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July 25, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
01:40:01
The Great, Conservative, American Betrayal with Chris Buskirk

For the second time Charlie sits down with the editor-in-chief of American Greatness, Christ Buskirk, this time in the wake of the racial protests and riots that have seized the country in recent months, to discuss how America arrived at...

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Supporting Freedom and Long-Form Interviews 00:01:39
Thank you for listening to this Podcast 1 production.
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Hey, everybody.
This episode I sit down with the editor-in-chief of American Greatness, and we explore some very big and provocative ideas.
You're going to really enjoy this conversation.
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Buckle up, everybody.
Chris Buzzkirk is in the studio.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
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.
Charlie Kirk Runs the White House 00:15:52
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.
Chris, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Thanks.
I can't believe that it's already my second time on the show.
It seems like a blink, but it's six weeks, seven days since, and a lot's happening in our country.
I was joking with somebody today, Charlie.
I said, you know, there was this brief moment in March when everything was starting to shut down.
I thought, like, we're going to get a little breathing space here.
Things are going to slow down.
And in fact, what happens is everything sped up.
Yeah.
So since, let's just recap.
When we last met, it was still the Washington Redskins.
Right.
Right.
So we did not have Google or YouTube, of which we are streaming live on, putting $100 million to BLM incorporated causes.
It just seems that a lot has changed very quickly.
What do you make of all this?
You know, I guess there's this sort of famous phrase, like Hemingway said, you know, that's kind of the way you go bankrupt really slowly and then all at once.
Yeah, it's gradually then suddenly.
Yeah, and that sort of, it's gradually and then suddenly with this too.
I mean, you say, well, this kind of came out of nowhere.
Not really.
I mean, this has been building for a while and it's like, yeah, these particular things happened.
The big donations you're talking about from Google, the tearing down of storage, statues, the revoking of the names.
Well, people have been agitating to have the Redskins change their names for 20 years, at least.
And I guess one of my quick takeaways on this is that it does actually show what persistence does.
Like if you have a dedicated group of people who want to accomplish something, it is possible to accomplish really big things.
And that's something that I know that conservatives, people on the right broadly, kind of look at the last 50 or 60 years, maybe more, and look at having lost every major institution in the country and say, okay, can you ever do anything about that?
You know, because we lost all we you know, even the military, I mean, when you look at the uh when you look at sort of the field-grade officers, you know, sort of colonels and above, they're interchangeable with the board of directors of a Fortune 100 country, right?
I mean, they they sort of went to the same schools, they subscribed to the same cultural beliefs and doctrines.
And I look back at that and or look not back, but I look at that and say, yeah, okay, we did lose these things, but there are people who are dedicated to this country, first of all, and to the ideas upon which it was founded, which made this a great country.
And we need to get to work and not just say, okay, well, we lost, let's retreat.
It's like, let's actually take a little bit of heart and say that actually human action and human agency matters.
And if we're dedicated and we're smart and we work hard, we actually can build things that matter and that change the trajectory, not just at the margins, not just fiddling with little things, but we have to change the trajectory, and that's actually possible.
Yes, I wrote a piece for your website, didn't it?
Think big, essentially.
And that was one thing you mentioned in either one of our private conversations or on the podcast where you said one of the big problems is the conservative movement is not thinking big enough.
Right, absolutely right.
Sorry, go ahead.
Well, yeah, I mean, this is a persistent theme that I, and I try and come back to this a lot, which is there's conservatives are, you know, I just am temperamentally sort of conservative, politically, obviously, on the right.
And conservatives, there's a sense in which we don't want to think too big because there's a lot of risk and we think, well, what are the unintended consequences?
Like, this is one of the sort of political principles.
It's kind of the Hippocratic oath.
Like, you know, first do no harm.
And I think that's right.
However, there are times when you really need to think big.
It's not enough to say, you know, wouldn't it be great if the marginal tax rate was 3% lower?
Like, I mean, I guess.
If you're an accountant for some probably anti-American corporation that has already disenfranchised our country, I guess that's important.
Right.
I mean, I guess like anybody else, I prefer to pay less taxes than more, but is that really going to solve the biggest issues that are facing this country?
No.
And then you kind of take it out and people start to say, okay, you're right.
Well, what's the next thing?
Well, I don't know.
Let's solve immigration.
That's really important, too.
I agree.
And that should be a component of anything that we're thinking about.
But think bigger again and say, how do we build institutions?
Like, what does the country we want look like?
Not what we think we can get in the next five years or 10 years, but what is the country that we want and how do we get there?
And I think it's necessary, actually.
I think it's not just a nice thing.
I think if a country lacks direction or a spirit of achievement, you're going to deteriorate.
And I think that in certain inflection moments of our country's history, we kind of found it by mistake, accidentally, or intentionally through making ourselves think big.
I mean, Thomas Jefferson, literally acquiring the western part of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase, was, by definition, thinking big.
Teddy Roosevelt, by commissioning the national parks, which is something that conservatives, for whatever reason, don't want to talk about.
And I think it's actually one of the coolest things that a Republican president ever did was preserving Yelso National Park with Ramsey Johnson.
It's one of the great legacies of any president, but especially a Republican.
And being a Republican.
It's being a conservative, by definition, is conserving what you love.
Or winning World War II was obviously thinking very, very big.
And going to the moon, JFK, or defeating the Soviet Union, I think when we lose a pioneer spirit or frontier spirit, or what does success look like, I think societies tend to meander.
And they will inevitably meander to leftism.
Yeah, this is, there's actually a lot there.
I mean, you think about the founding of this country.
I don't know.
Founding a new country is pretty big, right?
I mean, this is...
It was actually probably the first time a country was founded with thought and intentionality to that date.
I mean, other civilizations are almost, they fell backwards into it.
Like, we're kind of the people regionally here, and this is like, we're going to start something new.
Yeah, right.
I mean, you have these different moments in history, sort of Athens, Rome, that they're, in a way, they're foreshocks as to what America would be and could be, because there was an element of thoughtfulness and intentionality there.
But still, then you look at 1776 and 1789, and that's quite a unique moment in history.
And it struck me as an irony that conservatives, the people who revere the founding most in this country, are in some ways the least like the founders.
The founders thought, I don't like the way this is working out with the king.
We have these systems of government that are already here.
We have legislatures and whatnot.
So we have sort of a mixed regime where we have local rule that's semi-autonomous, but we're still ultimately colonies of the crown.
And they said, you know, actually, we can do this better, and we want to do it better.
So we're going to just, we're going to found our own country.
And then you fast forward 200 years and like sort of 20th and 21st century conservatives revere the founding itself and the documents and the ideas.
And the symbology of it, sort of.
Yeah, but yeah, but how many conservatives that you know, I've done, you don't have to name any names, but how many can you think of right now, these sort of household brand conservatives, can you think of that would get behind founding a new country?
None.
None, right.
I mean, maybe there's a couple, but I don't know who they are.
But that's my point, is that it's sort of that the phrase from the Declaration, when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to exolve ties.
Right.
It becomes necessary.
And so that's a huge statement.
It is a hugely, it is a statement that's pregnant with all these implications.
And that's the sort of big thinking that a lot of Americans need to be doing.
And, you know, and I reflect on that period of the founding.
You know, Jefferson reflected a certain stream in American political thought at that point.
And then you sort of have the Hamiltonians and you have sort of the people gathered around John Witherspoon, who had a more maybe a more distinctly Christian view of what they were doing.
I've spent some time recently reading sermons from that era, which were very influential.
He had activist pastors back then.
Boy, to say the least.
You didn't have a pastor that wasn't involved in the public square.
Yeah, that's...
It was the rarity.
Yeah, it was the rarity.
It was interesting because I've read because there was some back and forth between pastors who didn't think they had the right to preach from the pulpit.
I think that's 100%.
Yeah.
I mean, there's like this whole dispute about what's the appropriate role.
There's this Protestant resistance theory.
The country was very Episcopalian at the time.
Yeah, and particularly in Tidewater, Virginia, In New England, it was Congregationalist, trending Unitarian, which ultimately had pretty bad effects on the country.
But, you know, on the, I guess my point here was you go back to sort of the Jefferson Hamilton, and then I'm just sort of using Witherspoon as a stand-in for sort of the Christian sensibility among the founders.
There was a broad spectrum, and yet they were all thinking about a new country.
That's my point, is that you had a broad spectrum of political opinion, and yet they were all pretty united ultimately on this one thing, which is we're going to build a country here on this, like the eastern shore of this continent, and we don't even know how far west this continent goes, really, but we're going to build a country here.
What you're saying is that the founders were not thinking about how they could lower the marginal tax rate with King George.
They just want to lower the T-tax rate.
That's what I'm saying.
But their spirit was not, how do we manage this awful circumstance?
I'm not saying that's a perfectly applicable example.
Yeah, no, that's right.
They were thinking about how do we build something new?
How do we build something?
It wasn't even just big.
It was the biggest thinking a group of people could do.
That's right.
I mean, as in political terms, when you're talking about regime-level politics, what is this regime?
That's it.
I mean, that is the most fundamental sort of thinking and acting that you can do.
And so, you know, when I think about sort of 21st century conservatives, people on the right now, they need to be thinking in those terms, not in the sense necessarily of founding a brand new country, but in regime-level politics, what is the regime that we want?
Because it will help us to sustain the type of life we want for ourselves and for our families.
Well, and I have, without saying any names, there are some conservatives that in the last couple of weeks, to say I've been disappointed would be an understatement, have said America is 400 years old, and they run some of the biggest organizations out there.
And I've privately sent messages to these people.
I said, we are not 400 years old.
We had a very distinct separation of the tyranny that pre-existed us.
That's a 1619 New York Times talking point, by the way, that it's 1619 that's our founding, not 1776.
And that might seem somewhat inconsequential.
I think it's incredibly important, actually.
Yeah, it's so the 1619 thing, obviously, I disagree with.
I think I have a little bit of a different frame on this.
I wrote something about this recently, and I think that you can, there's, I agree with you in the sense that the United States of America came into existence in 1776.
But there's a part of our history that's important that goes to 1607, not to 1619.
So you have the settlements in Virginia, and you have the first written law in North America by colonists.
So you have Dale's Law written in Virginia, then in 1620, you have the Mayflower Compact.
And when you go back and look at, and by the way, these are super short documents.
So I'm about to say, when you go back and read these, it's an assignment.
If you read both of them, it's like a 10-minute assignment, totally, to read it.
It's not like reading Hegel.
No, it's not.
I mean, it's very, right.
It's extremely straightforward, and yet, which, by the way, the law should be.
It's very straightforward.
And that way people understand it.
They know what their obligations are to the law.
More laws, less justice.
Yeah.
With Cicero, you say.
But when you look at them, there was a very distinctly American sensibility in those first legal documents.
And you can see that develop then into what became the documents in 1776 and 1789.
So like the 1619 thing is an intentional perversion of that.
Yeah, no, right.
This is a family show, so I'll say nonsense.
It's nonsense.
But I do think it's important to look at those original documents.
Yeah, I mean, and look at like who were those people that really did come here and settle?
Why did they do it?
Because they said it right in their documents.
It was no secret.
You know, what were the things that they thought were important?
When they were forming these very small societies, in the case of the Plymouth colony, you're talking about sort of 200-ish people, right?
What were they trying to accomplish?
Well, and they lay it out.
And those things stand the test of time because the law has to have goal.
Well, they obviously want to restrain evil of the normal kinds, murder and theft and those sorts of things.
But there are other laws where what they're trying to do is they want to make sure that the people are secure and that family and worship, the ability for those people to worship in their churches, that those things are protected so that because those are the sort of the three institutions in life are family, church, government.
And government exists to allow those two to function in their worlds.
Now, obviously, not everybody worships, and we think that that's their right to do it or not do it.
But for the people who do, the fact that they are able to do so and that the church is able to operate in its fear is absolutely critical.
And for the family, too, that's a natural pre-political institution.
And it exists before government.
And in that sense, government exists in order to benefit the family.
Like families and people come together in political arrangements to protect each other and to protect themselves.
Government Exists to Benefit Families 00:02:47
And so that's, and all those things were really clear in those 17th century documents in the early 1600s.
And then it's even when you, again, you get back to you get back to the language in the Declaration, the Constitution, saying, you know, we're going to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
And so that's us and our kids.
Yeah, I was thinking beyond just themselves, multi-generational.
Exactly.
Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
And that's, I think, what we really need to be thinking of in very concrete terms when we're thinking about politics is what's the end result?
You know, does it benefit these parts of society so that they can do what they naturally do, imperfectly, of course, but what they naturally do?
Or are we doing what we as conservatives often accuse the left of doing, which is being utopian?
Like, are we just making things so abstract that it doesn't even matter what the results on the ground are because, hey, we got to say that we're free markets or something.
Like, I like free markets too, but you pursue these things.
Well, it's almost the idolatry of ideologues, right?
So it's right.
They make an idol out of something that is, in its sense, I think, ideologically in the right direction, right?
I think that it's Marxism, right?
But I also think it's, first of all, I think it's not always applicable.
And I also think that a country can, I don't think, can sustain itself if you do not have a very clear direction of the type of country that you either want to preserve or the type of country that you want to try to aspire to.
I don't.
I don't think that saying that we want to lower the corporate tax rate is inspiring enough to be able to keep a society going.
I just don't.
Yeah, that's right.
And so what would be some of your applications of what the conservative movement is doing terribly wrong right now?
What can course correct?
What kind of conservative movement should we have?
I think what we want to do is reduce our use of abstractions because I find that they tend to be, they have become, I'll say it that way, they've become like a coping mechanism for the inability to actually impact policy, to change conditions on the ground.
And so we sort of come up with these slogans, which, you know, the slogans themselves may be perfectly true in theory, right?
I agree with that.
Correcting Conservative Movement Mistakes 00:06:41
Okay, great.
But it's not a political program.
And so I think about it, like, what do we, I think about it in these terms, like going back to what I was saying, what do we want the country to look like?
Well, it's pretty simple.
Like, and it should be, these things should be measurable.
Well, we should be secure from foreign enemies in our own country.
That would be nice.
That would be good.
Yeah, that's a good place to start.
Our people should be secure in their homes and in their property.
Like, you should not be afraid to walk down the street.
You shouldn't be afraid of people stealing from you, including the government, by the way, or oppressing you in some way.
Also, again, including the government.
But those are sort of, I kind of view those as, that's like the outlines of the box inside which the society lives.
Like, you've got to have physical security.
So when you have that stability, you totally take it for granted.
Yeah, exactly right.
Like, everybody likes to talk about privilege right now.
A friend of mine wrote a piece for us at American Greatness about, and we might want to actually talk about this, about the lessons that we could learn from what happened in Russia in the 90s.
And it's not what people expect.
That's when Putin first took over, right?
He took over in 2000s.
Okay.
But we'll come back to that because it's a totally fascinating subject.
And I've got a book recommendation on it, too.
But you have to have physical security first of all, but then once you have that, then what?
And I would say that the metrics that we should be using are, you know, I'm open to others, but how about this for starters?
Family formation is growing.
It's easy to form families.
That's not currently happening, right?
It's occurring for people later in life.
It's growing.
And it's demographically different, right?
100%.
Yeah.
Families should be getting together, you know, people should be getting together, forming families.
Those families should be stable, and they should be having children enough to, at a minimum, sustain the population of the country, preferably to be growing the population of the country.
Those people should be able to buy a house and afford a house.
And here's the one that I've actually inexplicably have gotten pushback on this one.
What a great country it would be if you could buy a house and support a family of four in a middle-class lifestyle on a single income.
Why is that controversial?
Do the feminists oppose that?
The conservatives oppose that.
Like everyone should be working.
Both, actually.
Really?
Yeah, like the libertarians don't like it and the feminists don't like it.
That's a strange intersection.
It's totally weird.
The feminists don't like it and say, well, you're anti-woman.
You don't want women in the workplace.
Well, that's not what I'm saying.
I don't, you know, if women are working.
If women want to work, God bless, work.
I'm just saying it should be a choice, not a necessity.
If women want to go to work whether they're married or not, more power to them.
But if women want to stay home and be able to have kids, they should be able to do that too while their husband's working and not have to go to work just to stay in the middle class.
Not because you want to be rich, but because you want to be able to afford to buy a house.
You want to be able to feed your kids.
You want to be able to give them health insurance and put them through school and all those things.
And what we've found is, and I'll give credit where credit's due here, a friend of mine, Oren Cass, who's a very smart economist.
He's terrific.
I think I may have actually mentioned this the last time we were together, but I plug it all the time because Oren did such terrific work on this.
He came up with this thing called the Cost of Thriving Index.
And what he found is that in 1985, the median male wage earner in this country could support a family of four, basically a middle-class life on 30 weeks of work.
He said now it's 53 weeks.
You go into debt.
Yeah, and so as Oren likes to point out very dryly, with a dry sense of humor, he says, problem being 53 weeks, well, 52 weeks in the year.
And so what happens is either you fall down the socioeconomic ladder distribution or you have to have two wage earners.
And basically that's what happens.
And there's all kinds of things that happen then.
Either you delay having kids, you don't have kids, you have fewer kids, the kids don't have as much time with either parent, as it turns out.
And there's a bunch of polling on this that shows basically most women want to be able to be with their kids, especially when they're young.
They may want to.
Yeah, they want to be able to probably go back to work later, but they want to be able to spend those key years, and that's sort of a moving target as to what that is, but call it 10 or 12 years or so, kind of get them into school and then be able to go back to work.
But what happens is that it's really hard economically to be able to do that where we are right now as a country.
And so you say, well, what should we want?
Well, that's one of the things is to be able to make that possible.
I think the numbers we use are all wrong.
Not all wrong, almost all wrong.
I mean, GDP is used as the predominant number as to societal success.
And I just reject it in a lot of different ways.
Agreed.
I'm not saying it's completely wrong.
I'm just saying it's mostly wrong and it's totally incomplete.
I mean, other numbers are, how about a suicide rate that doesn't skyrocket and actually goes down over 30 years?
How about opioid addiction or middle-class wages?
How about do you make the stuff that you consume in your country?
Right.
And these sorts of things matter.
And so as a side note, I want to ask you about this, though.
Do you think that since 85, we have valued physical labor less and cognitive ability more?
And do you think that's out of whack?
So the first part, 100%, yes.
We've definitely diminished, I mean, to the point basically of belittling sort of physical labor, artisanal type of labor, and we've fetishized office work, not even something that's, you know, very, that requires like sort of high cognitive aptitude.
Dignity in Physical Labor vs Office Work 00:03:24
Like it's not that we have fetishized like neurosurgery or mathematics or people who are mathematicians.
I mean, those people, of course, get the respect that is their due, I think.
But there's somehow a sense that's, by the way, very much reinforced by the education system and has been sort of pushed out to parents, which is you want to work in an office, like that's respectable white-collar work.
But if you are somehow working in a traditional like blue-collar field with your hands or whatever, that's like somehow you're in a lower class in a way.
And it's absurd.
I mean, it's it's you know, there's the old joke, like when the toilet's overflowing, who's the most valuable person in your role decks?
It's the plumber, right?
It's not your lawyer.
Yeah, the story I have, I was speaking in Winnetka, Illinois.
You might be familiar.
Yeah.
Winnetka, for people watching, is a very high income.
It's like Highland Park, Dallas, you know, Highland Park, Texas, or La Jolla, you know, Palo Alto.
And so I was speaking there, and the audience is agreeing with everything I was saying.
I was saying that we need less kids to go to college.
We need more people to work with their hands, and everyone was there.
And I started to get a little bit angry inside because I knew that they were just virtue signaling their support.
I said, okay, how many of you want your kids to be plumbers?
And the room started laughing.
And I said, no, no, no, seriously.
How many of you would be okay if your kid became a plumber?
Room of 300 people and that one hand went up.
I said, well, if you want your kid to do well, maybe you should say maybe I'm okay with it.
There's actually dignity in that.
But I said, so you guys would be okay with a higher likelihood of them going to a college to borrow money they don't have, to study things that don't matter, to find jobs that don't exist, where we know we need plumbers, especially in Winnetka.
They actually do pretty well.
They do really?
All of you have like 45 bathrooms in your room, in your house.
Look, I had right before Thanksgiving, I've told a couple of people this story.
Right before Thanksgiving, I needed to have, we had a short in two rooms in our house, an electrical short.
The lights wouldn't go on.
It was weird.
And it was not just a breaker.
So we got an electrician who was referred by a friend.
The electrician comes out and a super nice guy.
He owns the company, smallish company.
I think he had like five guys who worked for him or whatever.
And he happened to be working on a job close to my house.
So he just ran over and fixed everything in an hour or two.
And I was just talking with him.
And like I say, it's like super nice, like chatty guy.
And he's just talking about like, oh, yeah, like I like, do you know so-and-so?
Well, no, no.
He's like, oh, yeah, well, he lives by, he kind of lives by me.
And he tells me where he lives.
And like, I know the street very well.
There's not, you can't buy a house on that street for less than $2 million.
I'm like, you can do very well being a contractor, right?
Well, it's because there's a labor shortage in that.
Right.
And it's a valuable skill.
And by the way, more power to these guys.
No, right.
I mean, I really needed the electrician that day.
The lights wouldn't go on.
I wasn't going to fix it.
I was going to kill myself if I tried to fix something.
But the point is that somehow that's not as good as, in a lot of people's minds, that's not as good as being like the assistant vice president of your pencil sharpener and working in.
But for some company that probably is funding BLM anyway.
Correct.
College Requirements Make No Sense for Jobs 00:04:30
But I think some of it, Chris, is I think the SAT standardized testing contributed to this negatively, which does not measure for any sort of trajectory of success in the trades of HVAC or plumbing or electrician or auto mechanic or maybe just the problem solver entrepreneur.
SAT doesn't measure any of that potential at all whatsoever.
And I think we have stigmatized those professions in such a unrealistic box where it's like, oh, those people are the lessons, right?
Yeah.
And here's the thing is it's not only those professions.
It's definitely that.
But you find out also that people go through sort of primary, secondary education.
They think if you want to be something, you have to go to college.
And it turns out there's a college requirement that makes no sense for a lot of jobs.
I mean, I did this, I guess it was at the end of last year now, but I went on like monster.com and ladders and some of the hiring websites.
I just wanted to see, because I was thinking about this exact issue, I was they wanted to see like what jobs require a college degree?
Like what employers require it.
And it's pretty much a standard requirement.
It's like it's just, I know they don't even think about it.
There's like you need to know this and that and the other thing, and you have to have a college degree.
And you look at these jobs and it's like entry-level sales for it doesn't matter what, you know, whatever the whatever the product is, like, why?
Right.
There's no point to that.
There's not some specialized knowledge that somebody gets going to XYZ university and then goes and gets this sort of entry-level job.
It's just a job.
It's like, you know what I mean?
It's not, they didn't become a doctor.
They didn't become a rocket scientist.
Yeah, they didn't pass the bar.
They didn't do any of those things.
And there's really no, there's no reason for it other than the sense that, oh, you went to college, that tells me something about you.
But actually, it doesn't anymore.
You know, I think there was definitely a time when it did, but that was a long time ago now when very few people went to college.
And those people went into the professions basically, you know, sort of go back to the early mid-20th century.
If you went to college, you know, probably you were going to become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer.
Okay, go to college.
All for it.
I mean, maybe not the lawyers, but everybody else.
We got enough of those.
Right, we got more than enough.
But then I think about a friend of mine who is in the venture capitalist business, has been for years.
I was talking to him a couple years ago about what he looked for when he was because he had built a software company and sold, and then he got into the venture world.
I said, well, what was the type of thing that you were looking for when you were hiring programmers, coders?
I said, you know, are there certain schools that have really good CS programs?
He said, yeah, kind of.
He said, but really, we never cared about that, and really nobody does.
He said, the great coders just code.
And they have been doing it since they were 12.
He says, I don't care.
I would hire them if they were 12 and they were really good.
I don't care if they went to school, didn't go to school.
It's very, very performance-based.
And in those fields, like the, I mean, look at Zuckerberg, right?
He's a good example.
Now he goes to Harvard, of course, and drops out, but because he was a genius coder, I mean, he's obviously super high IQ and very good and very good technically, but this is somebody who could have done a lot regardless of going to Harvard or not.
Think about somebody like Palmer Lucky.
You know, Palmer goes by Facebook.
Right, you know, right, exactly.
Starts Oculus.
I think he was, what, 18 or 19 when he started?
Yeah, then goes and sells it because he just went and did something.
And I tell people this all the time.
I actually say it on my Twitter feed quite often.
You know, there are experts and then there's expertise.
And what people call experts typically is somebody who's been credentialed, and that's very different than expertise.
Corporate Megatrons Exploit Your Movement 00:14:49
And I think we've seen that a lot lately, right?
You know, what did the experts say?
It turns out the experts actually don't know.
I think it's a hypnotic technique.
I mean, they say the experts say, who?
Yeah, right.
There are people from Berkeley that have been wrong professionally about everything.
There's no price if they're wrong, by the way.
There's no cost, I should say, to them.
If they're wrong, they get promoted.
Yeah, if they get wrong, they get called again by the New York Times to be a subject matter expert on some bizarre thing.
Experts say that we're all going to die eventually.
Because I've got the cartel behind me, right?
I have this credential.
The people who make these decisions have this credential.
And so we have to protect the value of this credential.
So everybody circles the wagons on the credentialing racket.
And it is totally a racket.
So it's interesting.
I think this would be a fun place to take the conversation because you say we as conservatives don't think big enough of where we want to take the country.
I think you and I are beginning that, but it's just not happening enough.
It just isn't.
And even the conservatives that say they stand for the founding principles and they pass out their pocket constitutions, when there's actually a call to rebel tyranny, authoritarianism, they're nowhere to be found.
But I think the left made a decision in the late 90s.
And I don't know if they did it consciously or if they did it accidentally or they did it.
I don't think it's relevant, but they just did it, where they decided, you know, these middle-class workers, we're going to kind of take them for granted a little bit.
We don't really need them.
We want to become the party of the super rich and the poor.
And you kind of see that the Democrats throughout the mid-2000s and early 2010 and 2011, the Democrats decided that we are going to represent the ruling class and also the people that we're going to convince are oppressed.
And Republicans, through Donald Trump, like backward backed themselves into saying, I guess we represent the working class now.
What does that even mean?
And Donald Trump did a great service to this.
But the Democrats have a very clear vision of the country that they want to create.
They want to create a country that is really, really good for a very, very small set of people that are in the country club, if you will, that are in the prescribed group.
And everyone else is struggling to barely get by.
And they have so I guess the question is when it comes to the left and the country they want to create, how does that even differentiate with some of what the establishment Republicans want?
Does it?
Yeah, that's the question.
I think it's somewhat.
There are some differences, but there's unfortunately more similarities.
I mean, there's more similarities than I think a lot of establishment Republicans or sort of conservative ink type conservatives would like to admit.
I guess let me start with the Democrats.
The formulation I've got, which is very, very similar to what you've got, is the way that one way to frame the political divide in this country right now is that Democrats, like I had one little wrinkle to the way you have it.
So Democrats are the party of true elites plus elite aspirants, people who want to be elites, but you might call them the professional managerial class, plus the permanent underclass, what Marx would have called the lumpen proletariat.
And they are allied against the middle class and the working class, which are sort of in America, you know, that's like in America, you might just call it the broad middle class.
It's called the Christian working middle class, mostly in the Midwest of our country.
That was previously industrialized.
Yeah, there's a big geographic element to it as well.
But it's, I mean, the really perverse thing about this for the left is that it incentivizes them to increase the size of the underclass.
The more people you impoverish, the more people that you convince that they are part of some intersectionally oppressed group, you can use those people against your class enemies, against the middle class, against the working class.
But all of the spoils of that go to the top.
So they use the underclass basically as stormtroopers against the middle class.
That's very well put.
And that is, that's why, you know, it's an interesting frame when you start to think about a lot of the sort of woke politics.
Like, in a way, there's a strand of that where that is, a lot of that is an intra-left struggle.
Now, when you get to the level of obviously a lot of things that spill out into the open, it affects everybody.
And it goes into schools and to HR departments, it affects everybody.
But there is an element of that where what you have going on is the woke politics is that I talked about those elite aspirins, what I call PMCs, the professional managerial class.
I did not make up the term, by the way.
It's well put.
It's the top 100 people at Deloitte.
Yeah, right.
It's McKinsey.
Even in media or academia, a lot of people in media, for instance, on MSNBC, you can be a contributor there.
You're actually not paid that well.
Basically, you get paid in status.
You don't get indicted when you should be.
Well, that too.
Yeah, you get paid and get out of jail for your cards.
It's literally happening.
Right.
But a lot of that, a lot of like the, a lot of the woke stuff is being used by those people to jockey within their competitive set.
So that's why you see all this like left-on-left violence, so to speak.
You know, it's like they're trying to get people fired.
And yeah, they definitely want conservative scalps, but they want the liberal scalps too, because that means that this person gets to take that person's spot.
And so that's sort of an interesting element about it.
I guess one thing I wonder about is is there a circumstance in which that makes that tears them apart because they turn on each other?
It has to be.
And I think the real struggle there is the people that actually believe the Marxist nonsense versus the people that say they believe the Marxist nonsense, they just want to be the top of the hierarchy.
Using Marxist nonsense.
Yeah, right.
No, agreed.
No, agreed hardly.
And that is the dividing line, right?
The dividing line is the Noam Chomsky's that actually do believe in this bizarro Rousseauian world where we go back to primitive and infancy, if you will, which will not happen because it goes so against human nature.
There has to be so much destruction to get anywhere near it.
Where there's the people that just kind of wink and nod at it, but they're going to use it as a way to climb up the ladder so that they can be king.
Well, let me give you a good example of that.
And you've seen it.
Every single person who's watching right now has seen this in the past six weeks.
Every corporation that you have ever done business with has been emailing you in these troubled times, please know that we stand with fill in the blank and we're doing this, fill in the blank, and we're doing that.
And look, aren't we good people?
And please, could you give us a corporate social responsibility brownie point?
My inbox has been flooded with this stuff for.
Every company I've ever dealt with, Postmates, Nords, Uber Eats.
In fact, it's so bad, it was like, we're only going to have like black restaurateurs or something like that.
Yeah, no Uber Eats.
It's a violation of the Civil Rights Act.
You would think.
You would think.
Could you imagine if it was the opposite?
Yeah, right.
It's like the DOJ would indict you in like a week.
That's the one thing that you can actually get the DOJ to do quickly.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, exactly.
No, the DOJ sends 15 FBI agents to go for a hanger on of a garage for NASCAR.
Right.
But God forbid they go arrest the arsenists.
But complete the point, because you're talking about the corporate...
Basically, there's if you are one of the people who sort of is a true believer in like systemic racism and you see this movement and you're very pleased because you think that this is a very, this is like this moral outpouring.
Okay, so I want to take that person who's just operating in good faith.
I hope that those people are out there.
Within a nanosecond, it just becomes a commercial for the Fortune 500.
Bingo.
Right.
And that's all it is.
It's just a commercial.
It's just, hey.
It's Nike maximizing their profits.
Yeah, hey by JP Morgan keeping retention.
Right.
Exactly.
Everything they abhor.
I think that's a really interesting point because if you point that out to the Marxists and you say, you do realize that these corporate megatrons that you hate, they're using your movement to actually maximize their profits.
Don't you hate that?
And I know a couple people on the left who are very serious about their Marxism and they hate it.
And I give them 100% credit for it.
But they are loathed by the left.
The Marxists or the corporatists?
No, no, no.
The Marxists who don't even go there because they'd say, nope, that's not us.
That's a whole different thing.
And there's all this intro.
We would have done it different.
Yeah, right.
But these are the people who are.
We were more Menshevek than both.
And they'll tell you why.
No, that's right.
They'll go down to the year, right?
But there's some very, I think, people of, it's obviously a very small set of people, but they say exactly this, and they say, this is like just corporate power co-opting a movement for profit in order to exploit.
And this is a point where I would say people who are conservative would say, yeah, it is.
Like, we can agree with that.
Like, we're not Marxists, obviously, but I can also see that what's happening here is that, you know, the Fortune 500 is just saying, this is a great chance for a commercial, and we can maybe drive wages down for the middle class because we don't like those people anyway.
And it's like one of these weird moments where there's people here and here who can actually see what's going on in here.
They're like, no, this is.
And I would add a wrinkle to it.
And I don't think it's contradictory.
I also think part of it is they just don't want to be boycotted next and they don't want to have to be the attention on them.
I think there's a part of that.
Yeah, no, no, 100%.
Part of it is there might not be huge profit upside.
And I'm talking more about front-facing businesses than back-facing businesses, restaurants in particular, where they're like, oh, no, no, no, we're with you 100%.
Just keep buying our cheeseburgers.
Totally, BLM.
They're just trying to signal it so that they don't become victim to whatever mob exists out there.
So I think that's partially true, but you also think about who populates the upper echelons of these corporations.
Do you think it's strictly profit motive?
I think it's partially that.
But I do think that they're, you know, you think about the people who are in their HR departments.
You think about sort of the upper echelon of a lot of these corporations.
I mean, what do they want most?
To make money.
Yeah, I mean, I get it.
That's fine.
That's what corporations are there to do.
But I also think a lot of these people were educated in these sort of very elite left-wing schools.
And their sensibility in all things is with the left.
And so maybe they're not on board, like deep down in their heart of hearts, maybe they're not on board 100%, but they're definitely sympathetic, right?
I mean, that's, and this is what, to go back to the original question, you guys, well, how different are conservatives on some of these things?
This is what this is what sort of the I'll say maybe sort of the people who are professionally conservative, people who somehow jobs in, you know, in media or politics or whatever, and they are conservatives.
This is what a lot of those people don't get.
And it is less true with the rank and file.
It's still somewhat true.
They don't understand that corporate America is 100% against us.
I mean, it is a rare company that is on the side of conservative values, conservative people, the people that fly overstates.
This has been such an eye-opener for me the more I've looked into it.
It's just unbelievable.
I mean, people say, well, yeah, I get it.
Like, I don't know, Google and Twitter, sure.
But, like, what about Chipotle?
Chipotle.
Yep.
No, them too.
What about like, one was like Brooks Brothers, right?
Brooks Brothers.
I got an email from them.
Yeah, no, I got it too.
It's funny, when that email came out, which was probably three weeks ago now, I had like 10 people email it to me because Brooks Brothers is like an American institution.
It's an American institution.
It should be in the Pan Am guide.
Their dress uniform is like anything from Brooks Brothers.
That's literally what the Pan Am employee guide was.
Brooks Brothers dressed every American president from the founding of the company in 1818 until the present.
I mean, there's, you can go online and see, there's like, there's pictures.
It's all BLM nonsense.
Yeah.
No, it's right.
That's right.
And they, here's the, here's the, here's why I choose Brooks Brothers is because it's like their clothing, you know, dress clothing is super American, super traditional.
Like every young Republicans meeting has like 75% of the guys there is wearing like a Brooks Brothers tie or shirt or blazer or maybe all three or the khakis or whatever.
And so like this is why I got so many people emailing this to me is because every Republican is on their list.
And they so, but nonetheless, they just sign up along with whatever the latest is.
I also think there's a third wrinkle to it though, Chris, which is that they think we're stupid and they don't think we'll actually act or shop morally.
I think they take conservative purchasing for granted.
But no doubt.
No doubt.
They're going to keep buying our products.
They're going to keep they either have no options or they're too distracted or not morally convicted enough to stop purchasing from us.
Yes, and they're right.
And that's not a criticism of conservatives.
Like it's very hard to conservatives aren't great at boycotts in general.
It's kind of not who we are.
Though there was a time in the 80s, I know conservatives did a lot of boycotts pretty successfully, boycotted, a famous one was boycotting 7-Eleven to get them to stop selling porn magazines.
Conservatives Keep Buying Our Products 00:02:01
That was maybe the last successful conservative right-wing boycott of anything.
But what these large companies know is that actually you don't have that many other choices because the consolidation that's occurred in almost every industry means that, yeah, you don't like it.
Sorry.
Oh, you're mad at Google?
Fine.
Go use like go use DuckDuckGo.
Well, look, my heart is with DuckDuckGo, but the search isn't actually that great.
Ask Jeeves or whatever, right?
Yeah, right.
And so Google's like, yeah, you know, pound sand.
But it turns out that that actually applies to a lot of products.
Like if you, I mean, you think about all the different brands.
Airlines.
Like, good luck.
Oh, yeah.
You don't like.
I hate you, American.
You know what they always say?
Have a nice day.
We'll see you next month.
Right.
Oh, that's 100% right because you say, well, well, there's also Delta and there's Southwest.
And there's no fly there.
Time consolidation.
Because the way that the airline industry operates is that basically every city is a hub and spoke.
So if you're in an American city, it's an American city.
If you're in a United City, it's United States.
Chicago United.
Yeah, theoretically, I could.
Phoenix, America.
We're in Phoenix, right?
This is an American airlines city.
If I want to go to New York, yeah, I could take United if I want to fly to L.A. first and then go to New York.
Or I could take Delta.
Right.
I could take Delta if I want to go to Salt Lake City and then.
And by the way, it's not like they're any better.
It's not like, oh, yeah, this other corporation is going to be a lot of fun.
All of them fund BLM, all three of them.
Right.
That has been such an eye-opener for me, and I think the chamber has played a part of this.
But we were somehow convinced, and of course, I'm biased to this because of what we do at Turning Point USA and the campus work that we do.
We were somehow convinced we as the general, we as a country, that somehow what was happening on college campuses wasn't going to metastasize into corporate America.
Responsibility and Equality in Hierarchy 00:15:57
And this was so foolish when you look at it over the last couple of decades.
Oh, yeah, their little radicalism, their hatred of our country.
It's just kind of like a nuclear waste spill.
We'll just wall it off and we'll keep it in New Haven.
No, it's a virus.
No, it's a virus.
And it spreads and it actually manifests and it's contagious.
And then next thing you know.
And even if you wear a mask, it's still spreading.
Exactly.
And next thing you know, you have MetLife, you have Anheuser-Busch, you have the biggest companies.
You just take the Dow, right?
The biggest 30 companies publicly traded.
Every single one.
I did this the other day.
I said, who's on the Dow?
The 30 biggest companies.
Every single one had a BLM racial diversity statement.
Every single ExxonMobil had a racial diversity statement.
What are you doing?
Because one evil cop did something evil in Minneapolis.
You're trying to tell me that's the reason why the top 30 companies in the Dow have to pay penance and pay tribute.
That's what it is.
I mean, it's, you know, it's basically a Dane Geld, right?
It's a way you pay to be left alone.
Yeah, exactly.
And so that's a very difficult concept for a lot of conservatives, though, to understand because traditionally, I don't know if it was as true in the 70s, 80s, or 90s.
Corporate America used to be somewhat center-right-ish, or at least somewhat pro-America.
And this goes to a point we were talking off camera.
I'd love to get your thoughts on it.
I think that the American trajectory right now is not sustainable for a variety of reasons.
One of the primary being we have an elite class, a ruling class, that actually hates the country that they are the elite of.
I don't know if that's sustainable.
I don't.
I don't think a country can continue that way because you will either have an uprising or the elites will just let the country go to total wreck, just complete and total ruin.
Yeah, I mean, it's there's a reason that Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters deplorable, right?
That's what she thinks.
And you'd this is, you know, you think about all the hatred and vitriol that's pointed at Trump.
It's not Trump they hate, it's the people who support him.
Yes.
Right.
He just is a convenient target.
He is, he basically is just the avatar of all of those people that they despise.
And they don't like people who are from flyover country, who don't, who haven't learned the jargon of intersectionality or whatever.
And, you know, this is like, it's the weirdest thing.
This is why people go to college, they learn this jargon, and then they go back to wherever they're from.
And it's not even like it has to be Wichita.
It could just be, you know, Orange County, California, or Riverside or something.
And they start talking in this jargon, and you find out people look at you like you're insane because they have no idea what you're talking about.
Until they populate those areas.
Until they populate those areas.
And it is, this is actually, I know this is what you're asking, but I actually think this is an opportunity for conservatives to sort of expand our base.
And this is why I think it's more useful to talk about sort of concrete issues than about like sort of theory and ideology.
Because a lot of people don't like having those things forced down their throat.
In most people's daily life, their experience isn't, oh, America's super racist and everybody's at each other's throats.
It's, you know, no, I mean, like, my kids play Little League and there's people of all different like races and religions and then we go for pizzas with all the families afterwards.
That's the way most people live.
But you would never know it if you went on Twitter.
Right.
You would think that it was constant like battles in the streets.
And if you go and sort of talk to people more directly and say, like, these people are not your friends.
Like, they're trying to weaponize you in the service of their personal advancement.
But, you know, we just want to see families stay together.
We want people to be able to buy a house.
We want people to make more money.
We want to make sure that manufacturing plant doesn't close.
Right, exactly.
Then I think that's really, I think that's very powerful.
But, you know, conservatives, or I won't say conservatives, Republicans still have this cognitive dissonance.
We think that to be in favor of free enterprise and private property and innovation or all those things or America, we think all those things mean, well, we have to be aligned with the Fortune 500.
Deloitte.
And those things are actually in tension.
That's the biggest takeaway from this conversation, though, that people have to have.
Yeah.
Because that wasn't.
But our think tanks tell us that they're in harmony, though.
Right.
And that there are, I mean, who are they getting money from, right?
And where, and have they gone outside of Washington, D.C. or New York lately?
Because, yeah, guess what?
Life is great in D.C. if you have one of these jobs where you can never get fired at a think tank.
And the house you bought 10 years ago for, I don't know, whatever, $300,000 is now worth $700,000 because property values in Washington, D.C. actually do only go straight up because the main employer there is never going out of business.
In fact, it's built in to grow at 7% a year.
Guaranteed.
Yeah, right.
And people come from all over the world to try and seek favors and things from it.
So, yeah, everything's great.
But for everybody else, maybe not as much.
Like, we wish the plant in Toledo closed and people got thrown out of work.
Boy, I wish the quote-in quotes plant in Washington, D.C. might close.
No kidding.
It might close some of its operations.
Republicans are on the wrong side of this issue.
And they will be.
I want to get into that.
But just to close the point on the elites, you look at people like Jackie Robinson, John Wayne.
They were the elite, right?
They were the elite of sports.
Even Michael Jordan was terrific on this.
He was so deliberately apolitical, even when he was pressured to get into politics, specifically in the North Carolina Senate race.
And they loved their country.
They always had very good things to say about America.
And yet now you see that there's a difference here.
I don't think we've seen this in American history before, though, where you have the tycoons of every single vertical of industry that outwardly want the demise of that country.
And it can go one of two ways.
The people completely reject those people and you create new elites because that's just not naming elites, but authors and figures that replace those, right?
Or they get what they wish, right?
They get what they want, and they do rule over almost a Brazilian model country where you have to, you have complete and total anarchy in the streets and you have a perpetual underclass and get used to it.
Right.
And so you've talked about this, though, about having better elites of the better ruling cause.
I don't want to tempt the audience too much with this, but I'm super fascinated with it because I think that's one of the more troubling signs of where we are in our country.
Yeah, I mean, look, one of the biggest lies that liberalism tells people is the lie of egalitarianism.
And the truth of egalitarianism is that we're all created in God's image, and that has important implications for politics.
It means just for life.
This is why you can't kill somebody else.
That's why it's murder.
That's why you can't steal other people's things.
You know, those sorts of things, because we all have that same moral equality.
What the lie that liberalism tells is that there is and should be an absolute political equality.
But that doesn't, first of all, it can't happen.
And they know it.
They want to have a hierarchy, right?
I mean, even you look at any sort of socialist or communist country, there's always a hierarchy.
There's always a pull-up bureaucrat.
There has to be somebody who's in charge of things, right?
That's just the way it works.
The state isn't going to work.
Even in Chaz, there was someone that was in charge of things.
Yeah, right, exactly right.
I mean, Chaz had its warlord.
Yeah.
That's going to happen.
There was an absolute hierarchy there.
So the question isn't how do we achieve this state of like this sort of radical political egalitarianism.
What we want to do is recognize the moral equality of people, but also recognize something else that we learn.
You see it in the Bible.
You see it, I think, just in human nature.
It's knowable just by reason, but also by revelation, which is that there are hierarchies and that that establishes an order that's good for people.
So you see it in, you know, you see really clearly in honor your father and mother.
Why?
Because they're there for your good.
Obviously, there are parents who do bad things, but in general, your parents are there to nurture you, to help you grow up, and to protect you when you're young and all those sorts of things.
Well, that's a model for the way hierarchies should be, right?
There's a responsibility that goes from superior to inferior in the hierarchy.
And again, when I use the term superior and inferior, I don't ever want people taking me out of context.
I don't mean that in a moral sense, but I mean that in the way that things are ordered.
Your parents are in charge of you.
They don't have a moral superiority to you.
It's not like it's okay for them to steal from you.
It's not.
But it is all right for them to order your life for your good.
And so the question is, how do you recognize that truth in the political sphere?
How do you create those hierarchies that benefit everybody, that recognize the moral equality on the one hand, and then sort of promote things that promote people being able to achieve sort of their best version of their life and then leaving it up to those people to go out and live their lives.
And that's the thing that we need to recognize that when we're thinking about elites, we want elites that recognize that order.
You don't pay lip service to a sort of a phony egalitarianism.
You talk about the real moral equalities and you also talk about how in the political sphere, for instance, you want government that is able to do the things that it does really well for the benefit of the country and for the people.
And in the sort of the other elite institutions, I'll call them, whether it be schools or media or whatever, you want them, there's a responsibility of all of those institutions to everybody else, right?
And that's something, I guess I would look at this and they say, you know, that maybe the big change that has sort of activated a lot of what we see that has harmed the country is when that sense of responsibility went away.
When it became, and I think this comes out of like this radical individualistic idea that I'm just out here to like self-actualize.
I'm here.
I just want to get liberated.
And all of a sudden you don't have responsibilities to anybody else.
That's not right.
I mean, we do have those responsibilities.
And the greater the authority you have, the greater those responsibilities are actually to others.
You know, it's this idea of like servant leadership.
You know, this was, I mean, this was like the idea in feudal systems of noblesse oblige, right?
There's a sense that if you are the feudal lord, you're obligated to make sure that everybody's fed in a sort of self-governing system.
We choose our leaders, but then they have to act on our behalf.
But that even applies to private companies.
Yes, they want to seek their own profit, but they also have an obligation to do right by their customers and by their country.
And regaining that sense of responsibility, I think, is absolutely crucial to having a healthy elite.
And the elites don't have that responsibility right now.
No, no, no, absolutely not.
I mean, this is like, you know, like sort of the, I guess sort of the right-of-center version of this is that sort of libertarianism, you know, the kind of the Ayn Rand version is like, no, you absolutely don't.
Like, just go and like, it's all about you.
Indulge yourself infinitely.
Right.
And by the way, you know, before the libertarians get mad at me, like, I loved reading Ayn Rand too.
It was like a great book, but I wouldn't advocate.
You wouldn't create a governing philosophy.
I wouldn't advocate running my life or let alone a country around some of the stuff I read in the book.
Yeah, and I think that you look at people that Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Ben, Brin, people that have amassed incredible amounts of wealth, okay, but they fund, they speak, they act completely contrary to any sort of social responsibility of America, of what we stand for, our history.
And you look at the robber barons that were supposed to be horrible in the 1900s.
And Tucker Carlson talks about this a lot, where you have Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan Chase, all these individuals, they actually loved the country and they knew they were in charge.
They said, yes, we have the money, we have the resources, you guys can hate us or love us, but we do have a responsibility.
Now, I actually think the robber baron description is a little bit overdone.
I do agree with the action that Teddy Roosevelt took, and this is disagreed upon in fundamentalist circles, but whatever.
But I think that if you allow that to continue itself, how will it be any different than eventually we're just ruled by the Romanovs?
Yeah, look, I mean, you think about the concentration of corporate power that led to sort of trust-busting in the early 20th century, you know, with concentration of power in banking and railroads and oil.
Yeah, I don't know.
Tell me how different that is than banking right now.
Tell me how different that is in a number of industries.
There's this huge concentration.
There's this huge concentration of power, which is bad for the country.
Yeah.
It's bad for us as consumers.
There's been some interesting things, I'll just use this as one example.
People, like libertarians, love to say things like, well, you know, if like you're in, I don't know, whatever, a chemical engineer or something, you can just, like, and you don't like the conditions at your company, you're going to disagree with them, just go get a new job.
Well, actually, as it turns out, that if you know, you have this, you're in a particular field, that's where your skill set is.
There maybe is only two or three or four companies that do that, number one.
So the set of companies that you can work for is quite small.
And then they're geographically dominant, kind of like the discussion we were having about the airlines.
And so maybe if you could get a job, that means uprooting your family and moving from Minneapolis to Memphis.
And that puts a strain on the family because now families get, extended families get spread out.
And that has all kinds of bad social consequences, right?
Job Losses Strain Extended Families 00:04:04
And economic, too.
And economic, too.
No, right.
Absolutely.
And so it's not like the market will solve everything theory just doesn't actually hold out because there's all these hold up because there's all these other externalities.
And it never, and you know, economic externalities, number one.
But number two is that there's like social externalities that like that the that a lot of economists just don't take into account at all anyway.
So how much of what's happening, and this is something that conservatives have just rejected.
How much of the decline of the fabric of our country do you attribute to be economic versus moral and cultural?
So the conservatives would always heavyweight the moral cultural.
And I'm not discounting that.
Do you think there's an economic reality?
100%.
Yeah.
I mean, how to you know, how to weight that I think is really hard.
I think that the important recognition is that there is a significant economic component to it.
Is it 30%?
Is it 51%?
I don't know hard, but when I see the fact that it's real and it's big is important.
I get asked all the time, hey, Charlie, how could young people believe in socialism?
I say, well, hold on, let's put yourself in a 23-year-old shoes.
They were told to go to college.
They learned all these crappy, crummy ideas, and then they can't find any job of meaning.
They can't buy a home, let alone a car, let alone start a family or sustain their kids.
And what might have been a prosperous economic climate if certain decisions weren't made to deindustrialize our entire country and with it bring in limitless cheap labor that disenfranchises our own workers, maybe they wouldn't be picking up the Bernie Sanders sign.
I mean, and just to say that economics play no role at all in this, I think it's ridiculous.
Yeah, no, it's and I don't know the numbers.
I mean, I don't think it's like 10%.
I don't think it's 80%.
I think that, of course, there's a cultural side to it.
For sure.
But I think when you take a factory out of Wichita, Kansas, that will create miserable people.
Yeah.
I mean, you think about, I mean, like, there's tons of social science on this.
For instance, when there's all kinds of bad things that happen in people's lives that happen after they lose a job, okay, and when the income goes down, divorces go up, substance abuse goes up, suicides go up.
All of these things are tied to jobs.
Fatherlessness, drug usage, alcoholism, all of it.
All of these things increase as a result.
And so you can't say, well, I don't know, like, you should have better character or you should go to church.
Like, okay, yes, I agree.
But let's recognize that people that we are, like, we're not Gnostics.
We're not just, so we don't think everybody is just a spirit.
We have bodies too, and we have to support those bodies, and we have to be able to eat, and we need a place to live, and we need it.
And by the way, we're also made to work, right?
Jesus was a carpenter.
He went to work.
He went to work.
Paul was a tent maker.
Luke was a doctor.
These people all, people in the Bible all worked.
We're told very clearly that, you know, we're made in God's image.
God is creative.
So when we're working, we're in a sense emulating God.
We're not creating ex nilo, but we're...
Out of nothing.
Right, out of nothing, but we are making things out of what's been given to us.
And we find satisfaction in doing that.
And so there's that other part of it, which is when people aren't working, there's an emptiness there because people naturally want to be.
You don't always have the job you want, but you want to be doing something.
And something meaningful.
And something absolutely right.
And one of the, and again, I've really woken up to this in the last year and a half and two years, which traditionally I would have said, oh, just they lose a job, pick up your stuff and go move to a big city.
Why Moving to Big Cities Is Awful 00:02:35
And now I think, that's awful.
No.
That was not our country, nor does that actually create a productive and happy country.
I'm going to make up a word here, the metropolitanization.
Is that a word?
It is now.
Why not?
You know what I'm saying by it, though.
But the overemphasis on metropolitan America, I think it's actually a disaster.
And where you just rent, you don't own and buy property.
You know, I talked about height restrictions last time we were on the podcast.
I'm still a huge advocate of it.
I like it.
Nationwide height restrictions.
And I think Phoenix is a testament to that, where you can have your own piece of property.
This is my home.
I'm taking care of this place.
I have a family.
I think if you just are kind of sequestered to a 900-foot apartment in Brooklyn to raise a family, I think that makes you less likely to raise a family, actually.
Of course.
That's harder.
And I think that that is actually one of the most meaningful things a human being can do.
And so I think the argument then necessitates itself by saying, well, then what kind of public policy are we creating to at least make it less hard to do that?
I mean, easy would be fine.
Yeah, that's right.
But let's pretend we can't get to easier, at least less hard.
Right.
And I think right now it is you have created these 12 or 13 metropolitan areas that are incredibly leftist and liberal where almost everyone who lives in those areas are high in debt, very miserable, low in church-going rates, low birth rates, low fertility rates, and they vote incredibly Democrat, right?
I'm talking about Atlanta.
I'm talking about Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Chicago.
You know what?
And I think the more we concentrate power and wealth and people in those areas and we get away from any form of, let's just say, horizontal expansion, I think that it's actually very troublesome for the country.
Yeah, it is.
No, it absolutely is.
I mean, it'll be interesting to see sort of what impact COVID has on all that.
Like, I mean, you know, New York has been shut down for months.
You know, I've got a bunch of friends who work in the city, but they live in New Jersey or Connecticut or whatever.
With, I mean, none of them have been in the city more than a couple times since March.
I know people who have already sold their properties in the city.
So, you know, does this change something about sort of that concentration?
Yeah, I do too, in those top 10, 15 cities.
Well, and I'm not convinced that everyone who lives there for a long period of time enjoys it.
And I have a fun story.
New York Shutdowns and Property Sales 00:06:58
In Los Angeles, our producer talked about it all the time.
People have these parties of how long they've been in LA as if they're like surviving a hostage situation.
Like, I've been here for six years.
Like, do you enjoy it?
Or are you like celebrating your survival?
It's okay.
So I'm going to diverge a little bit here, but I think you're going to appreciate it.
So thinking about California, because California was basically, it was in the sort of, I don't know, middle 20th century, it was like the apex of the American dream.
Yes, especially Southern California.
Yeah, definitely.
They didn't ask where you were from.
They said, what do you do?
Right.
Yeah, no, and it was, and it was great.
I mean, California, in a lot of ways, California is still unique just because the geography and topography there is very unique and the weather is very unique.
And there's still a lot of good things about California, though fewer and fewer in a lot of ways all the time.
But it was sort of everybody in America somehow aspired to be like California.
A lot of people moved there.
And everybody from all over the world aspired to that too.
We're harmonic with that, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Dreaming, graduate.
A lot of our movies were pointing towards an ass bugsy, pointing towards a glorification of right.
Disneyland was open there.
So it was all this sort of canned.
We started movie production there all day.
And remember, the defense industry had a huge presence in Los Angeles.
I mean, that was LA's main industry.
And then there were baseball teams there.
I mean, it was the whole movement towards California.
Yeah.
And so.
Okay, it's very interesting about the defense team.
Yeah.
So there's a I'm not sure where to start on this.
So there was a high school in Sacramento called La Sierra High School.
And La Sierra, the athletic director La Sierra developed a program and a fitness program for the students.
He thought it was important.
He thought the students would benefit from it like mentally and physically.
And so there's a point here.
It became very famous.
So he implements it in the very early 60s, like 60 or 61, I think, is when he first implemented it.
And what happened is that within one year of doing it, discipline problems effectively disappear.
They're down like 85%, all the discipline issues in the school.
Testing scores go up.
All the academic attainment in the school goes up by every metric.
Everybody's happy.
And there's a ton of video.
It's on YouTube if you want to see it.
There's a ton of video of it.
And you see all these kids doing this thing, and they do it 55 minutes every morning as a school.
And so it's just massive group exercise.
These kids are like ridiculously fit.
Okay.
And they're all like 16, 17.
Some of them are 18 years old.
And they look like they're all fitness models.
But it's all of them.
Like some of them more than others, obviously.
But they're all like crazy fit.
I'm bringing this up for a point.
By the way, there's a documentary on this that's available on Amazon called The Motivation Factor.
I'm like, I should be getting a commission.
I've told so many people to watch this.
I'm going to have to check it out.
But what happens is in 1962, JFK gets wind of this.
And JFK, and there's a great video of JFK too, talking about it.
And he's like, this is how we're basically going to make America great again.
Like, this is great.
Excuse me.
So JFK says we're going to roll this out to all of the high schools in the country.
It ultimately gets rolled out to like 4,000 high schools.
Nobody really implements it as well as the original high school did, but it had a big impact.
Sorry.
And I bring it up because they interviewed in the documentary, they interviewed all these kids who had been kids in the early 60s.
They're all in their 70s now.
They're ridiculously fit 60 years later, right?
It stayed with them for their whole lives.
Wow.
Oh, gosh.
And the point is, is that there was this sort of can-do aspect to what we could achieve as a country, what we could achieve together.
And it was sort of a holistic.
Yeah, it was sort of a holistic approach.
It wasn't just we're going to make more money or we're going to even start a company, which I think is good or whatever.
It's let's all like live our lives in a way that is sort of mutually responsible and where we support one another.
And that's why I thought it was interesting that it was like group exercise.
It wasn't like, hey, everybody.
Go run their own.
And even though it was competitive, it was also sort of like, in a way, it was like SEAL training because it was like you were really encouraged to help each other achieve whatever the next goal was.
And these kids stayed fit their whole life.
Stayed fit their whole lives.
A lot of them achieved all kinds of different things.
And it makes me, when I start to think about the elites question, I think about like, how different is it today?
You know, we have JFK, a Democrat, right, who is implementing this versus, say, a Gavin Newsom, governor of California now.
And his response isn't, for instance, to COVID, isn't like, how do we build treatments?
How do we, like, there's going to be people getting sick.
How do we increase the capacity to treat those people?
It's everybody stop moving.
Let's not do anything.
Like, that's, like, that's a very un-American.
It's a very draconian medieval.
Yeah, it's like, let's not build a solution.
Let's just not do anything and hope the storm blows over.
But even more than that, like on the specific issue, like, of, of, of childhood and fitness, like, they've basically ended PE in California on Newsom's orders.
Why?
Because it's fat shaming.
Why?
Because it's trans shaming.
Right.
So you go in the peer, in the, in basically on our two generations, you would call it.
You go from this thing of how we can all achieve health, fitness, which also led to higher academic attainment, which led to less disciplined problems, which led to more camaraderie among the students.
You go from that to, actually, let's not do anything.
Let's not even have PE at all because somebody's going to not feel good about themselves, which I think is specious anyway.
Election Campaigns and Candidate Types 00:16:12
But it's just such a shift in the way elites think about anything.
It's not how do we build.
How do we control?
How do we, it's like they don't know what to do or don't want to do it.
In a lot of ways, it's very confusing as to why.
A lot of them are probably afraid of other elite institutions judging them unfavorably because of an oppression Olympic that was created, as you mentioned.
Yeah, an oppression Olympic.
That's good.
And also, you have, in a lot of different ways, I think, metastasized down, and Newsom is a byproduct of this.
I just don't think he could even pale in comparison to some of the leaders that we had multi-decades ago.
Right.
I think that we now reward political, I'm trying to think of a nice way to say this, but political creatures that have very little talent, probably low IQs, and they look nice, and they are narcissists.
They love looking at themselves.
They love hearing themselves talk.
Where, I mean, you look at someone who the Republican Party, if we were smart, we would tell the story of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
He might be one of the greatest presidents in American history and gets no credit for it at all.
I mean, he's probably the most forgotten president.
If there was a fifth person to put on Mount Rushmore, it should be Dwight D. Eisenhower.
I think.
For a variety of different reasons.
And the least of which being he spent the 1957 summer White House at the South Dakota Game Lodge, literally 35 minutes down the road from Mount Rushmore.
However, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a lot of different ways, I can't really remember where I was going.
Oh, yeah.
You put Dwight D. Eisenhower up against Gavin Newsom.
I don't even think that's even in the same categorical, right?
But I think there's something to that, though.
Where Eisenhower had direction, he had patriotism.
He couldn't care less what people thought of him.
His motives were pure and true, which goes to the point I really want to end with, which is a long point, which I think that one of the reasons why we get Gavin Newsom's and why we get Andrew Cuomo's and why we get the weak Republicans that we get, and I think it's structural,
is that the way that we finance our political leaders and the way that someone gets to the top is their capacity to be able to trade favors, keep special corporate interests happy, and play the kind of fiddle of the donor up to the top just long enough until they're able to get elected to the highest office.
And I don't think that was the case, though, in the 50s.
It wasn't actually the case.
In fact, Eisenhower, there wasn't really much campaign finance at all back then.
And I'm not saying that there should be no contributions or anything.
I'm not really even putting forth a policy prescription here.
I'm saying it's a big problem because we have incredibly unqualified and honestly foolish people that become leaders because they're good at just basically providing favors to a subset of the population that doesn't want with the rest of the country, but best for their bottom line.
And so the issue that I think is the one that we as conservatives and Republicans need to zero in on is how we finance our elections.
And how we influence public policy through that.
Yeah, I let me say one thing about Eisenhower first, and I'll say something about that.
The 1956, so there's a presidential election here.
Richard Nixon running as VP.
Yeah, so the 1956 Republican platform, go read the section on labor, okay?
And it is exactly the sort of thing that you and I have been talking about here.
And it was basically that all of the things that Eisenhower was talking about and doing in the 50s were purged out of Republican orthodoxy in the late 60s, 70s, early 80s.
And if you go back and look at that, you say, you know what, Eisenhower was ridiculously popular.
He was ridiculously successful.
And that was part of why.
So let's like.
But it was George Romney and Rockefeller that were the ones that were the architects of the deconstruction of that Republican agenda.
Hmm Romney, huh?
George Romney was governor of Michigan, and he was a ruling class Sikka fan.
Yeah, it's like in the DNA, I think.
Whatever is the wrong side for the country, that's where the Romneys are.
Always, always and forever.
So, yeah, so on the campaign finance thing, yeah, it's, I mean, that's such a hard question.
I'm kind of with you on this.
Like, it seems like the incentive structures are all wrong.
But what I'm saying is what's the better way to do it?
It creates a magnet for really bad people to get involved.
Not just bad, but just people that shouldn't be in elected office.
They're just really willing to kind of sell themselves out to get into power.
And then also, this is why I think we just can't get anything meaningfully done.
I really can't, is the incredible power of the lobbyist class and the corporate interests.
It creates just impossible movement.
And I think Republicans are so wrong on this.
And I'll be honest with you, when I read, you know, I sign up for all these ridiculous left-wing newsletters.
So I get this newsletter from this website called Our Revolution, right?
It's Alexandria Kazi-Cortez and Elon Omar and Rashida Talib, a bunch of nonsense.
And I read all of it, and I go down to the bottom, right?
And on the bottom, there's a disclosure.
Disclosure.
Okay, this is interesting.
It says, we do not take money from registered lobbyists.
We don't take money for anyone that has ever been registered to lobby for a foreign government.
And I'm reading this thing.
I agree with all of it, except the fossil fuel thing.
I don't like it.
But I'm like, why are they better on the campaign finance?
Why don't our people say we won't take money from lobbyists?
It's a good question.
I mean, this is a place where a lot of where I'll just say Democrats in general have been way better than this than Republicans, which is to motivate a lot of small dollar donors.
Or even just reject the corporate money.
Yeah, I think those two things go hand in hand, not just because of financial necessity, but because it represents an ethic of who you're responsible to.
I think that's interesting.
Yeah.
But I think the small dollars will come if you actually stand for something.
Yes, I agree.
But you have to go out.
Look at the way AOC does, handles her social media.
She's very charismatic in a lot of ways, but she's on it all the time.
And there are a handful of Republican congressmen who I think are pretty good.
Matt Gates is good.
Matt's very good.
Andy Biggs is very good.
Jim Jordan.
But there are exceptions.
Now, AOC is an exception for Democrats, too.
But that's the direction of their party.
And what I'm trying to conjecture, though, and predict, we're going to get rolled on this issue because they're going to play the moral high ground and say, we don't take money from corporate interests.
Yeah, they do that in the super PACs.
No, I know that.
But yes, but they are not.
But if that purity actually does exist at any point, I think it's very hard to win against that.
Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right.
And this is where Republicans need to, I think, be smarter and more aggressive, which is building out the base, getting our people really much more involved.
And it can be something as simple as, like, Bernie was great at this.
Bernie's average contributors, I think, was something like $27.
That was in 2016, but in 2019, 20, it was something like that.
I mean, he had a lot of people giving him small amounts of money, and people would sign up and they'd give him $10 a month, but it would be like an auto renew, and they just hit the credit card every year.
And that it's not just the money there.
Those people, the money is...
It's almost like shareholders.
Yeah, right, exactly.
They have a sense of ownership.
That's a signifier of what their commitment level is.
And so people, everybody knows this who's in politics.
If somebody gives you money, they're definitely voting for you, right?
And they're also going to tell people about you because they're psychologically, mentally invested besides being financially invested.
And there's, because campaigns are expensive, there obviously is an incentive to go and get the max donors, the people who give you $2,700.
But it is way more powerful if you have a lot of people giving you a little bit because those people, they get their family members to go to the polls and vote for you.
They get their friends to do it.
They're there for you.
Well, and I'm just not convinced.
I think that you could win an election with, and I know this because we're in organizing.
This is what we do.
And I listen to the constituents.
I'm convinced you could win an election with half the money and a better message saying I don't take corporate money in this climate that we're in right now.
And that goes to where I think things are headed.
And I want to build this out to you as we close, which is I see not necessarily this election, because I don't think this election is anything we've seen before.
I think it's going to be off the wall.
I don't really know how it's going to end.
Obviously, I hope the president wins.
But the direction is there's going to be a revolt against this ruling class.
And I think that Donald Trump election 16 was the beginning of.
I don't think it was a one-off thing.
I think that the repulsion that people have for the wine and dine Malibu Manhattan class is only going to grow.
And so it can become a socialist workers' revolution, which would be awful.
Right.
Really, really bad.
Or it could become a conservative workers' revolution or a renewal.
And that's the one of two ways I think it could go.
And if it goes to the left, I mean, it's unrecoverable, in my opinion.
So what do you think of that analysis?
100% right.
Whoever is going to win the next 30, 40, 50 years, it's going to be a populist party in some way.
If Republicans, or let me say it differently, if conservatives, the people on the right want to win, it has to be a people's party.
It's the only way it works.
You can get a broad base of support.
You can win elections handily.
I mean, what I like to say is we want to shoot for being a party that consistently gets 55% of the vote.
Do what FDR did in the 30s.
And he had a very big popular majority that cut across all the sort of class, race, religion.
He just had a very broad, he had a very broad base of support all across the country.
And that's what Republicans need to be shooting for.
Instead, the strategists like to parse all the demographic data and say, we need to get more of the evangelical vote or whatever.
That may be true, and that's great.
They're human beings.
Right.
Like, we don't do well with this group.
We do well with that group.
And yes, the bulkization of American politics.
Yeah, and you don't win long-term that way.
You don't build a movement that can change the trajectory of the country by doing that.
And that's what we need to do, is to change the trajectory.
Well, and what my fear is is that we are up against another FDR movement of a Democrat who is younger, pretty well qualified, speaks well, has the ideas of Bernie Sanders and can actually explain them, is right on the money and politics issue, doesn't spit in the eye of conservatives on cultural issues, but just enough to keep the left at bay, doesn't outwardly hate the country, we would be in a political minority for a very long time.
That combination.
That maybe is Gavin Newsom.
He may not be all of those things, but I mean, think about a Newsom in 2024.
He's good looking.
He's articulate.
He won't say tear down Mount Rushmore.
Right.
No, exactly right.
He won't say good things about Vladimir Lenin.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, that's right.
But he'll keep the Leninites happy.
That's an incredibly dangerous proposition because the fact we're running up against Joe Biden, I mean, it's a gift, I really believe.
I mean, it could have been a Democrat.
I don't know how that selection could have been, but it could have been a Democrat who was not one of the radicals, not losing his mind and or as corrupt as him.
Like a normal Democrat would have been very different.
I think we could beat Joe Biden.
I think we should beat Joe Biden.
But in the years to come, better beat Joe Biden.
Yeah.
So what do you think it's going to take for Trump to do that?
Yeah, I think it's a good question.
I mean, I think he needs to go back to basics.
The things that got him elected in 2016, those things will get him elected again.
I think that I mean the one the one place that I think the one issue that I think is somewhat less potent, still equally as important is immigration, but politically it's less potent this year.
Though I think it is every bit as important.
It's the issue.
Yeah, but let me so I just want to add that caveat, but in terms of what is going to drive those people to vote for him that he needs to get to vote for him, you know, he's still got to win those same six to eight states and he needs to go back to things like getting people back to work, what we're talking about.
How do you buy a house?
How do you make more money?
How do you be able to for how do you be able to have kids and afford them?
You know, it's what he was talking about when he said, you know, we want to bring manufacturing back.
You know, and I love the way his formulation is always like, oh, we have the most beautiful coal miners in the world.
I love our coal miners.
You know, those type of things, that's really important to the people who vote and the people that he needs to get to vote.
And I think he needs to go back to those things, to those themes.
And I've told you this before, like we've done, you know, we've done a bunch of polling.
In fact, we're in the field right now in Pennsylvania and Ohio polling those states.
We'll have stuff out Friday.
But one of the questions we ask is, would you be more or less likely to vote for a candidate who had a plan to make America self-sufficient in food, energy, and health care?
It's an 80% winner, right?
And talk about those things.
It's a sense of being protected, of the country being strong, of being secure.
You start talking about those things, people get up.
And people light up.
And people who maybe you would think are not natural Trump voters, they hear that in a way that makes them more amenable to a Trump vote, too.
And so on the issues, I think it's those sorts of things.
On I guess I would say two things just on the sort of the practical politics of it.
Number one, and hopefully the president watches this podcast.
So I would say this to him.
There is exactly one political advisor he should be listening to, and it's Donald J. Trump because he has exemplary political instincts.
Like he knows how to run his campaign and what it takes to win better than anybody else.
So he should trust his instincts on those things.
And the other thing is, is he needs to be out more.
He needs to be out there.
I agree to people.
He needs to be trapped.
I mean, I threw out the idea he should have done a 50-state tour this summer.
Every state.
Yeah.
I mean, that would be amazing.
He's the best as a hyperactive president, in my opinion.
He likes it.
I mean, it just, you know, at the event that you guys threw here in Phoenix a couple weeks ago, I mean, it is, you know, it's so evident that he enjoys it, and he has such a great rapport with the crowd.
And for, you know, I had never been to a Trump rally before, and you don't get a sense of it by watching, even by watching the whole, you know, two hours or whatever on television.
There really is a connection between him and the crowd.
He likes it.
Some of the subtleties about the way he looks at people or talks to people, it doesn't come through on the video.
And I guess I say it this way.
Trump Rally Rapport with the Crowd 00:02:26
There's two types of candidates.
There are candidates who get energy from campaigning.
There's candidates who give energy to campaigning.
And the president so obviously gets it.
So it's like he creates his own virtuous cycle the more he's out with people.
And I think he needs to do a lot of that.
And not every candidate or president is like that.
In fact, I think he gets turbocharged by doing more events.
Yeah.
I think he finds the message better by doing more events and all that.
Okay, so here's my one more thing that I think that he should do.
He should go on Joe Rogan for two hours.
Oh, I think that would be a great idea.
Right, and it does two things.
First of all, it would be like just a riot.
And I think he could handle it.
He could definitely handle it.
By the way, I don't think he does enough combative media like that.
Not the liberal media.
Screw that.
I'm talking about the curious media.
I'm talking about someone like Joe who will be fair.
Rogan.
He'll be like, dude, why do you do this?
Right, right.
Exactly.
Like, they would get into it.
That would be good, but you know what else it would do?
So it would.
That's a very good idea.
The other part of it is it would be great, but you know who wouldn't, who would then have pressure to do Rogan?
Biden.
Biden.
That's a good point.
He couldn't do it.
There's no way.
There's no way.
So it's like a win-win.
So that's my, Mr. President, you shouldn't do it.
President Trump is amazing in that format, though.
Yeah.
He can defend himself better than anyone else, right?
Yeah.
And I love that idea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's it.
All right, everybody.
Please subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show.
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We got the link there.
Chris, this is great.
Amgreatness.com, right?
Yep.
AM Greatness.
I think I have a piece that's still up there.
You sure do.
You got a couple of them.
Yeah, it's awesome.
Thanks, guys.
We'll see you soon.
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