All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
July 21, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
59:23
Portland on Fire, The Death of the Middle Class, and the Slow Creep of Socialism in America
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Revolution in Portland and Seattle 00:02:38
Thank you for listening to this podcast one production.
Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast One, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Hey, everybody.
Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, we ask the question, how is it that civilizations are ripe for a revolution?
We talk about Portland, Seattle, China, Venezuela, Cuba, and Russia.
We tie it all together on a historically important foundational episode here on the Charlie Kirk Show.
Please email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
For the first 15 people that listen to just this episode, tell me that you have listened to this episode and tell me who you think the worst president in America is at freedom at charliekirk.com.
First 15 to do that will win.
A signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine.
Oh, and guess what?
You can't say Barack Obama, because we all know he was the worst president.
So who do you think the worst president besides Barack Obama was?
Email me at freedom at charliekirk.com.
Type in Charlie Kirk Show right now to your phone.
Take out your phone.
Type in Charlie Kirk Show.
Hit subscribe.
Five-star review.
And please consider supporting our program by going to CharlieKirk.com slash support.
CharlieKirk.com slash support.
Become a monthly supporter.
It helps keep us protected from left-wing boycotts that want to destroy our program.
Buckle up, everybody.
Super fun episode here.
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.
America's ready to get back to work, but to win in the new economy, you need every advantage to succeed.
Smart companies run a NetSuite by Oracle, the world's number one cloud business system.
I put my name totally behind NetSuite.
It's terrific.
With NetSuite, you'll have visibility and control over your financials, HR, inventory, e-commerce, and more, everything you need all in one place.
Whether you're doing a million or hundreds of millions in sales, NetSuite lets you manage every penny with precision.
You have the agility to compete with anyone, work from anywhere, and run your whole company right from your phone.
Join over 20,000 companies who trust NetSuite to make it happen.
NetSuite surveyed hundreds of business leaders and assembled a playbook of the top strategies they're using as America reopens for business.
Receive your free guide.
Seven actions businesses need to take now and schedule your free product tour at netsuite.com slash Kirk.
Get your free guide and schedule your free product tour right now at NetSuite.com slash Kirk.
NetSuite.com slash Kirk.
Chaos in Our Inner Cities 00:03:02
Portland and Seattle are in a state of chaos.
Now look, Portland and Seattle are some of the most left-wing, Marxist, quasi-totalitarian cities in the entire country.
And it's easy to write off these two incredibly almost sovereign countries within our country as just, oh, that's left-wing, Seattle being Seattle.
But there's a deeper lesson at play here.
I want to dive deep into this episode of exactly what can we learn from what is happening in Portland and Seattle?
And also what is happening in the news right now with the Trump administration mobilizing federal resources to try to solve these problems and these issues in our inner cities.
I also want to ask the question, how do you get socialism in your country?
We talk a lot about how socialism is growing in America, but rarely do we dive into the actual practicality of how socialist policies come to be and how socialist politicians are able to find a population of which their horrible and sinister and malevolent ideas are actually able to resonate.
And so let's first focus in on what's happening in Seattle and Portland, and especially Portland.
The main controversy happening right now is the deployment of federal troops on the streets of Portland to quell rioting and, quote, peaceful protests.
Rioting that has been holding that city hostage and innocent business owners and bystanders for over 40 days.
The Trump administration argues it retains authority to conduct law enforcement activities in cities where they are not welcomed by local officials, including in Oregon where Governor Kate Brown, one of the worst governors in America, insists that DHS withdraw and that Portland's mayor has made similar calls.
Now, what exactly is the federal government responding to?
Well, over this last weekend, rioters once again attempted to seize control of public property, both state and federal, eventually setting fire to the Portland Police Association building.
The federal building in downtown Portland was also attacked when rioters tearing down barricades that were constructed to prevent the mob from overwhelming the facility.
In a truly incredibly and historically weak response, still acting under the direction of Mayor Ted Wheeler, police, quote, ask the protesters to leave or face possible arrest.
You don't ask when your police association building's on fire and when people are destroying federal property.
Now, the move follows a similar announcement in Chicago.
The Department of Homeland Security, DHS, is sending 150 federal agents to Chicago this week.
Good for President Trump for doing this.
The Homeland Security Investigations, HSI, agents are set to assist other federal law enforcement and Chicago police in crime fighting efforts.
This is the type of movement that we need to restore order.
Now, mind you, this is all after the creation of Chaz and CHOP in our country.
This is all after statues, police departments set on fire, businesses in total flames.
We're supposed to believe this is all because of the unjust killing and murder of George Floyd, of course.
How America Becomes Marxist 00:06:04
This all begs the question: how does something like this happen in America?
How do you get a population that so willingly sacrifices the gift we have been given to live in this beautiful country?
How does it make them ripe for a revolution?
How do you get socialism?
How do you get this very dangerous intersection of Marxist communism and nihilism?
Let's dive deep.
It's not just because of the cultural institutions that are teaching our kids to hate America.
That plays a huge role.
We talk frequently here at Turning Point USA.
Whatever happens on college campuses will soon happen in corporate boardrooms, in the halls of Congress, and in the entire American culture.
It's not just because of the media companies and the activist media and social media and Hollywood propagandizing a public to hate America.
All of that has actually been happening for a couple decades.
Now, mind you, it's much worse today than it was in the 1970s and 80s.
But if we don't dive deep into the practicality of how a country becomes Marxist or socialist, and I mean economically, I mean financially, then we have an incomplete picture of how a country descends into tragedy.
In 2015, according to multiple articles at Fortune.com, Businessweek, and many others, it says, quote, the middle class is no longer a majority of the country.
There are many other figures and many other statistics to show this, one of which is by an economist by the name of Oren Cass.
This was written up in the Washington Post and many other public media publications.
And I'm not a fan of the Washington Post, but this study is completely true.
It went to show this, that in 2020, you need to work 66 weeks in order to fulfill major household expenditures.
And in it are the price of college, transportation, health insurance, and housing.
Now, there's two parts to this metric.
I don't think as many people need to go to college that are going to college.
I think that health, insurance, and health care are going up dramatically because of government intervention, and we'll go into that.
But a better metric is this, is that in 1985, you could work 36 weeks to be able to provide for a single family, a four-person family.
Now you have to work 53 weeks in order to provide for one wage earner.
Some people say that, well, the middle class is not disappearing.
We have nicer things now.
We also have entirely new categories of goods, iPhones, laptops, multiple TVs in the home.
And then we have creative destruction.
I think some of that is true.
I think we definitely have nicer things.
And for example, Kodak has gone out of business, but all of us have a supercomputer smartphone camera in our right-hand pocket.
But that doesn't discount and that doesn't replace the fact that middle-income earners, primarily people that work with their hands, have been steadily disenfranchised.
I really believe that the socialists intentionally use distraction issues such as the bathroom issue or things like pronouns, which I think are important.
And I fight on those cultural issues, but a lot of them are kind of distracting versus the honest assessment of the economic decline of middle America.
The middle class, or as Aristotle called the golden mean, has almost evaporated.
And it is not because all of them got into the upper middle class.
It just isn't.
I encourage you to listen to our sister episode with Ben Shapiro, where I think we very politely disagree on this issue.
I am a free market capitalist, but I also recognize that because of government policy, selfish politicians, and some, let's just say, anti-American corporations, the American middle class is in danger of going extinct.
In fact, we almost have a permanent underclass that in one way or the other is dependent on the federal government and endlessly in debt.
And then you have part of the 5% of America that has an incredible amount of wealth and income.
And not necessarily at the expense of the rest of the country, but definitely it's not benefiting the rest of the country because they're primarily in information sharing industries where they have made decisions to deindustrialize our country and to bring back that capital to our country despite the predominant employment sector being in Wuhan or Shanghai.
It's a serious problem.
Now, mind you, in many places in Seattle and Portland, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles, there are microcosms of what happens when you allow leftist and radical policies to take root.
Now, if you disagree the American middle class is evaporating, I just, it's a non-starter for me.
Now, why it's evaporating, that's where we'll disagree with the left.
I actually think it's because of FICA taxes, 8% of your earnings disappearing immediately, property taxes being too high, the cost of college being too high because of the federal government.
I think it's actually because of left-wing ideas and because of too big of government, we are seeing the middle class be squeezed and destroyed.
But income inequality is a real thing, and it's greater on the coasts and in the South than it is in the Midwest, incredibly, according to a 2019 report by the New York Federal Reserve.
So basically, if socialism is the enemy that we are trying to prevent against, then we need to have an honest assessment of how that transition happens.
We need to look at some real historical examples of what happens when skilled workers and those with college degrees have increasingly concentrated in large urban areas since the 1980s, which has happened here in this country.
What happens when you leave rural America behind?
And Detroit really exemplifies this trend.
According to the New York Federal Reserve Report, increased global competition and tech advances precipitated massive job losses and plant closures in the auto industry, displacing lower and middle skilled workers, people that work with their hands.
Make no mistake, when you no longer have a middle class in your country, when you allow your middle class to disappear, you are giving the socialists the greatest gift imaginable.
The Danger of Rural Abandonment 00:15:26
Let's look at some real examples.
How about Cuba?
Cuba is a communist country.
We shouldn't discount, though, the history of how it became a communist country.
We're going to go through three specific examples and a fourth one that is not as in-depth, but it's pretty obvious, which is we're going to go through the Cuban example, the Russian example, the Chinese example, and the Venezuelan example.
So start with Cuba.
It's obviously in the northern part of the Caribbean.
It's the pearl of the Antilles, if you will.
In May of 1902, Cuba was granted independence from the United States of America.
Fast forward in 1940, it created a new constitution, and someone with a very fun-sounding name, Flugencio Batista.
Flugencio Patista.
He ruled through a series of different power struggles, but his most famous rule was from 1952 to 1959.
Now, mind you, Cuba was plagued with massive illiteracy.
The middle class had very little to any purchasing power.
And business owners did not believe that their kids' life would be better than their life.
This unfortunately led the way to a wannabe autocrat, a tyrant.
One thing that human history tells us is that there will be no lack of self-righteous, evil, and pernicious tyrants that want to take power.
Fidel Castro was locked up due to trying to rebel against Batista in the early 1950s.
He fled to Mexico City.
He met the anti-gay Marxist activist Che Guevara.
They joined forces, and Che Guevara, alongside Fidel Castro, helped assume power in Cuba in 1959.
Now, a lot of it was because the citizenry of Cuba lost faith in the very system that they were living in.
A lot of the reason as to why Fidel Castro's awful ideas and his charismatic speeches were able to resonate with the middle-class Cuban is because the middle-class Cuban looked at Batista and looked at the capitalist system or the lack of a capitalist system as no longer working for them.
Endless utopian socialist promises prey on the failures of a pre-existing ruling class.
And some of those failures are very legitimate.
I mean, Batista was not serving the best interests of the Cuban people.
Castro did worse.
But Batista was a failed leader.
And some people, according to declassified CIA documents, Central Intelligence Agency documents of our country said that he was propped up by the United States government.
That's still debated in a lot of different circles.
So you have Castro, you have this tyrant, because the middle class of Cuba no longer felt invested in the status quo.
It led to a perfect gateway to communism and socialism.
There's no shortage of action going on with our exclusive partners, betonline.ag.
Sports are slowly making its way back with UFC boxing, NASCAR, and soccer leading the way, and BetOnline has all the best odds and lines for the upcoming games and matches.
Do you need more?
Bet Online has simulated NFL, NBA, and UFC happening every day live for you to check out.
Looking for something else other than sports?
Bet Online also has hundreds of live casino games, poker tournaments, and all the best props in the business.
Visit betonline.ag or use your mobile device.
Join right now to receive your new welcome bonus and start playing today.
Bet online, your online wagering experts.
Visit betonline.ag.
Don't forget that promo code podcast one for your sign-up bonus.
Bet online, your online sportsbook experts.
How about in China?
We obviously see the Chinese Communist Party today.
But if you actually look at how Mao took power, he first took power in 1949 after a long power struggle, basically post-World War II, where Japan controlled a lot of Manchuria or it was then China.
And Mao then took power in 1949, and he slowly but steadily implemented communist ideas.
But in May 16th, 1966, Mao did something very different than most other communist leaders, and it was even different than Fidel Castro.
He went on the most ambitious revolution, not economically, but tried to have a revolution in people's thinking.
Mao recognized that most of the people of China post-World War II had no hope whatsoever that the prior little fiefdoms in China would continue to be able to portray faith in the general Chinese system.
But in order for Mao to be able to assume total control of the country, he instituted a massive cultural revolution, a decade of slaughter, of blood, and totalitarianism.
He created something called the Red Guard.
The Red Guard were mostly young people.
They traveled the country, destroying statues, burning books, and abolishing Chinese history.
Sound familiar?
Over 16 million dissidents were sent to death camps and labor camps.
Throughout this decade of the Cultural Revolution, Mao broke the back of the Chinese middle class.
In fact, there is not a worker in China that was allowed to report to work that did not have Mao's, quote, little red book.
I encourage all of you to check out Mao's little red book.
And by the way, I talk to so many college students about this.
They know nothing about Mao's little red book.
Do you know what Mao's little red book was?
It was literally a little red book.
It was a little red book that was all 267 of the most famous quotations from Mao Sedong.
In fact, there would be members of the Red Guard, which was their equivalent of the SS, that would go around and ask people, do you have your little red book with you?
And if they didn't, they can go to prison.
It was total top-down indoctrination.
All loyal citizens were required to have a little red book.
Now, this was made possible because there was not a vibrant and functioning middle class of people that owned private property that felt invested in their system.
You allow incredibly evil people like Mao to take power when a majority of your country does not own anything.
If a majority of your country owns nothing and does not believe that if they work hard and play by the rules a decade from now, they will be better than they are today, then all of a sudden like Mao starts to make sense.
All of a sudden, someone like Mao actually, tragically, becomes very, very popular.
And the same could be said for the transition in Russia.
Now, for all intents and purposes, the Soviets could be considered as the world's first Marxists.
Now, mind you, Marx was a mid-1800s author that theorized and complained about the mass industrialization happening in European cities.
Marx made many different observations.
Marx was a huge opponent to private property.
Marx thought that work was inherently alienating, which is, of course, rubbish.
He thought that modern work was insecure.
He thought that workers get paid too little while their owners get rich and it's a primitive accumulation of wealth.
That's a direct quote from the Communist Manifesto.
He thought profit was theft.
Well, how are you supposed to have a market?
Well, how are you going to make anything without profit?
That's such nonsense.
He thought that capitalism was inherently very unstable.
And he thought that capitalism is actually bad for capitalists.
He argued that marriage is a business relationship.
It was a commodity fetishism.
And in fact, that's how we actually got a lot of the quasi-intersectional caucus between the radical feminists and the Marxists.
And he wanted free public education and he wanted no private property at all whatsoever.
And so Marx's ideas were really not taken very seriously at all during his time.
It wasn't until a radical by the name of Vladimir Lenin were these ideas actually taken seriously.
Vladimir Lenin was actually in prison.
He was imprisoned for trying to cause a revolution against the Romanov dynasty in Russia and he was sent into a prison in Austria.
As a way to try to break apart World War I, Vladimir Lenin was put in a rail car back to Russia in World War I and was told that, hey, why don't you go cause some trouble in Russia and try to begin the end of this war.
And part of his contribution to the end of World War I was actually him causing so much chaos in Russia, it actually relaxed the Eastern Front.
Now, Russia and the Russians were essentially the first Marxists.
And you have to understand that the aristocracy all across Europe was crumbling.
But what was really important is that in Russia, there was no middle class.
There was resentment.
It was a depressed society.
And what the Marxists prey on are three of the worst attributes of the human psyche and how humans can actually operate: resentment, deceit, and arrogance.
You combine those three, you're in a lot of trouble.
Now, post-Lenin, you had Joseph Stalin.
Joseph Stalin employed the worst possible tactics of a totalitarian.
But the reason why Stalin was able to be successful as a common theme between Cuba, China, and the USSR, it was more than just cultural.
It was more than just making persuasive arguments.
It was more than just people not going to church.
It was that people materially felt that their labor and their time and their dreams and their ambitions meant nothing.
Stalin, for lack of a better term, was the gold standard of dictatorship.
It was probably the most power you could possibly accumulate.
He ruled for over 30 years.
I mean, by comparison, Adolf Hitler only ruled for about 12 years.
Stalin almost three times as long.
He first instituted a series of edicts called collectivization.
This collectivization was so dangerous and so destructive to the Soviet psyche because basically he went to the entire peasant class and he said, you cannot have more than a certain amount.
In fact, there was an edict from the top that Stalin put forward to the peasant class that 25% of you are living too large and you will be punished because of that.
He thought that Marxism was the transcendence of capitalism.
Now, mind you, what's really amazing about the history of Joseph Stalin is he was actually a seminary student early in his life and he didn't just not believe in God.
He hated the idea of God.
He famously, before he died, shook his fist up to the heavens and said, I will finally get you, God, or something of that variation.
Stalin was a committed Marxist.
Don't let the revisionist history college professors tell you in a different way.
They said, well, there is no such thing, there were no Marxists.
Communism has ever tried.
Stalin was a disciple of Marxist-Leninism.
He wanted to eradicate capitalism at all costs.
And here's one example of it.
Stalin very well could have allowed capitalism to continue in the countryside.
Stalin was assuming the first experiment in communism.
Understand, the Romanovs ruled from 1613 to 1917 in Russia, basically 300 years.
So people knew a status quo for 300 years.
And one of the reasons that they basically rejected the provisionary government from the February Revolution of 1917 to the October coup that the Bolsheviks enacted in October of 1917 was because that provisionary government could not handle the question of industrialization as well as the Bolsheviks.
The Bolsheviks had an answer: industrialization is awful.
We must embrace communism and that the state should run the economy.
Well, the people that had a lot of resentment and had a lot of anti-aristocratic feelings, sound familiar, and a lot of anti-ruling class resentment, sound familiar, all of a sudden embraced that.
They owned nothing.
It was post-World War I.
I mean, everyone was impoverished.
And when people owned nothing and they were in debt or had no resources, as it is today in America, all of a sudden, the demagogue and a dictator like Stalin and Lenin, they become incredibly popular.
But Stalin was not, Stalin was not happy enough with just socialism in the cities, capitalism in the countryside.
See, there are 120 million peasants, and capitalism in the countryside was actually working.
Their ideology superseded the reality.
You see, Stalin wanted communism so badly, he wasn't going to allow capitalism to continue in the countryside.
He wanted Marxism everywhere.
He was a true ideologue.
Sound familiar?
See, the ideologues in America, they don't care what works.
They just want themselves to be right.
They want to be right more than what is good.
The underlying, almost suicidal destruction of capitalism in the countryside resulted in the greatest famine that we know in human history.
So he led a revolution against the kulaks.
We've talked about this before on the Charlie Kirk show: of how Stalin wanted anyone that owned any sort of private property in the countryside to be destroyed.
Stalin challenged his fellow ideologues whether they actually believed in Marxism.
Because some of his fellow inner circles said, Joseph, don't actually go after the countryside.
It's working.
Our entire country is being fed.
You can kind of do a little bit of things on the edges, but let the peasants live as they were.
We'll have socialism in the cities.
Stalin wasn't okay with that.
You see, the left, collectivists, or the Democrat Party in America today, they're never okay with just dominating their one little sphere of influence.
They want control over everything.
It's a very important lesson that we can derive from Joseph Stalin.
See, Stalin sent urban activists, mostly hyper-educated young people, to the countryside.
The Kulak revolution was total and complete class warfare.
Go after the rich peasants is what he commanded.
And in part, collectivization.
The commune was just an instrument.
De facto peasant ownership was outlawed.
So the collectivization process was implemented.
So in 1929 and 1930, they were very lucky.
They had a good harvest.
In 1931 to 1932, Stalin was less lucky.
In fact, he had no luck at all.
It was the worst famine on record.
Now, mind you, if there was privatization and not collectivization, the market would have compensated to have some resources be saved, some be stored away.
A price system would have been enacted.
And the market would have disallowed, basically, for mass famine, mass starvation to occur.
Instead, five to seven million Ukrainians died.
Just think about that.
Five to seven million people died of starvation.
Do you understand how painful it is to die of starvation?
You basically scream yourself to death.
You're just screaming and asking for food.
Five to seven million people died because of Stalin's ideology.
The Pulit Bureau, the people around Joseph Stalin, they insisted and they said, why don't you go back to privatization?
He said, no.
Basically, it was the Machiavellian term.
The ends justify the means.
Five Million Starved by Ideology 00:04:07
One-fifth of his regime died in 1932 because the starvation continued.
And of the ethnic Kazakh population, one-third of them died.
It was starvation, the likes of which the world has never seen.
Not because the weather was worse, not because it was the worst uncontrollable disaster.
This was the worst planned famine because of an ideologue named Joseph Stalin.
Because prior to that, the Romanovs, they were unable to manage and produce a Russian middle class.
Stalin continued to have quotas with very little concessions.
And eventually, the entire peasant class was reduced from 120 million people to 80 million people.
And if you dared disagree with Joseph Stalin, they would lock you up in prison, which then led to one of the most perplexing periods in American history, similar to Mao's Cultural Revolution, where he killed tens of millions of people.
Mao probably killed anywhere between 60 to 100 million people.
But Joseph Stalin then went on one of the most pathological, bloody campaigns in human history.
You see, Stalin was committed and ideologically possessed to destroy capitalism.
So was Mao Zedong.
But then Mao in 1936 started on what was called the Great Terror.
On the Great Terror between 1936 and 1938, get this number.
He executed 830,000 people.
One to two million people on top of that were arrested and sent to gulags or work camps.
What's even more puzzling is that Stalin went after every single person in his inner circle, almost every single person.
He purged his inner ranks.
He wanted to almost break the will of his inner circle.
Interestingly enough, if you study also Leon Trotsky, who is more popular in the West than in Russia, Leon Trotsky, they almost hated each other.
They helped create the Leninist Russian Revolution and they ended up hating each other.
Trotsky hated Stalin.
In fact, he wrote against Stalin in the West and Spain and in Mexico and all across, even in New York City.
And Trotsky actually was very positively impressed by American capitalism, despite himself being a committed Marxist.
But Trotsky warned against this.
He said that communism will eventually become abused by sociopathic tyrants like Joseph Stalin.
And as a lesson to us all, this is a lesson to the American ruling class, all of you out there that are leftists.
Some of you, it seems as if you guys are going through a perpetual competition of, I hope you eat me last.
Please eat me last.
Just remember, I was on your team.
But Tukhachevsky, General Tukhachevsky was more than just a general.
He was a marshal of the USSR.
He was murdered by Joseph Stalin with the confession that he was forced to sign splattered in his own blood as a signal to all the rest of the generals in the armed forces, you could be next.
Joseph Stalin wanted the wholesale replacement of the elite and to make people confess for something they did not even commit.
Does that sound familiar?
And all of this was made possible.
This incredible murder of innocents in Russia, in China, in Cuba, largely because the middle part of the country, as Aristotle called the golden mean, you see Aristotle dating all the way back to ancient Greece.
Of course, remember, Socrates taught Plato.
Plato taught Aristotle.
Aristotle taught Alexander the Great.
Aristotle differentiate.
Aristotle agreed with Plato on a lot of things.
He disagreed with Plato and other things.
Aristotle was so convinced that a middle class was necessary for a functioning society.
That if you do not have that golden mean, and Cicero also talked about this, Cicero served as a Roman council in a lot of ways was a best-selling author of Roman times.
Home Security and Hope 00:03:06
That if you do not have people that think that their energy, their dreams are going to result in something better down the road, they will be ripe for a revolution.
That in fact, those people will inevitably embrace the most malevolent ideas you could possibly imagine if they lose faith.
You see, volatility is a precedent for authoritarian control.
Traditionally, the American middle class has always been immune to these Marxist totalitarian movements for a couple reasons.
The first of which was a faith in God is that it just, it didn't mix well.
The middle class and most of the country was a very religious country.
Believing in nothing and believing in societal redefinition, it just seemed so extreme compared to the teachings of loving your neighbor and the teachings of the Bible.
As America has become less religious, it has become more likely to this Marxist experiment and these totalitarian revolutions we see happening in Seattle and Portland.
And they're going to grow.
Just like they grew in Stalin's Russia, where he was not okay with just socialism in the cities, capitalism in the countryside.
They're going to want socialism everywhere.
There's one thing that everyone needs to know about home security systems.
It's that criminals are on the loose.
They're looting.
They're killing.
They're doing awful things.
And home security companies, most of them trap you with high prices, tricky contracts, and lousy customer support.
So while there are a lot of options out there, there's only one, no-brainer, simply safe.
SimplySafe is a no-brainer.
Protect what you love.
That's what I've done on all my property.
There are criminals just a couple blocks from me.
They're breaking into homes.
They're stealing items.
They're doing evil things.
And guess what?
We got SimplySafe.
SimplySafe's got everything you need to protect your home with none of the drawbacks of traditional home security.
It's got an arsenal of sensors and cameras to blanket every room, window, and door tailed specifically for your home.
Professional monitoring keeps watch day and night, ready to send police fire at medical professionals if there's an emergency.
You can set it up yourself in under an hour, just peel and stick the sensors exactly where you need them.
No technician required, and there's no contract, no pushy sales guys, no hidden fees, and no fine print.
All starts $15 a month.
What is your dog, your home, your family worth to you?
I'm sure it's worth more than $15 a month.
And simplysafe.com slash Charlie is the place to go.
And we're not the only ones who think SimplySafe is great.
U.S. News World Report named it the best overall home security system in 2020.
Try simplysafe.com slash Charlie and get free shipping at a 30-day risk-free trial.
There's nothing to lose.
SimplySafe.com slash Charlie.
And so the second reason as to why the American middle class, people that work for a living, earn between $60,000 to $80,000 a year in modern income terms, the reason why they've always been so resistant or reluctant to join with the Che Guevaras or the Joseph Stalins or the Vladimir Lenins or the Leon Trotsky's is because they bought into the system.
Debt Burden Breeds Radicalism 00:15:00
They believed that the more they worked, the harder that they worked, eventually their life was going to improve.
But if you look at the numbers here, and so you just look at the average debt burden in the country and consumer debt hit a new record of $14.3 trillion.
And you look at credit card debt in particular, and student loan debt, which are, in essence, depreciating assets over time.
You're just paying to service the debt.
Credit card debt has a massive balance.
The average American has about $38,000 in personal debt, excluding home mortgages.
And that's up from $1,000 a year ago, according to Northwestern Mutual's 2018 planning and progress study.
Now, mind you, I'm not indulging in victimology politics, Elizabeth Warren style, and blaming the evil capitalist companies because of this.
I do think that corporations have to take more social responsibility for what they do.
I think they've done an awful job of that.
And when they fund BLM Inc., they're not exactly on my good list to want to get any sort of favors or goodwill or me to say nice things about them at all.
But you just look at auto loans.
The average family in America has $27,978 in auto loans, which is by definition a depreciating asset.
You buy a car and you drive it.
It is not going to get more valuable.
Now, household debt is the only part of this, basically, if you're talking about mortgage debt, that I think is actually structurally okay.
But the average debt burden, basically, right now, most middle-income earners are not going to be able to get debt-free by the time that they die.
And so either that debt will be passed on to their kids or that debt burden will have to be reallocated somewhere else in the economy.
And so going back to the number that I said earlier, according to Oren Cass, on a middle-income salary, median income, you have to work 66 weeks just to pay for modest expenses.
That doesn't count saving, by the way, at all.
And a lot of this also has to do with how we do our money supply.
Again, I blame government for most, if not all of this, but it's a real problem.
And to just ignore the economic aspect of this as being a gateway drug for socialism, I think is not looking at the full picture.
I think it's rather incomplete.
And of course, part of it is cultural.
Of course, part of it is the fact that we teach our kids to hate America.
However, I look at my parents' generation.
In some ways, these Marxist ideas were actually more fashionable in the 60s and 70s than they are now.
I know that might sound very unusual, but in the 60s and 70s, there was a steady pro-Marxist movement within our universities that had widespread support.
You just look at the 60s and 70s protest war music.
A lot of it was pro-communist symbology.
A lot of it was about fighting the man and empowering voices such as Angela Davis and many others.
Why is it that people in the late 60s and all throughout the 70s, why is it by the time that they were in the 1980s and 1990s, they were voting for Ronald Reagan?
And they kind of just turned their back on the nonsense that they were taught by these radical professors.
And now, mind you, I'm not for a second saying that the radical infiltration of our cultural institutions has not worsened since the 1970s.
I'm not saying that.
I'm just saying that it was there then and it's also here today to some extent.
And the reason is that this is reason number three, and it ties in reason number two why the middle class has always been immune to these sorts of revolutions is because those college graduates, my father's generation and my mother's generation in the 1970s and 1980s, they kind of saw their life improve after a few years after graduating college.
By the time they were 28 or 31 or 35, they saw their incomes going up.
They saw their wages increasing.
They saw their wealth increasing.
They were able to buy a home, buy a car, start a family.
And that kind of off-the-wall rant from Angela Davis or those extreme writings from Jacques Derrida resonated far less as soon as you own a home and you're able to take your family on vacation.
The question today, for someone who is 32 that graduated college a decade ago and is $75,000 in debt, the question is this.
Can you live a decent life without having to go into debt?
And so we went through all of the debt burden in America and the fact that you're not even able to save, let alone survive on a middle-income salary.
A lot of it is because of government.
A lot of it is because of too high taxes and regulation and lack of social mobility and entrepreneurship.
And some of it is because we decided to ship away all of our core industries to China and to third world countries and act as if we're getting richer because of it because we have mountains of plastic in our garage that we never use.
I think it's a mixture of both.
I don't think it's total and complete surrender to the free market God that we must act as if it's a religion.
And I definitely don't think it's a complete and total blame game on all things capitalist.
I think it's mostly because of government.
And I think capitalism and free enterprise is mostly the solution, absolutely.
But if we're honest with ourselves, we have leveraged the labor and the totality of our citizenry, which mostly has benefited the economic elite, but severely harmed the everyday citizen.
And here's two reasons why.
We have lived beyond our capable means as a society, going $26 trillion in debt and devaluing our currency and getting people addicted to government programs.
And we have grown the size of government, the second reason, so tremendously and increased taxes because of it.
And so I think we must be very honest with ourselves: if we want to prevent these totalitarian autocrats from taking power, BLM Inc. and Nicole Hanna-Jones, the new hostile takeover of the New York Times,
if we are worried about these resentful, deceitful, and arrogant totalitarians from taking power, we must get very serious that if we don't address the economics and we don't convince the 42-year-old right now in Lakeland,
Florida, who has not seen their wages go up and they're $38,000 in debt, if we don't communicate to them and convince them truly, not just through messaging and persuasion, that yes, America is actually improving for you, which it was mostly during the Trump economy, but those days are gone because of the lockdowns that will go down as some of the worst mistakes in American history, not just because of the virus, but because of how we reacted to the virus.
If we are not able to convince them of this, then the socialists will win.
They will.
And Ben Shapiro articulates this very well in our sister episode.
They are disintegrationists.
They are.
And the Marxists, they always want three things, always.
They wanted three things in China, in Cuba, and Russia.
And I forgot the fourth example, which was Venezuela.
And that example is used a lot.
But in Venezuela, they had a very rich country that respected private property rights.
And unfortunately, because of corruption and using government regulation to their favor, nine families basically controlled everything in Venezuela, which led the way to a communist revolution.
So all four examples in Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and China is a commonality that when people don't own anything, or even worse, as we have it in America, when people owe more than they own, which was the case in Russia in the post-war order because there was so much structural debt that was poured upon Russia, people are going to overturn the tables.
People are going to say, I don't have to live like this.
I'm not going to live like this.
I don't think this is functional or healthy, and I don't think it's sustainable.
And so I think this is a huge lesson from the Trump era.
Because if we think that the middle-class revolt is only going to be pointed in the direction of the totalitarians and the socialists, we're fooling ourselves.
I think a couple years from now, what I'm saying right now will be tragically true.
When a charismatic, pro-worker, pro-middle-class, and non-culturally insane socialist starts to communicate about what I am saying and the decline of the middle class, they're going to have a lot of support in middle America if we don't get this right.
And it's more than just corporate tax cuts.
And it's definitely not DACA amnesty deals that is going to be able to improve the lives of the middle-income worker in Tennessee.
The three things that the socialists always have in common, always, is a utopian vision.
They are willing to say that anyone that has more than you got it by stealing, almost communicating to the cane-like aspect of our psyche.
And Jordan Peterson talks about this brilliantly.
And also, they are willing to destroy everything and anything till you get what you want.
Nihilism, which is the belief in nothing, coupled with Marxism, occurs and sets in when people lose faith that their actions, good decisions, make little difference to their own life and society as a whole.
It becomes even more accelerated when you see your rulers continually live lavishly while you toil incessantly just to go further into debt.
We've seen this so many times.
When Gavin Newsom keeps the winery that he's a co-owner or partner with, if he keeps that open in California but keeps everything else closed, that brings in a form of cynicism, if not nihilism.
Especially when you are working just to survive and your rulers get bailout money when they don't need it.
When Amazon's market share increases so dramatically and you've had to go into debt in this shutdown and this lockdown, you start to ask yourself the question, does this work for me?
And they say, it doesn't work for me.
And you pair all of that with the non-stop cultural assault from the 1619 project and the decline of our schools.
You have the foundational aspects and the introductory ingredients for exactly what Castro was able to parachute into because Batista was such an awful leader and people were widespread, illiterate.
He didn't take care of the Cuban middle class and Castro capitalized on it.
It's why Lenin took power post-Romanovs.
It's why Chavez took power in Venezuela.
And it's why Mao was able to hypnotize an entire country using his little red book.
I think we as conservatives have a misplaced obsession on just the cultural side.
And mind you, my whole organization is focused on winning the American culture war, on being able to make persuasive arguments, on making sure that people love their country.
But if you have a middle-class worker in Minnesota that believes America is the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world, but they really truly believe cynically that the country is rigged against them economically and materially, how is that sustainable as a country?
And every example I point to is a mixture of culturally charismatic, pathological tyrants that are able to insert themselves into a moment of time when the middle class is so economically depressed and depleted, they take advantage of it.
They are exploitationists.
And that's what you see on the left today.
There's a beautiful parable in the Bible of the parable of the sower.
And Christ talks about where it's the inverse of the parable, and it's incredibly applicable.
Where Christ says certain people will hear the message and they will decide to ignore it.
Some people will hear the message and decide to grow with it.
And that's the seeds that are planted in the soil.
And part of the parable is seeds that are basically thrown onto dirt or to rock and they are not able to grow.
And essentially, no plant is able to flourish.
That was Marxism and communism in the 1970s.
The seed being communism and Marxism, something bad, not something good in the parable of Christ.
And the seed of Marxism basically was thrown on rock because most of the people it was being thrown on my father's generation in the 70s and 80s, when they heard these ideas and they entered the workforce, they kind of just ignored it.
And they said, yeah, I kind of have a good job and I like this country and I found someone I want to marry and I have kids and that was all a bunch of nonsense and let's not do that.
And the ideas kind of just stayed to 10 to 15% of the American population of people that were relentlessly bitter and resentful.
But now you have those very same Marxist seeds that are being thrown down and they're being thrown down on very rich soil.
Because now you have a 28-year-old that is $60,000 in debt with little to no job opportunities because they studied something silly at some left-wing coastal university that taught them to hate the country.
There may be a barista, and you see their parents are not doing well either.
So they are almost in cultural and economic harmony with the generation prior to them because their parents are probably very far in debt.
And all of a sudden, those rants and those raves and the Castro speeches that they were forced to copy verbatim and almost the modern-day equivalent of the little red book is white fragility, where I don't think, I think the modern-day equivalent of the little red book is the 1619 project, where they're going to stop you on a college campus and make you recite the 267 incantations of Mao, which is now the incantations in Nicole Hanna-Jones.
It's eerily similar.
And now, all of a sudden, that nonsense that was downloaded and uploaded into a young person's brain, when they are economically hopeless, they then take action on all those bad ideas.
Those seeds, as Christ told us in the parable of the sower, are now finding rich soil.
And that rich soil is 30 million people of my generation that own nothing.
They can't engage in capitalism because they have no capital.
They're just in debt.
And so don't be surprised when all of a sudden they're the ones that have these Bernie Sanders signs.
Seeds of Revolution Find Soil 00:09:56
And as a way to make themselves more culturally cohesive and as if they fit nicer into the broader tapestry of American life, they've rejected God and they find their religion in movements like BLM or the environmentalist movement or the anti-gun movement.
Human beings operate in awfully predictable patterns.
You're never going to remove the need or the desire for a connection to a greater power or a greater purpose.
Just because you have destroyed the Episcopalian and Presbyterian and Baptist church in New York City, all but destroyed it, basically.
That doesn't mean all of a sudden that that left-wing activist who lives in Brooklyn who is $80,000 in debt and is barely getting by being a bartender and a cocktail waitress like Alexandria Casio-Cortez, nothing demeaning or wrong with that.
It's just true.
It doesn't mean that just because they're not going to the Baptist church on Sunday doesn't mean that they're not going to go somewhere to find meaning.
Instead, they're going to go to some BLM protest meetup once a week to find common values and goals and objectives, what the church used to do and actually did behind absolute truth.
Now they find that meaning in some sort of social revisionist history seminar.
And this all sows the seeds to end the analogy for a jungle of socialism that is growing in Seattle, Portland, New York, San Francisco, that is incredibly dangerous.
And so, yes, it is our cultural institutions that have abdicated their role in the public arena.
It absolutely is The propaganda arm of the Democrat Party, which is Netflix and Hulu and Google and all these other companies that give preference to these ideas, but those ideas would fall flat and those ideas would not be able to flourish or grow if they were communicating to a generation of young people that were flourishing.
Those ideas wouldn't really have any sort of resonance or traction if they were talking to a generation of young people that were saving money.
And you have a generation that is eternally indebted.
The average personal debt, $38,000.
Credit card debt is 25% of all debt.
Two in 10 Americans spend 50 to 100% of their monthly income on debt repayment.
Think about that.
20% of our country spends anywhere between half to all of their money on just paying old debt.
And so where's the money going?
Well, 15% is spent on dining or nightlife, which is definitely a depreciating X, definitely a depreciating asset.
Clothing is 13% and hobbies is 13%.
Now, mind you, it's not every single person that is in this category, but this is very generally true.
And even if these people have a decent job, even if my generation is able to get a little ahead of the curve economically, they're not even able to keep pace enough to pay their skyrocketing debt and housing expense.
When you don't own anything, you have no stake in your country.
And then all of a sudden, someone like Vladimir Lenin or Alexandria Casio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders starts to resonate with you.
And then more and more start to feel disenfranchised.
And you couple that with a propaganda machine that teaches you to feel victimized.
And if you feel that you can't afford a family, which essentially is a critical part of our Declaration of Independence, literally it says for our posterity.
Our declaration was written for future generations.
It was written for an intergenerational compact of liberty and freedom and for an investment in the future.
If you feel like you can't even financially afford a family, then you definitely don't have an investment in the country at all.
And that's why so many people are silent when 1619 starts to take over the country.
If you were flourishing economically, BLM and 1619, it would fall flat.
And so when you are taught to be a victim and then you're so far into debt because of some decisions that you might have made or some decisions that were made around you, and again, I'm not, it's very avoidable.
And I'm a big believer in individual agency and action.
I handicap that less because so many young people and so many parents have been sold this idea that you must go to college to succeed and you must get yourself out of debt very quickly to get that piece of paper and then you'll be able to flourish.
And I value that so much less today than ever before.
And of course, this was avoidable.
But if we do not come up with a set of policies that are either rooted in free market capitalism or rooted in holding corporate America accountable or whatever it might look like and definitely not around the ideas of Warren and Sanders and Biden and all those incredibly dangerous, malevolent exploitationists.
But if we do not have an agenda to get the middle part of our country reinvigorated, we're done.
All of a sudden, you are going to see either a Chinese, Russian, Cuban, Venezuelan-style Marxist revolution come take our country because the precedent for all of those is a middle-class decline.
When you don't own anything and you are just meandering around society in debt, barely surviving, you are ripe for a revolution, which is exactly what we're living through today.
And this is probably one of the most structurally dangerous trends that I see in our country.
I really do.
And the pandemic fueled a lot of these trends.
The pandemic only further pronounced almost all of these.
Debt has only increased.
Economic opportunity has gone down.
Middle class wages were going up and they're not going up anymore.
A lot of middle-class families are not even in the marketplace anymore.
Millions and millions of people out of work.
Price of goods are going to go up because we have decided to create $5 trillion.
And we are going to do an episode either this week or next week called Inflation is Coming, How the Central Bank's Creation of Money Out of Thin Air Actually Hurts the Middle Class and Lower Class the Most.
Because when you don't own anything, when you are not invested in the society and you are just renting, then when you just create a bunch of money, you are going to get hurt the most.
When you don't own property, when you don't own securities, you're the one that's going to get priced out of the system when all of a sudden you have 7% inflation.
I mean, if you wanted to destroy the country, you would take these sequence of steps.
If you wanted a socialist revolution, you would destroy the American middle class.
And I'm talking about someone who just earns $70,000 a year, has three kids, wants what is best for them, wants to take one vacation a year, wants to take weekends off, enjoy their favorite sports team, will never commit a crime, go to church on Sunday, save a little bit for themselves and their kids, and go retire nicely when they hit 60 or 70.
That should be built into the American Compact right now economically.
And just being kind of deferential and saying, oh, that doesn't matter and people have to make it for themselves.
I mean, that probably is true in an absolute extreme individual initiative argument.
But my broader argument is that's not sustainable.
That if you lose that promise, if you lose that guarantee, then all of a sudden the people that we as conservatives fear the most will assuredly take power.
That you will get a Vladimir Lenin in our country sooner rather than later.
So in a future episode, maybe this week or next week, I am going to go through a middle-class compact of some material things that I think we can do to improve the American middle class.
Because we have now talked about the problem.
We've identified how the destruction of the American middle class from a debt standpoint and from an income standpoint has led to this current status quo and why BLM Inc. and the 1619 project and why all this has great resonance.
So please email me your suggestions, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com, your recommendations and your suggestions as to certain policy ideas that you think that we can have a promise for the American middle class.
In fact, we might do that episode tomorrow.
I think that would be a fun episode to do.
A compact or a contract with the American middle class because we've diagnosed the problem and then we want to be a solution-based show.
Please consider supporting our show at charliekirk.com slash support, charliekirk.com slash support.
As you're listening to this episode, as it airs today, we have our first exclusive Skype call with our monthly supporters.
So you might have missed out because you could have been on it.
Exclusive, CharlieKirk.com slash support, CharlieKirk.com slash support.
Please email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
I'm about to go sign a bunch more copies of the MAGA Doctrine, M-A-G-A doctrine, the only ideas that will win the future.
Email me, you, subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Type in Charlie Kirk Show, hit subscribe, give a five-star review, screenshot it, and email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And also get involved with Turning Point USA, the nation's largest conservative student organization and over 2,000 high school and college campuses across the country.
tpusa.com tpusa.com.
Thank you guys so much.
Stay tuned tomorrow for a compact and contract with the American middle class so that we can solve this decline of the backbone of our country.
How do we solve it?
Through conservative, market-based, pro-American ideas.
Well, we'll get into that tomorrow and make sure to listen to our sister episode of Ben Shapiro.
It's terrific.
He wrote a great new book.
Check it out.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
God bless.
Export Selection