Our inspiring statesman: The Charlie Kirk legacy



Charlie Kirk was only 31 years old when he was taken from this Earth, but his time here has undoubtedly left a lasting imprint on not just the nation’s youth — whom he was dedicated to reaching — but all Americans.

Blaze News editor in chief and BlazeTV host Matthew Peterson, BlazeTV host Jill Savage, and Blaze Media Washington correspondent Christopher Bedford are devastated by the tragic loss.

“Charlie Kirk built an organization and helped build a movement that ultimately propelled him to the very heights of American politics,” Peterson says on “Blaze News: The Mandate.”

“And what we saw today was unspeakable evil, really, a political assassination of someone who was a political leader. This was someone who is a bright light, who I first met at the Claremont Institute’s Lincoln Fellowships,” he continues.

But Charlie wasn’t your average leader.



“Famously, Charlie didn’t go to college. Incredibly smart guy. He sought out wisdom. He sought out knowledge. He was a very sharp student, and he constantly adjusted and changed when he learned new things or saw new things as he was building and helping to make America great,” Peterson says.

“He was an incredible, incredible human being who never stopped doing, who never stopped learning, and who never stopped building,” he says, adding, “And ultimately I think that what he wanted to be was a statesman. ... This is what he wanted to become: an American statesman who changed things for the good. And that is what he did.”

Bedford agrees, though he notes that there was “a strange side” of Charlie that he “didn’t expect.”

“Sweetness. Humility, which really surprised me. Soft-spoken, kind. He had taken personal interests in people. You knew him through Claremont. I knew him through some hunting and fishing trips that our late friend Foster Friess put together and then later on through podcasts and events,” he explains.

While Bedford recalls that the events were “big, glitzy, glamorous, shiny, light-filled things with all kinds of celebrities,” he says Charlie “was not like that.”

“Not in person. Someone who’s married, someone with two children,” he says.

And Bedford has noticed that Charlie’s passing has stirred something in Americans, regardless of how political they are.

“One woman I know, who’s not — she just follows politics tangentially, one of my friends’ wives, she texted me and said, ‘I’m feeling really delicate right now. Not delicate like a flower, delicate like a bomb,’” he says.

“They’ve just killed a cultural figure,” he continues. “Not a politician, not a businessman, but a cultural figure who touched a lot of lives and was in a lot of living rooms with people and was on their personal devices and was on their Instagram feeds and TikToks and came into their classrooms and talked to them on campus and touched a lot of people.”

Peterson couldn’t agree more with Bedford’s friend’s wife, commenting, “Delicate like a bomb is right.”

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The food pyramid big lie: How flawed science fed America a toxic diet



We all remember the famous Food Guide Pyramid developed in the 1990s that supposedly captures what a healthy diet looks like. The base of the model is made up of grains, followed by vegetables, fruits, dairy, proteins, and topped by a small section for fats and sweets.

It was a helpful tool that guided Americans in cultivating a healthy lifestyle for themselves and their families.

Except it wasn’t, because the model is fundamentally flawed.

On a recent episode of “Blaze News: The Mandate,” Blaze Media editor in chief Matthew Peterson sat down with Claremont Institute Salvatori Research Fellow Glenn Ellmers to dive into the lies behind the government’s “health” advice.

“Around the middle of the 20th century, we started to see what were called diseases of civilization. ... We started seeing obesity and diabetes and coronary heart disease and all the things that go with the modern lifestyle,” Ellmers says. “The problem was, our scientific experts identified the wrong culprit. They thought that the problem was the foods that people had been eating for thousands of years.”

This led to foods like eggs, butter, and meat being vilified, hence their small category on the food pyramid. Instead, “experts” pushed for making carbohydrates — especially highly processed ones like breads, pastas, and cereals — the largest staple in people’s diets.

The idea that foods refined by man are superior to foods from the earth is rooted in the prideful assumption that science supersedes, and even controls, nature, Ellmers explains.

Even though the USDA has abandoned the food pyramid for a new graphic called MyPlate, which emphasizes balanced meals with roughly equal portions of vegetables, fruits, grains, and proteins, plus a small dairy portion, “it still hasn’t fixed the problem,” Ellmers says.

Sadly, this obsession with science over nature impacts more than just what food is elevated. It also heavily influences other lifestyle factors.

Instead of sunshine, exercise, and whole foods, “experts” push medications to “fix” people’s problems.

“I have friends on the right who try to eat healthy, get out, exercise, work out, get sunshine, run around on the grass barefoot. Then, I know a lot of friends who are deeply unhappy, on all kinds of prescribed medication, not physically fit, and they think that science can solve their problems,” Ellmers says.

“Has modern society really made people happy? ... We have loneliness. We have drug addiction. We have people taking all kinds of medications to solve their problems. People are still too sedentary. People are in their homes ordering fast food, addicted to video games and internet porn,” he adds.

“In my experience, the people who can unplug, detach themselves from the screen, go out and run on the beach, eat a steak and an orange are actually a lot happier. So I’m not at all persuaded that the promise of science, that the conquest of nature, will lead to our happiness and our liberation.”

To hear more, watch the full interview above.

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Populist youth is taking on the woke left — and the weak right



Paul Gottfried is an American philosopher and historian who has largely been disappointed by the conservatives of the past for their refusal to enforce their supposed values, whose moderate stances have led to the LGBTQ cult takeover as well as the rise of far-left figures like Zohran Mamdani and Jasmine Crockett.

“Watching Fox News, I’ve been struck by the fact that they simply went along with gay marriage. … Last year I saw Caitlyn Jenner on Fox News ... presented as some kind of conservative transgender,” Gottfried tells BlazeTV hosts Jill Savage and Matthew Peterson on "Blaze News: The Mandate."

“There seems to be a reluctance to offend groups that are seen as very powerful and may interfere with the careers of some of these establishment conservative celebrities, but this does not seem to be the case with the populist right,” he continues.

“They’re very frontal in their attack on the social cultural revolution that the country has gone through in the last 20, 30 years, and you know, they don’t hold back, which I think is much to their credit,” he adds.


This is what Gottfried calls a “spontaneous counterrevolution.”

“I cannot get over this transformation, but it has really risen from the people in a way that the neo-conservative takeover certainly did not,” he explains.

And Gottfried believes the youth who are taking on the left in a harsher way than their elders did are right to do so for the sake of the future of our country.

“I think the woke thing is more dangerous in America than communism ever was,” he tells Peterson and Savage, noting that what makes it so dangerous is what drives it.

“What drives this woke left is not utopianism or some vision of this. It is absolute hatred. It is hatred of normal people, as far as I can determine,” he explains.

“It’s pure malice that drives many of these people, where the feminists hate the men. You know, ‘I’m the victim of the patriarchy,’" he mocks. “And you look at these women, they’re living very well. How are they victims of the patriarchy?”

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Epstein victims speak out! Will PREDATORS finally be revealed?



The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has released over 33,000 pages of Epstein-related records that were provided by the U.S. Department of Justice — but Americans have been conditioned to wonder if this is real transparency or just D.C. political theater.

The same uncertainty applies to apparent meetings taking place behind closed doors that may be uncovering more information about the predators involved.

“Speaker Mike Johnson and Oversight Chairman James Comer actually quietly pulled something together that you almost never see. It’s been a rare bipartisan closed-door meeting,” BlazeTV host Jill Savage explains on “Blaze News: The Mandate.”

“They had six women who survived Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse, and for at least two of them, it was the first time that they had ever spoken out,” she says, noting that Johnson called the meeting both “heartbreaking” and “infuriating.”


According to Johnson, some of the women had been “groomed” for over 30 years.

“There’s so much that’s happening behind closed doors, and we still just don’t know. Are we going to get the transparency that we want, or is this more of the actual political theater?” Savage asks.

“There’s not much new, but what is new is that, you know, we’re told that these women have provided names of additional persons of interest, so that is interesting. Who are those people? Will that come out? Will we talk about that? I don’t know,” BlazeTV host Matthew Peterson says.

“We also have about a thousand pages ... that are new, flight logs from him flying out of the country. But what we don’t have so far is actual names, and that’s what most people want,” he continues.

Blaze media senior politics editor and D.C. correspondent Christopher Bedford isn’t too pleased with how long it’s taken for them to interview these women in the first place.

“It’s the kind of attention that Congress probably should have paid to this from the very beginning, which is bringing in victims, having closed-door meetings, which, you know, are more serious than open-door meetings,” Bedford says.

“Open-door meetings are theater for MSNBC, CNN, and Fox,” he continues. “They’re not real. There aren’t real questions. It’s just, ‘Let me see how many points I can get. Let me see how many points I can put on the board.’ … But closed-door sessions are much more serious.”

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Two leaders stand in the stark light of blame after horrific Minneapolis Catholic school shooting



On Wednesday, August 27, Robin (formerly Robert) Westman, a 23-year-old transgender-identifying person, opened fire through the windows of Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis during a school Mass, killing two children and injuring 17 others. Westman, a former student, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, left behind writings and videos expressing hate toward multiple groups and an obsession with mass shooters.

“Minneapolis didn't just let a massacre happen. It helped make it happen,” says Jill Savage, BlazeTV host of “Blaze News: The Mandate.”

And two people stand under a harsh glare of blame: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D).

Minneapolis’ reputation was already waning thanks to the George Floyd riots and its defund-the-police crusade when Tim Walz made the state a transgender sanctuary in 2023.

But even though this move has proved disastrous, Mayor Frey has doubled down in his support for Minneapolis’ transgender community. “Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity,” he said at a press conference on August 27. The next day, he reiterated the sentiment in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett.

“Should we be talking about the trans community and making sure that they feel our love and support, or should we actually be looking at the Catholics right now — the ones that were actually killed yesterday in that church?” says Jill.

“This is the 42nd or maybe 43rd attack on an American Catholic church this year alone in the United States. It is over 520 attacks on Catholic churches here since 2020,” says Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford.

“They’ve been satanic; they’ve been anti-Catholic; they’ve been pro-abortion; they’ve been pro-trans.”

But they haven’t been that surprising.

“Minneapolis and Minnesota have had an extreme tolerance for evil and promoting evil,” says Bedford, condemning the state's “permissive abortion laws” and policies allowing the state to take children away from parents who oppose "gender-affirming care."

Bedford stresses the need to investigate how things like cross-sex hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and mutilating surgeries impact a transgender-identifying individual’s behavior. Perhaps Westman was just a case of mental illness; perhaps there were drugs related to his gender transition that influenced his deadly actions. “I think that's something that's absolutely worth investigating,” he says.

As for Walz, Bedford says he “deserves condemnation for his anti-Catholic sentiments.” The woke governor denied Catholic schools' requests for security funding in 2022 and 2023, despite an $18 billion state surplus, leaving nonpublic schools without access to safety grants provided to public schools. He also allegedly denied Catholic school students access to Minnesota’s Postsecondary Enrollment Options program, preventing them from earning tuition-free college credits, despite their academic eligibility.

“These are the sorts of things that are going on in the United States and are being allowed by our politicians. … It's soft on evil, and it allows it to fester,” he says.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

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Trump vs. RFK: Where do they stand on the vaccine fight?



Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. is shaking up Washington by cutting vaccine funding, challenging Big Pharma, and pushing to yank the COVID shot off the U.S. market — while President Trump continues to champion Operation Warp Speed.

RFK’s latest moves were featured in an article in Newsweek, which appears to be what the president is responding to.

“Despite COVID, which was a very unfortunate situation for the whole world, we did a great job with it. Never got the credit for the job we did. Operation Warp Speed, people say, is one of the greatest achievements ever, in politics or in the military, because it was almost a military procedure,” President Trump said during a recent cabinet meeting.

“But everybody, including Putin, said that Operation Warp Speed, what you did with that, nobody can believe it. And we did a great job,” he added.


“It looks like HHS, they’re like, ‘Hey, you know what? We’ve gotten rid of some of the other vaccine stuff. You can’t give this to kids or pregnant women anymore.’ And, you know, sometimes you just want to leak some information out there,” BlazeTV host Jill Savage tells Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford on “Blaze News: The Mandate.”

“And Donald Trump heard that, and at his press conference, I mean, you just heard the reaction,” she adds.

“Yeah, that’s expected,” Bedford says. “That’s kind of an amateur move from HHS when you’re dealing with President Trump, who’s not like most other people.”

“The secretary of defense has found this out, for example, when he went ahead of the president on putting off arms shipments to Ukraine. This is something that was actually on the president’s agenda, but it wasn’t the right time with the president’s negotiations with Russia and Ukraine, and he was extremely irritated that there was a rollout beforehand,” he continues.

As for RFK’s moves, Bedford believes he’s taking it “a bridge too far.”

“He ought to take warning, and he ought to probably back off and figure out a different way, because if he does want to get this done, then leaking it to Newsweek, leaking it to liberal reporters and not going through the proper [channels] and convincing the president,” Bedford explains, “well, that’s not the way to do it.”

“That’s actually the way to lose your job,” he adds.

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CONFIRMED: Biden's DOJ was in PANIC over legality of 'autopen pardons'



Brand-new evidence indicates that Biden’s DOJ knew that the autopen pardons were legally flawed, and internal emails show that even his own lawyers raised alarms.

“So I’m a little biased here, of course, but this is a big one. It is the first written, black-and-white evidence of disagreement in the senior-most levels of the Biden camp as it related to the autopen pardon spree,” Oversight Project President Mike Howell tells BlazeTV hosts Jill Savage and Matthew Peterson on “Blaze News: The Mandate.”

An email from a top official at the DOJ went out the day after the 2,500-plus commutations.

“He goes off on Saturday morning, outlining all the reasons why these are not enforceable commutations. They make no sense. They need further direction from the White House — read between the lines there: from the president and not an autopen,” Howell explains.


“And moreover, that the actual interpretation of the very vague thing that Biden allegedly announced would apply to — guess what: a lot of violent criminals. And that it did. And so in Biden’s grand, you know, commutation of 2,500-plus, caught up in there were people who shot cops, who killed witnesses, who were kingpins that are now back on the streets for the most part,” he continues.

“Silver lining: Some of them are still in federal prison because he shortened their sentences, but there’s still some are serving it out. Trump could refuse to release them,” he adds.

Peterson, while not exactly shocked, still can’t believe America really went through a time like this.

“So we really did have probably as bad, or worse, of a case, of any time in American history, a president who was dysfunctional sitting there in that office with these clowns around him.”

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3 theories behind Bondi and Patel adding a co-deputy to Bongino’s FBI role



On Monday, August 18, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey was appointed as co-deputy director of the FBI, a newly created position, to serve alongside Dan Bongino starting September 8.

This unusual move, announced by Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, ignited a firestorm of speculation. Some theorize Bailey’s appointment is a prelude to Bongino's potential departure, or even Kash Patel’s, while others argue it aims to stabilize FBI leadership, advance Trump’s law and order agenda, or reshape the agency with politically aligned loyalists.

On a recent episode of “Blaze News: The Mandate,” Jill Savage, Blaze Media editor in chief Matthew Peterson, and senior politics editor Christopher Bedford dove into this controversy.

“I think fundamentally they need very talented people in extremely important positions to get the job done. ... [The FBI] is a large agency where a ton of reform is needed. It’s at the heart of the corruption that’s been allowed to fester in this country,” Peterson says. “So it would make sense to bring in someone who’s a very sharp, aggressive AG who’s done great work in Missouri and had a national impact.”

“That’s the positive, right? The negative is that there’s some things maybe that aren’t getting done that people think should get done, and they feel that there needs to be some change in how leadership is operating,” he adds.

Jill agrees there may be underlying factors behind Bailey’s sudden appointment. “Anytime you put ‘co-’ in front of something, it’s like, okay, what is actually happening right now?” she says.

Bedford suggests the new role might be a genuine effort to support Bongino, who, as the deputy director, has the enormous task of “[overseeing] the personnel of the FBI.”

“That’s tens of thousands of people that he’s got to deal with and got to manage. And Bongino, despite being a former officer, Secret Service agent, and despite having a very successful radio show and podcast, doesn’t have that kind of management experience,” he says.

The rumor in D.C., however, is that Bailey is there “to replace someone” — Bongino or perhaps even Kash Patel, Bedford says.

“That’s where it starts to get a little spicier because I think [replacing Patel] would start to really upset more people,” he adds, especially given Patel is the “main reason for why we have so much of this Russiagate information.”

Peterson, despite acknowledging Kash’s invaluable contributions to the Trump agenda, can’t deny that rumors are swirling that Patel’s leadership is lacking at the FBI.

“There is a lot of talk around town and elsewhere that that’s not happening and that some of these reports on the left, while no one wants to agree with them publicly, may have some validity to them in terms of how things are going over there at the FBI,” he says.

“We’ll have to wait and see, but the main thing I think we should take away from this is that Bailey is talented. Bailey is energetic, and they need more than two people at the top of this thing and whatever is going on over there. We need someone who is going to be aggressive and who’s going to actually clean house.”

To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.

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DC Democrat slams crime laws turning Washington into a war zone



Denise Rucker Krepp may be a former Obama appointee and lifelong Democrat, but that’s not stopping her from calling out D.C.’s devastating crime policies.

Krepp blames the D.C. Council for redefining “juveniles” to include offenders up to age 24, undermining accountability and fueling carjackings, shootings, and lawlessness across the city.

“When I was a kid, a juvenile was somebody under the age of 18 ... but according to the D.C. Council, a juvenile is somebody under the age of 24,” Krepp tells Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford on “Blaze News: The Mandate.”

“I mean, a 24-year-old man is a man, not a juvenile. And if you tell a 24-year-old that if they commit armed carjacking and they won’t be held fully accountable, then what do you think’s going to happen?” she continues.


“At the age of 24, some of my best friends were 24-year-olds. They were two years out of the Marine Corps already,” Bedford agrees.

Krepp recalls confronting the Ward 6 Councilman Charles Allen, saying, “Charles, what are you doing, dude?”

“He just blew me off and he said, ‘Denise, I know what I’m doing.’ Okay, you definitely knew what you were doing. You pretty much invited President Trump to come in and bring the National Guard in to solve your problem, which you created,” Krepp says.

“He kind of seems like the left-wing leader of the D.C. city council, or one of the most vocal champions of some of these causes,” Bedford says.

He notes that “there was enough anger” among Democrats that there was a recall petition for Allen — but it failed.

“I think it failed because people looked at the recall effort and said it was funded by Republicans. And I, you know, when people said that, I laughed. I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ It wasn’t funded by Republicans. It was funded by Democrats. It was Democrats telling Charles Allen that what he was doing was unacceptable,” Krepp says.

“Unfortunately, the majority of Democrats did not agree with that,” she adds.

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Did a COVID conspiracy turn a Christian preacher into an alleged Minnesota assassin?



Vance Boelter was a Christian preacher, father of five, and a former business adviser to two Democrat governors — and he’s now been accused of one of the most shocking killings in Minnesota history.

One Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband were shot dead, while another lawmaker and his wife were seriously injured.

And the alleged gunman’s story isn’t making total sense, so Blaze News investigative journalist Joe Hanneman is doing his best to change that.

“We’re just starting to get into some of the nitty-gritty details,” Hanneman tells BlazeTV host Jill Savage and investigative journalist Steve Baker on “Blaze News: The Mandate.”


The suspect has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

“I spent about six weeks digging into his background, because this story, from the beginning, just simply did not make sense. This was not a career criminal. This was not a criminal at all,” Hanneman says.

“His entire life up until about the middle of May stands at great odds to what happened on June 14. And so I figured there just has to be a story behind that, something that would give us some clues,” he continues.

Hanneman then made contact with Boelter in the Sherburne County Jail in Elk River, Minnesota, through the jail’s messaging system.

“He and I spent the weekend texting back and forth, probably, I mean hundreds of texts. And he’s starting to unroll what he says is his story and the reason that he was at those houses that night, which, again, has another kind of bizarre twist to it — that he did not mean to shoot anyone. He didn’t plan to shoot anyone,” Hanneman explains.

“He was, he claims, going to make citizen arrests, and this was related to the clot shot. He was doing investigations, he said, for two years on the COVID-19 so-called vaccine and the deaths that it has caused,” he continues.

This is why Boelter claims he began working in the funeral industry.

“He says now that the reason for that is he was investigating these, what they call ‘sudden and unexpected.’ And that obviously, that’s been a big issue since the COVID-19 scamdemic came up,” Hanneman explains.

“So,” he adds, “I’m trying to peel this back with him. Slowly but surely, in 200 characters at a time on a text. So as long as he keeps talking, I hope to keep learning from him.”

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