2,422 videos 1,389,747,653 views US Joined Aug 30, 2018
Charlie Kirk is the Founder and President of Turning Point USA, the largest and fastest growing conservative youth activist organization in the country with over 250,000 student members, over 150 full-time staff, and a presence on over 2,000 high school and college campuses nationwide. Charlie is also the Chairman of Students for Trump, which aims to activate one million new college voters on campuses in battleground states in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. His social media reaches over 100 million people per month and according to Axios, he is one of the "top 10 most engaged" Twitter handles in the world. He is also the host of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” which regularly ranks among the top news shows on Apple podcast charts.
Josh Hammer and Andrew Kolvet Declare the Cold Civil War Over and America Won
Josh Hammer, senior editor at large at Newsweek and host of the Josh Hammer Show, joins Andrew Kolvet on The Charlie Kirk Show to make a bold declaration: the cold civil war is over, and traditional America has won. Hammer argues that Barack Obama declared war on America in 2008 with his promise to fundamentally transform the nation, initiating a cold civil war that reached its peak during the Biden administration's embrace of DEI and woke ideology. But Donald Trump's second term has brought a Reagan-style victory mentality that is transforming culture overnight. From sweeping executive orders eliminating DEI across government and beyond, to a vibrant young conservative movement dominating popular culture, Hammer and Kolvet examine why this moment represents the most transformative cultural paradigm shift in a generation and why the momentum appears built to last.
February 2, 2025
The Cold Civil War Has Been Won
Andrew Kolvet welcomed Josh Hammer onto The Charlie Kirk Show with an important observation: while Charlie Kirk was deployed with Vice President JD Vance, there was major news to discuss. Hammer, senior editor at large at Newsweek and host of the Josh Hammer Show, had written a compelling op-ed titled "The Cold Civil War is Over, We Won." While Kolvet acknowledged he wasn't ready to pop champagne just yet with much work remaining, he found the premise compelling and asked Hammer to make his case.
Hammer agreed that just because the enemy appears defeated doesn't mean it couldn't rise again, but argued that what we've witnessed in the opening week of Trump's second administration represents the most transformative, culture-shifting moment of our lifetimes. The key, he explained, lies in understanding how this cold civil war began in the first place.
Barack Obama Declared War on America
According to Hammer, Barack Obama declared war on America and instituted the modern American cold civil war. Obama famously said in February 2008 that he sought to fundamentally transform America. As Hammer pointed out, one does not seek to fundamentally transform that which he loves or seeks to conserve.
Throughout the Obama presidency, this war manifested in multiple ways: Obamacare represented the largest entitlement since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. The administration beat up on cops and exacerbated racial relations. Attorney General Eric Holder used disparate impact theory, a predecessor to Ibram X. Kendi's anti-racism ideology. Foreign policy disasters like the Iran deal further damaged America's standing.
Obama tried repeatedly to declare war on the half of America he infamously called "bitter clingers," the same people Hillary Clinton would later label "deplorables" in 2016. This civil war was stopped for about three and a half years during Trump's first term, until George Floyd met Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Minnesota, triggering the riots of summer 2020 and ushering in what Hammer calls "peak woke."
The Biden Administration Represented Peak Woke
The past four years under Joe Biden represented peak woke, according to Hammer. Biden literally chose his vice president, Kamala Harris, because she was a "woman of color." He selected his Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, for the same reason. Time and again, as journalists like Chris Rufo reported, the administration weaponized the instrumentalities of the American administrative state to implement DEI programs that overtly discriminated against white people, Christians, Jews, and Asians in favor of blacks and Hispanics.
This was the moment woke reached its apex. But it has now been slain, because Donald Trump adopted a mentality going back to Ronald Reagan's famous approach to the Cold War.
Trump Adopted Reagan's "We Win, They Lose" Mentality
When Ronald Reagan was asked about his approach to the Cold War after coming into power in 1980, following the difficult 1970s with competing visions like Henry Kissinger's détente versus Cold War hawks, Reagan famously declared: "We win and they lose." People said he was crazy, a cowboy, a warmonger. But that mentality helped win the Cold War.
Donald Trump has taken that exact same mentality into his second term. Hammer suspects the galvanizing moment came around the time Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and special counsel Jack Smith started prosecuting Trump, trying to throw him in jail, bankrupt him, ruin him of all his possessions, and deprive him of his liberty and livelihood. Or perhaps it was when Thomas Matthew Crooks in Butler, Pennsylvania came within millimeters of assassinating him before a global television audience.
At some point, Trump had his Clarence Thomas 1991 Anita Hill moment where he looked at all the radicalization around him and said enough is enough. Echoing Barack Obama's famous line, Trump essentially said: get me my pen, get me my phone, because this isn't going to fly anymore.
Executive Orders Are Transforming Culture Overnight
That's exactly what America witnessed in Trump's first week back in office. The sheer volume of executive orders has been staggering, covering DEI, gender ideology, birthright citizenship, and much more. But Hammer focused particularly on the DEI executive order, which doesn't just eliminate DEI in the executive branch but goes far beyond.
The order instructs the attorney general and Secretary of Education, along with the entire cabinet, to enforce Title VI and interpret the Supreme Court's affirmative action case in Students for Fair Admissions in a way that effectively bans DEI in any taxpayer-supported institution in America. This is the kind of action that wins culture wars overnight.
While Hammer emphasized the need for constant vigilance and keeping the foot on the gas pedal, what has been witnessed so far is the stuff of legends. He compared it to when the English took over what was then called New Amsterdam from Peter Stuyvesant and the Dutch in the 1600s, renaming it New York City. They famously took it over without firing a single shot through a pure, unmitigated demonstration of force, and the enemy yielded.
The Movement Has Staying Power
Kolvet raised the question of whether this transformation has staying power, noting Trump is the only president in American history with a higher approval rating at the start of his second term than he ever had in his first. A clear majority across five different polls shows Americans support deporting all illegal immigrants, not just some or the worst first. Main Street America is seeing the changes, seeing the momentum shift, and American malaise is out while self-constraint is abandoned.
Despite the trauma of 2020 and 2022 making it hard to fully believe, Kolvet asked whether we're at the beginning of an 8 to 12-year run. Hammer responded with an emphatic yes. JD Vance, at only 40 years old, is the natural heir to the throne, which is partly why Trump tapped him. This is a long-term play evidenced by Trump's cabinet picks. Pete Hegseth is only 44 or 45 years old. So many cabinet picks are very young people because this is a movement.
MAGA and America First represent what's cool right now. This is the anti-establishment mentality, the same way Barack Obama was considered irreverent, similar to how the "cool kids" in the 1960s were burning down college campuses over the Vietnam War. MAGA is basically that today—the middle finger to the establishment.
The Democratic Party Is a Rotting Carcass
The Democratic Party, according to Hammer, is a rotting carcass filled with octogenarians and septuagenarians who are literally two to three decades past their prime. Joe Biden perfectly encapsulates this reality. Meanwhile, the Republican Party is filled with young, up-and-coming people who have an inherent love of their country.
This is being reflected in popular culture everywhere. NFL and college football players are doing the Trump dance in the end zone after scoring touchdowns. Carrie Underwood went acapella at the inaugural address. Big tech oligarchs are coming around. The cultural moments keep accumulating.
Kolvet showed an image of Charlie Kirk casually sitting next to JD Vance on Air Force 2, calling it breaking news of them plotting the future blizzard of executive orders and actions that will take the country back. The movement is ascendant, and it's impossible to separate Trump's momentum from this entirely new generation of young leaders like Kirk, James Blair, Sergio Gor, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Taylor Budowich, and countless others.
This new young core is assuming control both from a media standpoint and an actual power standpoint. The amount of transformational change possible is impossible to fully comprehend or appreciate at this moment. History will write about these days and these leaders who are transforming America back to the founders' intent, restoring the Americanism and dynamism of the people in the truest sense.
The Left's War on Fun Has Failed
Kolvet brought up a New York Magazine cover story titled "The Cruel Kids Table" by Brock Collier, a trans journalist who applied for press credentials at the Turning Point inaugural eve ball and was on the red carpet. The story featured pictures from the ball, and even this critical journalist admitted that conservatives are winning and culturally ascendant, now dominating realms of culture that would have been hard to fathom just a few years ago.
The magazine appeared to have cropped the photo to make it look more monolithically white than it actually was. But Hammer argued that a normal American looks at that photo and sees a bunch of good-looking young people having a great time, dressed nicely, clanking their glasses and saying cheers. There's nothing wrong with the picture.
This gets at what Hammer calls the left's "war on fun." They scold you for driving a gas-guzzling pickup truck or SUV. They call you a bad person for wanting to have numerous kids—God forbid you take the Book of Genesis seriously and be fruitful and multiply, having three, four, five, or more children who will consume oxygen and emit carbon dioxide. They hate when you teach your children about religion, the Bible, the things that actually built this country, the Founding Fathers, the Constitutional Convention.
The left has become a bunch of pearl-clutching, overtly faux-moralistic prudes. They hate looking at anyone more successful than them, which gets back to the roots of socialism and Marxism—the whole idea of envy, class envy, and individual envy. Hammer noted he was looking at the leftwing rally on the eve of inauguration, the Women's March with pink hats on the National Mall, and observed a bunch of typically ugly people, with obvious exceptions.
As Matt Walsh pointed out on Twitter, what really defines the left now besides purple-haired, nose-pierced, overweight young people screaming about some injustice they invented in a college laboratory? Young kids having fun, wearing flannel in the country, listening to country music—conservatives are the fun movement now.
The Left Must Disavow Obama to Recover
It's fascinating, Kolvet observed, that in 2008 the left's cultural ascendency promised so much but failed to deliver. Instead, it delivered a dystopian, puritanical scolding about invented injustices. This conservative movement can actually deliver on the promise of lifting everybody up and having fun.
Hammer agreed, noting that if the left has any chance of recovering—and thankfully it's not his problem as a man of the right—they must disavow the entirety of the Barack Obama legacy and his post-presidential legacy. They need to go back to the old Democratic Party of Bill Clinton and his predecessors who, whatever their flaws, focused on bread-and-butter issues, not woke propaganda.
