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July 17, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
37:09
Chris Bedford | The Coming Rebellion

Charlie is joined by one of the smartest writers in the conservative movement, Sr. Editor of the 'Federalist' and former Editor-In-Chief of the 'Daily Caller News Foundation,' Chris Bedford. The two discuss the changing...

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show 00:01:43
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Hey, everybody.
One of the most fun conversations I've had recently is with Chris Bedford from The Federalist.
You're going to really enjoy this conversation.
He's wicked smart, has a great wit about him, and really has a unique take on the issues and has been ahead of the curve for years.
Honored to call him a friend.
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Fun conversation in store.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
Super thrilled to be joined by one of the smartest and wittiest people that I have had a chance to get to know, Chris Bedford, who's a senior editor at the Federalist.
Chris, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Thanks for having me.
So I was really, we spent time together last summer at an undisclosed location fishing somewhere.
The Marxist Movement Against America 00:04:47
And you said something that was super interesting that I've used and reused with sometimes giving you credit, where you said that this Marxist movement in our country is one of the first ever that is against the country they're trying to take over.
Let's just start with that.
Can you elaborate on that?
Because that is a very just prescient observation that I don't think enough people realize.
Well, thank you for that.
And that was a really good trip.
I still actually haven't worked my way through my haul of fish from that trip yet.
I'm not very good at eating salmon or cooking it.
The problem, the weird thing about America's left is I don't think they've got a real place in history outside of maybe some of the anarchists, certainly not with the traditional left, of how much they hate this country.
I mean, if you look at the previous more modern left-wing revolutionaries, from the Nazis to the communists, the Bolsheviks, all of these groups were fiercely, fiercely patriotic.
They had different ideas about what the country should be.
They didn't like the Tsar.
They didn't like the Jews or they didn't like whoever.
They pick enemies.
But at the end of the day, they are fierce nationalists.
Che Gruvera was a fierce Cuban nationalist.
So was Castro.
Hitler, obviously, a little bit of a nationalist.
The Soviets were all about the motherland or the fatherland.
And the Chinese, as we're seeing today, are strict nationalists, even as a essentially Soviet-style economy Leninist economy, which, by the way, Russia still is.
The American left is very different from that.
They hate this country.
They like the other countries more.
They want to destroy this country and everything that made it.
They want to, I mean, they go from the radical environmentalists who just think that humans are a bad thing and a pollutant.
Carbon is maybe one of the more socially acceptable pollutants to them, to the leftists on campus who, and now in our streets, and now in the New York Times, and now disrupting your events, who just think that white people are the horrible thing and white genocide needs to happen.
This is a toxic way of thinking.
There's no end to it, and it's constant self-flagellation.
And there's no way to respond to it except with American exceptionalism and doing our own thing.
It's not a reasonable cult.
Yeah, so I guess my question is: there's so many different ways to take this.
First of all, how are they successful in creating a movement of self-loathing?
Because the reason why the Soviets were fierce nationalists, but also they wouldn't have been able to assume political power being anything else.
I mean, there was almost an expectation to the agrarian class against the Romanovs, like you have to love this place if we're going to put you into power.
It was just kind of obvious, right?
I mean, Fidel Castro would not have been able to assume power saying, you know, this whole Cuba thing is awful.
I hate it all.
In fact, it was the reason he was able to win over the workers, at least in appearance, I think he was much less popular than the revisionists would tell us, is because he used the symbology and the history of Cuba to his advantage, right?
So can you walk us through, first of all, have we ever seen this before?
Where you have a movement to try to almost convince the country that now it's time to commit suicide and to go wherever.
Now this is kill yourself.
Right.
That's basically what it is, though, right?
I mean, and second.
And secondly, why is this happening?
Because that's a very, that's a deeper question that I think you'll be able to give a pretty, you know, a pretty substantial answer.
Something to answer.
As much as I can, I wish I could help us all just solve it.
I would definitely give you the key if I could activate all the campuses.
The only close thing I can even think of are the anarchists, the Bolshevik, not the Bolshevik, the Russian anarchists, the German anarchists, the assassin of President Garfield, Charlie Gitta, the people who, it was a cult of death and a really strange thing in that movement, not unlike religious extremism that we've seen in ancient biblical history and the Jewish fights versus the Romans and now more frequently in Islam.
There was a willingness to die in a glory of death where people would run into crowds holding bombs, these anarchists, just to kill as many people as possible.
Or some of the Bolsheviks followed through on this old Russian idea of carrying bombs and rolling under the Tsar's carriage in attempts to kill him.
Suicide for them was kind of an interesting, glorious thing for the revolution.
But I will give credit to our revolutionaries here.
People have been asking me, how do we fix the press?
Glorious Death for the Revolution 00:07:54
It's become so dishonest.
And I actually think the press is about as honest as they've ever been.
And they're fully exposed now.
The New York Times is no longer pretending to be some kind of arbiter.
They're straight up saying we can't, we're sorry that we ran a Republican senator because he called for law and order.
The people have had to resign.
People are being fired from major newspapers.
They're saying that there's no more objectivity.
There is only learned truths.
They're straight up telling us that the Soviet Union is better than us because they had more diversity in their cosmonaut suicide program and that the white people are horrible and the history of this country is not starting with our founders.
They're very, very honest about it.
I think the left is so happy or so content and so accepted with this fear-mongering that they're actually able to pull a lot of this off.
And the root of the rot is you'll see it in corporations outside of school.
You'll see it in school.
You'll see it in newspapers.
These young cadres are coming out of the universities, people you have to deal with all the time, who are being indoctrinated in this stuff, and they believe it.
And they take over the HR departments and they start their own slack channels, the black New York Times staffers, black gay female Times staffers, black gay persons, transgenders, people of weight slack channels, all these different groups breaking it down.
A lot of the poison and toxicity that takes over the newsroom or takes over corporations begins in those little cloistered groups that are taught in college to be like that.
And then they have the HR department.
So you're sitting there, maybe you've been in the company for 20 years, 30 years.
You're an old classical liberal at the New York Times or at the Bay Capital.
Yeah, Barry Weiss, any one of these folks who is generally a centrist or more open-minded to these ideas, and you're afraid.
Because if you were to post on your Facebook page at a major corporation that you stand with the blue, you are going to be pulled in front of your HR department, at some of the more woke ones, some of the more lawsuit-resistant ones, and you're going to possibly lose your job.
The reason why the silent majority is so silent is because they're being silenced by the threat of massive reprisal from their corporations, from losing their jobs.
From all of that, and Tucker Carlson's talked about this, I've never seen a movement before where the most powerful people in the country are doing everything they can to destroy the least powerful people in the country.
It's sickening, and I wish I could get a more simple answer to this pathology of trying to hurt people who are lesser than you.
But it's kind of like that Game of Thrones cult where they, you know, they got some good ideas.
They've got some problems.
The monarchy is not perfect at all.
That little kid's a bastard.
But their isolation to whip themselves and flagellate.
And you can even see this with the crowds when they yell, shame, shame.
I mean, that was a putrid nightmare scene just a few years ago, even when it happened to a very bad woman on television.
Now it's just public.
It's just like you do this to people.
The Democrats think they can harness it.
They're pushing it.
Amazon thinks Jeff Bezos thinks he'll be killed last, so he's funding it.
Bank of America is giving away a billion dollars to Black Lives Matter, which is a fraudulent near-terror organization.
The pathology, I think, of fear, wanting to be part of this club and this junior class of acolytes who are just walking through the streets, you know, barefoot chanting, those things are combining, I think, to people who are without religion, an America that's lost its eternal truths, lost objectivity, been told for decades there's no objectivity, there's no beauty, there's no truth, it's only science.
Follow God Fauci, the new Pope.
These people, it's just lost and they don't have anything to stand for other than making themselves feel better.
And it leaves us very vulnerable as a civilization.
That's really well put.
And so I think one of the reasons why we have this insurgent Marxist attempted revolution that is actually having success around self-loathing is that post-Reagan, I think the Republican Party became far more interested in protecting corporate interests and trying to create an idolatry of corporations, not of the country.
And so because of that, you're going to have hierarchies and haves and haves-nots, right?
Have-and-have-nots.
It's going to happen.
The issue is that we expanded wealth so dramatically for certain zip codes, particularly around Washington, D.C. or Silicon Valley, Malibu, and Manhattan.
And the rest of the country felt continually disenfranchised.
So those places that felt disenfranchised, what do they do?
Well, they send their kids to try to be like the Malibu people to the universities, right?
That's what you do.
Okay, I'm going to go send my kid to Ohio State.
And they come back and they become like a Bolshevik.
What is this?
And non-binary and they don't believe in the history.
And you do that for about 15 or 20 years and you send your most prized possessions, your young people, to these universities.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that self-loathing all of a sudden becomes fashionable.
And unlike the Soviet Union in 1917 or 1921 or 1930, through every variation of their allowance of the transition from agrarian, let's just say monarchy to whatever was replaced there, I think they handled the transition economically improperly, basically, because you have people that lived under this agrarian rule for 5,000 years,
and all of a sudden this industrial revolution begins all throughout Europe, and the Bolsheviks allegedly had an answer to that.
But the reason why the Bolsheviks had to be nationalistic is the middle class, they still loved their country, right?
They said, no, we actually still love where we are from because that's the only thing that we know.
It's completely different now.
And I think, and I'd love your analysis of this, Chris, there's a lot there to unpack.
A lot of it has been our inability to handle this explosion of wealth, or at least this explosion of wealth for certain people, while also communicating what the country actually is.
It's not just an idolatry of corporations.
And I love free enterprise.
I do.
But one of the most eye-opening things the last couple of years is how the conservative movement has almost prioritized corporate America over the country that we live in.
I'd love your thoughts on that.
They absolutely have.
And we should be clear.
I should be clear that even though the Bolsheviks were, to your point, you know, to our point, patriotic and nationalistic, they really did at the end.
This is why our modern leftists so honest, they hated their country.
They destroyed everything about it, but they had the experience of nationalism.
Yeah.
Right?
I know.
I know we're both on the exact same page on that.
Most of these groups, you know, they don't let you know how much they hate you until they're in charge.
We're blessed to have one that's very clear about it right now in our midst.
You know, the GOP was always kind of traditionally a northern industrial party.
That's where there was the trading up in Salem and Boston, and then the factories later, the Industrial Revolution.
And Calvin Coolidge is famous for his defense of business and how it was a part of the American character.
But Coolidge and people around his time, and you see it with Barry Goldwater later in the 1960s, did not confuse the nature of man with what a lot of the modern GOP has.
Barry Goldwater in Conscience of a Conservative wrote in the 60s that the difference between Democrats and Republicans, or at least conservatives and liberals, because he hadn't yet taken over the party, was that liberals look at man as a material creature and conservatives understand man as a spiritual creature, which is why conservatives say, hey, throwing money at this, reparations, welfare, expanded government access, that doesn't make anyone happy.
The Future of the GOP 00:14:20
It doesn't make you better.
A job makes you better.
And the reason, I mean, just watch any of your friends.
They can have all the money they want.
But if they've got no job and they've got no, you know, they've got rich dad giving them a credit card on campus, you might notice they develop drug problems and other kinds of antisocial activity because what is there to do?
I mean, what is there to chase if you have no self-worth from a hard day's work?
And the Republicans have forgot a lot about that.
And in their defense of business and in their defense of free markets, they confuse that thing with free trade.
And the ability to trade between Massachusetts and Missouri, they're largely on equal playing grounds.
That's different when you deal with China and other mercantilist countries that look at trade as war.
And people get hurt.
And you can't replace lost jobs simply with consumer goods.
I mean, we've got companies like Walmart that a lot of people defend, a lot of Republicans very fiercely so, and they've done some good things.
These companies like Walmart, it's hard to tell if they destroyed the town or if they came into the dead town and just lived there because the main streets, the folks that open up small shops, they can't compete with that.
They can't provide cheaper goods.
They can't provide the same amount of employment.
We end up with parking lots, and these companies import their goods, which is why they're so cheap.
It helps gut the American industrial base.
And at the same time, they're huge lobbyists for food stamps and other things that their employees and a lot of their customers rely on to buy these cheap goods.
It's kind of like a reverse Chinese opium trade.
And I sing all at Walmart not because they're the only ones who do this.
It's incredibly difficult right now to find made in American products.
It's basically a luxury good to find a pair of sperries that are made in America.
It's like 350.
Walmart is the best at it.
And they've used that to go throughout America and expand and make billions of dollars off of a lot of suffering in the country.
Apple's another one.
It's something we'd want to think of as a flagship company, but they opened up business in China.
It's a billion people.
It's ability to manufacture cheaper, sell us this plastic, sell us this addiction, sell us this information.
We buy it, and before you know it, they're completely beholden to the enemy and not even willing to call themselves an American company anymore.
This global elite is so separated from the needs of us, Americans, human beings, that they think of themselves as global citizens and global elite.
And then that's kind of a trigger word because when you hear some people raving about the globalists, sometimes that's a sign that they're insane.
But there really is a globalist group of very powerful and elite businessmen, politicians, proponents of the United Nations, proponents of world trade, that don't care about this country.
And when your ruling class doesn't want to defend your country, it's very difficult for those who don't have those resources to stand up and do it in their stead.
And that's why the middle class saw Trump as their champion.
And that's why they rose up in numbers.
They said, finally, there's a defector from the ruling class to defend us.
And they were largely correct about that.
That's a Teddy Roosevelt figure.
That's exactly what it is.
Not a mob.
Yes.
Not a mob outside the mansion, a guy inside who says, hold on a second, guys.
This whole place is crooked.
Yeah.
And so he was right.
And what I think is very interesting, though, is, and I've really come to realize this with a lot more clarity in recent years, is, you know, Chris, I got my start in the conservative movement in 2012, 2013, reading a lot of the pamphlets and the policy papers pushed by these think tanks, and I don't have to say any names.
That, you know, I was an 18-year-old coming into the movement, right?
And I love the free market.
I love all that.
And there were those vociferous defenses of Walmart and how us trading with China is like the greatest thing ever.
And I remember so vividly, and I still have the emails back and forth with some of the scholars there at some of these think tanks that were, you know, in long-form detail.
And I can't help but look back and say, were these purchased?
Were these paid for?
Was this really what you?
And I do not believe that the continual importing of mountains of plastic from China has made our country better, more fulfilled, more meaningful.
And if you dare say that, though, in certain circles, and I think this circle's really disappearing quickly, it's considered like heretical to the religion of free markets.
And again, I love free markets.
I love private property, but I also love my country a lot more than some abstract theory that you put on a wall, right?
And I don't think, you know, I don't think it's a good thing that Walmart has that kind of consolidation of power at all.
And I'll give you a quick example.
It was just so materially evident.
I recently was in Montana backpacking.
And thank you, Teddy Roosevelt, for preserving these beautiful parts of our country so that I don't have a target in the middle of the Bitterroot Mountains, right?
So, and I went to Darby, Montana.
It's right there in the Bitterroot Mountains.
And it was so clear: the only thing Darby has left is it's become basically a standing museum of what small towns used to be.
So you go and you talk to the person who owns the restaurant and all that.
They don't make anything.
All they are is an old cowboy town that tourists come and see what it used to be like.
That was it.
They used to have a manufacturing base.
They used to have, they used to make everything in their town.
It's all gone.
And it was just so clear.
And I asked how it was going.
They said, well, you know, we have a big opioid problem.
We have a suicide problem.
We have this recovery clinic.
And it's just destroyed.
And so you can go up to Hamilton, Montana, 30 miles north, and they have their Walmart and they have their big box chains and their stores and mountains of plastic and all that.
And I'm more convinced than ever that's not sustainable for a country.
It just isn't.
And so you have, to your point, about 90 miles away, Sun Valley, Idaho, right?
Which is where the ruling class gathers in the summer and they Davos in the winter.
Their association with our country is like, oh, yeah, I love America.
I have a place in Aspen and Sun Valley.
Like, okay, hold on a second.
Like, that's a nice place.
Yeah.
I keep my jet in, you know, Phoenix.
I think I love America, right?
And really, what it is, is you have a growing economic elite that were educated in these universities that actually share the ideology with the Huffington Post reporters and the Berkeley intelligentsia.
They see America as nothing more than a sandbox to maximize profits and to just go to the next place.
Can you expand on that?
Because this is different philosophically than how conservatives were talking six or eight years ago.
And I actually think it's a good thing.
I think it's a great thing.
And I think you're right on all of those counts.
One of the biggest tricks that the folks pulled on us, the free trade people, is taking advantage of the fact that you and I and other people like us love free markets.
We think that there should be a fair competition between our fellow Americans.
Taking that free market love and saying that free trade is the exact same thing.
It's obviously not the same thing.
I mean, I was talking to some ranchers in South Dakota on a cross-country trip, reporting trip recently, and they don't even know what they got for it.
And I promise someone's going to look into it once the world stopped ending.
What happened to Made in the USA?
You're not allowed to put that on American beef products anymore.
Someone in the U.S. government who was working on the treaty with the World Trade Organization made some decision to make a trade where they would no longer advertise and even let Americans know, unless they buy it from the farm themselves, where beef came from if it came from this country.
And the reason is because Brazilian and Canadians decided Brazilians and Canadians said that it would unfairly target them because Americans might prefer to buy their own beef as opposed to beef from a foreign country.
I sure hope so too.
And the cattle ranchers are struggling so hard.
It's horrible right now.
But some bureaucrat decided they didn't want to be unfair to Brazil.
Now, the average politician in Brazil doesn't think like that.
And the average politician in Canada maybe actually does.
But most of the world doesn't think, well, how can I be more fair?
How can I represent the other citizens?
I mean, look at the Democratic Parties.
Look at Joe Biden's number one priority.
The first thing he's going to do, he said, is take care of the DREAMers and import 20 million people or however many illegal immigrants there are, make them legal citizens.
So his first duty as president of the United States is to the citizens of Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador and Mexico and fine countries, all of them.
But you'd think that the president of the United States, who's asking for the vote of the American citizenry, would put at least something, maybe get a snack or a glass of water for the American citizenry before you take care of the citizens of foreign countries.
This backwards thinking that's completely supported by the schools, and thank you for fighting this every day.
Unfortunately, they're on break right now, right?
That's completely supported by the schools is that thing.
And these companies, they really do take advantage of the fact.
When I used to be at the Daily Color, we called around to about 15 or 20 of the major U.S. companies, Ford, Chrysler, Microsoft, and asked them if they consider themselves an American company.
Most of them said they consider themselves a company of the world.
Now, there are some rules to that, because if you say you're an American company and you're Twitter, then France is going to crack down on you because they want you to be a French company.
But in reality, they take advantage of our IT.
They take advantage of our safety.
They take advantage of what used to be a law and order country, our Navy that protects the seas, our ability to defend them, and then they sell us out entirely.
Yes.
The only companies that were willing to say they were still American were the car companies, because I think Ford, someone at Ford, had the good sense to say, wait a second, our whole brand is being an American company.
We can't sell this out.
And they gave us the right answer.
Well, I think Fiat Chrysler would have a tough time saying they're American for obvious reasons, but that's a different topic.
But I think, and this is one of my new themes I'm really focusing on.
And Tucker really opened my eyes to this when he said it.
And I think he just said it in like a 20-second off tangent, but it was so insightful to me, which you look back to the people that were supposed to hate, and I do think they had too much power.
And I think we could learn a lot from Teddy Roosevelt, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, J.P. Morgan, Chase.
They were actually patriotic ruling class.
They were not trying to serve the interests of another country.
I think that they knew they were in charge.
They assumed that mantle.
And they said, yeah, you know, we are distinctly pro-American.
We do have a lot of money.
We have a lot of resources.
But we are going to kind of be the protectors of this country.
And I do think it was the right thing to act on them.
Whereas you look at the modern-day equivalents, to your point, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, the Google people, Sergei Brin, and all those individuals.
Do you really think that they have a patriotic, any sort of patriotic core?
Absolutely not.
They look at themselves as citizens of the world.
They look at themselves as America being this awful place that sure has a lot of money and resources, and maybe we can maximize profits here.
And so I think the kind of shift in how we view corporate America has to be one of the most profound takeaways for conservatives.
I want to ask you another question, though, as kind of a sidebar to this, Chris, which is the Republican Party's failure to, I think, reform itself to an actual workers' party, I think will go one of two ways.
If we think that Donald Trump was just a one-off aberration, we're fooling ourselves.
I think Donald Trump's the beginning of a trend of a revolt against the elites.
And it's either going to go in a socialist workers' direction or it's going to be kind of an Eisenhower-Teddy Roosevelt direction where the Republican Party represents the middle class of America again.
How would you grade Republicans' reaction to the recent BLM nonsense to all of this in the last couple months, let's say, the kowtowing to corporate America, a lot of their silence?
How would you judge the Republican Party and all this?
Terribly.
I think the elected representatives and senators of the Republican Party are cowardly.
They don't want to fight on anything.
They want to take away the lessons from everything that this is simply economics.
I think the first probably revolt that we really saw against the elites was 2010 with the Tea Party.
That's exactly right.
And there are some articles, some articles that came out from a Claremont Review from American Spectator, Rest in Peace, that came out and said, this is a revolt against the ruling class.
And for people like Paul Ryan to take it as just, all right, this is my blank check to eliminate Social Security and do more free trade deals, like that was not actually the answer.
We're just going to balance the budget.
I think all of those things can be important.
But that was not what the Tea Party revolt was about.
It was a revolt against elites who seemed disconnected from America, embodied in the Barack Obama administration with all the fancy Kennedy-esque bureaucrats who came in, all the know-it-alls.
That's continued.
And the Republican Party, I mean, Mitch McConnell, a shrewd tactician, strong Republican Senate leader, he cares about judges and he cares about protecting campaign finance.
There's basically no case on campaign finance he hasn't been involved with except for Citizens United.
And he's very, very important on judges.
Now, things like abortion, things that a lot of social conservatives and Americans care about, things like immigration, a lot of Americans care about, things like the entire Trump populist idea, those are hard fights he'd rather not have.
So he'll give, he'll make great ads to them, and he'll say all the right things on the campaign trail until the Republicans who are in safe red districts do the same.
But then that's it.
It's always, well, next year we'll fight that battle.
Next year we'll fight that battle.
Keep coming back and voting for us because, and this is true, the Democrats are not an alternative.
The Democrats are antagonistic to all of these things.
They think that abortion should be more common.
It's amazing to see their honesty recently.
Republicans have a Republican voters have no other home, I think, than the GOP.
Unfortunately, they've taken it over, but it's been a tough takeover since Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and now Donald Trump.
The Democrats are completely hostile, and the only hope is to hold these organizations severely accountable from the think tanks you talked about to the Republicans.
But even though I like the guy, I don't think Kevin McCarthy is going to lift up the populist torch.
I don't think that Secretary Pompeo is going to be the next Donald Trump.
I have a difficulty seeing the next Trump, just like I have difficulty seeing the next Lincoln or TDR.
And I'm not comparing them, but those guys are just forces of personality.
Democrats Are Antagonistic 00:06:54
They're not exactly like each other.
But I do see exactly to your point that this genie is not going to go back into the bottle.
You and I are now sitting here.
We might have had a different discussion 10 years ago on what it means to be conservative.
And visiting the GOP recently in Connecticut, I had a great time with the Greenwich Republicans, a phenomenal group, and Fairfield Republicans.
It's a very, very wealthy aspect of Connecticut.
I was speaking up there.
And the entire left of the state, the entire west of the state is working class and it's solidly blue.
I think that if the GOP is successful in this and the policies that Trump has pushed onto the GOP and you've been pushing are successful, then that'll hopefully be reversed in the next 10 years.
And the elites of the coast will be blue and the working class will be red.
And I think that's the future for the GOP.
It has to be.
And we also have to ensure we have a working class, not just the consumption class.
And it's two completely different things.
You have to have people that are making things and at least having value in the marketplace, not just buying piles of plastic on the little crumbs that they get redistributed.
And I don't mean insignificant crumbs in Nancy Pelosi's sense, but just whether it be some sort of government handout or something that, oh, yes, now you can go buy XYZ.
I think that we've, in a lot of different ways, we've overvalued whatever it means to get a college degree, and we've undervalued labor.
I really do.
And if you dare say that, I think there's more space to say that now in the conservative circles, but if you would have dared say that 10 years ago, they say, oh, it's creative destruction.
It's all these great things.
I've been to these towns.
You have destroyed them, and you have forced them and their children to go relocate to these miserable cities that have no rules of law.
They're honestly the most depressing places of America, San Francisco and New York.
It's awful.
There's no spirit.
It's awful.
The religion is whatever the new vogue woke thing of the month is.
It's either the LGBT thing or the BLM thing.
It's no different.
No, seriously, it's no different than...
I know, you're right.
It's like Pope Fauci.
Right, but it's no different than the Catholic Church.
Like, this is the month of Holy Week.
There's Holy Week.
This is the month of the Pentecost.
You have these different themes in the Christian tradition.
It's no different in New York.
It's like this month is LGBT month.
Like, wait, what?
And then this month is BLM woke month.
It's essentially, I will be unsurprised in the next decade if they have to take the Eucharist in some sort of vegan snack in Central Park to they get blessed by some sort of atheist figurehead.
And I'm half kidding, by the way, because we all have a yearning.
We have a yearning for worship and connection and ritual.
And the only difference...
Have an original sin now, something that you're born with, and something you can never get rid of.
That's a great point.
Yeah, so through baptism, they've got a priest class, the columnists.
They've got rituals.
You've seen them bowing and worshiping at the feet of other activists.
It's wild.
Yeah, and from a social psychology standpoint, it's no different than the creation of early day Christianity, except that there's no moral just, there's no morality to this at all, and their figurehead is anything but righteous and true.
So, Chris, we're running low on time.
Can you just give us a general observation of where we're going into November?
I think you and I are completely on the same page with the future of the party.
And I laugh.
I talked to some of these Republican senators, and you could just tell that they think that this is just kind of like a thunderstorm that's going to pass.
Oh, yeah.
Like, I can't wait for this.
They hope it all passes.
Yeah, I can't wait for the tornado siren to go off and we can go out and play again.
And, you know, you don't understand.
It's never going back.
It's just not.
In fact, if you guys want to go be some lobbyist for some foreign country, go do that now because the parties have completely changed.
I think the Republican Party's changing for the better.
So where do you think things are going into November specifically?
I believe firmly we have to get President Trump re-elected.
And Joe Biden, for a variety of different reasons, should be incredibly beatable.
I'd love your analysis on that.
You know, I think you're right in that President Trump needs to be re-elected because Joe Biden is not, unfortunately for Joe Biden, he's not there anymore.
And the people who are running Joe Biden are so far to the left.
They are the people we're seeing in the streets and those who are condoning it.
And our society is going to have a difficult time.
Very, very difficult time with Joe Biden.
I'm talking existential crisis.
That's the level that we're at of breakdown of law and order, breakdown of fact, public shaming, firing, basic professional lynchings.
And there's only a matter of time before it actually turns into violence against conservative citizens and simply peaceful citizens who are silent in the face of the new party orthodoxy.
Donald Trump, however, really needs to step up to the plate on this.
Republicans are just, they cannot wait for him to be defeated.
They're already talking about how, well, at least when he's defeated and this goes away, the nation can go back to normal, and then maybe we'll retake the Senate in two years.
Like, that's the way they think, and that's the way that they were thinking in 2016, too.
Well, Orange Man's going to get beat by Hillary Clinton, and then maybe we can make some money, things will go back to normal, and then we can regain maybe the House or get back the Senate in 2018.
Trump is basically alone on this.
The military leadership's not behind him.
The Republican leadership's not behind him.
So he's going to need the votes, but he's going to need also to focus dramatically, really dramatically, on Joe Biden, on his policy and what he's running for.
Right now, he's not running on wall, immigration, trade, working class like he did the first time.
He's kind of all over the place, and he's working a lot in different feuds.
So I'd like to see some message discipline from Donald Trump.
But I am getting the feeling that the mainstream class is once again very wrong in predicting that he will go down easily.
A lot of Americans are completely fed up.
And unbelievably, the left has gone and taken moments of national tragedy where we all looked together and said, wow, that's a horrible thing that happened in the streets out there.
And they've turned it on America and they've held a gun to our heads.
And it's waking the country up.
I think that hopefully that silent majority that's been quieted is still out there.
Yeah, I mean, look, we have elections, so we don't have civil wars.
I mean, this is, people have been asked, well, when are we going to speak out?
I say, well, thankfully, the founders came with this brilliant idea of representative government, so you don't have to resort to defending yourself.
I think a lot of people are saying, let's just take it easy.
I do have still the right to vote.
I still can do that.
And that's not as good as...
We saw how the left reacted to the last election.
They literally rioted.
No, that's correct.
That's right.
That's right.
And I don't want to be overly dramatic.
I mean, I don't see any other pressure release valve except an election.
I just don't.
And I don't want to say if it goes unfavorably, we're going to go in that direction because we're decent people.
We won't.
But it's really hard to say that things are going to end well if these people that are so disenfranchised and so ridiculed do not have at least some semblance of being able to get towards victory in November.
Final Thoughts and Sister Episode 00:01:28
And I do think that the polling is incorrect and wrong and misguided.
So, Chris, final question: anything you're working on you want to make our audience aware of?
Anything that you're working on a big piece right now about a prominent magazine that might have made a serious error in judgment.
Well, there you go.
That's a nice tease.
So it's the Federalist, one of my favorite websites.
And, Chris, you're always very thought-provoking.
So, we got to have you come out to Phoenix and do a longer-style thing.
But thanks for joining us.
I'd love to.
It's great to talk to you, as always.
You too.
Thanks, Chris.
Talk to you soon.
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