2026: The Aftermath

00:00:03 Speaker 1: My name is Charlie Kirk. 00:00:05 Speaker 2: I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic. My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth. If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're going to end up miserable. But if the most important thing is doing good, you will end up purposeful. College is a scam, everybody. 00:00:26 Speaker 3: You got to stop sending your kids to college. 00:00:27 Speaker 1: You should get married as. 00:00:28 Speaker 2: Young as possible and have as many kids as possible. Go start a Turning Point USA college chapter. Go start a Turning Point USA high school chapter. Go find out how your church can get involved. Sign up and become an activist. I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade. Most important decision I ever made in my life, and I encourage you to do the same. Here I am. 00:00:46 Speaker 1: Lord, use me. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. 00:00:56 Speaker 2: Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirk Show. a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals. Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com. That is noblegoldinvestments.com. 00:01:17 Speaker 1: All right. Welcome, everybody. It is the morning after a very, very tough election night, and that is the truth. We're going to be honest with you today because we were honest with you Last night, and guess what? That was a tough night. That was a brutal beating, the likes of which we probably haven't seen since Watergate. I mean, you could go back to 2006, 2008. 00:01:43 Speaker 4: For Republicans, yeah, probably, yeah. 00:01:44 Speaker 1: Yeah, so that, but listen, a night of historic proportions, and the question is, why? What happened? Well, there are a few different answers to that question. But I want to remind you right now that God is still on the throne. He's still in control. That this is still America as long as we can keep her. And we got to get to work. You know, Charlie used to always say we don't fight because we know we know we're going to win. He stole that from Dennis Prager. We fight because it's the right thing to do. And I'm reminded of a clip that Erica shared on social media where Charlie, she's videoing him before the 2024 election, said, what happens if we lose? And he said, well, we wake up the next day and we fight and we fight. So that's what we have to do today. That is our task. That is our purpose. And it's also to be really honest about what happened and why. And the vice president has put out a tweet this morning. that basically is saying we know why we didn't win everybody knows why we didn't win there's one real answer for why we didn't win and the question is are we willing to be honest about it there are other reasons sure there's a collection of reasons but the one real reason has to do with the war all the exit polls confirm it the perception within the voter voting electorate of what that did to the economy, what that did to affordability, what that did to gas prices. And you could be out there in the audience, and you could disagree with that. You could say it's something that we needed to do. We needed to deal with the Iran problem. It had been lingering for 40-plus years, and that there's only been 20 casualties, which is 20 too many. But, yeah, it's not Vietnam. But perception so often is reality. And a point that we made on this show when the war started— was that we did not feel that it had been properly sold to the American people. And I would say that the voters spoke loudly last night and said, yeah, it didn't get sold to us the right way. And then we wanted peace. There was an off ramp. A lot within our coalition fought that. They wanted to see Iran dealt with once and for all. The voters said last night is we want you to focus on domestic policy. 00:04:07 Speaker 4: Yeah, we should. I mean, we have to. First of all, we have to be honest about just kind of the scale of what happened right now. So first of all, look at the Senate. We have defeats in Senate races that we were not even particularly closely watching going into last night. South Carolina, Darlene Graham lost. She lost by, right now it's lost by four points, not even a razor thin margin, but a really shocking one right now in Mississippi, Scott Colum. is up by about 1,000 votes over Cindy Hyde-Smith. Almost all of the vote in. Nobody was looking at that one. Nobody was looking at that one. And, I mean, even last night, it looked like they were fine to hold it. And then some late-arriving ballots, and I know that'll make some people cry foul. I will just say Mississippi is Republican at every level of the government. And so it's probably not that. It is probably a real reflection of We got beaten badly. Tallarico versus Paxton in Texas. We did not just lose. James Tallarico won by 12 points. The governor of Texas is Democrat. The railroad commissioner is going to be a Democrat. It looks like the legislature is going to be Democrat. It is now a blue trifecta. We have the same thing in Arizona. We chased over 100,000 ballots in Arizona, and it wasn't nearly enough, obviously. In a wave year where the Democrat, where the electorate goes D plus 16, the question then becomes, what are you going to do about it? And the lone bright spot was Florida. 00:05:46 Speaker 1: And that state has 1.3 million more Republicans than Democrats, and they barely held on. Now, there's one race that remains too close to call, two, technically, if you can count Mississippi. But we are still watching Alaska. which is now separated by 624 votes. Mary Peltola, the Democrat who schemed to get a fake Dan Sullivan on the ballot, is up. And interestingly enough, Dan J. Sullivan Jr., the other Dan Sullivan, the decoy Dan, has 3,500 votes. So that's the margin and then some in that state. So we'll see how that ends up playing out. There's the latest updates there. So the reason why now the vice president put out a tweet this morning explaining that, yeah, he ends it in a very, I think, poignant way. He said, I remain hopeful about our country to the people who are pissed off and want to say, I told you so. So you were right. You did tell us. So take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the result, you should be. Let's take that anger and get back to work saving our country. But in the middle of this long tweet, he says he's speaking to a pollster, one of the smartest people he knows in politics, and told him yesterday that we'd lose the generic ballot by 13 points. It ended up being even more than that in many places. He said, I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, He saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. Here's the top four answers that this pollster received. One, end the war. Two, focus on the cost of living and inflation. Put America first. Four, change our relationship to Israel. Those were the four answers. And, you know, I put out a social media post this morning. It said it's time to end the Iran war. And I say that knowing that a lot of you in this audience disagree with that, that you believed in what the president was doing in Iran. And listen, I think that there are really good rationalizations and justifications for going into Iran. No nukes. They were going to try and blow up regional allies. But at the end of the day, the voters have spoken. We had an off-ramp to peace with the MOU in the summer. And I loudly cheered for it. And I took a lot of gruff. Some from you in this audience. But last night was why. Because we could see the political tea leaves long before election night. You could basically track the data of... the popularity of this administration back to the Iran war. And you can see the lines diverge like this. You can track it with the gas price and then the knock on downstream effects of what that did to people's perception of the economy, to the perception of feeling betrayed by a president they thought was the no new wars president. There are other, yeah, We could talk about ballot chasing, and yeah, we chased over 100,000 ballots in the state. We probably helped get elected a Republican governor in New Hampshire. But in a wave election where you think chasing can make up three, four, maybe five points, when the electorate is swinging wildly, D plus 13, D plus 15, they're saying something loud. 00:09:49 Speaker 4: End the war. 00:09:49 Speaker 1: Focus on the cost of living and inflation. Put America first. Change our relationship with Israel. Those are the four top answers. Now there are a few bright spots, and Brandon Gill is one of them. Blake, tell us about Brandon Gill. 00:10:02 Speaker 4: Well, Brandon Gill, we're looking for wins where we can. And so, for example, in Gill's district, it looks like it's a place that was voting for Tallarico over Paxton decisively. By 11 points. By 11 points. And by extension, that means voting for a Democrat governor. That's what we have there now. democrat every state level office and then brandon gill still won by 10 points and we're happy with that because brandon gill is he's not just a republican survivor he's a republican survivor who's good on the issues and good at communicating we're going to need more brandon gills to turn the tide so we want to have winners like that around and there's other white pills and even within the scale of the disaster that we just experienced i actually want to highlight one that uh might be surprising to a lot of people, which is that if you look at, uh, which groups, like, shifted specific ways in, uh, from, like, 2020 to 2024 to 2026, it's very interesting. Send up, it's the image from the intersection that I sent today, if you guys can find it. Uh, so, for example, there's a lot of focus on how Hispanics swerved back towards Democrats. And they did, and that's a big reason Texas is blue. That's a big reason we're losing a lot of these races. But, I will note, for example, Hispanic men from 2020 to 2024, the reason we won so big in 24, they moved our direction between those two elections 33 points. And then from 24 to this election, they moved towards the Democrats by 24 points. So do the math. That means actually Hispanic men are nine points more Republican than they were in 2020. Hispanics overall are seven points more Republican than they were in 2020. We have made durable gains with that group that we can build upon. If we revert back to the mean in 2028, who did we actually get hammered by? We got hammered with young people. I think that strongly supports that this was the war above all that really made people angry because they're really upset about it. We got way worse with ordinary suburban voters. We got worse with just regular white voters. So that's where we bled support from 2020. Those are places we can make it back. So there's a lot of focus on demographics is destiny, and it does matter a lot. But we actually are seeing durable gains where we need to have them to be able to contest elections in this country, even in states like Texas, like Georgia. 00:12:24 Speaker 1: And listen, I'm a big believer. Yeah, the Latino men, that's a thing. I think you need to focus on young men. You need to focus on young men. I will tell you that in 2024, the amount of enthusiasm that young men, young white men, young Hispanic men, but specifically young white men, and there's nothing wrong with saying it. The amount of enthusiasm that they had for the political movement and the coalition that we were building was through the roof. They believed that things were going to be different. And whether you look at Epstein, which I believe was the first psychic break, the bungled handling of that, and then Midnight Hammer, and then obviously the full-scale Iran invasion or war. 00:13:06 Speaker 4: It wasn't really an invasion. 00:13:07 Speaker 1: I will be more precise– Young men were frustrated. Remember when I brought up the $ 20 burrito and how much flack I took? I took it greatly because I knew I was right. Not that every burrito cost $ 20, but that the price of normal things that people expect to be able to afford was too expensive and that that was accentuated by a war of choice was a huge deal to the voters. And we need to be honest about that. You need to build a coalition where your young men are enthusiastic. Because guess what happens when young men are enthusiastic? A lot of the women will come along too because they want to hang out with the guys. The young guys will post memes. They'll post on social media. They'll tell their friends. They'll scream it loudly at the frat party. So when you are losing that link, yeah, maybe they don't show up in as great a number at midterms. But they'll show up in a general, which is what we have coming up next. And they grow up. And they vote a lot more as they get older. So it is a canary in the coal mine when you are losing young people. That is why Charlie believed in what we were doing so much at Turning Point. Why it was so important to the future of this country. And while privately talking to him, he knew that Epstein and Iran were huge issues. And the first thing is just being honest. Being honest about that. So one of the problems that you could have is learning the wrong lessons. This is an interesting thing to look at. This is from nwokeness on X303, if you could throw it up. Here's what's interesting. The governor's race plus eight for the Dems. Amy Acton. She's like the white Kamala. Voter ID amendment. plus 31 yes if we have that graphic please throw it up 303 north carolina results senate plus 20 democrat voter id amendment plus 20 yes nevada results governor plus seven democrat voter id amendment plus 25 yes so he adds even in a blue tsunami voter id was able to pass with landslide margins. 00:15:35 Speaker 4: Big landslides for a lot of transgender laws, so mostly men out of women's sports. That's passing in Washington, one of the bluest states in the country. I believe there's another one passing, maybe North Carolina. I can't remember where it was. Nebraska had one pass. Another big one that we should care about, Idaho had an amendment to repeal their abortion ban. That failed, so remains illegal there. 00:16:00 Speaker 1: That's the second amendment. 00:16:02 Speaker 4: It's the second time we've won an up or down 50% vote. So South Dakota did that in 24. But now we did it in Idaho in a bad year. Of course, in Florida, we also survived where that was a 60% vote. So it got majority, but it didn't clear that threshold. So we've got wins there. We have a few of those. 00:16:17 Speaker 1: And that's important because what they'll say is the policies are unpopular. No. Some of the policies that we push hardest on, like the Save America Act, voter ID in federal elections, those are popular. Those are winning in a blue tsunami year. The other thing that is important to note, the exit polls indicated that Republicans still scored favorably on immigration. Now, there's a lot of, I think, questions being asked about did we pursue our immigration agenda in the right way? The critics will say it was too shock and awe, it was too in-your-face, it was too much public raids on the streets, and we should have focused more on businesses. My answer to that is no. Yes to all of the above. Why we didn't focus more on businesses is a giant looming question, but we should now. And if you do that, maybe you can avoid some of the optics that the Democrats feast on. Here's another one. This is from Echelon Insights 304. In their own words, Trump voters who now disapprove. What were their biggest issue? Economy and cost of living. Foreign policy wars, including Iran. 00:17:30 Speaker 5: Okay. 00:17:30 Speaker 1: The economy cost of living was by far and away the top. 00:17:34 Speaker 4: I can't afford to live. That is one of the quotes they have there. 00:17:38 Speaker 1: And yeah, in 2024, I got the impression that he, being Trump, was going to support the country a lot more than he has been. Now his actions have increased the cost of living. Now, some of this, again, is perception over reality. But when you have a war in Iran, every knock on effect, gas prices is going to impact the perception of the electorate even more. The high inflation caused by the endless wars and how he campaigned for no more endless wars. 00:18:08 Speaker 4: And I think this is a very powerful, and this is another quote, the on-again, off-again situation with tariffs is causing unnecessary problems. That's the thing with tariffs. It's hard to critique that too hard because in contrast with the war, something we didn't run on, nobody really expected, and they feel really betrayed. If tariffs are tough, that's a harder one because Trump 100% campaigned on doing tariffs. It is his signature issue that he's passionate about. But I think that highlights an important aspect of it, which is that they were rolled out and announced very abruptly. He did those Liberation Day tariffs. There was a lot of, he's announcing new, really aggressive tariffs on X that are taking effect next week. And then they would suddenly get turned off after something. And then he would say they're coming back. And if you were an actual small business owner, someone who's reliant on imports from China for certain inputs in your business. That made things really uncertain. It made things very difficult. I think a lot of ordinary business owners, that was just a really stressful thing. And if you're not in that world, it's difficult to see that. But it mattered a lot for those people. And I think that's an important thing when we talk about the economy and cost of living. It's not just that the war made it worse. I do think there was an aspect where the way this administration presented its policies to the world made it worse. People have brought up the ballroom. We like the ballroom. We like the idea of the ballroom, but it was also clearly a gigantic passion project of the administration that was going on for months and months. And that's probably not the best look if other people are really concerned about inflation and their sense is this is a top priority for the administration ahead of fixing that. And that might not even be true, but it is a perception some voters have. 00:19:56 Speaker 1: I think that the most common text I got from people, and again, I'm not necessarily pointing my finger at any one person. But the most common text I got from people was that they felt like the president had been tone deaf on things like that. Now, I believe that the president was putting up huge wins. We did hold shows on the wins that the president was putting up, that the administration was putting up. But if it's coming down to shows like this to make that point, that's a problem. And. I can't tell you how many people were frustrated about the renaming things and things like that. And by the way, all of these things are totally fine if the economy is rip-roaring, if inflation, if gas prices are down. 00:20:34 Speaker 4: And another one as an example. So there were 43 or so, 43 or 44 data center-related measures on the ballot. And– I think they went 43 to 1. Harwood, North Dakota, a town of about 400 people, they voted in favor of data centers outside Fargo. So from Fargo to the future, every data center has got to be built there now. Well, and that affects places like Greg Abbott in Texas. So, and yeah, voters who said AI was a big part of their vote, which wasn't as important as the economy or the war, but they did exist. They were tilting left. And as an example, Trump spent a lot of this past fall really pushing, oh, we're going to call it super intelligence now. If you call it AI... You're not with us. Like that was clearly his point of emphasis. And you mentioned tone deafness. I think people who are worried that AI or SI or whatever is going to take their job. that is not going to satisfy them that things are fine. What if instead it was he was getting promises from, you know, Anthropic is about to do an IPO. What if he did an announcement with Dario Amadai where Dario says, we're going to be putting a share of the new Anthropic IPO in every single Trump account? Something like that where you really make the pitch, I know you're all worried about AI, but everyone is going to have a stake in it succeeding. So it's not going to replace you. It's going to enrich you. And that's a long-term strategy. But I think if you had a lot of that and that's what the administration was leading with all the time, it would have satisfied a lot of people more. Another issue, and I think about this with the young men turning on us. People are debating, did a perception of corruption in the administration play a role? I think it did. We know young men love betting on sports. They love going on those prediction markets. They like cryptocurrency. What's some of the stuff we've had in the last few years? We've had a Trump coin. We've had these crypto pump and dump type adventures. with cryptocurrency. 00:22:24 Speaker 1: Alleged. Alleged. 00:22:25 Speaker 4: We've had, you know, allegations of insider trading on prediction markets that people were making money by saying we're going to bomb Iran or go into Venezuela. Like someone in the administration was able to profit off of that. And you know who would instantly know about that? Young men who actually like playing the. 00:22:42 Speaker 1: Field of those apps. They were very cute in on all of those rumors and allegations. And again, perception becomes reality. And you've got to address those things head on. And by the way, You know who's talking about that today and yesterday is Ron DeSantis out of Florida. All right, everybody, if you have a family, you know that you got to be prepared for your family. 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So the morning after, what are some things that you learned from what happened last night? 00:25:10 Speaker 5: Okay. 00:25:10 Speaker 3: So the first and most important is that the Iran war is not just unpopular, it's catastrophically unpopular. And that has a whole series of implications about how Republicans need to handle it going forward. That means originally the idea to go into war was a mistake. And it's a mistake regardless of whether or not you think the substantive benefits are good, if you think it is good to have deprived Iran of its ballistics, which I do, if you think it's good to have really put a lot of pain on the Iranian regime to have destroyed their military capabilities, I think that's all great. But you still have to think about, you know, there's a reason when you're in a plane, you have to put on your own face mask, your own mask first before you help anybody else. If you if we lose the country over it, then on net, it's bad. And moreover, all the sort of, you of how we would end up bringing the war to a successful conclusion. If the war is catastrophically unpopular, then political will is a resource in foreign policy as much as any munition. So if you don't have the political will for your plan, then it means that your plan is bad and it won't work. And so that also implicates what we need to do going forward. It means we need to bring the war to an end immediately. The people have spoken. They want the war over. That much is obvious. And so we need to end it. And that's true even if we think that the geopolitical consequences of fending it will be bad, which I do. I don't think the geopolitical consequences will be good for the United States. I think we're going to have to deal with some problems as a result of having to pull out in a sort of hasty manner. I think it's going to have knock-on effects that we don't like. But that doesn't matter because the consequences of Democrats having full control of the government in 2028 if they win the White House are extraordinary and worse than the potential knock-on effects geopolitically that we're going to have to deal with from a pullout. So the answer is the war needs to end. in short order. And then even if that means, you know, I mean, I think probably it looks like honestly, something like the Joe Kent plan, which is he described it to me in our debates was along the lines of we remove the naval blockade, we maintain the sanctions and try and make a deal with Iran to remove the remaining sanctions. But that's that's sort of what I think needs to happen. I think people I also think that it's it's a lesson. I don't think anybody gets to protect their hobby horse in terms politically, like the idea that somehow tariffs aren't also a problem here. Like you can look at the numbers are tariffs did not help. Cost of living was a huge problem. So I think the administration needs to, everybody kind of needs to get on board with the idea we have to win the White House in 28. A true disaster could result from unified Democrat government. And we need to be pulling every lever to do what is necessary to show that we've heard what the voters have said and change our policy. 00:27:53 Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think it's important to emphasize that point, that why it's important to win in 28 especially is because Democrats, the census, but also just because Democrats got a lot of, Senate upsets, they now will have a majority that can push through pretty radical stuff. It will be very hard for us to retake the Senate. Until 2032. 2030, 2032, yeah. In 2032, we'll have a great election cycle because there might be a Democrat in Mississippi who's up, and they're probably not going to do great. It's going to be a very winnable race. 00:28:23 Speaker 1: What you said, though, is I think really profound, Will. You said that means was getting into this war a mistake? The answer is yes. 00:28:33 Speaker 4: By definition. 00:28:33 Speaker 1: Even if that has negative geopolitical ramifications. And I heard Matt Walsh say it last night. He said, I'd rather Iran have a nuke than to let commies run America. Now, there's people in this audience that are going to find that crazy. And I understand it. But what I think we can look back and say, you know, the midnight hammer strikes were one thing. That was a precision strike. We got in, got out. And if we had to do it again, I think there would have been less pushback, less blowback of another precision strike. But what we ended up doing, the ramifications politically are disastrous. And there needs to be a real come to Jesus moment and be willing to be honest about that, because guess what? You know, we might not control the Senate till 2032. At that point, I believe, uh, What is it? Or not Scalia. I keep saying Scalia. Alito is going to be 82 and Clarence Thomas is going to be 84. So either, you know, we can't replace them as is. If we had a great night last night and we went into. 28, there's still nobody who could really replace them. They're just that good. So, I mean, we're stuck in a position where either they retire early and we try and ram them through in six weeks, which would definitely inspire the Democrats to pack the court and expand it to 13. 00:29:57 Speaker 6: Correct. 00:29:57 Speaker 3: Yeah, that's not a good strategy because it'll delegitimize the court. 00:30:01 Speaker 1: Exactly. Or we just make sure we wrap them in bubble wrap and take them to the doctors every week and do full body scans to make sure they're OK. I mean, these are our options right now. So the ramifications also for the census. All right. So if we don't win in 28 and I want everybody to start putting all of your energy and your mindset into 2028, because if we don't win that with the redoing of the census in 2030, because remember, 2020 was botched with covid. It's a it's a mess. And the 2030 census is going to move a lot more political power into states that Republicans should control. But we didn't last night. I guess the question then becomes, OK, so if it was if it was the wrong political mistake, the wrong political calculus to go in at all and then to not take the MOU off ramp. Who who ends up coming out at all unscathed? Who has a potential in twenty twenty eight? At this point, Will, so DeSantis is making a lot of noise yesterday and today. You've got a lot of people saying Rubio, a lot of people saying Vance. How does this change how you're thinking about 2028? 00:31:08 Speaker 3: Well, it blows everything wide open, right? And obviously it's suddenly, I mean... If Trump changes course and improves his standing, which happens, right? I mean, you look back at Clinton in 94. He got wiped out in that first midterm and then came back to win re-election. So it's not unheard of. I mean, two years is a long time in politics. Things could change a lot in terms of how Trump's endorsement is perceived. But you see the fact that J.D. put out that post today where he's saying clearly the Iran war was a mistake. It wasn't worth the loss of our Senate seats. And that's not the same message that Trump was putting out on Hannity last night or on Fox, at least. I think it was Hannity. So, you know, obviously, J.D. 's willing to break a little bit with the president. So it's it's much more wide open. Like before this midterm, I would have said to you that whoever Trump picks will be the nominee. Now, I don't think that's as obvious at all. And I think it's also going to lead to some interesting consequences. Like even if, for example, say Trump wanted to continue the war and wanted to escalate things. Well, it's not merely that there's going to be 56, 57 Democratic senators who are going to want to oppose that. It's that the remaining senators see the writing on the wall and aren't going to want to lose their seats in the next cycle. So they're probably would be willing to override a veto to defund it. So I think it's not even just even whether or not you think the war should end. I mean, I think it should end as a result of this thing. But whether or not you think that it kind of has to and it will. I don't think Republican senators are willing to give up their seats. Trump may not be running for reelection again, but those senators are. 00:32:35 Speaker 4: I even go beyond that. When I think about what would have to bring people back, because I think there's a lot of burned trust that people said, OK, I'll give Trump a shot in 24. I think he's a different type of Republican. He's not like Bush. He's not like these people who love these Middle East conflicts. He's not like Lindsey Graham. And they feel really burned by that. Do you even think it's enough to end the war? I almost worry you've got to be ending the war and then also be saying, I'm also bringing troops home. I'm closing bases down in the Middle East. I'm making it so this can't happen again. Do we need to be talking that level of change in our Middle East policies? 00:33:14 Speaker 3: Probably, honestly, and I think it wouldn't even be a bad idea. I think one of the interesting military aspects of this war is it revealed that fixed bases aren't very useful in the Middle East because they're just sitting ducks for ballistic missiles and drones. you'll notice that we kind of withdrew all our troops from our forward bases and put them on carriers that were moving so they couldn't be easily hit by ballistics. So I think that would be probably a wise thing to do anyway. There's a whole different set of interesting military issues to talk about with this war, what it revealed about modern military doctrine, where we're weak, where we're strong. And that's a whole other show's worth of stuff. But yeah, I think that back to your original question, yeah, I think there's a lot that has to be done on this front. But in a world where things go back to improving and, you know, the next two years are laser focused on the economy, I think, you know, people have short memories in the same way that, you know, we won. Trump won and then lost and then won again and then is now has lost a big midterm. 00:34:09 Speaker 1: So, you know, one of my biggest frustration, my frustrations, Will, is the short term memory that people have for immigration, forgetting the caravans that were coming over and, you know, storming the border and customs and border patrol and how, but, but the wrong lesson at the same time that would, we could take from last night is that immigration was somehow a loser for us. The exit polls actually show that as the lone bright spot really is they still like Republicans on immigration more. That is a good sign. So when you look at young men going far, far to the left, when you look at Latinos going far to the left, the fact that we were still on exit polls winning on one issue, immigration, tells you just about everything you need to know. And I will say, I don't remember anybody running on immigration. I don't remember any of the messages. 00:34:58 Speaker 4: The New York Times didn't talk about it in their Democrat endorsement. They talked about Trump's out of control, that the war is bad. They talked about things like that. They didn't talk about immigration. And they did in 2018 and 2020. That's the dog that didn't bark. 00:35:10 Speaker 1: Right there. Immigration. Guess who did talk about immigration a lot? One person that I can think of. Brandon Gill. And he won his seat handily in... in a district that went 11 points for Tal Riko. The other issue when we're talking about Iran is Israel. J.D. brought it up. You are an Israel supporter. But how does this make you, as somebody that is a supporter of Israel, how does this change your thinking? Maybe it doesn't. But what are you now contemplating on that topic specifically? 00:35:43 Speaker 3: Well, I mean, the funny thing is, I think on the core U.S.-Israel issue of, say, financing for aid, I mean, Trump announced that was going away. And that's something that not only I support, but most people would, I think, be surprised to find out most right-wing Israelis support it as well. They want, they feel like it's a way that they can be controlled by the United States themselves, which is sort of ironic given the way that this debate normally happens. But that's actually true. I would say that in terms of, I mean, some people want to go further and sort of like end the American-Israeli alliance. I think that would be a very, very dramatic mistake. And that's really at first and foremost based on concrete American interests. Israel is a cybersecurity power and an AI power. Both of those things are going to be extraordinarily important for the United States going forward. And many of the arguments I hear from people are something along the lines of, well, they remind me of the 1970s. There's something like, oh, well, it's Israel that's creating all these problems for us in the Arab world, and we improve our relations with Arab countries and improve our ability to access oil. But we're actually the biggest oil producing country in the world. The real, and honestly, AI and cyber technology is going to be much, much more important in the coming 20, 30 years for our national security than any of this stuff. That said, I think that Israel rightly will, I think, understand that our availability to help in their conflicts is basically zeroed out for the foreseeable future, that they are going to need to handle everything on their own. And I think they're in a much stronger position to do so now after the events of the last few years. 00:37:12 Speaker 1: Well, you know what's interesting is that when we're looking at those exit polls, there was a lot of ink spilled in Michigan that the Jewish vote was going to come Mike Rogers' way. Exit polls would indicate the opposite, that they basically stayed static, that you got about two-thirds that vote Democrat and one-third that vote Republican. So we didn't even see a movement there. And I think that those exit polls are going to echo the ripple effects from those. You can expect those in a lot of talking points from Israel skeptics moving forward. 00:37:38 Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I'll push back a little bit on that, because remember, we only won 51 percent of the white vote. 00:37:43 Speaker 5: Right. 00:37:43 Speaker 3: The directionally do we want a lot. You know, the Jews trended towards us while basically everybody else trended Democrat. So in a normal election year, I think we actually probably would have, you know, if it were a D plus one environment instead of a D plus 13 environment, we're looking at maybe 55, 45. 00:37:59 Speaker 1: So there's, there's a. 00:37:59 Speaker 3: Lot of, you know, that's non-trivial. And also, I mean, El-Sayed performed way underneath almost all the other Senate candidates. 00:38:06 Speaker 1: You almost got me excited last night when I saw your tweet on it, you were like, don't sleep on that. I was like, Oh, Oh, I went right back into the numbers. 00:38:14 Speaker 4: It was a closer race than Texas. 00:38:16 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:38:16 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:38:16 Speaker 3: It was closer than Iowa, closer than Kansas. The only really one that did better was Susan Collins in Maine's, which of course she would. But, you know, El-Sayed dramatically underperformed. He was a repellent candidate who drove a lot of people who loathe Republicans to vote Republican. So I wouldn't say now that said, I think this has to be tempered by the fact that the Jewish population in this country is not massive. And so, you know, you obviously shouldn't think like, ah, the real way we're going to win going forward is by going hard for the Jewish vote. But it's also not a reason to antagonize it. 00:38:46 Speaker 1: Yeah, I will tell you that there is– one of the main things that I'm seeing is people are really upset at Mark Thiessen. You know that op-ed? I saw that everywhere. There's no downside to striking a run. I mean, one of the wrongest headlines– I mean, to be fair, Mark probably didn't write the headline. The editors at The Washington Post probably wrote that. But, I mean, the substance of the op-ed was directionally in that line. So– I've seen that everywhere. I've seen a lot of people upset with the neocons writ large and this sort of thing. And I think there's some truth here. I think that they read the room wrong. I think that they read the room wrong and people like Charlie read the room right. Because guess what? He was talking to students all the time. He was talking to our kids. I can tell you that in... South Carolina for example a lot of our chapter members at Clemson they didn't like Darlene they didn't want to vote for Darlene because they associated her with Lindsey Graham in the war in Iran and so that's just a political reality and that's going to have ramifications with Israel moving forward it just is And those are hard politics. Well, last minute and a half here. Anything else that you think is important that we're looking at right now as we assess the aftermath? 00:39:59 Speaker 3: Yeah, I want to answer, you know, point out that we, you know, I'm helped out with NatCon and the Edmund Burke Foundation and we put on NatCon Jerusalem and it took an enormous amount of heat. um from pro-israel forces for having bringing young new right people to kind of come to israel and describe like how things are changing among the relationship we took an enormous amount of heat for that uh from from pro-israel forces and i think that the election results kind of show why we did that uh that this is this is a real issue that needs to be confronted honestly and not have people to get shouted down uh if they're you know have questions about the u.s israel relationship And I think it really does need to be rebuilt on firmer foundations. 00:40:36 Speaker 1: I completely agree, Will. And I don't mean to paint you as some sort of starry-eyed, no-questions-asked guy, because that's not what you are. You are a nuanced guy. You're looking deeply at that issue, and you understand that there are headwinds there for that alliance. And I think those are really important. I mean, for me, I draw the line at, it's kind of like, porn, right? The famous, you know, you know, when you see it, anti-Semitism, you know, when you see it and you know, the ADL and all these guys have done such a disservice to Jews around the world by calling things that were anti-Semitic, anti-Semitic. 00:41:12 Speaker 4: That's why Charlie started using Jew hate. 00:41:13 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:41:14 Speaker 1: So we, we don't even use that word anymore. Most of the time it's Jew hate, you know, when you see it, but there's a lot of things that are called anti-Semitic that are simply are not. And we need to be open to those conversations. What you guys did in Jerusalem at NatCon was important and really important first step and very prescient. Will Chamberlain, thank you, my friend. Thank you for your honesty. We'll talk to you soon. An important message from Noble Gold Investments. November 3rd, control of Congress is on the line. And whatever happens, your savings are going to feel it. If Democrats take power, we could be looking at years of gridlock, followed by the same policies that fueled inflation before. More spending, bigger deficits, and a weaker dollar. We lived through this already. In June 2022, inflation was out of control and unchecked. Now, the national debt is over $ 40 trillion, and Washington isn't slowing down. What has gold done since 2022? Doubled. Up over 100%. That's right. You can't control what happens on election day. You can control how prepared you are. That's why so many Americans are turning to physical gold and silver. Visit noblegoldinvestments.com slash kirk. That's noblegoldinvestments.com slash kirk. And download your free wealth protection kit. Noblegoldinvestments.com slash kirk. Is your wealth protected? If not, now is the time to act. Past performance does not guarantee future results. It is the day after... And we are looking through the rubble, trying to make sense of what just happened. And one man who has been proven right, who's a friend, somebody I stay in constant contact with and pick his brain on polling. And man, I can tell you, even behind the scenes, he was right. And now his book is surging again on Amazon. So pick up a copy of it, burn it down, uh, with Rich Barris and Joshua Lysak. Those are the authors. Rich, welcome back to the show. Um, You know, I talked to you this morning, Rich. Better late than never, brother. 00:43:11 Speaker 7: What? 00:43:13 Speaker 6: Better late than never, brother. 00:43:14 Speaker 5: I know, right? 00:43:15 Speaker 1: Pick up the book. You know, I talked– I mean, listen. I know that there's a lot of visceral anger that you feel because you feel a little bit like the prophet in the Old Testament waving your hand saying, you know, guys, you got to wake up. This is what's happening. And they didn't listen. And a lot of people attacked you. And I want to– Putting that aside, because we've all been attacked. Jeez, I've been attacked a lot. 00:43:43 Speaker 4: Yeah, of course. 00:43:45 Speaker 1: But putting that aside, we need to look at the numbers, right? Some of the exit polling, right? And we need to start identifying what really happened here and what they were responding to, because I think different groups were responding to different things, right? You've got young men. They went hard left. We've got Latinos going left, but Blake made a good point. Not as far left as they were in 2020. So maybe we, maybe there's some, some more, I don't know. 00:44:14 Speaker 6: Well, that depends where. 00:44:15 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:44:15 Speaker 1: Okay. Fair enough. 00:44:16 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:44:17 Speaker 1: So, but the point is each group is probably responding to the big overall economy, affordability around war topics, maybe a little tariffs here and there, but there's other things that played a part in this too, right? The perception of, you know, corruption within the admin. There's, uh, the, uh, You know, the other things of, you know, naming ballrooms and things like this, naming bodies of water, ballrooms, beautification. If you had to pick the top three buckets for what moved the electorate and I'm going to pull up the exit poll here, we'll go one by one. But give us your top three. 00:44:52 Speaker 5: All right. 00:44:53 Speaker 6: So the narrative was was this. It was this. 00:44:58 Speaker 7: Blaming the Iran war, which was a broken promise, we have to call it what it is, all right? If you want to have any hope to fix things, guys, you have to address it head on, and you have to call it what it is, even if it upsets people, and even if it, you know, could get you in a little trouble. 00:45:14 Speaker 4: The voters were. 00:45:15 Speaker 7: Promised no new wars, and a man that they know has been able to laser focus, target on the economy, and make their lives better. They picked him and brought him back because... Everything during the Biden administration was just lies and they made a mistake and they knew they made that mistake and they wanted Trump back because they knew he could be, he was a good president. He could keep foreign policy, you know, to a quiet noise because he's just handling deals like the Abraham Accords and he could be laser focused on the economy. Number one, 100% was prices and cost of living, but. 00:45:51 Speaker 6: It wasn't just that. It's not just an economic message. 00:45:55 Speaker 7: Guys, prices were getting better before we started the Iran war. 00:45:58 Speaker 6: They knew that. 00:46:01 Speaker 7: So they blamed the war and they blamed the lobby and this broken promise for the economy getting worse, which is why when they asked, do you blame Trump for prices? Do you blame Trump for the economy? I think those numbers, they're bad and they're somewhat unfair. His supporters will say they're somewhat unfair, but what they're missing is they blamed the war for those prices. They blamed the war for the economy. So they held him personally responsible for it. 00:46:29 Speaker 6: And Republicans are losers. Let me just say this. 00:46:31 Speaker 7: Everyone who wants to pile on the president this morning and they want to blame the president, you guys were losers before Donald Trump came along and you'll be losers after Donald Trump is gone if you don't learn the right lessons. He taught you the right lesson. It's economic populism. It's America first. 00:46:48 Speaker 6: It's no new wars. It is not going back. 00:46:52 Speaker 7: To corporate oligarchy that the Republican Party represented before Donald Trump came along. 00:46:56 Speaker 1: I have a question on that, Rich. There's been a lot of people that have been made, a lot of people have made the point that this, you know, when you expand a coalition, right? So we've got, now we've got the tech bros. We've got a bunch of tech bros that like joined in 2024. How much did that perception in your polling and what you can see, did that bleed into this feeling that the admin had been co-opted by this sort of tech oligarchy? 00:47:21 Speaker 7: The interesting thing about this, this is a great question, man, because the interesting thing is that Elon Musk, when he was pushed out, was actually still extremely popular among under 45-year-old men. Where his numbers went south was actually with older people during Doge, the boomers. 00:47:37 Speaker 6: Who thought, he's going to cut my social security, all right? 00:47:41 Speaker 1: Which, by the way, look what we did. 00:47:42 Speaker 7: We sacrificed our entire coalition to win boomers by about four points. 00:47:46 Speaker 1: It was pathetic. 00:47:47 Speaker 6: Um, but in any event, um, he, it's not the tech bros. It's how they advanced. 00:47:53 Speaker 7: Well, they didn't advance the conversation about artificial intelligence and data centers. We had polling out of the years over this, Andrew, they wanted the, they wanted the data centers in, uh, urban areas. They were more popular in urban areas yet. They were being dumped and, or the threat of being dumped in, you know, um, rural areas in Florida where there's, you know, uh, a Gator alley and, Even in Texas, there were rural farmers who were telling us, I don't want it here. 00:48:20 Speaker 4: Iowa, Ohio, everywhere. 00:48:22 Speaker 7: And they didn't even bother, like the war, they didn't even bother to engage in a conversation. They thought a one and a half point national popular vote lead in 2024 was enough to just browbeat people and do whatever you want. That's not how this goes today. And unfortunately, when you don't engage the American public and you don't win them over, you lose their favor, and they start to begin to not trust you. And this just be– like so many of these other issues, it became a credibility gap. So even by the time they realized they had a problem with data centers, you have to understand when you lose the trust of the voter, later if you try to come back and talk to them about these things, they just don't believe you. So that is a textbook example of what happened here. Data centers, Iran– Israel, whatever issue it was, they were in this credibility gap. So if they even by this time attempted to pivot, it almost wouldn't have worked. They just ran through things, brother, without even trying to Yeah, it was. 00:49:21 Speaker 4: I even remember in 2025 hearing people in D.C. say a lot of people are behaving like. they have won every election for the rest of time that we will never lose power, never lose an election again. Like incredible overconfidence, smugness, hubris, hubris. 00:49:37 Speaker 3: Yes. 00:49:38 Speaker 4: Uh, but so I want to ask you, cause I see some people mentioning, uh, corruption as a topic. Tanner Greer on X is a guy I like to read. He said, topics are Iran and corruption. He talked about betting market stuff, the, the sense that there's insider dealing within the administration that relates to the tech question, of course. 00:49:56 Speaker 1: As well. 00:49:57 Speaker 4: Uh, You talk to a lot of people. Is there awareness of that? Do you think that that played a role in the election in the sense that the administration had corrupt people in it, or was that not coming up? No, it did. 00:50:10 Speaker 7: We do a rank distribution for the most important issues, so we don't say, which are number one? I mean, we do that too, but we'll say, rank your issues, your top 10 or your top 12, and we do 12 most of the time. And everything else, we just don't even show if it's not making it onto that list. But corruption and accountability– surged and bumped other issues like crime and safety where republicans had some strength it bumped foreign policy guys was always like seven to nine nobody cared um incorruption and accountability i believe. 00:50:41 Speaker 6: Ended four nationally i. 00:50:42 Speaker 7: Have to go look it up but it came out of nowhere so did ai data centers which i believe ended just ahead of foreign policy it was there and i'll tell you what opened the door to it epstein and it's not even like there's something there that they're saying okay there's something in the epstein files It was a proxy. You're not going to hold the ruling class accountable. And now I'm hearing all these stories about crypto this and, you know, pardons that. 00:51:05 Speaker 1: It just all people. This is so key, Rich, what you're talking about, because when when I call them psychic breaks with the base, you know. 00:51:13 Speaker 6: You were right about that. I remember that last year. 00:51:15 Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Trump said you remember when he famously said I could shoot somebody on Fifth or Sixth Avenue, I forget which Avenue, and my base would still have me. And that was true at the time. And I think there was this belief that that would hold true. But when you have these psychic breaks with stuff that are wildly important to the base, like Epstein, then every other thing becomes magnified that they have an issue with. And it's because of the credibility gap that starts emerging. Everything gets nitpicked. Everything gets awfulized in the voting electorate. Even the base starts applying the worst possible interpretation to all of those topics. That's right. And so when you talk about things that open the door to things, that's what we're talking about. And some of it is irrational. And I think that's why some of the emails we get, like, some of it's irrational. Perception is reality. Yes, we are aware that President Trump is touting White House renovations right now. 00:52:14 Speaker 4: We've got a lot of your emails. 00:52:16 Speaker 1: Yeah. We're aware of it. Yeah. Apparently, he also did acknowledge that the Iran war tanked everything. So Rich Barris is with us. Rich, one of the more interesting things that is coming out of this is how this changes the landscape for 2028 and why 2028 matters. Let me just remind you, for a lot of reasons. I mean, I think the Democrats, if they get control of power in 2028, they will destroy America. I think as big as 2026 was, 2028 is existential. It is completely existential. Right now, we still have a conservative executive, okay? But 2028 will then control the census in 2030. Yes. 00:52:55 Speaker 7: And that's going to control— And there actually will be redistricting in 2028. 00:52:58 Speaker 6: That's why this was important. Last night was important because we just got rap kicked out of us. 00:53:05 Speaker 1: And it's a problem. We got bodied. We got bloodied. I mean, it was a bad night. 00:53:10 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:53:11 Speaker 1: Interestingly enough, DeSantis timed this Stephen A. Smith interview for the day of the, it came out the day of the election. He named names like Kristi Noem. I think he said Corey Lewandowski. Deserved. Talked about civic virtue. He talked about how he sold all his stocks and, you know, he didn't trade at all when he was in Congress. Scoring a lot of, I mean, honestly, it's like hard to believe that wasn't timed on purpose. Because it was such a litany of things. Yeah, of course. So now the three names that I'm hearing, and there could be a dark horse candidate. I still think there could be. JD, Marco, now DeSantis is a lot louder today. What do you make of this new landscape and what's emerging after last night? 00:54:00 Speaker 7: Funny thing, the Florida, the Sunshine State poll that we did, which was correct. And we caught a lot of flack for it because we showed a very close governance race, and that was right. So our record in Florida goes unmatched again. I had– we had Vance DeSantis Rubio for the nomination in the Sunshine State in Florida. Here's my concern, and I think the Florida governor is a fantastic governor. I think he's probably everyone's favorite governor ever. Right. 00:54:32 Speaker 6: On the Republican side. 00:54:33 Speaker 1: And I know there are a lot of it's not by. 00:54:35 Speaker 5: Yes. 00:54:35 Speaker 1: At that point. 00:54:36 Speaker 6: No, DeSantis. 00:54:37 Speaker 5: No. 00:54:37 Speaker 7: Byron's got to earn his earn his way. And let's hope he governs better than he campaigns. I'm just saying it. Look, the problem I have is that I'm a numbers guy and I look at the map and I'm just going to say this flatly as clearly as I can. because I can clearly see the bad actors already. They wake up early and they start all over again, even though they didn't just resolve. 00:54:59 Speaker 1: They just, yes. You consider bad actors. 00:55:02 Speaker 4: Brother, they're bad actors. 00:55:03 Speaker 1: I mean, there's a lot of bad actors. Yeah, they're bad actors. 00:55:06 Speaker 6: I don't consider them. 00:55:06 Speaker 1: They are bad actors. 00:55:08 Speaker 7: They have their own interests in mind. They don't have the interest of the, the president, what the future is with his family, making sure that his family isn't hunted to the ends of the earth when he's. 00:55:17 Speaker 6: Out of the white house. 00:55:19 Speaker 4: His kids. 00:55:19 Speaker 7: I mean, these are the things that the president is going to have to worry about in the very near future. All these people care about is how much PAC money they can bill to their firms. 00:55:30 Speaker 1: That's all. 00:55:31 Speaker 7: And Marco Rubio has zero chance to win the presidency. 00:55:35 Speaker 1: Of the United States. 00:55:35 Speaker 4: Why do you say that, Rich? 00:55:36 Speaker 1: You told me that on the phone. 00:55:37 Speaker 2: Zero. 00:55:38 Speaker 1: Why? Break it down. Be specific. We got three minutes left here. Let me be specific. Yeah, which groups is he not able to capture? 00:55:43 Speaker 4: Marco Rubio cannot win. 00:55:45 Speaker 6: He cannot win. The Midwest. 00:55:47 Speaker 7: And you cannot get to 270 unless you win the Rust Belt and part of the Mid-Atlantic. 00:55:52 Speaker 1: He can't do it. 00:55:52 Speaker 6: He's not going to win the white working class. 00:55:54 Speaker 1: Could he bring back North Carolina and Georgia, though? 00:55:57 Speaker 7: He doesn't in our polling, which we're going to reveal very soon. The entire time we've been polling, I haven't released it all. We've done not just top of the tickets, but combinations of tickets. This idea that Marco Rubio is a Hispanic, so he's going to win Hispanics in Texas and a growing population of Hispanics in Georgia. 00:56:14 Speaker 4: Is laughable. 00:56:16 Speaker 7: An 80-year-old billionaire from Queens, New York, won more Hispanics than any Republican presidential candidate in the history. 00:56:24 Speaker 1: Of the exit polls. It's more vibe and riz. It's more charisma. It's attitudinal. Riz, it's more swagger. It's like, and I do agree with that. 00:56:31 Speaker 6: It's a rational policy choice, brother. They don't like this. 00:56:34 Speaker 7: Marco's being all quiet and cute right now about how he's not a neocon. 00:56:38 Speaker 6: He is a neocon. And that foreign policy killed. 00:56:42 Speaker 1: Us last night. DeSantis has got that label before in the past too, Rich, that DeSantis has the neocon thing, right? When it came to Ukraine and he made some comments during that. 00:56:51 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:56:52 Speaker 1: Do you not think that that would impact him? We'll see. 00:56:55 Speaker 7: I'm actually willing to give DeSantis a little bit of a chance because just from things that I see him say, it's possible for people to have a sincere change of opinion. And I can't help but to wonder if that actually is the case with DeSantis. But my issue is how– it doesn't matter what I think. It's how voters are going to look at these men and how they're going to think. There's going to be one guy who comes out of this thing saying, not only was I not for this, I tried to stop it. There's one guy who is a millennial veteran from the Midwest who can win the Midwest. And I don't even think it's fair for us to do this to the vice president, just so I'm very clear. I'm not sure we deserve him. I'm not sure it's fair to put all of this on his shoulders. I know that other people are like, hey, you don't get to pick fate. 00:57:44 Speaker 1: No, he does. 00:57:45 Speaker 6: It's up to him. It's his own future. But I'm telling you, he is the only one who can win. 00:57:51 Speaker 1: Do you think that he can pull out of what just happened last night and put the coalition back together or a coalition that you do? Give me the list of the five groups. I think he's the only one. 00:58:05 Speaker 4: Yeah, this is perfect. 00:58:06 Speaker 7: I think he's the only one who can do it, but it's narrow to be sure, guys. He has to take a certain stance, but I got the polling to prove it. I mean, young men are a massive problem. That's going to be an issue for us. The white working class in general swung against us. They went back almost to the— most of them who swung against us, a lot of them just stayed home. That's a big problem. So we need someone who can turn them out. Hispanics, again, do not vote for last name. They make rational policy choices like everybody else. Go look at the vice president's tweet today. He's the only one who so far, as somebody who pulled the selection correctly and spoke to God knows how many Americans— He's the only one who articulated why we lost correctly. 00:58:48 Speaker 1: That's it. 00:58:48 Speaker 7: And yes, DeSantis tried, you know, that night before to do it. And I see the clock running out, but unless you were there, I'm not sure you truly know. 00:58:58 Speaker 1: Burn it down. New bestseller. Rich, Rich is getting that second wave of book sales today. Go check it out. 00:59:06 Speaker 4: Rich. 00:59:06 Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us. 00:59:07 Speaker 6: Thanks guys. 00:59:10 Speaker 1: Charlie Kirk believed that ideas shape character, conviction, and courage. That's why he spent years studying the classics, the American founding, and the Bible through Hillsdale College's free online courses. Continue that commitment to learning with C.S. Lewis on Christianity, a free seven-lesson course featuring Professor Michael Ward a leading Lewis scholar. Are right and wrong a matter of opinion? How can a good God allow suffering? Lewis's writings take these questions seriously. In works including Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man, he defends moral truth and explores what Christianity asks of us. You'll follow his journey from unbelief to faith and examine his insights into prayer, grief, and the hope of heaven. Discover lessons that challenge you to think very carefully about Christianity and put your understanding into practice. You can enroll today completely free Visit charlieforhillsdale.com to start learning today. That's charlieforhillsdale.com. Learn deeply. Think clearly. Lead boldly. Carry it forward at charlieforhillsdale.com. We've got a ton of emails coming in from you guys. And it's awesome. And I think that's a really good way to end the show today. We're going to interact directly with you if you want to send your thoughts. Freedom at charliekirk.com. We're going to hear directly from you. All right, Blake. Let's hear what the audience is thinking today. 01:00:29 Speaker 6: All right. 01:00:30 Speaker 4: Well, we've got several of them. And so I just queued them up because we have a big range of responses. And we have some people here who might not be here on a normal day as well. People who are, I think, a little more frustrated than our usual viewer. So this is one of the first ones. 01:00:40 Speaker 1: Diane. 01:00:41 Speaker 4: Trump basically lied. No Epstein files released in full. Going to war with Iran. I voted for him three times. He made us look like stupid idiots. 01:00:51 Speaker 1: And. 01:00:51 Speaker 4: You don't have to agree with Diane, but that is a real sentiment. 01:00:54 Speaker 1: A lot of people have. I had family members texting me that way, that they felt foolish. 01:00:59 Speaker 4: They felt like they felt for something. Because I think that war message, it appealed to so many people, it won over a lot of people, and it was just so directly contradicted by events. 01:01:10 Speaker 1: You think about Charlie on college campuses. One of the direct messages that Charlie would go on college campus and talk about is like, hey, if you vote Kamala or Biden, whenever the debate was happening, They might draft you into a war in Ukraine. And so that was something that resonated with young men that didn't want to go fight another foreign war. Again, if you are of a certain age in this country and it's getting older and older and older. Yeah. You grew up with just pure war. 01:01:35 Speaker 4: You grew up with war and you have no memory of us winning wars. So you associate war with. Our country in decline, us losing in the Middle East on stuff that no one can explain to you why it's a good idea. It was such a winning message for Trump to be able to say, for people to say, this is a different type of Republican who gets it on that issue. And it hurt really badly. And that's why I talked with Will. It might not even be enough to end the war. We need to really credibly show we are dismantling the apparatus that made these wars happen. 01:02:02 Speaker 1: I want to add something, too, because I tweeted this morning that it's time to end the Iran war. I have no idea what the reaction to that has been. I got a number of texts from journalists. Here's what I'd say. You know, what somebody said when the first thing I said was, you know, that they said before we got on the show was a little too late. And I will say, sure, I've gotten that critique from Dave Smith last night. The truth is, if you are an avid watcher of this show, you've probably sent me an email or sent Blake an email saying, you guys are too negative on the war. 01:02:34 Speaker 4: Yeah, we've gotten a lot of those. 01:02:36 Speaker 1: So I have been trying to speak up and make my point heard. But yeah, when Trump first did it, we extended him some leash to do what we elected him to do, which is make hard decisions. It has not panned out. It has been a total political loser. And maybe I shouldn't have given him that leash. I certainly didn't want that war in the first place, but we were trying to do the best that we could to honor how Charlie, we thought Charlie would handle it because ultimately we are still trying to live up to some of the things that Charlie left us in the, the vision that Charlie had. And so I, I candidly, it's the most impossible thing for us to be in a position. 01:03:15 Speaker 4: And it's a real thing. A lot of people have tried to get a lot of attention and, money, fame, whatever, by really aggressively saying how Charlie would handle something, react to something, what he would say in the situation. And we're in that tough position because we genuinely knew him and we care about him and we love Charlie and his family of having to be restrained and say, this is a situation he didn't go through. We don't know exactly what he would do. Here's how he handled related things. And that's what we've said. We've said Charlie would have fought against the war before it happened. He would have not been happy that it broke out, but we don't think he would have torn down the president over it. 01:03:56 Speaker 1: You've got to remember, Charlie worked his tail off to get President Trump elected, and he wasn't trying to burn down the coalition. But he would have been very honest about the challenges and the strains that that put on it, and that's what we've been trying to do. But after last night, being very clear— about where that line is, that it's time to end that, I think was fair. 01:04:16 Speaker 4: I think 100%. I think that is what Charlie would be doing. He would be blowing up the White House now saying, guys, you've got to go bold. Go big. Get the focus back on domestic issues, the economy, getting wins for young people, showing that they're your top priority. I think that's what he would be emphasizing. I think that's exactly right. All right. We've got some more here. 01:04:38 Speaker 1: This is one. 01:04:39 Speaker 4: Robin says, we wouldn't be in this situation if Charlie was still with us. He wouldn't have let all of those independent Hispanic black young voters switch over to Democrats. It will take years to recover from these losses. Even if we win the presidency in 28, Democrats will still probably control the House and Senate, maybe the Supreme Court. Trump is now live talking about the ballroom the day after the election, the day before he was talking about the reflecting pool. He has become the Trump builder in his presidency. He is out of touch with the voters who elected him. 01:05:10 Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, listen, I want to address the first part of that, that this wouldn't have happened if Charlie was here. I really I think you we need to be careful. Charlie was uniquely powerful voice and influential voice. And yes, things would have been better with Charlie. But Charlie, you can relate to this, Blake. We had so many conversations yesterday. Looking at the coming fissures and the wedge issues when it comes to Israel and Iran and Epstein, we spent so much time thinking about how to message on that and how to deal with it. Because even Charlie understood that he wasn't going to be able to fix everything that was coming down the pike. So it's important that we don't ascribe supernatural abilities to Charlie that no human has. He was a great man. Yeah, could he have made things better? I definitely think he could have. Would the movement have fractured the way it did if Charlie was still there? Probably not as much, but it definitely would have some. People forget how much Charlie was attacked by very prominent voices. 01:06:08 Speaker 4: If Charlie was still with us, I think we'd have maybe the Mississippi Senate seat. We'd win that instead of being down on it. Maybe we win. Maybe we hang on in Maine. I don't think he would make us not lose in Texas the way we did. 01:06:19 Speaker 1: I just think, yeah, this was so much bigger and so structural that... it really comes down to, this was a, this was a, a rebuttal, a rebuke. I mean, of some of the president's policies. It was, it just, I guess don't get this deep. You don't get a D plus 15 electorate, you know, for nothing. Okay. So, okay. 01:06:43 Speaker 4: Maybe he'd have stopped to the war that then maybe we can talk about that. But even that there were a lot of, there were a lot of voices arguing against the war who were not listened to. And there were a lot of voices fighting for it as well. So next and all right. HC says, either we reset our relationship with Israel and the Middle East, or the Democrats will do it for us after 2028. Thank you for breaking down last night's mess. Keep fighting. 01:07:06 Speaker 1: I think that's totally valid. I think that's totally valid. It's going to happen one way or the other. The question is, you know, and I go back to what Will Chamberlain said in hour one, is it going to happen on a more firm, realistic foundation that actually has both countries' best interests at heart? Or is it going to be just like, shock and awe and and cut off and by the way i have long been you know i don't get any credit for this uh but i because i again i'm i'm trying to be a coalition builder i am often very skeptical about some of the stuff in israel okay but the point that will made is valid the intel sharing and the tech and the data side of things israel is a leader in that and we do benefit by making sure that some of those lines of communication and sharing and cooperation stay open now that doesn't mean we should be subservient to them that doesn't mean that they should be a vassal state of the united states but i completely agree it's going to be reset it will one way or the other the question is on our terms or theirs all right next email all righty. 01:08:11 Speaker 4: Uh So Aaron says, unpopular time to appreciate President Trump and all his allies, but I want to thank you all. It is not the end. We will sort things out later. People feeling betrayed hurt a lot. Hating Israel is not the answer. And this person argues, Aaron says, the Iran war was essential. I am upset, though, about the mishandling of the Epstein files. President Trump proved how to bring fuel prices down. uh duty is duty praise god though for president trump so that's a more pro yeah. 01:08:40 Speaker 1: Well and let me just tell you that there is a truth in what this uh listener said the electorate is fickle what what i'm realizing is these huge swings back and forth are now becoming the political norm and what that says is there's less loyalty to a political tribe and more a hunger for real political change. No status quo. That's what they're saying. 01:09:04 Speaker 4: There's a miasma of like dissatisfaction and unhappiness that people sense America is in decline, that they have a leadership class that is not aligned with their interests and their concerns and that things are bad. And they, are kind of constantly punishing reaching out they love to cyclically punish people unless they're in one of those just an unwinnable state for one party or the other a lot of division and it makes me so sad because I do think they are they're reaching out for a coalition that gets them and speaks to them and we have we had a big chance in 2024 and a lot of damage was done by specific decisions that we made that it's like I said yesterday if we were losing because of the iran if we were losing because of immigration if people said ice is the number one issue we hate the deportations it's so ugly what they've done we don't like it that would stink and we'd have to we'd have to really think oh do we have to change on the issues here do how but no instead they're saying we don't like the things you didn't run on in 2024 we just wish you'd stuck to what you ran on yeah next email got another minute oh yeah for sure uh let's see Bob says, last night's elections were a total catastrophe. I think Charlie would have been and probably is disturbed about the result. The big problem we have is too many spineless Republicans. The leader in the Senate, Thune, they should get him out now. Other Republicans, he is a rhinocrat. We need people like Charlie who never backed down or compromised their Christian principles. 01:10:34 Speaker 1: It's interesting. Speaker Johnson has already said he's not going to run for leadership. Looks like Jim Jordan, Steve Scalise are going to be the new guys running for leadership um you know there's a lot of critics for both those guys but i think jim jordan is somebody who's long been a friend he's got some criticisms that he's you know too buddy buddy with tech and google and things like that i think jim jordan's a good guy um so it'll be interesting to see who who emerges in that fight but yeah dune yeah i think dune is planning to reapply to be leader well. 01:11:05 Speaker 4: He's uh he's got a diminished caucus to say the. 01:11:07 Speaker 1: Least We're getting to your emails here, your reaction to last night. But I want to talk about two things really quickly. One, President Trump, I believe, was talking to Hannity. It could have been Brett Baier. I'm not sure. We'll see you in the clip. But he's talking about how he's open to making a deal with Democrats on immigration. I want to address this really quick. Stop 48. 01:11:24 Speaker 5: Really not in control because they can send over, you know, 50 different great bills that they're all excited about. And I send them back with a nice stamp veto. And, you know, it's There's not a thing they can do about that, and I hope not to have to do that. I'm a person that likes getting things done, but I can work with them on a lot of things. I mean, we can work with them on immigration, I think. Immigration's a big deal. I've always felt we should be able to work on immigration. 01:11:53 Speaker 1: All right, so an immigration deal with this composition in the House and the Senate would be a disaster for Republicans, unless they're willing to really make a concession. Listen, in good faith, I'll wait to see whatever they put forward. But there can be no amnesty. There can be no amnesty. And anything that does not secure and seal the border, dead on arrival. OK, that I mean, by the way, legal immigration should be way curtailed. Those are the things that conservatives would do. At least we thought they would do. They failed to deliver on it. But this is a huge, huge deal if you could open Pandora's box to some really, really scary stuff here. Now, the upshot is that if he does a decent deal or a good-ish deal with Democrats, I have no hope that they would do that. It won't happen. Then maybe you could tie their hands in the future. It's something to think about. Listen, I think Mr. Vito, he truthed out a veto hat, a hat with the word veto on it. I think that's probably the best policy. Don't let these maniacs. screw up our immigration policies, because look at what we've been able to do with the policies on the books. Guaranteed, the rules that are on the books are more sane than what they're going to come up with. All right. Other thing, here's a quick clip. President Trump sort of acknowledges Iran. It's defiant, but it's in there. Stop 47. The people under him were fantastic, all good people. 01:13:23 Speaker 5: I guess right now you have two candidates, right? 01:13:24 Speaker 4: Did you ask him to shut me down? 01:13:27 Speaker 1: No, no, no. 01:13:28 Speaker 3: Mr. 01:13:28 Speaker 6: President, Vice President Vance says the reason Republicans lost last night was the war in Iran. 01:13:35 Speaker 5: Well, I think it's largely true because it drove the gasoline up a little bit short term. And probably that's probably true. But at the same time, if I had it to do again, I'd have to do it again because long term, it's the only answer. 01:13:50 Speaker 4: You can't let Iran have a nuclear war. Do you feel like it was worth it? I do. 01:13:54 Speaker 6: Well, you have no choice. I mean, I thought the oil would go up a lot more, and I did it on that basis. 01:13:59 Speaker 1: You have no choice. 01:14:00 Speaker 4: You have to do it. 01:14:00 Speaker 5: You can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon, or everything that you see here someday might not exist. 01:14:07 Speaker 4: I think that's Trump being defiant, as they say. 01:14:10 Speaker 1: But at least he acknowledged J.D. Vance's tweet. And it wasn't like, well, J.D. 's wrong, or I disagree with J.D. J.D. should stop talking. None of that. It was that I think that's mostly true. And then he said, I would have made the same decision all over again, which is very Trump. 01:14:26 Speaker 4: That's very Trump. 01:14:27 Speaker 1: All right. So I actually look at that as a positive. Go ahead. 01:14:30 Speaker 4: More emails, more emails. John says the Democrats will actively sabotage the economy to have a 2028 club to beat on the Republicans. Democrats would settle for scorched earth to rule over the ashes. That's something to definitely watch for. We'll definitely need to be on point with messaging to oppose that because. We already know Democrats do that because they wreck the states that they occupy. 01:14:51 Speaker 1: And then they flee like locusts. 01:14:53 Speaker 4: And then they flee like locusts. They are happy to rule disaster states. Sandra says, we voted for mass deportations and didn't get them. We voted against endless wars and here they are. We voted for accountability and have seen zero arrests. We voted for the release of the Epstein files, still no accountability. There's a mixture of real things and untrue things, and that speaks to why I think we're pretty frustrated with this, Andrew. Like, We actually did get the largest wave of deportations we've seen in our lifetimes. And there's a lot of people out there who decided to present that as we were lied to. We didn't get deportations. When we got massive scale-up of ICE, instant securing of the border, record deportations, just... I find it frustrating. That said, totally acknowledge the real anger over Iran, which is totally legitimate. The anger over the handling of Epstein, if nothing else. 01:15:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, and here's the deal. When it comes to mass deportations, I think you got more than you think you got. And I think you underestimate how hard it is to institute a deportation force. That was the one big beautiful bill. It gave funding to hire more ICE agents. We've got 3,000 more that are coming online in the pipeline right now. But what I would say is, could have and probably should have been added to the mix, and I think Trump was reticent to do it because he didn't want to attack businesses and hurt businesses, which there could have been some smart politics there. But you could have done an aggressive approach going after employers. That's the obvious vector is if you go after employers. Trump didn't like the idea. He repeatedly said he didn't want to go after employers, didn't want to target businesses, especially farms that use large amounts of illegal labor. But that's kind of incomprehensible with what the base wants. The base wants them gone. So instead of charging a few dozen businesses with fines, you could have arrested people, and that would have sent a signal to the rest of the economy that we're coming after you now. You did this shock and awe street stuff, right, which ended up becoming a political cudgel for the left, right? 01:16:56 Speaker 4: Yeah. I think you had ICE scaring people in cities that allowed people who, you know, you could say people who panic a little bit to freak out more. And if instead it was a few high-profile arrests, just say, this guy, he's running an all-illegal shop to harvest strawberries in California, or he uses immigrants as scab labor to displace Americans. Like, we've had that in, you could have that in the Midwest. And the thing is, you'd only need a few of those arrests to really send a big message. Business leaders, they would react to that sort of thing. They might freak out. They might panic. And then you'd get to position yourself. Wow, Trump is defying the big corporations that have enriched themselves on this illegal labor. 01:17:39 Speaker 1: Totally different dynamic. And what he could have also done is walled off the economy from illegals, right? Bank accounts, benefits. That would have been a real mass self-deportation agenda. And maybe... In the aftermath of last night, we can start instituting some of those wider, more far-reaching things. Because guess what? We've got a lot of work still to do on that front to undo what Biden did in his four short years that felt like an eternity. Let's see if we can get more. 01:18:07 Speaker 4: And more in. I'm a half-glass-full type of person. This is Don. My take is that the Dems will overstep in a huge way. Just as the tsunami lands, they'll try to impeach too many Republicans. They'll reveal how ridiculous and petty that they are. But Trump, he did disappoint. I think he underestimated the difficulty of the tasks at hand. Love you guys. God bless. Thank you. We have Don says people voted with their wallets in spite of the fact the economy is better than two years ago. The sheeple won. That's one way of putting it. 01:18:41 Speaker 1: There's a lot of economic illiteracy out there. People don't really understand certain levers that move the economy. 01:18:49 Speaker 4: Marty says, stop talking about our losses. We use paper ballots. The machines weren't secure. Democrats cheat. I want to say, do Democrats do shady stuff? Yeah, in Alaska, we might get a Democrat senator because of shady stuff. But this level of defeat in the states that it happened in, it is not explained by fraud. 01:19:07 Speaker 1: Let me tell you, the White House itself was looking at a D13, D15 electorate. They saw it in the polls, and that's what we saw come out last night. We'll continue this tomorrow. God bless you all. Onward. 01:19:27 Speaker 6: For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.