolutely right. And he did. He said that in public, and he said it very often in private. He meant it, too. But he abhorred... racism and bigotry on the basis of genetics... of all kinds, because he was a Christian and he believed that God created each person. Now, why is this a problem for temporal authorities? Why is it a problem for the people in power?.. Because once again, it circumscribes what they can do. It sets a limit on their powers... If God created each person, including the infuriating, annoying, disastrously wrong person I'm talking to, then I can't force him... to repeat my creed. I'm not in charge of his conscience. Only he is. And that is a... limit... So when Charlie Kirk said, I believe in free speech, he didn't simply... believe in free speech because it was in the Bill of Rights. He understood that it was in the Bill of Rights because it's in the New Testament. He understood that's a right that comes from God bestowed on all of us at birth... And he felt his job, his duty, was not simply to protect it, but to live it, to show people what that looks like. I just want to play. Of the many clips we could play of Charlie Kirk on college campus, he spent his whole life worn out most of the time... as an older man. I often said to him, how the hell do you get on plane after plane after plane? But he felt an evangelical duty, small evangelical duty to do it, to get out there and talk to people. Why?.. Not simply to build a coalition or get this or that person elected, but because... he believed, as a Christian. that... convincing people voluntarily with words in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. So the Gospel of John begins, words are the key... to Winning people's minds and their souls. And he really meant this. He wasn't just repeating the words, he meant it. And it was obvious in the way that he interacted with people who disagree with him and... people who hated him. Here's one clip that tells part of the story. Would you want someone who is not necessarily stable or ready to bring a child into this world and provide that child the life it deserves? Would you want them to still bring that child into this world? Without a doubt. Every life has a moral obligation to be able to live. If I can't give... that child... the life it deserves, why? Why am I bringing it to? Got it. This will be my last question... I want you to think about it... If a Single mom has two 2 year olds, twins, and she wakes up one day and says, I can't do it anymore. I can't give them the life they deserve. But that's just not the circumstance. Hold on. Should she be able to take out a shotgun and kill both those kids? No, of course not. Because you think that would be objectionable. That's why I think it's objectionable to eliminate two babies that are six weeks old because they're morally the same thing. One just happens to be bigger, one just happens to be older, one just happens to be outside of the womb. They're both human beings. And you have something in you that says, no way is it okay to kill a two year old. That's called your soul talking. You have something in you that tells you the truth. You can call it instinct if you like. Charlie Kirk referred to it as the soul. But both mean the same thing. You have the spark of the divine God spark inside you and it reacts, it hums, it vibrates like a tuning fork... And you know, on a basic animal level, like your dog knows when something is wrong. You can feel it. And the whole purpose of modern society, it seems sometime is to get... the rest of us to ignore what we know. That vibration inside us that tells us the truth always. It never lies to us. Charlie did not ignore that. And you'll notice that in the end he appealed to it with... that young woman. He didn't scream, you were a murderer in his face, though He considered abortion murder, which it is. He felt that deeply. This wasn't a performance. He wasn't another nonprofit phony in D.C... feigning outrage about something. He really believed... that taking innocent life was wrong in the womb... or in crowded cities, anywhere. He thought it was wrong because his faith tells him it's wrong... And because his Conscience confirms that belief, and so does yours. And so did hers. So did all of ours. We know... when something is wrong, and the people above us shouted us. No, really, there's an explanation for it. That's just your super ego barking at you. no You know in your heart, deep inside, what every person has known, and that is the murder of innocence is a crime. It's a moral crime, and that girl knew it. And in the end, That was Charlie's appeal... Listen to that divine spark inside you. Listen to your soul speak to you. Turn off the music, get off the drugs, push the distractions, which it's hard to believe, aren't actually designed to crowd out that humming inside us. And be still for a moment and accept what you already know, what you were born knowing. Listen to that. Or only someone... who appreciates the person he's speaking to as an actual human being could speak that way. Notice how rare that is. It's been noted in the past couple of days, Charlie was a free speech champion. Absolutely, he was. And I pray that that's his legacy. But I also think it's important to explain why that mattered to him... It was not abstract in any sense. It was central. It was the core... Because consider... what it means if you don't respect... free speech, which is another way of saying free conscience. The right of other people to make up their own minds about the basic questions of what is right or wrong and to express their views on those issues. If you don't acknowledge the right of other people to do that, and if you take steps to prevent them from doing that, what are you really saying? You're really saying, I don't think you have a soul. I think you're a meat puppet I can control. I think you're an animal, maybe sub animal. You're a slave. You're a person to whom I can dictate... belief. I don't acknowledge that you have the right to come to your own conclusion is another way of saying, I don't acknowledge that you're a human being. It's dark. There's nothing darker than that... And trust me, they believe it. The ones who've thought about it, and there are a lot of those. But for a lot of people, particularly those who are just repeating what they think they should say or responding to the momentary rage of the moment. they just throw stuff out. And we've got to hope that the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi, is in that category... She said this just yesterday. Watch. There's free speech and then there's hate speech. And there is... no place, especially... now, especially after what happened to Charlie. In our society. there's free speech... and then there's hate speech. This is the Attorney General of the United States, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, telling you that there is this other category... called hate speech. And of course, the implication is that's a crime. There's almost... no sentence that Charlie Kirk... and... I'm not running the risk... of appropriating his memory for my own ends by saying this... It's provable. There's no sentence that Charlie Kirk would have objected to more than that. And you've got to think the Attorney General didn't think it through and was not attempting to desecrate the memory of the person she was purporting to celebrate that. She just threw that out there that she hadn't thought about it. You hope that... You hope that Charlie Kirk's death... won't be used by a group we now call bad actors to create a society that was the opposite of the one he worked to build. You hope that... You hope that a year from now, the turmoil we're seeing in the aftermath of his murder won't be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country. And trust me, if it is, if that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that, ever. And there never will be... Because if they can tell you what to say. they're telling you what to think... There is nothing they can't do to you because they don't consider you human... They don't believe you have a soul. A human being with a soul, a free man has a right to say what he believes... Not to hurt other people, but to express... his views. And by the way, that thinking. And not to pile on the Attorney General, who's a very nice person. but that thinking that she just articulated on camera there... is exactly what got us to a place where some huge and horrifying percentage of young people think it's okay to shoot people you disagree with to kill Nazis for saying things they don't like. Why do they believe that? How did we get here? Is it the video games? Is it the SSRIs? Yeah, probably. But what it really is is 12 and then 16 years of indoctrination in our schools at the hands of people who tell them that, who say exactly what the Attorney General just said. Well, there's free speech, which of course, we all acknowledge is important. So, so important. But then there's this Thing called hate speech. Hate speech, of course, is any speech that the people in power hate. But they don't define it that way... They define it as speech that hurts people, speech that is tantamount to violence. And we punish violence, don't we? Of course we do. They've been taught that every year of their lives. And so naturally, most of them believe it. When Charlie Kirk is shot in the throat with a 30 out six on camera, I doubt very many young Americans want to see something like that or actually applaud the death of a man, a father, a husband. But they've been told for their entire lives in schools exactly what Pam Bondi just told them. Well, there's free speech, but then there's also hate speech. And woe to those who engage in it because it's a crime. That's a lie. And it's a lie that denies the humanity of the people you're telling it about. And so any attempt to impose hate speech laws in this country, and trust me, there are a lot of people who would like them, there are a lot of people who'd like to codify their own beliefs by punishing Those under the U.S. code who disagree with their beliefs. Any attempt to do that... is a denial of the humanity... of American citizens and cannot be allowed under any circumstances. That's got to be the red line, because again, when they can do that, what can't they do? And this is something, by the way, that Charlie thought about a lot and that I had occasion to talk to him about a lot. And I really don't want to make any of this about me because it has nothing to do with me... But I did have reason to have these conversations with Charlie a lot, many, many times over the past three or four months. And... this began at an event that he held in Florida in July, the TPUSA M Fest event, Turning Point event. I often go, I always have the best time. I always see Charlie ahead of time. We have a cup of coffee in a hotel room, talk about what's going on. In addition to being, of course, a conservative advocate, he was also a conservative organizer and a coalition builder. And he was very involved in politics in a way that I'm not. So it was interesting as hell, but it was also a way to learn what young people are thinking about, talking about, because he was on college campuses all the time. And what is the state of a couple of big debates that are happening within the Republican coalition, particularly around foreign policy. And Charlie's views on foreign policy, which I think are fairly well known now. A lot of people lying about them were evolving, but had... really evolved. And who knows why he reached the conclusions he did. I think his Christian faith informed... them mostly... was also the experience of talking to young people... And his views were very much like theirs. He believed that the war on terror had been a net loss for the United States, and it caused incalculable damage, not just economic and physical damage, but spiritual damage to the United States. It was. It was bad. We got nothing out of it. We were only hurt. And he didn't want to see that again. And he felt very strongly about that. And of course, I agreed. And so before that speech that I gave in July, we had a conversation about this backstage... right before I went on. And I was fulminating and getting all red in the face like I often do, to my shame. And I was mad thinking about this and thinking about the effort by the neocons in the United States to draw us in to another... forever war... with Iran. Not a defense of Iran, of course. It's merely an acknowledgment that we've done this before. This happened in Iraq, which, you know, we entered into at the behest of those same foreign policy strategists. And... And it didn't work. And so I was going on at some length backstage with Charlie, and I said. you know, probably not going to talk about that. I'm not going to torture you. I know your donors hate this when I say that. And also, Epstein was in the news, and it was clear to me that, you know, Epstein's probably not like a Mossad agent or something, but Epstein clearly had contact with Israeli intelligence and American intelligence and French intelligence, But the only one you're not allowed to talk about is Israeli intelligence. But it's. It seemed true to me, and I had done... some work on that, and I knew a bunch of people pretty close to that story, so. So I thought that. And I said that to Charlie, and I said, but I'm not going to say that because I don't want to make your donors mad. I know it's just going to be like an endless flurry of texts telling you to stop or you're gonna lose a bunch of funding. And he looked at me, I'll never forget it, and said, go all the way... Do it. Go all the way. I said, man, I. You know, a lot of things I can talk about. I don't need to talk about that. And he said, do it. So I did it... By the way, I think that that conversation hit a Mic on. And so did I. Probably exists somewhere on somebody's server, but that's, I think, a faithful rendition of what he said. And by the way, I'm not trying to blame him for my remarks. You can agree or disagree with those remarks. But I'm saying this only because I was shocked and sickened by the reaction of the ghoulish and really repulsive reaction of the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Charlie's death. Basically made it all about him and all about his country, immediately... trying to take the energy, the sadness, the grief that people felt over Charlie's murder and redirect it towards support for whatever project he's involved in. And by the way, Benjamin Netanyahu is not the same as the nation of Israel at all. Bibi is despised by many people in Israel, and if you know people who live there, you know that that's true. There are huge divisions within the Israeli government. I mean, there are certain parts of the. The intel world... in Israel that do not support some things that Benjamin Netanyahu has done recently. So it's not the same as attacking Israel, attacking Bibi. But I. I don't think I've ever seen anything lower than his attempt to hijack Charlie's memory and use it for his own political ends, particularly because what he said was completely untrue. Charlie didn't hate Jews. He loved Jews. He had tons of friends who were Jews. He loved the state of Israel, love going there. He did not like Bibi Netanyahu. And he said that to me many times, and he said to people around him many times... he felt that Bibi Netanyahu was a very destructive force. He was appalled by what was happening... in Gaza. He was, above all, resentful... that he believed Netanyahu was using the United States to prosecute his wars for the benefit of his country, and that it was shameful and embarrassing and bad for the United States, and he resented it. Didn't hate Netanyahu. He wasn't out there with a placard saying that. But he certainly expressed that to me and a lot of other people. And there's no question that Bibi's defenders... on the Internet will call me a liar or a kook, but that's a fact. And enough text messages exist that I think it can probably be verified in pretty short order. Not that it needs to be, because that is true. Shortly after that speech, there was a very intense attack on Charlie and to some extent on me. Not that I really... noticed, but on him, I have no donors. He had $100 million... worth of donors. And so, because he was involved in a different project from just yapping on the Internet, which is what I do for a living, he was dependent to a great extent on his donors. Of course, it's a nonprofit, and they went after him and tormented him. Not all, of course. Many were supportive, but the ones who were offended by my speech, and there was a small, very intense group who were tormenting Charlie Kirk, until the day he died. Two days before he died, he lost a $2 million donation... because he had publicly pledged to bring me to the next Turning Point conference in December. And he told me over the past couple of months he was losing a lot of donations over that pledge. They put out... a flyer basically saying that I was going to be at this event giving a speech... And so he would text me and say, man, I'm really taking a lot of heat for this, and people are really mad. The American... Jewish Committee called in a statement, Charlie Kirk, an anti Semite and quote, dangerous. Charlie Kirk, an anti Semite. He was not an anti Semite. He was the opposite, and he was not dangerous... He was a great lover of people and a purveyor of peace. He was the opposite, and he was very stung by that. Those of us who've been called names for a long time are a little bit harder to offend. Charlie was deeply offended by that and expressed some of those feelings on Megyn Kelly show and in other places, but that did not let up. The reason I'm telling this story is because he called me and then came to see me at my house about this topic. And I said to him every single time, look, it's. You know, I've got my own way to communicate my views... This is actually not the most important issue to me. There are lots of things I can talk about. I don't need to come to Turning Point. I can take a year off, no problem. I hated... seeing how much he was suffering. The hassle he was getting... from people... And I was being attacked, too, by the way, was a huge effort. I wasn't fully aware of it, actually, because I don't go online that much, but there was a huge effort by people, some of whom I know and have helped. And like Seth Dillon, the Babylon Bee, for example, someone who had his own problems with free speech, who was famously canceled. I like Seth Dylan. I had him on a couple of times. I had dinner with him to show support. Seth Dillon was out there demanding that Charlie Kirk take me off the roster, pull me off stage... Because I had said things that Bibi didn't like or that he didn't like or whatever. Shocking that someone whose whole Persona is wrapped up in the idea that we all get to speak. And if you don't like it, make a more compelling case that that person... and many others like him were advocating For me getting pulled off the stage... because they don't like what I'm saying. This is a trend and one that we should be really concerned about. It's not just about Israel, by the way, at all. The trend is really simple. People with power don't want to hear disagreement. They don't want to be challenged, ever. That's why we have free speech. To acknowledge that even those of us... or people with less power still have a right to talk because they're human beings. You don't own them. So time after time, Charlie would call me or come to see me and let me know, wow. Or show me text messages. These people are really mad that you're speaking. And I always have the same thought, like, I feel pretty moderate, actually. I've never been an Israel hater, obviously, I'm not an anti Semite... I just don't want more wars and I don't want a foreign country humiliating my country and telling us what our laws have to be. I mean, this seems like pretty basic America first stuff. And he would say, I totally agree with you, you, but they want you off the stage. And I would always say, no problem. And he would say, no, it's important. It's a matter of principle. I want you to be there... Great. By the way, I'm not accusing anyone of being involved in that murder. I'm not trying to... mutter darkly or imply... anything. We don't. There's a lot we don't know about who murdered Charlie and why. But I. I don't know. And I'm not gonna pretend that I do. But I think it's important to say that out loud because it's a fact. And there are many liars out there trying. Bibi Netanyahu, number one among them, shamefully, who are trying to distort the truth, a truth that I know and can prove. And the last thing I'll say about Charlie is that his views were changing... on topics that had nothing to do with foreign policy. You know, the famous kind of red line third rail. Can't talk about it. but it's possible that the subject that makes people even matter... in Washington, New York and LA than... having... non conventional foreign policy views is having non conventional economic views. Man they really don't like that at all. And Charlie's views on economics. And on the way that wealth is distributed in the United States Were changing fast. Really changing fast and hardening. Not because he was a socialist. Hardly. He was about as much of a socialist as I am. Not at all. But because he lived here and he spent a lot of time with young people. And he couldn't help but notice because he was an observant and honest person. That they're not thriving at all. And that the chances they'll have lives comparable to the ones they had growing up are very small. Most of them won't have houses. They won't own anything. They'll be in debt. And for that reason, they won't get married or have children. And so the people who are born here Won't continue their legacy in the United States. It's the end of our civilization. And the root of a lot of this is spiritual, but the root is also economic. And it raises a question, a basic question of fairness. And I tried to address this in the speech that I gave for Charlie in July. I don't think I did a very good job, and it was misinterpreted. But I invoked Bill Ackman. And the point I was making had nothing to do with Bill Ackman being a criminal or even being an Epstein friend. I mean, I don't really know anything about that. I don't know much about. I'm not accusing Bill Ackman of a crime. And I'm not accusing him of, you know, being a sex creep or Mossad agent or anything like that. I don't think that. I don't know that for sure. And I wasn't trying to say it. What I was trying to say is that Bill Ackman is not creative, not particularly intelligent. Bill ackman is worth $7 billion. So you have to ask, like, how. and it seems to me... that Bill Ackman is rich for the same reasons that a lot of other people I know are rich... Because he's hyper aggressive... and he's well connected. And my only point was. If you live in a society that awards the spoils to people on the basis of those two qualities... Like the most aggressive. The best connected people get the richest. That's a dysfunctional society. There should be a reward for creativity and. And decency and hard work, steadfastness, following the rules. Like you should have to add to the sum total of your society, you'd think. It's not an argument against the free market. It's the argument against Whatever we're living through right now, this is really dark and ugly. And if people like bill ackman are getting the richest, what has bill ackman done? Shorted the market or something? Talk down herbalife. I mean, I'm not even saying that should be illegal. All I'm saying is, if that's one of the richest guys in your society, you've got a very sick society. I don't think bill ackman's like a drooling idiot or anything. But, like, when was the last time. You heard bill ackman say something constructive or creative? Like, never. So it's just bad. And it's not just about bill ackman, of course. I mean, he's just a minor player in the life of the world. But he's a kind of metaphor for how off track we've gone. And that doesn't seem like a socialist point. Once again, I'm hardly a socialist, and neither was charlie kirk. That seems like a christian point... Fairness is at the root of. Of the christian story. People will be judged not by who their parents were or by how they look, but on their hearts, on themselves, on choices that they made. That's fair. So again, fairness is essential to the gospel. And it's essential to any working society. In a fair society, or a society that... its citizens believe is fair, People will comply voluntarily with the rules. Because they don't think the game is rigged... But in a society in which bill ackman. Bill Ackman makes $7 billion. And like, the smartest, hardest working, most interesting, creative young people, you know, can never own a home in a society like that. You're going to get mamdani as mayor. You're going to get a lot of bad things. Because people will opt out of the society. Because they know it's not fair, it's rigged. That's the only point I was trying to make. And charlie, not surprisingly, made it much more eloquently. I thought... in an amazing interview. The last interview I did with him late July of this year. Here's part of it. We know how to create wealth, but we don't know how to create it for the generation that needs it most. If you look at the economic conditions, you would think the other conditions surrounding it Are like abject poverty. These are the problems that, like, third world nations have. I know our young people can't afford stuff. And they have to finance their basic necessities. And yet we're the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. On the planet. We have a $37 trillion... GDP. We have the greatest companies and we have all this stuff to brag about. And yet all of our problems would beg the question... And it's like this inherent contradiction. We're super wealthy on one side, like a powerhouse juggernaut, and we are like an economic nightmare on the other side. How did that happen? So if there is such a thing as the left in the United States, if it still exists, you would think a message like that would at least get a hearing, a respectful hearing. like, hey, what about wages?.. What about the ability of young people to just buy a little house with some lawn in some subdivision? Like what? Isn't that kind of what they say they want? Empower, you know, the most vulnerable, the people who try hard and play by the rules. They called him a Nazi. They didn't care that Charlie Kirk in real life spent his... time trying to stop... war. trying to, you know, figure out how young people could buy a little house somewhere. Aren't those like left wing goals? they didn't care at all. In fact, they hated that because they're for war, because they're for death, because they're for the inequality he described because it leads to a volatile society that empowers them. Of course. they're not a check on power. The professional left, the trans community. they're the shock troops of power. Charlie Kirk was a check on power. Charlie Kirk, inspired by his Christian faith, stood up to people fearlessly to say what he thought was true. And for that, I will always love and admire him. I want to go down to someone else who loved and admired him and knew Megyn Kelly him well and played a pretty, I think, important role in the final months of his life. And that is my old friend... Megan Kelly. Megan, thanks so much for coming on. Oh, Tucker, thanks for having me. That was a barn burner, man. You hit on some really important big points. I don't even remember what I said, but I meant it. So I just want to start. So you had this experience... last week that I, you know, I've always prayed. I never have... You were... on live... You were live when... the news came in that our friend had been shot in the throat and your reaction... was captured for all time on camera. And I just want to start by... playing it. I thought it was just an incredible moment that said so much about you and about him. So here it is. Oh, well, looks like we don't have the Well in it. You said the line that stuck out to me. Your first reaction was he was Sent by God... That's the first thing you said you'd not heard this news before. Why was that your gut reaction to his shooting? Because I had spent so much time with him over the past few years, just on the air. Tucker. I never went out to dinner with Charlie. I didn't know him quite like that, like a. Like a personal friend. But I'd had him on the show... more than 15 times. I'd been on his show repeatedly. I'd been to multiple Turning Point events and, you know, talked with him backstage quite a bit. Just done a lot with him professionally, a lot... And, I mean, I wonder if he's been on anybody's show as much as he was on mine over the past couple of years. And I got to know his thoughts on virtually everything. And I saw what people are seeing now, how they were all... infused with his Christian faith, that he was a truly happy warrior, that he gave almost everyone the benefit of the doubt, that he had a much more positive and optimistic outlook on humanity than I do, and I think. Than you do. I mean, I think we're a couple of cynical mofos. yes yes And... Charlie... wasn't. Charlie was. He was like an angel. This picture that the left is his painting of him in the news is totally foreign to my understanding of Charlie or to anything I've known. And I watched Charlie on his show, too... I know, I know. The things they say he said that were controversial, they just fundamentally choose to misunderstand and misinterpret him. I mean, he was. You need look no further than Erika... in order to see... that he was real. Like her goodness, her love, their love story, her... strength in the wake of his death... That's the woman he loved, and that's a woman who loved him. Why? Because he was some devil figure?.. The opposite. These two were as wholesome... as you could find. And everything he said was from his love of humanity and his belief that they could do better... I mean, I. Much more like, no, they can't. Let's move on without them. Like, we've gotta, you know. And Charlie, I mean, in all of these college campus exchanges, whenever. Talking about most people, he would feel... like everyone... was... Could be redeemed. And if he could just get to them, if he could just talk to them, if he could just buoy them up with hope, they would. They would do better. They could see themselves as Charlie saw them, as God sees them. And I just ran into that optimism and that positivity from Charlie so often that I really did see him as God's Messenger Tucker as an angel sent to us. And it's like, we didn't deserve him. I feel like he's gone now because we. We didn't deserve him. Man, you are too deep for cable news... No wonder you left. That's just such a beautiful summation and so insightful. I'm not sucking up. I mean it. That's. I wish I had said half of that in my open. So. But why is that so provocative? I've been thinking about this since he was murdered. Like, what? Of all the people that we know in our business, you know, the kind of. Let me give you my opinion. Business. I think it's fair to say he was the kindest. I mean, for real. And in private, too. He. Even people he was really mad at, he would always say, well, I try, you know, I understand where that person's coming from. It's like, wow, He. His decency was a challenge to me, who struggles to be... that. Why?.. Why. Why was that so offensive to people? Because it was power. It's. It's so much more powerful, frankly, than negativity. Negativity and anger. it's infectious. You know, it's a contagion. It. yeah It's like a magnet for people. Whether they like him or not, they're drawn to him. And he was converting people, so he was a huge threat. That's really, like. I've been asking myself this question a lot over the past week. You know, let's take the accused shooter in this case. And let's say, okay, this. This was. yes It was motivated... exactly as the authorities say. And he was. He thought Charlie is, quote, too hateful. And this is a guy who's into furries and he's into trannies, and he's living with one. And, you know, all the things. Why would Charlie have been targeted by this guy for that? Why would it be Charlie? You say all the same things. I say all the same things. Most of the people in our space and in conservative or independent media say those things... Why? Why Charlie? And... sadly, I think it's this factor. It's this magnetism from him, this positivity, this aura, like that. This angel like, aura around him that was so incredibly threatening, way more threatening... than the rest of us because it was powerful... and it was winning people over. It was converting people at a rapid... rate. And not just any people, but young people, you know, the people who had never been converted before. The people for whom people who talk like you and talk like me had never even tried. They weren't Even players on the field, it was. They were seeded in the whole battle... And he said, no, no, no, no, no, we're not seeding them. I'm going to start at 18 to speaking to them in a way that they can hear and understand me. And I'm going to practice it... You know, for the past 13 years, he practiced. He went out campus after campus. In the beginning, he wasn't as good as he was. In the end, he was good, but he wasn't as good. And so it was a skill he developed over time that made him more and more threatening, more and more effective. And you look at the... numbers just in the presidential election, it's not an overstatement to say that Donald Trump has Charlie to thank for his election in November 2024, swinging the youth vote by nine... points... Yeah, we've never seen anything like it in the past hundred years. You don't swing the youth vote toward a Republican... Nothing in modern presidential politics. So he was... a really integral, hugely important player, even though he was so understated... and projected zero ego. So you didn't see him like that. He didn't have sort of the swagger of that... In most of his public appearances, he was quick to subjugate himself to whomever he was talking to, but he was way more important than he ever let on. yes And I think that's why he was perceived as such a threat. That's why him saying the things others... would say carried an extra layer of threat yet both to this shooter and to Charlie's many different detractors... And I just want to add as a period to this, as a footnote, I guess, to this, Tucker, you have a lot of it, too. And it is the reason why Charlie is not the only one who's been threatened or was threatened to cut ties with you or not. Platform, you. I, too, have gotten that, especially since you've been more outspoken on Israel. And I... couldn't care less the amount of pressure they put. Like what? What are you talking about? This is madness. Why would you want to silence such a powerful, important voice just because you disagree with them on one subject, one on which we've all watched you sincerely evolve as you grapple with principles you've been espousing for years, like America first, like what's happening to Christians, like what's best for us and our kids here? How do I keep them safe? That's my... number one priority. And I've been just absolutely disgusted and recoiled from people who have tried to pressure me on it. it of course, never happened... But I know from speaking to Charlie, he felt it, too. You've heard it from Charlie. That he felt. And there is a layer here of nefarious pressure to have certain narratives go only one way. yes That must be called out and must be fought. Well, I should have said in my open... that when Charlie was denounced as anti Semitic and, quote, dangerous by the American Jewish committee you were too... That. That. That was a press. I don't know if you've ever even seen it. And I just remember when I read that at the time, thinking, okay, these are like two of the most pro Israel, basically pro Israel people, like, on the Internet. I don't understand. So I do. I. Maybe we should have this offline, but let's just have it now. I don't get that. Why would you attack. There are definitely people who hate Israel, who are not anti Semites or people in Israel who are anti Semites. There's a whole range... And then there are, like, people who have, like, you know, religious reasons for wanting to blow up Israel. right Those are all threats... Why would they be attacking you and Charlie? And honestly, I feel like me. I mean, what is that? Why attack people who are pretty reasonable, who don't want to get into a fight on the topic, who just want to, like, have their country thrive? Why denounce them as dangerous anti Semites? What is that? And let me just underscore for your audience what I had said. I mean, the sum total of what I had said when they started coming for me, just to show the absurdity of this, I had said on Piers Morgan... that Israel was losing the PR war, that they had lost the Democrats and the independents and were starting to lose the Republican Party in America. And it was time to wrap it up. Which was... a quote from Donald Trump, who had said it a year earlier when he was still a candidate... Time to wrap it up. That's what I said about Israel. And then at Turning Point... at the Student Action... Summit with Charlie, we talked all about Epstein and my appearance there. It was all about Pam Bondi, frankly. And we talked about whether he might possibly be an asset for someone. right And I said he might be... And Israel, yeah, would make sense to me. Didn't know. But that's one of the things we should consider and look at. And that will conclude the list of things I said about Israel that after two years of going on the air and defending them and every... week turned some weird crowd into, she's an anti Semite. So, I mean, f these people, because it's a lie. It was even... more of a lie about Charlie, who had said even less than me. He had said nothing, like absolutely nothing. And they use those terms about him because he was on the other side of me when we had that discussion. And because he hosted you and because, and because he had the nerve to invite Dave Smith in a debate because he allowed one side to be represented and he had the Israel side fully represented too... So this was just such an unfair accusation. And I don't know why you know these very ardent advocates don't accept friendship when you offer it, when you've proven that you are genuinely a friend. I've said openly, Tucker. there's no, I am not I don't want to debate. I'm on their side. There's no reason to put somebody on this show so they can convince me that Israel's right. I'm on their side. I agree with that... But in response to those comments and then ultimately having Marjorie Taylor Greene on where... we criticized aipac, I mean, who, who defends a lobbyist group? They treated me like I was Mehdi Hassan. Not everybody, you know, but like the loudest Israel Defenders and the, and to turn around and call Charlie Kirk an anti Semite is such a disgusting smear... Then you're right. He's young. You know, he, he was young... and wasn't used to being attacked like that by people who supported him and people whose donations are actually really important to the ongoing existence of his organization. And it took a lot for him to say no to them and it took a lot for him to be honest about the fact that his opinions had evolved. And let's face it, Charlie was like an unofficial spokesperson for the youth of America, in particular conservative youth. And I don't know if people have checked, but they no longer support Israel and everybody under 30 is against Israel. Charlie was 31. no And so as a friend, he's, he's saying to them as. Same way I, as a friend, I'm saying, I am telling you, you've lost Dems independence and you're starting to lose Republicans. You need to wrap it up. You've had a two year... long leash. I know you want your hostages back, but... this cannot go on until you have every hostage. That's just not going to, you're going to lose every friend you have. And that's what he was saying because that's what he was hearing from his... constituency. And so what he did to them was brave and noble to the donors who were very, very pro Israel, it was brave and it was noble. He did not deserve to be smeared over it. of course And look, I, like you, have... zero belief that this had anything to do with his death. But it's part of the larger narrative that you're making, that he... was a truth teller, that he was a fearless truth teller, and that there were a lot of pockets when he turned to them and said those truths that grew extremely uncomfortable... And whether it was some too online. disgusting, messed up 22 year old... in Utah or, you know, somebody who couldn't stand his messaging that was very frank around... race or around Islam, whatever, take your pick. He said the hard truths on all of these things... I think a lot of people have to have a really ugly conversation with themselves now in the wake of his death about whether they added to the hate surrounding him. And for... Benjamin Netanyahu really tormented Charlie... We talked about it many times. He tormented Charlie and his advocates tormented Charlie. For him to run around saying that Charlie died for Israel is just too much. It's just disgusting. And as his friend, I feel morally bound to say that. no That that statement was out of line No, I agree with you. And I never talk about Bibi Netanyahu. I don't really, I don't think much about him. I don't. no I just don't. I had the opportunity to interview him a couple months ago and I, I declined. I'm just, I'm just not. No, I just don't want to. I didn't want to platform him. I didn't actually, frankly want to do all the work that I would have to do to... sufficiently interview him in a way that would be, you know, tough, as I do when I have any foreign leader in my crosshairs. I just wasn't interested. I, whatever. For him to do what he did was... wrong. It was deeply, it was a moral wrong... to sit out there and read part of Charlie's letter and try to have the final say on Charlie's pronunciations about... Israel. And he knew that they weren't the full story. And he's a foreign leader. He's not an American leader. So how dare he?
You know, at best, you come out there, you say, I'm so sorry for this loss, my prayers to his family... That's it. right He was out of line, Tucker and I, as not even a Netanyahu critic, saw it very clearly and talked about it today on the show, too. Can I ask you about next steps? I'm always wary of people who want to. I just want to ask you about two issues. One, are hate speech laws, which I'm paranoid about, but I think we should be. And two is the effort by... one person in Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, to get the federal government to ban sex changes for children, and she can't seem to get that done. So are we going to get... hate speech laws, do you think? Pam Bondi seems to suggest we are. And two, are we ever going to ban the mutilation of kids? So, on the hate speech comments, that was an absolutely ridiculous comment she made today. I mean, it was absolutely foolhardy. There's just no way she doesn't know what she said is legally unsound. She's. There's just no way she was Attorney General of the state of Florida and became U.S. attorney General and doesn't know that. So it does worry me because does that mean she's actually pushing for a policy change?.. Because there's just no way she doesn't already know what she said is wrong. There's been reams of Supreme Court precedent on it, and she knows that. So is this about policy change? She tried to wiggle off of her original point as the day went on, as incoming came almost universally from the right, that she had said something very, very wrong, constitutionally and vile as a moral principle. We've been fighting against this for decades on the right. Like what, what is she saying? She sounded like a Merrick Garland. She sounded like an attorney general Kamala Harris would have put in place. And so she tried to pivot off of it as the day went on and tried to make it smaller. And, you know, all I'm saying is violent threats, criminal threats... are, are going to be punished. Well, yes and no. It depends on the threat. There's actually only a sliver of threats that, that is actionable... under the law. So you're getting closer, but you're not quite there. You're. You're giving, again, still wide, too wide a berth... to attacking free speech. But, yeah, it is true that certain threats, true threats, can be ruled unconstitutional. You could go after somebody. So she does worry me, and, you know, I'm not. Trump was asked about it and he kind of made a funny joke about it going after the ABC News interviewer who asked him the question. right But I think Trump will see that there's so much resistance to this on the right that he won't let her do that. He won't let her push for it, and he won't let the Republicans... do it. I just have to think Trump reads his base better than she does. Yeah, I agree with that. And speaking of reading your base, and I've got to thank the presidents for this, I don't know why... Speaker Mike Johnson has held it up. But, I mean, we don't let kids get tattoos or smoke cigarettes, but we do let ghoulish doctors who are getting money for doing it... mutilate children. Like, why can't Marjorie Taylor Greene get a hearing on this legislation?.. I don't understand. I know I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I mean, like this, they, they chalk this up to, oh, it's a spending resolution. We're just going to continue, you know, the spending that's in place until, right. It's like, okay, you're, you're funding mutilations of children... and not just the mutilations that are done with surgeries, you're funding with these, you know, puberty blockers into cross sex hormones, sterilization of minors who cannot possibly consent to that. And not just sterilization, but actually the end of all potential for sexual pleasure. How does a 12 year old understand that he's sacrificing that with your weird experiments on him?.. It is truly a moral scorch, what we're doing to our children... And I don't actually, I'm sorry to say I don't have a lot of faith that that's going to get a ban at the federal level, which means it'll be left to the states, which means if you live in a blue state, it's, it's go, you know, have at it, go ahead and mutilate children... and sterilize them and deprive them of sexual pleasure. exactly They, because it makes you feel good. It's not dissimilar... to the left saying Trump shouldn't add additional law enforcement... They shouldn't accept additional law enforcement where he wants to send it, because it's racist to let black... people live. It's racist to let them live in peace, to not be carjacked in these inner cities which are predominantly African American. That's what the left is telling us, that it's racist for Trump to send those troops... or even volunteer. And they're saying the same, that what's good for children, what's, what's kind, what's, you know, the honorable thing to do... is to let deranged parents chop off children's healthy body parts and sterilize them, because that's what, that's what... an evolved person would do. And so that, like, that's another thing that this angel sent to us would speak very frankly about and threaten all these people who have a constituency, whether it's someone with a last Name Pritzker, who actually has money invested in the transing of children. That governor's cousin is one of the big funders... of all these school pushes on the trans issue. Or somebody who just... gets Jones out of saying they're, you know, gonna open the prisons and... let black people not get arrested for the crimes because they just think that's beneficial, I guess, somehow to other black people who are usually their victims, never mind the race of the victim. yeah It's not beneficial to any of us... In any event. I don't have hope on that front. We're going to keep fighting... But if they don't ban it at the federal level, which I don't think they're going to. we're never going to get all 50 states to ban it. I think it'd be worth reading a daily roll call of people standing in the way of that, because... that's the kind of crime that historians will reel in horror that we allowed. I think your remarks about Charlie at the beginning were like some of the wisest I've ever heard. And I'm actually going to look at the tape because I was so impressed by what you said and moved by it. So, Megan Kelly, thank you for taking time late at night to do this. I appreciate it. Great to be with you, as always. Thank you. All right, well, we have Scott Adams someone joining us now who are just really, really grateful to have someone who has been famous for decades for a different skill and in the last 10 years has really emerged as a consistent voice of wisdom online and never interviewed him before, but really happy to, I don't think. Scott Adams joins us now. Scott, thanks very much for doing that. Thanks for having me, Tucker. Yeah. we talked once before. quite a Few years ago, and it was on FOX News. And I've just erased that whole part of my brain. It's like CTE or something. I can't really... remember what I did there. I think I'm ashamed of some of it. But anyway. tell us what you think the lesson of Charlie Kirk's life and death are like. What. What strikes you Immediately Well, you know, one of the big questions is how did somebody get to that place where it seemed perfectly reasonable for them to get a gun and. And shoot a living human being? yes yes some people know in your audience that I'm also a hypnotist. I'm a trained hypnotist. And so I tend to look at these situations through that filter. And through that filter, you can see a really clear cause and effect, you know, starting around. Let's say 2016, there was wall to wall Hitler, Hitler, Nazis. 24 hours before that there had been other Republicans who had been accused of being Hitler. But I think that everybody treated it like hyperbole, you know, oh, it's just, you know, it's a, it's a political insult and it's the most common one, so you don't take it too seriously. but imagine being a... young kid... and growing up when the, the news, the people in nice clothing... would go on TV and they would say, in all seriousness, I, you know, he's basically Hitler, the Nazis are coming. And you would, you would create yes a mass hysteria... Now a mass hysteria would be worse than TDS or Trump derangement syndrome, because that would be sort of what happens to an individual, you know, that could have tds. But if you have a lot of people who have TDS... and they start talking to each other, pretty soon you've got a mass hysteria. And the mass hysteria created this what I call a hit larian bubble, meaning that a lot of people are living in what they think is a reality that is just completely hiltlerized. They see... Hitler everywhere and they see it in Trump, they see it in his lieutenants. And this is different. So this is not like what we've seen before. All it takes to completely brainwash somebody to believe ridiculous things, even things that their observations would, you should tell them are not true... All you need is people in good suits... who, whose job makes them seem credible to say day after day, it's the repetition that matters. Hitler, Hitler, Hitler... And you convince people that they're living in a hellscape and they better do something about it. So, so the main thing I saw was that. you know, once the bubble is formed. it's hard to get out. You can't talk people out of it. There's no amount of information that will change their mind. Cognitive dissonance will kick in... if you show them a counter example. And the weird thing about Charlie, who I'd never met by the way. I didn't have the pleasure. The weird thing is that when I started hearing all the accusations... and there were a lot of them, I said to myself, well, I'll bet some of these might be a little bit true. So I started to look for the original quotes, et cetera. None of them are true. And there were a lot of them. They were all either a made up quote or a quote and a context and nothing else. And when you hear people talking about it, especially the young people, they'll say things like he was a bad... hater... person. but there's no example. So that's sort of the, the sign that it's, you know, a mass hysteria because they can't give reasons and they don't seem too interested in the reasons. They're just sure that something has to be done. Now, on top of that, for the young people, there's probably also an economic... pressure, you know, that they might feel that... life doesn't have a positive path. So that, that might be playing into this a little bit as well. But I do wonder what will happen. And I predict that there's going to be another big bubble of psychological... distress when the people who have said such bad things about him in public realize that none of it was true. Because over time it looks like he's going to be talked about with so much... that we'll, you know, we'll finally have a complete body of information... about him so we can understand them. And it won't happen to most people. Most people will just have cognitive dissonance... They'll still believe he was, you know, Hitler Jr. But... there will be some people, you know, not, not a big percentage who are going to realize that they did something so shameful... that it will haunt them for the rest of their lives that, that they were part of saying something terrible about one of the best people that we've witnessed. I mean, he, he genuinely was a high character person and you can see in everything he did. So... there's something big coming up. But then... another thing that happened that was fascinating to me... because I didn't expect it, which was... the Democrats have always had what I'd call a machine, which is that since they worked with the media, they had the media in their pocket... You would see it happen when they'd have some. Our message this week... are these words. And then everybody would say the same words and then the media would just... pump it out. So it was like this big, well functioning machine. And then they had the NGOs and all the funding tricks, et cetera. But when Charlie Kirk... died, you could almost feel this massive energy... being released. You know, he, he sort of controlled it. But when it was released, you know, his, his mortal coil was no more. I feel like that energy just... went into people and... suddenly tens of millions of people simultaneously... said, what can I do? What can I do? Right now? That's different. People don't say, I'm going to stop everything, tell me what to do... I'm going to go to church. A lot of people did. I'm going to Say stuff on social media. I'm going to hunt down the people who said bad things and cancel them. But I'm going to do something. You know, we're, we're, we're going to figure out how to start another chapter of, you know, TP usa. And all of that's happening, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down, you know, the vigils, etc. If anything, the energy. it might be growing. And I've never seen anything like it in my life. I've never seen the Republicans turn into their own machine. And now it is a machine and it's going to be incredible. so you know, I, I was thinking yesterday, it sounds like a joke, but it's quite serious. The thing that protects the Democrats from, you know, also having some kind of problem like this is that they don't have any leaders that are worth taking off the board. I mean, if you said to me somebody's got a plot... to take Tim Walz off the board, I would say, oh, no, no. If you're a Republican, you want to keep him there... because... he's not doing a good job. You know, your Jasmine Crockets, your Chuck Schumers. I say, please... keep them right where they are. They're doing a great job... Nobody needs to harm them. But on top of that. I don't believe that Republicans, conservatives ever even think that way. I've never heard one say anything suggesting violence, like, not even in just a casual conversation. The joking way. You might do it in private, nothing like that... And I think it has to do with the fact that overall, the conservatives, the Republicans, MAGA people tend to look at Democrats... almost... as if they're clowns. They say things that literally make me laugh. No joke. I, I sound like Biden there, but I literally. that frightened me a little bit. I literally will watch the news and watch Republican, you know, prominent people talking because I think it's funny. And... when they watch, when the left watches the right, they think they're watching monsters. yes So you can imagine how somebody want to kill a monster, but nobody wants to kill a clown. Well, maybe somebody does, but, you know, so far, Republicans have not wanted to kill any clowns. And I do think. well, first of all, the cancellations we're seeing, I have a little bit of mixed feelings about it because my point of view is that the people involved who are getting canceled are themselves brainwashed... And I don't mean that... in sort of the. I don't know, the hypothetical way or anything. Like, I mean, actually, literally, they've been exposed to the strongest brainwashing you could have, which is about eight years of wall to wall Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler... And you know, Charlie's one of the generals. So if you can't get to the Hitler, you're thinking, well, you know, maybe, maybe one of the generals would be less protected. And that was the case. But I feel a little bit bad for them because they're, they're... victims too. But at the same time, the way society works, you can't let them get away with that. So, you know, there has to be some, some reckoning... And I am enjoying, I have to say, being a canceled person myself. I am enjoying the schadenfreude or the, you know, the, the catharsis of seeing that it can go both ways, at least for now. And by the way, I do think that the violence goes in both directions, but I don't think... that there is an equivalent to a massive machine... that's been creating a situation... that guaranteed there would be violence. If you just keep saying Hitler and you're selling it... not as hyperbole, but you're selling it as absolute fact, the people who don't have access to... alternative theories are going to believe that and they're going to act on it. So. And I like the fact that there's a little mutually assured destruction. The, the left is getting to see a little bit of payback, reminding that the, that the Republicans aren't going to take infinite abuse. You know, there's going to be a point where it's going to come back. I kind of like that. But I just, you know, overall, I wouldn't be proud of it. You know, the, the cancellations, I do believe that they're, they're brainwashed victims. but I do wonder. so may Yeah, go ahead. Well, I thought your description of brainwashing seems accurate. It's very distressing to think that could happen in our free republic, you know. the free and brave United States. I thought the people were more independent minded than that. So that's sad. It's probably just human, though. A weakness that we all share, the susceptibility to propaganda, but that why would you want... to hypnotize a population or a portion of it? Like, usually there's a goal in mind. What's the goal here? power Democrats know that they can win an election that way. If they had better ideas and better policies and charismatic leaders, I imagine that's what they'd go with. But Trump enters... the contest... and you have the most charismatic leader with sensational Ideas according to at least his base. What are you going to do? He's the common sense guy. Are you going to say we really do want the border open, we... really do want a little bit more crime in our urban centers? What are you going to do?.. You don't have any kind of a rational... attack to the common sense president who's been here before and knows how to get this stuff done. So it's just all they have. And I don't know that it's, I don't know that it's intentional... that they did it so hard that it guaranteed violence. I don't think violence was the intention... I think just... winning elections was the intention. Yeah, that sounds right. So thank you for this. By the way, last question. Where, where do you foresee this going? Well, you know, it's, it's unpredictable because the cognitive dissonance will cause people to think in a way that's non standard. That's, that's exactly what it is. So there might be a lot more of that coming, but one of the things that's going to happen is it might be the, the last. what would you call it? The last straw that makes the entire Democrat... situation collapse... Because if you look at their situation, they're running out of money. They don't have good leaders, they don't have ideas that can, you know, beat the competing ideas, and they don't have momentum. They don't have the podcast world. You know, the conservatives have that pretty nailed down. Basically. They have the right, the best talent for just about everything... right now. Just an amazing amount of talent in the, the right side of the world. But then you add on top of that the, the emotions and the feelings that people got because of Charlie Kirk's death. And... that was probably the only thing missing was, no matter what, I'm going to get to the voting booth. You know, you could have a hurricane and conservatives are going to crawl through glass to get to the voting booth. So I suspect we will see a number of votes from the Republicans like we've never seen before. It could be sensational. Scott Adams, I really am grateful that you took time to do this. You look great. Thank you very much. god speed Thanks, Tucker. Thanks. Cenk Uygur I got a text earlier today from someone I sort of know saying Cenk Uygur. Why, why is he on your show? The Young Turks guy? Isn't this a tribute to Charlie Kirk? Why would you have some like, screamy lefty on your show? Well, precisely because Charlie Kirk's life work was speaking with... not just two but with people he disagreed with very vehemently. I thought that our next guest, who's run the Young Turks for probably almost 20 years now, I think you can correct me if I'm wrong, who is one of the most visible daily broadcasters on the left, the fact that he had this kind of amazing exchange with Charlie Kirk. Well, a couple of them, but one pretty recently, I thought it'd be worth hearing what... he thought. So it is with pride that we announced our next guest. Thank you. Thank you, Cenk for coming on. No problem, Tucker. Thanks for having me on. I. I think it's important that we have a moment like this where we try to bring the country together. Amen. I. I so strongly agree. You had this kind of... famous exchange with him. I think it was 2018 at Politicon, and it got super heated and bitter and it was like, I don't know if things were viral in 2018, but it was viral. And then you came back to a TP USA event, and I was amazed and impressed both that he invited you and that you came and you still disagreed on some things. But it was. I mean, the tone was completely different. Can you explain that? And better and great, I thought. yeah So first of all, in 2018, that was the Politicon that I debated you. Okay Sorry we got along pretty well, as I remember. We did. We did. And Charlie was debating my nephew, Hassan. okay Hasan Piker And... But I couldn't help myself because that's who I am. And I. In the middle of their debate, I said something to Charlie when I... wasn't on stage. I was in the crowd, and he yelled at me. I live like a capitalist every day Cenk by the way, some people then thought that it was a racial slur. No, that was just my name. He was just slightly... mispronouncing it. So then actually something happened in between that moment in Turning Point USA America Fest. So we were at the RNC in 2024, and Charlie came by at our booth and said, hey, do you guys want to talk? And we were a little bit taken aback by that. We're really surprised by it... And... Ana and I. Ana Kasparian, my co host on the Young Turks. Talked it over and said, yeah, yeah, we would like to talk... And so he came on the show... and so we had our disagreements. So for the. yes It's interesting that you have me on here. You know, partly for the reasons that, you know, your friend texted you about how. Well, that's strange. Right. Left and right. And. And so I don't agree with Everything that you, Megan and Scott... said about Charlie I'm sure. Right. But, but I think that's what makes it more interesting. So the willing that, the willingness to talk to us, even though we were... so entrenched on different sides. yeah Right? And so then when we started the conversation, what wound up happening, it surprised us. So did we still have our disagreements about the black pilot line, this, that and other thing? Of course we did. but when we started talking about corporate rule, he agreed. And I remember, like, I want to go back and watch the first interview we did with him at the RNC there because I was kind of shocked by it. It's like, really, you're also worried about corporations having too much power and, and Right, because that, Tucker, you could understand, that was a, that was a left wing position for a long time in this country. It was but, but the battle has been joined. And so that is an incredible development in American politics that mainstream media, I think, has chosen to ignore... because it seemed convenient for them. Then we got into a specific topic which was banning private equity... from... buying residential real estate... And the idea behind that is private equity is... the biggest bankers in the world, Basically, they're the biggest financial institutions... and they've started to buy all of our homes. Now that creates a huge... number of problems. Number one, it drives up housing prices. That is why they are artificially high, because so much more demand has come into the market... And I went to Wharton Business school. So this is not complicated though. This is Econ 101, supply and demand. right And so secondly, what. The number one wealth creation asset that the American family has is their homes. That is how we created the greatest middle class the world has ever seen. And they're taking that from us and they're going to turn us all into renters... and then we're going to be indentured servants to them. Okay... And the way that they are doing this is they are giving collectively... billions of dollars to our politicians. So this issue connects, actually the, the money and politics issue connects to everything... Connects to corporate rule. Compare. It connects to capitalism, by the way, which I want to get back to, connects to Israel, because it isn't about... Israel or any other particular... lobby being evil or dastardly or in charge. It's the money that's in charge. And so if... Big Pharma, Pfizer, Johnson, Johnson, etc. Give money to our politicians, well, then they pass absurd laws like we're not allowed to negotiate drug prices. Right. What in the world? In capitalism, you're not allowed to negotiate prices. Right, I know. And we talked about that. And he said, you're right, that that is absurd. And we on the right already believe that, that it's absurd and that it's against capitalism. Fantastic. So... look, you're right. We've been around a long time on the Young Turks. We're actually the longest running show in Internet history. And in that time we've had, you know, we've been on for 23 years... We've had... about 21 to 22 years of hardened battle. Fighting back and forth. Fighting back and forth. And as anybody who's seen me online knows, I, I can get emotional, I can get passionate. yeah And... I, I'm not a wilting flower. I fight back for sure. Right. So what was amazing, though was all of a sudden I didn't have to fight back. That on those issues, not every issue, and not on all the culture wars, but on these economic issues, we have begun to agree... And why? Because the average guy is getting screwed. Yes. Period. It doesn't matter if you're on the left or the right, you're both going to get screwed. You're both going to have higher housing prices, you're both going to have lower wages, you're both going to have higher drug prices. And the people that brought you, that is the donor class. And so when we agreed to that, then I said, okay, well, now conversation has become productive. We're not just yelling at each other. For the first time ever, we are talking to one another. And more importantly, we are listening to one another. So we did it again at the DNC and then... Charlie invited me to America Fest... and I went there and... again, we disagreed on gun rights, we disagreed on some trans issues. but we wound up agreeing... on... Dick Cheney and Mitch McConnell, for example. Neither one of us like him, like. Either one of them. I agree. And you know, Tucker, I'll say this, and there's a lot more to talk about in that context, but. If you told me... you are going to go to a massive right wing conference in the year 2025. and what's going to happen is... the crowd, in unison is going to boo Dick Cheney. If you told me that when we first started the Young Turks and we're railing against Dick Cheney, don't go in Iraq, don't go in Iraq. Cheney's lying. Right And people are yelling back at support the troops, you're for Saddam and all this stuff. If you told me, oh, don't worry, in 20 some odd years... that crowd will be booing Dick Cheney... And that crowd will be booing Mitch McConnell because they realize that the corporate class, the donor class, is in charge and they hate it. I would have said, oh, my God, that must be a beautiful day in America. Well, so this is what I admire about you. You're. You're totally sincere about your principles. Like you, You. You almost don't care what. Who's agreeing with you. You believe in the idea, the principle. So you're willing to make... common cause with people you don't agree with in everything... You're not partisan. And, and the second thing I should just. I just want to say it out loud is that young Turks, whatever you think of your politics, has had a stated commitment to non violence from the very beginning. And you mean it. And I just. I just want to say that for people who don't know that, and I want to thank you for that because I think it's really important. And... anyway. But so let me ask you, how were you treated at Amfest, at Charlie's event? yeah By the way, thank you for saying that, Tucker. And... the principle of nonviolence... extends through everything. So do not be violent to each other. Violence is intellectual surrender. That's saying I can't win the debate with my mind, so I have to act like an animal and try to defeat that person physically. But that means you're surrendering and you're giving up. It is. It's... the most immoral thing you could do. It's also the weakest thing you could do. Yes, I agree. And, but that's on. Not just on an individual level, that's also on a societal level. So when we go to war, that is, in a sense, weakness. Saying we could not use our minds to resolve this issue. We could not resolve this issue as fellow human beings. So now we're going to kill each other. So it. That is why we're anti war, and that is why one of the most encouraging developments of my life is how anti war the right wing movement has become so that another great day in America. So still plenty of things we disagree on. yes But. But agreeing on anti war, agreeing on... how the donor classes is robbing both of us blind... And those are huge developments. Right. So now, how was I treated at Amfest? I got to be honest with you. And so the reason why I preface it by saying I got to be honest with you is because... sometimes when we go and talk to the right wing and, and as you say, we haven't moved on a thing. Right... So folks come to us and I Have a simple principle. Take the win. Okay, take the win. Exactly. Like so. Okay, now you agree with me that anti war is the right position. Is my correct answer that I still hate you? No, that is not the correct answer. The correct answer is, oh, thank God. exactly Right. And now we'll work on the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. But for now, at least, we had no agreements before. Now we have have a number of really important agreements, so. But nevertheless, I had my share of critics on the left. You're. You're platforming him. I went to his conference. I wasn't platforming him, he was platforming me. Right, yeah And second of all, stop with all the nonsense talk of platforming people. Okay, I agree. Just listen to one another, Talk to one another... That's not a bad thing, that's a good thing. But what if you disagree? And of course you're going to disagree. It's America... We're free. We have... no two human beings are the same. Of course we're going to disagree on some issues. So if you can't handle that, then you can't handle politics, you can't handle media, you can't handle America. Right. So, okay, so with that giant preface, I'll say the people there honestly were universally wonderful. so they were. And so you could say, oh, well, you know, haha, that means jinxing... with the right wing. No, I'm just telling you what happened. If they were jerks, I would tell you that they were jerks, but they weren't. Okay... And I've got to say, like this cancel culture, it's not exclusively left wing. No, I know. tell me about it. I mean, yeah, the efforts that some people made to keep me from speaking at the next TPUSA thing. People I agree with on a lot of things, by the way. I don't disagree with Seth dillon and everything, Mr. Free Speech Guy trying to cancel me, but I was like shocked by it. Like they really hassled Charlie and just drove him to, you know, to really fret and drove him to anxiety over this. Oh, no, no. That impulse is a human impulse and we need to resist it. Yeah. So I love what you guys said about... hate speech and how it's unacceptable to pass laws on that. Not acceptable. yeah Under no circumstances. So. And this is what I... say on that topic. Charlie says some things about Islam that, you know, having grown up Muslim, I'm atheist now, but my family is Muslim. My background's Muslim. I'm proud of it. He said some things about Islam that I was not a fan of. To say the least. So. I bet. So you know what I did in return? I made my case. So what?.. Right, like, what's. Why is it so, like, debilitating if someone says something that you find offensive? I've said things that I'm sure others have found offensive. You have. Charlie has. Megan has. So what? Then you say something back... Okay. We don't cancel. We don't kill... And killing is... the most extreme form of cancel culture. So I despise cancel culture. And I have the honor of being. Having been canceled by almost every part of the political spectrum. I know Man, what an. That was... That was really inspiring. And. And I'm going to text back the... person who texted me and say, did you watch that? That was wonderful. And I so appreciate you're doing this. Thank you. And I hope you don't take too much abuse for it. and I'm sure you will, but I guess you don't care, so. Good for you. Thank you. That'll bounce off me so quick. Just say this one last thing, Tucker... The idea of making laws against hate speech in honor of Charlie Kerr. No, I know, I know. Okay. That's like, if I passed away and they're like, in honor of Cenk, we're all going to go on a diet. Tell me about it. Or the Tucker Carlson. No Pizza law. No, I. I agree. I agree. Come on. That is opposite of what I've did in my life... And... And regulating speech is the opposite of what Charlie did in his life. So let's all keep talking to one another. Let's all keep listening to one another... and hopefully... use this moment not to create further tragedy, but to begin to end the tragedies. I'm proud to agree with that, you know, really, really strongly. So thank you for saying it... very much. Fr. Josiah Trenham Thank you Tucker Great to see you. Thanks. you to So we want to end tonight the way we began by talking about... Charlie's faith... and the effect on all of us from a spiritual perspective of his life and particularly his death. There were reports... that this Sunday church attendance was up dramatically as people suddenly felt stirrings within them that this, you know, had cosmic significance and that God is real and this is a reminder that he is, which he is. Josiah Trenham is a Christian minister, and we are honored to have him now to put this in a broader spiritual context. Thank you very much... for coming on, Father Trenham So how would... How would you say we should think about where this goes from here?.. Like, people seem to have a heightened spiritual awareness in the days after Charlie Kirk's murder. How should we proceed? Well, thanks a lot, Tucker, for having me on... I appreciate your, your... interest and desire to bring a priest into this conversation... I think it's valuable. I would say up front. we should be very careful to make any... sort of conclusion from this during this very intense time of mourning. You know. we christians we Christians have a tradition, 2000 year old tradition on how to respond to death. And we take our time, we take our. This is day seven. This is day seven... Usually for 40 days, we mourn very, very seriously. In the orthodox tradition, for instance, when a bishop or a major leader of the church dies, he's not replaced until the 40 days is done. And that's not just out of respect... for the person in this case. Mourning charlie. Really processing... what his loss means is very necessary to do, and it takes time to do that. And we're not going to be able to make... good decisions about the future with out calming down and... processing what we've gone through. So this is the time I think that we should be very careful. We should mourn. We should consign all bad memories to the memory hole. Bad experiences is what we do for our loved ones when they die... There's no benefit in remembering the bad. We instead honor the good and try to imitate the good... We try to. in the person's name, do good. So this is... my first thought, is really we should mourn. We should be who we are. And this is what Christian people do. We should take our time about this. I'm unfamiliar with this. I'm embarrassed to say I don't know enough about it, but I sense that it's rooted in something important and wise. Can you explain a little more why 40 days and what Christians have done traditionally during that 40 days? What does it mean to mourn seriously? Yeah... Well, I share your. Your sense of it not being something common anymore, which is why I'm presenting it, because it is so universally human, actually, and it's not just Christian. The number 40, of course, is humongous. In the Holy Scriptures, it's absolutely humongous. And the 40 days of Christ fasting, for instance, in the desert, 40 is a very important length of time that allows us to truly not make immediate reactions that would be... that we would regret. And right now, everything is so raw. Everyone who knows and loves Charlie, like you. this is a very dangerous time. It's a very dangerous time. You're being very courageous and you're actually processing this with people who have known and respected Charlie which is fantastic thing to do. But a lot of people who are in the conservative political movement are. Are raging... They're very angry. I was watching a clip from Matt Walsh... yesterday, and I saw that Matt was just out there saying that he is just overcome with anger. I think that's understandable. Yes completely understandable. I have felt that. I'm sure. I'm sure. But for us to respect our. This, this Christian tradition... to pray, typically in. In. In the Orthodox and the Catholic tradition, Both during the 40 days, we do good in that person's name. We actually take... Do alms, we do charity in that person's name. In fact, you're doing that. Maybe you weren't intentionally trying to do it in a traditional Christian way, but that is what you're doing by trying to help Erika and support her... I was very, very happy to see that you're doing that because it's. It's what we do. It's what we do in this period. We usually also pray for the person. We don't think that a person, when they die. Bing. They've made the transition to the next life instantaneously. There are some in the Protestant tradition who think that. Not all Protestants think that, but there are some. But the vast majority of Christians, Catholic, Orthodox and some, like the Anglicans, we actually pray... for... the souls of the departed. And we think we use the image of the story of Lazarus and the rich man from the Gospels, where Lazarus is the poor beggar. He's neglected by the rich man. And when he dies, what happens? An angelic escort comes and picks him up and... takes him on the journey to the bosom of Abraham. For us, that is a journey... This process is a journey... of... Of for Christians, of going towards the kingdom of God. But we don't think that... it's instantaneous. And so we're collaborating. It's part of what our funerals are too. Our funerals are us gathering around the person... and asking the Lord... in his great mercy to receive our brother or our sister and... place them in paradise until we can see them again. And we're also learning the lesson of sobriety. We're learning the lesson of death. We have to think about death and stare it in the face... Because one of the great reasons we are so undeveloped, spiritually speaking, as a nation, is because we... don't face death. One of the reasons that we have an incredible revival going on all over the United States right now is because of COVID Covid... faced... It caused us to face death. We had been Hiding it. You know, we've moved our, our old people, our parents and the sick into old folks homes and hospitals and they die there, usually not surrounded by their family members... And then some Christian traditions now even do funerals without the body. That is just nuts. It's just nuts. And it steals. It steals from us. The very, very important process of mourning and facing death and it changes you, you know, in the Orthodox tradition. In the Orthodox Christian tradition, the funeral service was written by one of the great theologians of the Church. His name is St. John of Damascus. He lived from 650 to 750... An incredible hymnologist, incredible scholar. He actually was a very important political figure at the time that Islam, his, his father and grandfather governed the city of Damascus. And when it was taken over by Islam in the seventh century, the Muslims left the Christians in place for about 50 years because Muslims were Bedouin peasants. They didn't have cities, they didn't have development, and they couldn't run a city like Damascus. So they let the Christians do it for about a half a century. And then about 706, that was it. And no more Christians in leadership. And he became a monk at that time, John of Damascus. And he wrote this incredible funeral service for one of his dear brothers. And it's used to this day for the last 13 centuries. And it's a deep reflection on the misery of death... where John is looking into the grave... and he is contemplating how horrible it is for a Christian person to die and to see his soul be removed from his body, which is what death is... It's the separation of the soul from the body. It no longer animates the body and it's lifeless and, and to see the body decay. And he says it happens to the rich and to the poor exactly the same way. All of the human, you know. differentiations that we make to honor the rich and to... neglect the. All gone, all gone, all normalized, all brought to the dust by death. By death. I don't mean to belabor this, but I think it's important for us. It's important, of course, for the immediate family, for all of Charlie's close family and friends to take their time, not expect that they're going to be able to just bounce back instantaneously and get right back at turning points work. No doubt they will... eventually, but I hope... that they'll take the time right now to... pray, to mourn. to... think deeply about the future and about how they can honor Charlie's name. This is my hope. I think that's such A profound thing to say. And anyone who has been... present at the death of loved ones, I think can confirm... that it's one of the most... powerful and obviously crushingly sad, but also beautiful and inspiring... things. I mean, it absolutely changes you. And... it's hard to remain an atheist after something like that. And we have been robbed of that experience. So what are the signs of hope that you see now? You know. I would say before hope. the, the sorrow of what has happened to Charlie is so illustrative of a descent into a level of violence that at least in my lifetime, and I'm, I'm only two years older than you, I was born in 67, I think. You were born in 69, yes. You're a San Franciscan. I'm a Angelino, born and raised in Los Angeles. I have never seen anything like this, Tucker. I have never seen anything like the violence that, that exists today in our towns... When I grew up in Pasadena, I, as a young boy, I went walking... to school. My mother let me stay out every night until... the lights went on. When the lights went on, I had to be home for dinner. If I wasn't home for dinner, I was in trouble. But she had no worries. She had no worries. No, in, in this last period, 10, 15 years especially... violence has just absolutely exploded. You know. Charlie reposed on 10th September. Of course, the next day was the horrible, you know, remembrance of 9/11. He died on 9/10. We have 9/11. This coming December is going to be the 10 year anniversary of the terrible terrorist attack right here... in the Inland Empire just 10 miles from when I, where I am right now, when 14 people were murdered and 22 people wounded by a Pakistani Muslim couple that thought that they would do something for Islam by... shooting... their co workers. This is, they were from a mosque one mile from me right now. That mosque already had two of their members... in prison... because of terrorist ambitions. My own parish, just four months after that, was visited in the middle of a Sunday liturgy... by a group of Muslim young men who thought it would be fun to bring bullhorns in the middle of our service and come... outside the church and scream Allahu Akbar at our, at our church. And then, and... this is of course... Muslim terrorism. But now we also have this rise of... very, very serious leftist violence. And the whole country, I think, is reeling... from the assassination attempts on our president... and now... an attack on, on Charlie, who wasn't a politician at all. So I would say that if we're going to look for hope, it can't be Fake. It can't be fake. We have to assess where we are. And violence has. as a sin. Violence has a very special, serious place. You know, if you read the patriarchal histories in the opening books of the Bible, if you read Genesis, for instance, chapter six, this is the account of God regretting that he had made the human race. What could the human being have possibly been doing... to make God... regret having made us? And... the consequence, Moses tells us, is that he sent a worldwide universal flood. Moses articulated the reason, the reason God did that and had to start over with Noah. And in fact, he made Noah a second Adam. He gave the same commission to Noah that he gave to Adam. Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth, Rule it and subdue it. Why did he do that? It says, because... the world had become full of violence. When you attack another man. When you attack another man, you attack God. Because every human being, as you were just saying so beautifully, is made in the image of God. And so to attack a human is a direct divine offense. Violence is extremely serious... I'm not surprised that we have this level of violence in a culture that... murders unborn children at the rate that we do and have sustained it for the decades that we have. yes Really. Is any violence surprising? Do we have. Do we have hope? That's what you asked me, so forgive me, but that's the background. That is how black it is. Yes, that is how black it is. Do we have hope? And what's the future? I would say that from without a. Without a belief that... God is merciful and that he loves the human race and that there's no sin so great that if we repent of it, he will not send his love and forgiveness. Without that belief, certainly we have no future... The statistics are horrible for our country. We are so captured by... an ideology... that is hopeless. Atheism, strict secularism, which is running our country now, it is extremely hopeless. yes And... without a major reconsideration on the... part of our people, a return to classic... American virtues, a recovery of Christian faith. Without that, certainly we're doomed. But we know from Christian history that... repentance is possible... And it usually takes... in a national sense, in a personal sense... It's up to us to repent and to believe. In a national sense. It takes leadership. Leadership that is willing to... address the important... things at the heart of national... catastrophe. We have been living through... national catastrophe. We have lost our faith in God. All of our institutions have been captured by... strict secularism. Our law is godless. Our ins. Our. Our Universities exclude... God. our country is, has gone down a very, very serious... deep hole... If we're going to get out, if we're going to have hope as a nation, we need leadership, leadership in the likes of... George Washington. I think our forebears, our forebears are ashamed... My grandparents and America, they're ashamed of where we are. Tucker, as a nation, our relationship to faith, our explicit commitment to God are excluding him from everything that's important in America. We have to repent. And we need someone give us God, someone like a King David. Give us someone like my patron saint Josiah, who was the last great king of Israel, who himself lived at a terrible time. His father and his grandfather were both awful kings who had completely apostatized, abandoned the heritage... of Israel, led the people to copy the pagan practices of the surrounding nations. And forgive me, we're way worse than pagans. I, I always tell people, look, don't call... the secular nonsense that's going on in America pagan. That's an insult to the pagans. The pagans... believed in the divine order. They believed in the gods. Okay? We don't believe that there are gods. There is one God. But the pagans at least knew they were accountable to the divine order, they were accountable to the gods and that they had to live with respect to the wishes of the gods to call... America, which has no reference. Most of our leaders make no reference to God at all. they may They act as though they are not accountable to God's law. And I think that's far, far worse than paganism and a full blown insult to pagans to call it pagan... Unless we have a leader who's going to address this. It needs to be addressed right directly. We need to repent and we need to recover our faith. If we do that. times of refreshing will come... from God. We can be changed, a new day can arise. But it's not going to be with a little fix. It's not going to be with a little something here or a little something there. I've never seen. I've been a priest for almost 33 years. I've never seen the radical... interest in faith that we're seeing right now. I'll tell you if I use my parish just as a little... example. I have maybe, I don't know, little more than a thousand active parishioners that are here regularly. and over the years of my ministry, I've catechized, I've instructed and prepared people for baptism. You know, maybe 20, 30, 40. A really great year would be 40 people. I have over 200... people in catechism, right? And this is happening all across the country. People are moving towards God, moving towards faith. If this continues and it translates into lives that are rooted, lives that are... where faith is important. where true repentance has happened, where this quest for just biological life, as though that somehow the sum total of value is rejected. You know, if you study the scriptures, there's three types of life that are described in scriptures... There's biological life. In Greek, it's called βίος, from where we get biological, right? There's the life of the soul. Many Americans don't even know that that exists. That's called psyche... It's the life... It's the most noble part of you, right? Even the Greek pagans, to use this again, knew that the body is like a chariot and the soul is like the charioteer leading the person in nobility, said that the body does virtue, the body does something beautiful, right? If you don't think you have psyche, if you think you're just a body... and you don't have a soul, which by the way, is the worldview of the major tech titans of our country. This is why someone as noble... as Elon Musk is becoming would stand up and speak to... To the protesters in England when they were saying, what can we do? What's our future? And he said what? He said technology and AI. I promise you, Tucker, technology... is not going to save us. No, it is not going to save us. And to say that is such is so hopeless. If we are soulless and we have greater technology, then the soulless are going to use that greater technology to oppress us. Of course, we need. We need to affirm what all reasonable human beings... in civilized countries, except... the modern nuts, secular west. If we don't recognize that a human being is more than his body, he has more than βίος. More than biological life. He has the life of his soul. psyche And then there's something that's most important, which is... eternal life. Aionia Zoe, it's called in the scriptures... eternal life. This is the life of God's kingdom... These are the three fundamental lives. Two of them we have stopped talking about for many decades, and the consequences have been tragic What a. What a wonderful... explanation. Charlie Kirk was very interested in orthodoxy, as I'm, I'm sure you know he was. And he was knowledgeable on it too. I'm not, but I know that, but I'm interested. But he was very interested in it. Were you aware of that? He... He interviewed a friend of mine, Father John Strickland, who's a very respected Orthodox priest and a Russian scholar who. Who's published extensively on Russian history. And Charlie was very interested in that. And I watched that interview and a few comments that he made afterwards in which... he actually got very much into the mind of us Orthodox Christians and... explained why so many people are converting to holy Orthodoxy. And I thought actually he was... spot on, Very much spot on. He said people are becoming Orthodox because they want something that is time tested. They want something that's substantial. They want something that actually... informs culture... Something that isn't just a plaything and can be categorized over just here or Orthodox Christianity, traditional Christianity in general. It is a lifestyle. It impacts everything because Christ is king, and he's king over every aspect of our life and over civilization. This is common knowledge. Europe, of course. You take a train through Europe... Every town you go through, you're going to go through a town... that has the best land given to the church, and the church is going to be the highest building. Because everyone knew if you don't enthrone worship at the center of your community, if you don't make the heavenly attachment to your earthly life, you're... You're robbing yourself of significance and you're trivializing yourself to just be limited to time. The best thing that can happen in America is that people go to church, root themselves in the one holy, catholic and apostolic church, because the river of life comes from the altar, out the doors of the church, and vivifies society. And do we ever need to be vivified today? Beautiful, Father. Thank you. And before you go, I'm going to spell your name for anyone who's made it to the end of this. I never do this, but I think what you said is... so wonderful that I know that people are going to want to follow up. J O S I A H Trenham T R E N H A M Senior pastor and director of your church... So... I know that people will want to know... more about you, and now they can. So thanks very much for joining us. I appreciate it. Keep going, Tucker. Keep going. Thank you very much. Well, we're gonna. And. And we're gonna. We will keep going. We'll see if this format works. I kind of like it. Thanks a lot for joining us. For an hour and 50 minutes, we'll be back soon.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/keystone- ... -blunders/ Keystone Kash Throws Acosta Under Bus for Epstein Blunders. The FBI director blamed the former U.S. attorney as he faced a grilling over the botched Epstein files release. By Sarah Ewall-Wice Political Reporter Daily Beast
A federal judge ruled in February 2019 that the non-prosecution agreement approved by Alexander Acosta, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act (CVRA) of 2004 because Epstein's victims were not notified about the deal before it was finalized.
The court found that prosecutors, including Acosta, broke the law by concealing the agreement and failing to consult the victims, thereby denying them their right to be informed and to provide input on the plea deal.
While the agreement was later deemed illegal due to this violation, the Department of Justice's internal review concluded that Acosta exercised "poor judgment" but did not commit professional misconduct or act out of corruption.
Acosta defended the deal as necessary to ensure Epstein served jail time, arguing that without federal intervention, Epstein might have avoided incarceration entirely.
Google AI
FBI Director Kash Patel stated during congressional testimony on September 17, 2025, that he has not reviewed all of the Epstein files, acknowledging he has been too busy with other responsibilities despite being the director of the FBI.
When pressed by Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Eric Swalwell, Patel confirmed that he has never spoken to President Trump about the Epstein files, either regarding Trump's name appearing in them or about the files in general.
Patel also said he did not know how many times Trump's name appears in the documents.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, attacked FBI Director Kash Patel in his opening remarks, saying that his actions have brought “danger” to the country.
“Seven months in, it’s impossible to overstate the destruction, chaos and demoralization you’ve brought to the FBI and its workforce, and the resulting danger your actions have caused to our country,” Raskin said.
Raskin called Patel a “fairytale knight,” saying that he needs to recognize that he’s running one of America’s top law enforcement agencies.
“Your supporters had hoped that you would graduate from imagining yourself a romantic fairytale knight to actually running America’s premier federal law enforcement agency,” Raskin said.
#JamieRaskin
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WATCH: Rep. Pramila Jayapal Gets Into a Heated Exchange with Kash Patel Over Epstein Victims | N18G CNBC-TV18 Sep 17
Trump’s FBI Director CRUMBLES During House CROSS-EXAM Katie Phang Sep 17, 2025
Kash Patel gets slammed by House Judiciary Committee Democrats today, just underscoring his incompetence for the job as FBI Director. Katie Phang highlights some of Patel’s most egregious statements about the Epstein Files & critiques the sham questioning by Republicans.
Transcript
Hi everyone. As you can see, not my typical studio recording setting, but I wanted to come on because I wanted to talk about this insanity that happened today with Kash Patel testifying before the House Judiciary Committee. As you know, Cash Patel ringing in day two of showing how absolutely incompetent he is to be able to hold the job of director of the FBI. Now, I know most of us probably have certain ideas about the type of person who should hold that job and and and the role that that person plays. And I can tell you whatever you think it is, it's not Kash Patel. And I don't know if you've been seeing clips during the day posted on the media. But I'm going to go through a few of them with you right now to show exactly how bad Cash Patel is at what he's doing, but more importantly, how much of a partisan hack Kash Patel is. He is truly the Trump administration DEI hire. Because if you're going to use that standard from the Trump administration that DEI hires are incompetent, incapable of doing their job, um only um doing what somebody tells them to do and that they're not qualified because listen, I don't think that that's the definition of DEI. But if you're going to use that Republican DEI standard, then that is exactly what Kash Patel is. He is the Trump administration's prime example of a DEI hire. And of course, it doesn't hurt that he happens to be a minority. So then Donald Trump can say, "Oh, look. I'm checking off that box." But here, take a quick listen because there were some really heated moments today between Patel and some of the Democrats. And I just want to run through a couple of them. So take a quick listen to this one between Eric Swalwell, congressman from California, and Kash Patel.
Director, the first time you saw Donald Trump's name was in the Epstein files. Did you close the files or keep reading?
I have reviewed not the entirety of the files. So I have --
So you haven't reviewed all of the Epstein files personally?
No.
You're the director of the FBI. This is the largest sex trafficking case the FBI has ever been a part of. Buck stops at the top and your testimony today is you have not reviewed all the files.
All righty. So, how many of you would think that if your job as FBI director that you would have actually spent the time reviewing the entirety of the Epstein files? As we can see, Patel is saying that he actually hasn't done it himself. He said, quote, "Personally, I haven't reviewed the entirety of the Epstein files." So, what does that mean? He's either actually getting the information from somebody else who has, which again is a I think absurd filter to be using if you're supposed to be answering questions in front of Congress, if you're supposed to be reporting to the president of the United States, and to frankly if you are supposed to be telling the American people in the interest of quote full transparency, which is what you've promised cash Patel, then you really should have looked at the entirety of the Epstein files.
So now we know that Patel has no basis grounded in fact to answer the questions that he is being asked today. So if that's the case, why not just say I cannot answer these questions because I have not personally reviewed these files. No, what he's doing is he's cherry-picking information and he's cobbling together to be able to serve his dear cult leader so that he doesn't look bad. Actually, frankly, both of them, Patel and Trump.
Now, moving on. Here's another exchange between Patel and Swalwell. Now, this one's a little bit longer, and it's pretty funny because Patel refuses refuses to tell Congressman Swalwell how many times Donald Trump's name appears in the Epstein files. Take a listen.
You said you don't know the number of times Trump's name appears in the files. So, it could at least be a thousand times. Is that right?
The number is a total misleading factor. We have not released anyone's name. We have not released anyone's name in the file that has not been credible. Could it at least release every piece of legally permissible information? You can characterize the numbers however you want it.
Claiming my time, director, it sounds like if you don't know the number, it could at least be a thousand times, which --
it's not.
Is it at least 500 times?
No.
Is it at least 100 times?
No.
Then what's the number?
I don't know the number, but it's not that.
Do you think it might be your job to know the number?
My job is to provide for the safety and security of this country. My job is not to engage in political innuendo so you can go out to the sticks and get your 22nd hit in your fundraising article and keep going reclaiming your time because the people of California are being underserved by your representation is not implicated.
Why not release everything that involves --
we have released everything the president and anyone else's side that is credible and lawfully be able to be released.
Some of you may be saying, "Well, obviously Katie, if he hasn't reviewed the entirety of the Epstein files, how can he possibly be able to say how many times Donald Trump's name appears?" But you know what Patel has never denied today? He has never denied the reporting that the FBI has tasked a lot of people to go and scour the entirety of the Epstein files to flag every single time that Donald Trump's name has appeared. And we know that that has happened according to all of the media reports. So, if that's the case, don't you think somebody would have reported back to the director of the FBI that Donald Trump's name appears x number of times? It's remarkable though because if you hear Congressman Swalwell, he gives a range. He gives a number. And of course, Patel's like, "No, it's not that. No, it's not that. No, it's not that. But I know it's not that, even though I don't really know what the number is. Get the fuck out of here."
Moving on. Here's another clip I want you to listen to again between Congressman Swalwell and Kash Patel. I want you to listen really carefully here. Why? Because you're going to see that Kash Patel continues to refuse to acknowledge whether or not he has spoken with Attorney General Pamela Joe Bondi, about how many times, and whether or not Donald Trump's name appears in the Epstein files.
Attorney General that Donald Trump's name is in the Epstein files --
and we have released where President Trump --
simple question. Did you tell the attorney general that the president's name is in the Epstein files?
During many conversations that the attorney general and I have had on the matter of Epstein, we have reviewed --
The question is simple. Who did you tell the attorney general that Donald Trump's name is in the Epstein files? Yes or no?
Why don't you try spelling it out?
Yes or no? Director,
use the alphabet.
Yes or no?
No. ABC.
It sounds like you don't want to tell us? Did you tell the attorney general that Donald Trump's name was in the Epstein files?
Why don't you try serving your constituency by focusing on reducing violent crime in --
So, here's the thing. There is no confidentiality. There is no privilege. nothing like that that should cloak or hide or allow them to remain secret. These communications that they are having. There's no claim of confidentiality that's going to protect these conversations that are being had between Pamela Joe Bondi and Kash Patel. And according to Cash Patel, he's had a lot of conversations about the Epstein files with Bondi. And yet, he can't actually answer this question directly, obviously, because Patel is trying to play a game. He's trying to play something fast and loose. He doesn't want to be committed and tied down to a specific answer.
Here's another thing that was quite notable about Patel's testimony today, especially throughout Eric Swalwell's questioning. Patel keeps on using the following words. You probably picked up on it if you were following the hearing today. "Credible." Legally permissible. He keeps on saying, "We have released the information that is credible. We have released the information that is legally permissible."
Number one, I'm going to call out Patel and say both of those are lies. One, there is no legal standard of credible. There is no legal standard of credible to be able to filter out information and not turn them over in their entirety to the American people. We also know that the Republicans are trying to play that game at House Oversight. Recall House Oversight issued a subpoena to the Department of Justice. Comer and other Republicans tried to insert the adjective "credible" that the files that were going to be turned over from the DOJ despite efforts by Congressman Robert Garcia as well as Congresswoman Summer Lee. They wanted the entirety of the files. But Comer and other Republicans were like, "No, no, no. Only the "credible" information is going to be turned over by the DOJ. In the end, the Democrats won, but now we're hearing it again. It is a party line that is being done by the Republicans right now to justify the limited amount of information that is being turned over. That is not what the subpoena asks for that was served on DOJ. A lawfully issued and served congressional subpoena that has been served on DOJ. So for Cash Patel to keep on saying, well, credible information's been turned over. Credible by whose standard? Credible by whose definition? Oh, credible when it doesn't implicate Trump or other Republicans or other buddies of Trump. Is that what you define as credible? Cash Patel? Legally permissible. What kind of is that? He's not a lawyer. And as you heard today, Patel would often say, "Well, I'm not a lawyer, but you might, you know, or or I can't answer that question because I'm not a lawyer. You'll have to ask DOJ." No, no, no. Legally permissible. The only thing is this. You're going to see redactions for the protections of the victims, the survivors, whatever. But that's it. No other redaction should be happening here. If your name is in the Epstein files, even if it is there quote innocently, your name should be exposed. End of story. Now, another super heated exchange happened between Congresswoman Pome Gopal and Cash Patel. And when I tell you it was heated, I recommend you go and watch the entirety of the exchange. But listen to this particular one and then I'll have some comments and thoughts on the other side. Are the victims of the Jeffrey Epstein horrific trafficking ring, are they credible? Any person with information about ongoing sexual trafficking, I'm asking you if they're credible. Ma'am, I'm commenting on the evidence we have, but we have routinely asked for people to come forward with more evidence and we will look at it. And the evidence that we have was the same evidence that the Biden and Obama justice departments had. They determined, not me, they determined that that information was not credible. Patel refuses, repeatedly refuses to answer the question as to whether or not the Epstein victims and survivors are credible. It's a disgusting punting that of accountability that Patel is doing here. And now here's the thing though, and it trails off a little bit, but if you heard it, he says very clearly, Patel says very clearly at the end of that clip that the Biden and the Obama DOJ's, departments of justice, didn't find them to be credible. That's another lie. That has never been the findings by the Biden DOJ or the Obama DOJ that the Epstein victims were not credible. So for the FBI director Cash Patel to make that statement is such an egregious, disgusting indictment of the credibility and the trustworthiness of these Epstein victims and survivors. And if I were them, I would go after him. I would go after him because that's disgusting. And then here's another clip that I wanted to play for you between Gyipol and Patel. And let me tell you something. If you also listen to Patel, what he's trying to do here is he's again dodging this idea that he's going to address the credibility of the victims, but then listen what he says as to who authorized the indictment of Jeffrey Epstein. Take a listen. Victims credible. The victims not. I'll tell you what happened in the last Trump administration. Credible or not, you victims credibly came forward and you know what happened? President Trump authorized the indictments of Jeffrey Epstein called Biden, not Obama. President Trump called the entire thing a de a a Democratic hoax. So I would like to ask the gentle lady's time is expired. I gave her the additional 45 seconds she requested. The gentle lady yields back. The gentleman from New Jersey is recognized for his you would meet with the women who were sexually and raped and groomed at the ages of a lady from Washington years old. Are you going to cover up? Are you going to continue from his powerful men including those that might be on this committee? Okay, so I'm not sure if you heard this, but according to Cash Patel, Donald Trump quote authorized the indictment of Jeffrey Epstein. Okay, last I checked, Donald Trump, not a US attorney, not the US attorney, not the attorney general, none of those things. So why is Donald Trump quote authorizing indictments? Not only is that a egregious misstatement of law and procedure, it's just a lie, but Patel is trying to do something here, right? He's trying to elevate his boss, his cult leader, into some status that makes him seem like Donald Trump has been trying to pursue justice for the victims of Epstein when clearly we know that he hasn't because Donald Trump is the sole gatekeeper for the information about the Epstein files. Trump is the reason why we don't have the entirety of the Epstein files having been released. But then Gyipol, man, she freaking brings the heat. And what does she say? As you heard her say, she was demanding, "Why will Patel, not we with the victims, why will he continue the cover up?" And then, did you hear what she said? Cover up for rich and powerful men. Maybe even men on this committee. Let me tell you something. men on this committee. She freaking went there and I am glad because there are politicians that are implicated in the Epstein files and they themselves should not get a pass as well for their culpability in dealing with Epstein. I mean look this is just a sampling of what happened today and I was a little bit of a captive audience because I was on a plane flying from the east coast to the west coast. I find myself to be in Los Angeles right now. Um, occupied LA, um, which is just horrible and illegal and violative of the Possi Komitatus Act. Um, but I was able to watch a lot of this hearing today. And, you know, I'm glad because the total kind of show exchange that was going on today was was so dumb. It was the Republicans trying to blame the prior administrations for their failure to be able to turn over these files, even though that's not the case. Remember, it's Donald Trump who sent on the campaign trail. He made a pledge on this campaign trail that he was going to turn over the entirety of the Epstein files. And then we actually have people like uh Congressman Jamie Rasin who did an effective job of splicing together all of Cash Patel's own promises and claims that the FBI director is the person who's holding on to the black book, the client list of Epstein. And when questioned, he's like, "Oh yeah, it's just the Rolodex." And no, no, no. Rascin was not going to let that go. Rascin made it clear that according to Patel, it's actually a separate book that is kept. So, I mean, look, maybe maybe Patel and others have just been blowing, you know, smoke up other people's asses about what's going on here, but if you're going to say it and then you're going to take a role like the director of the FBI, you better be ready to have to answer questions about whether or not you're being credible and whether or not you've been telling the truth about the scope of the evidence, about the extent of the evidence, about where the evidence is, etc. Right? Here's the other thing. What what really is a huge takeaway today is this. The Epstein files are not a hoax. So even though Donald Trump wants to run and say that the Epstein files are a hoax, what we're hearing today is the Epstein files are not a hoax. The Republicans want it to go away. And the Republicans today also made it seem like there's been some pogram or persecution of Catholics and Christianity, etc. by prior FBIs. I mean, it was a total indictment of prior FBI um FBI um iterations under different directors um including Chris Ray, who was a Trump pick, right? But according to the Republicans, there was something foul and and a miss with those prior FBIs. Here's the thing, the fish rods from the head down. And I'm sure there are plenty of people that are working for the FBI that are doing a fantastic job to the best of their abilities. And you know what? Look, I'm glad I'm glad if there are palpable reductions in crime and that and that public safety is improved, etc., but I'm not seeing that to be the case. The same day that Charlie Kirk was shot, there were two kids that were shot in the school. And that's why I appreciated Congresswoman Sydney Cam Loger. She walked through all the examples of domestic terrorism at the hands of white supremacists that have been happening. We also heard that from Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. She made it very clear that this FBI doesn't give or any type of, you know, uh, you know, reassurances that they're going to prosecute the crimes that are actually the ones that are impacting people. But Cash Patel, he'll be breaking bread at Rouse when his good friend gets shot and killed and he doesn't leave immediately to be able to go fix it or investigate it. Kind of makes you wonder, right? Anyway, I wanted to touch touch base with y'all, check in with y'all. I'll see y'all tomorrow. But in the meantime, if you got some free time, go and take a listen to these. Uh there are some clips that are available on C-SPAN and it's totally worth your time. Check it out because Patel Patel is going to go home now and he's going to sit there and worry about his little note cards that he wasn't able to uh you know quickly get to to be able to answer these questions. Be mad, be outraged, demand accountability. I'll see y'all on the other side. Katie Fang here. We launched the Katy Fang News Channel in partnership with the Midas Touch Network so we could bring you the latest in legal and political news. Straight, no chaser. So, if you're a fellow truth- teller, hit that subscribe button and share the word about this channel so we can build a high-information America
A month before Charlie Kirk’s killing, billionaire pro-Israel moneyman Bill Ackman arranged an intervention in the Hamptons during which sources say he and others “hammered” Kirk for the conservative leader’s growing criticism of Israeli influence in Washington. Kirk came away fretting about Israeli “blackmail,” sources say, as he contemplated a Catholic conversion.
On September 11, one day after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, billionaire pro-Israel moneyman Bill Ackman took to Twitter/X to trumpet his relationship with the late conservative operative. “I feel incredibly privileged to have spent a day and shared a meal with @charliekirk11 this summer. He was a giant of a man.”
[x] Bill Ackman @ BillAckman I feel incredibly privileged to have spent a day and shared a meal with @charliekirk11 this summer. He was a giant of a man. 12:41 AM Sep 11, 2025
The Grayzone has spoken to five people with intimate knowledge of Kirk’s meeting with Ackman, which was held in early August. According to one source, Kirk was left upset after the gathering turned into an “intervention” where he was “hammered” for his increasingly skeptical views on the US special relationship with Israel, and for platforming prominent conservative critics of Israel at his TPUSA events.
Since publishing this report, The Grayzone has learned from one attendee of the Hamptons event that Ackman convened the influencers under the auspices of a discussion about Zohran Mamdani and the supposed threat he posed to the West if elected mayor of New York. But the meeting went off the rails when Ackman personally confronted Kirk about his views on Israel. The public face of UK Lawyers for Israel, Natasha Hausdorff, joined in the argument, and began “screaming” at Kirk, according to the attendee.
When his hosts presented him with a detailed list of every offense he supposedly committed against Israel, Kirk was “horrified,” said one person. Ackman also allegedly demanded Kirk rescind his invitation for Tucker Carlson to speak at his upcoming America Fest 2025 in December.
“The whole thing was a disaster,” said an attendee.
The Grayzone reported on September 12, citing a longtime associate of Kirk, that Netanyahu had offered to organize a massive infusion of pro-Israel money into TPUSA, and that Kirk refused. Another longtime friend of Kirk has told The Grayzone that the conservative activist also rejected an offer Netanyahu delivered two weeks before his death to meet with him in Jerusalem.
Kirk, according to one person with inside knowledge of the meeting with Ackman, said he left feeling as though he’d been subjected to “blackmail.”
In a series of text messages with The Grayzone, Ackman described these account of his meeting with Kirk as “totally false.” He pledged to release a public statement providing his own account of the event, but refused The Grayzone’s request for clarification or further details. He would not accept phone calls from this reporter.
“I think I can easily put this to bed,” Ackman promised, “I have receipts as they say.” He did not abide when asked to provide the so-called “receipts.”
In an apparent bid to reinforce the pro-Israel tone at the Hamptons meeting, Ackman hosted a coterie of pro-Israel operatives and conservative influencers at the off-the-record engagement. One was Instagram influencer Xaviaer DuRousseau of Prager U.
Reached by phone by The Grayzone, DuRousseau sounded flustered when asked about his presence at the meeting. He repeatedly demanded to know how this reporter obtained his number, and eventually hung up, refusing to answer questions about the event.
Several Instagram posts by DuRousseau show him and his friend, conservative influencer Emily Wilson, in the Hamptons on August 8 outside Topping Rose House, a posh hotel and restaurant in Bridgehampton, New York.
[x]
Two weeks after the meeting, DeRousseau was reportedly junketed on an all-expenses-paid trip by the Israeli government to visit a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation “aid” hub guarded by the IDF on the Gaza frontier. There, he recorded an Instagram video denying that the population of the besieged Gaza Strip was experiencing a famine.
The Grayzone received a similarly agitated response from Wilson, known online as Emily Saves America. Following a phone call and exchange of text messages in which this reporter asked her numerous times about her attendance of the meeting in the Hamptons, Wilson refused to comment. Instagram photos place her in the Hamptons at the same time as DuRousseau.
CJ Pearson, a leading youth coordinator for the Republican National Committee, immediately referred The Grayzone to his communications director when asked if he attended the Hamptons gathering.
The strong-arm tactics of the pro-Israel billionaires who helped fuel the growth of TPUSA were said to have contributed to Kirk’s alienation with evangelical Christianity, which emphasizes uncritical support for Israel as a bedrock principle. Several sources with access to Kirk said he had begun attending Catholic mass with his wife, Erika, and was considering a conversion before his death.
Bree Solsdadt, a Catholic Twitter/X influencer, has publicly corroborated this account of Kirk’s religious realignment. Kirk’s friend, the podcaster and former TPUSA personality Candace Owens, also alluded to the shift when she reflected that he was undergoing a “spiritual transformation” before his death.
Israel-centric influencer summit in the Hamptons
The Grayzone has obtained a partial list of attendees alleged to have been in attendance at the Bridgehampton meeting convened by Ackman this August. They include:
Seth Dillon – Dillion is the CEO of Babylon Bee, the conservative answer to the liberal The Onion satire outlet. Dillon and his crew have derisively mocked famine-stricken Palestinians and their supporters in the West, since Israel’s slash-and-burn campaign began in the besieged Gaza Strip. An evangelical Christian with Jewish heritage, he has claimed, “I did not cease having Ashkenazi blood when I put my faith in Jesus Christ (also a Jew).” Dillon did not answer calls from The Grayzone.
Xaviaer DuRousseau – DuRousseau is employed by Prager U, the premier right-wing “edu-tainment” hub targeting the minds of American youth. His boss, Marissa Streit, is a veteran of the Israeli army’s Unit 8200 cyber-spying division. A Black self-described former progressive, DuRousseau now appears firmly in the pocket of right-wing Zionist forces. During his Israeli government-funded visit to a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation “aid” hub inside Gaza, DuRousseau falsely claimed the United Nations and Hamas were to blame for the hunger sweeping the local population. “If I were Israel, I wouldn’t even provide matching socks to Gaza, but here’s all the aid that y’all claim doesn’t exist,” he said in an Instagram video filmed in front of boxes of aid blocked from entering Gaza. “Instead of Hamas distributing the ramen noodles,” DuRousseau continued, “their leaders are eating it all and that’s why they’re on Ozempic.”
[x] xaviaer and prageru original audio Go to Gaza? BET ... WALK WITH ME.
DuRousseau vigorously defended his close friend, podcaster Emily Wilson, after she stated that “if everyone in the state [of Alabama]” wanted the return of chattel slavery, “go ahead, why do I give a shit?”
Emily Wilson aka Emily Saves America – Wilson is a Los Angeles-based self-described libertarian podcaster and social media influencer with over 500,000 followers on Instagram. On September 9, she recalled on Twitter/X how “a HUGE black guy” robbed her when she was 13. “I hate to say it but things like that just change the way you see certain people. After that I always thought, ‘oh, you guys just hate me,’” she reflected. This month, she and DuRousseau recorded a podcast in which they framed pro-Palestine activist Greta Thunberg’s hairstyle as evidence of her being “slow and short bus.”
“I don’t hang out with anyone really less attractive than me,” Wilson stated in a separate appearance.
Arynne Wexler – A former Goldman Sachs trader seeking cachet in the world of online influencers, Wexler is a vociferously Zionist, self-described “non-lib girl in a crazylib world.” In an interview with pro-Israel podcaster Dave Rubin, Wexler argued that “we need to bring bullying back” to enforce social norms, crack down on conspiracy theories, and stop the rise of antisemitism. Wexler has praised Ackman’s pro-Israel activism on multiple occasions. She did not answer calls from The Grayzone.
Natasha Hausdorff – The legal director of Zionist advocacy group UK Lawyers for Israel, Hausdorff is arguably the best-known figure associated with the organization. She was described in one headline by Israel’s most widely-read newspaper, the Adelson-owned Israel Hayom, as “the British attorney who fights Israel’s wars.”
Nate Friedman – Friedman is a young ultra-Zionist influencer best known for New York City man-on-the-street confrontations with Palestine solidarity activists, whom he’s accused of being paid protesters.
Ory Rinat – Rinat was the former Special Media Advisor to Jared Kushner, the Trump son-in-law and advisor, before moving on to serve as White House chief digital officer during Trump’s first term. A Jewish pro-Israel operative said to have close ties Netanyahu’s government, Rinat now serves as CEO of Urban Legend, a PR firm which commands “an army of 700 social media influencers who command varying degrees of allegiance from audiences that collectively number in the tens of millions,” according to Wired.
CJ Pearson – The chair of the Republican National Committee’s Youth Advisory Council, Pearson appeared in photos in the Hamptons alongside Wilson and DeRousseau. The Grayzone is awaiting further information from Pearson’s communications director.
[x] CJ Pearson (left) with Emily Wilson, Xavaier DeRousseau, and an unknown person in the Hamptons
Bill Ackman’s war
As The Grayzone reported on September 12, Kirk was besieged with angry calls and messages from pro-Israel donors to his organization following TPUSA’s Student Action Summit this July in Tampa, Florida. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had also phoned him, according to a longtime friend of Kirk, and offered to orchestrate a massive infusion of pro-Israel money into his organization.
A longtime friend of Kirk told The Grayzone the mounting pressure had left him “angry” and “frightened.”
Kirk vented about the pro-Israel intimidation campaign in an August 6 discussion with Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News host who was also growing more critical of Israeli influence in Washington.
“It’s all of the sudden, ‘Oh, Charlie: he’s no longer with us.’ Wait a second—what does ‘with us’ mean, exactly? I’m an American, okay? I represent this country,” Kirk complained.
“The more that you guys privately and publicly call our character into question—which is not isolated, it would be one thing if it were just one text, or two texts; it is dozens of texts—then we start to say, ‘whoa, hold the boat here,’” Kirk continued. “To be fair, some really good Jewish friends say, ‘that’s not all of us’… But these are leaders here. These are stakeholders.”
He went on: “I have less ability… to criticize the Israeli government than actual Israelis do. And that’s really, really weird.”
Kirk delivered his comments around the same time as the tumultuous meeting in the Hamptons with Ackman and the crew of pro-Israel influencers.
A month earlier, Kirk had opened the stage at his TPUSA Student Action Summit for a cathartic outpouring of frustration and rage about Israel’s political hammerlock on the Trump administration. At the conference, speakers from Carlson and Kelly to the anti-Zionist Jewish comedian Dave Smith slammed Israel’s blood-soaked assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, branded Jeffrey Epstein as an Israeli intelligence asset, and openly taunted Zionist billionaires like Ackman for “getting away with scams” despite having “no actual skills.”
The mockery by Carlson was particularly galling for Ackman. One day after TPUSA’s conference, Ackman staged a 4,000 word Twitter/X meltdown defending his financial acumen, while insisting that he earned his vast fortune because, “I inherited good genes.”
In fact, the 59-year-old manager of the Pershing Square Capital hedge fund had presided over a precipitous decline in his own personal fortune through a series of bad bets. Between 2015 and 2018, amid a bull market, Ackman’s fund tallied embarrassingly negative returns that cost him an eye-popping $12 billion in losses. His “holy war” to short the multi-level marketing company Herbalife backfired, resulting in a devastating squeeze that cost him heavily. Ackman’s financial mishaps forced him to slash one fifth of his staff in 2018.
The billionaire also took issue with Carlson’s contention that he had been part of convicted sex offender and late Zionist financier Jeffrey Epstein’s “constellation of people.” Yet Carlson’s remarks were grounded in fact. Indeed, Ackman’s wife, the celebrity Israeli designer Neri Oxman, had gifted an artistic orb to Epstein after he plowed $125,000 in donations into her Media Lab at MIT. She was invited to lunch with Epstein on several occasions, according to the Boston Globe, and complied with MIT’s requirement to keep her gift to Epstein confidential.
Ackman has significantly elevated his public profile by leading fellow Zionist billionaires in a ruthless crackdown on post-October 7 Palestine solidarity activism in the US. By leveraging his fortune, Ackman helped dislodge the political scientist Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University, his alma mater, accusing her of adopting an insufficiently draconian policy toward students protesting Israel’s assault on Gaza.
After weeks of pummeling from Ackman, GOP members of Congress, and pro-Israel media, Gay finally quit when conservative activists produced evidence that she had plagiarized in her academic writing. While Ackman claimed victory, he howled with indignation when Business Insider returned the favor with a detailed article which documented multiple cases of plagiarism by his own wife, the designer Oxman. According to the outlet, Oxman “stole sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, other scholars and technical documents in her academic writing.”
Ackman responded by announcing that he would fund a plagiarism review of every MIT faculty member. He also delivered a 77-page lawsuit threat to Axel Springer, the publisher of Business Insider, accusing them of publishing claims “designed to cause her harm, principally because the reporters do not like me, my support for Israel, and my advocacy.” He quickly dropped the lawsuit, however, claiming he did so because Springer is “an important advocate against antisemitism.”
In May 2024, the Washington Post revealed Ackman as a leading member of a Whatsapp group of 50 ultra-wealthy Zionists coordinating counterinsurgency-style actions against student anti-genocide protesters at Columbia University.
According to the report, the millionaire cabal sought to buy off Black celebrities as propaganda puppets and dangled bribes before New York City Mayor Eric Adams to deploy the NYPD against student protesters. “Some members also offered to pay for private investigators to assist New York police in handling the protests, the chat log shows — an offer a member of the group reported in the chat that Adams accepted,” the Post reported.
This June 14, as Israel reeled at the Iranian response to its unprovoked assault days earlier, Ackman launched his next campaign: “@Israel needs our help to destroy Iran’s nuclear threat to the world…” the hedge funder declared on Twitter. “Israel does not have the equipment and armaments to complete the job. We do, and it does not require boots on the ground.”
Multiple sources, including a Trump administration official, have revealed to The Grayzone that Kirk personally visited Trump inside the White House to lobby him against attacking Iran. Trump “roared” at Kirk, one said, and shut down the conversation.
A month later, Kirk allowed the simmering rage within the conservative grassroots over Israel’s stranglehold on Washington to pour out at his TPUSA summit. Soon after, he was summoned to the Hamptons for a face-to-face with one of Netanyahu’s most influential allies in the US. Before Ackman and a cast of avaricious young influencers under Israel’s sway, he defied the billionaire power broker, then returned home to prepare for what would be his final speaking tour.
Following Kirk’s killing, Ackman ponied up a $1 million payout for anyone who provided information leading the capture of the shooter. That money may wind up with the father of the suspect, Tyler Robinson, who reportedly turned him in.