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July 29, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
42:39
Joe Biden, John Roberts, and America UNHINGED with Eric Metaxas
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Welcome to the Program 00:02:16
Thank you for listening to this podcast one production.
Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast One, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcast.
Hey, everybody.
Been traveling like crazy.
I flew to DC just to be able to talk to nine doctors, as you heard in our sister episode.
And I also snuck a short interview with Eric Metaxas, the great Eric Metaxas, who is a senior fellow at the Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty at the only school I put my name behind at Liberty University.
Enjoy this in-depth interview where we talk about Christianity, the Supreme Court, John Roberts, and so much more.
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Buckle up, everybody.
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.
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.
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There's so much going on.
I thought when things get this crazy in America, I don't know about you, but I'd love to hear from Charlie Kirk.
Charlie is with the Liberty University Falkirk Center.
Supreme Court Rulings on Churches 00:15:25
And actually, so am I.
And here's Charlie Kirk.
Charlie, welcome to the program.
Great to be back, Eric.
God bless you.
We're going to have some fun.
And God bless you.
Listen, over the weekend, I got a package in the mail from Ryan Helfenbein, who runs the Falkirk Center's Liberty Center.
And look what he sent me.
I don't know if anybody, if you're watching on video, I'm holding up a handsome Liberty University mug.
It's got a lovely cork base.
I demand that in most of my mugs.
And Charlie and Ryan, they took the trouble to get me that.
But anyway, look, you and I, we have so much to talk about.
I'll just shut up as quickly as possible and ask you, my friend, the news over the weekend has continued to be troubling and more than troubling.
So what is your take?
Well, you know, especially on Friday, great to be here, Eric.
We saw the Supreme Court come with a very puzzling decision.
The Bush appointee, John Roberts, has really been playing into his caricature lately of siding with the most radical elements of the United States Supreme Court.
And for those people that don't know, on Friday evening, you know, it's funny how they always do this on Friday evening to try to quell the rebellion of anyone that actually might be paying attention.
Calvary Chapel in Las Vegas sued asking why can casinos and restaurants have 50 or more people, but churches cannot.
Pretty reasonable complaint.
The Supreme Court then decided 5-4 with Roberts siding with Breyer, Kagan, Sodomayor, and Ginsburg, saying that, you know what, it's okay to discriminate against churches, even though casinos and restaurants, marijuana dispensaries, and strip clubs can have 50 or more people.
Gorsuch had his.
Hang on.
Now, you say discriminate against churches, and you're speaking on some level hyperbolically, even though I agree with what you just said.
In other words, the point is they don't seem to explain how it is not discrimination.
You're saying that this many people can go into these establishments and gamble and so on and so forth, but churches know only 50 people.
And this is Nevada.
We could talk about other states, and I'd like to do this in a minute.
But how is it possible that somebody like Roberts, who's not a anti-constitutionalist, how do you suppose he rationalizes this in his mind?
That's, I guess, my question.
What is his, what is he doing legally and in his mind that he thinks it's correct?
So I'll answer that.
Then I'll tell you how Gorsuch dissented, which was brilliant.
There we go.
So Roberts, at least in my interpretation of the opinion, he says church is different because people are more packed together.
It's a gathering for a couple hours.
And it wasn't just church, a synagogue, mosque.
He said this is a mass gathering protocol and that the state of Nevada does have the ability to do that.
I think it's nonsense.
I mean, this idea that you're not going to get close together with people when you're going to go to a marijuana dispensary or to a restaurant or to a casino is just pretty, pretty outrageous.
Now, Gorsuch dissented from where Roberts would have his opinion.
And Gorsuch said, this is not even a question.
This is the most simple case that we have seen recently.
I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but this is basically the language that he used.
And he said that the First Amendment shouldn't apply at Caesar's Palace, but not at Calvary Chapel, Las Vegas.
It was a great final line in his dissenting opinion.
And Gorsuch went out of his way to also mention synagogues and mosques.
Now, Eric, what is really concerning for me is that the Constitution more and more seems kind of like a suggestion document to the United States Supreme Court, no longer the actual document that they have to defend and that they have to interpret.
Now it's just kind of like a reference point.
Like, oh, we might, we might consider it in some of our ruling.
I agree with you.
I went through the same sort of mental gymnastics this weekend, Eric, because I said, well, John Roberts, he's ruled correctly on some things.
He's not a dummy.
How could you come to this decision?
I mean, Sodomayor and Kagan, I get that.
I mean, they're Rassoian Ava Peron types, right?
Like they got lost in the Argentinian Revolution and somehow found themselves on the Supreme Court.
But John Roberts, I mean, he was Bush appointee.
He's supposed to be one of us, and he's not.
He came up with a very bizarre ruling here, and I think dangerous.
I think he really betrayed our country for what he did here.
Because here's what's happening, Eric.
Pastor Rob McCoy, Pastor Jack Hibbs, the real fighters out there, they have now had an increased amount of governmental overreach and scrutiny this last weekend.
So you're right.
It does, the decision was Nevada.
We're talking about California now.
That's right.
But now it's a national application of it because the Supreme Court ruled on it, right?
So now other churches across the country that were reopening safely and securely are now feeling the pain and they're being targeted because of this outrageous decision.
Well, I guess I want to, there's a few things that pop into my mind as you talk about this.
I preached in Ocean City, New Jersey a couple of weekends ago, and they have an auditorium that seats 1,000 people.
And so they said, well, we can have Theoretically, 200 people in here would be safe social distancing.
But Governor Murphy has said only 100 people, it's the max.
In other words, it doesn't matter if the church auditorium could hold 1,000 or 500.
If it's either 20% of what it could hold or 100 people, whichever is less.
So we ended up having the service outdoors, and I don't know, there's probably 180 people there or something like that.
But the reason you and I are annoyed by this, and many Americans are annoyed by this, is there seems to be a level of animus toward religion.
There also seems to be a level of subjectivity.
In other words, if everybody can sort of see the point, you say, well, we don't like it, but we get it.
But it does seem that the rulings have fallen unfairly against churches.
And that's why folks like Rob McCoy and Jack Hibbs and now John MacArthur are, I think, heroically dissenting.
I completely agree.
And, Eric, look, I wanted to give some of these people at least the temporary benefit of the doubt.
I really did.
But when we have to tolerate as a society 56 nights of arson and terrorism in Portland or in Chicago, where they have thousands of people congregating at once, and you're telling me that 51 people are violating the law if they gather in Las Vegas to go take communion or to go take a holy sacrament.
I mean, this is outrageous, Eric.
And what's really happened is that the Supreme Court basically has said church is not essential.
That is what happened here.
Not every member on the Supreme Court is 5'4, and their reasoning is backwards and incorrect.
But I think that the default position of our government, Eric, should be we should have to go to extreme lengths to shut down religious services.
I think one of the reasons we are seeing so much unrest is because people have not been able to go to church.
People haven't been able to connect to the moral center.
I am actually against this kind of digitalization of church services.
Call me old school.
I actually like being able to dress up, go to a church, feel as if I'm entering into a house of God, have a complete and total mind kind of shaping experience.
Whereas you just kind of turn on your television at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning, I don't feel that same sort of connection.
And you have millions of people that agree with me, by the way.
And people wonder why we kind of have this identity crisis as a country.
I don't think it's unfair to say it's because we've disallowed church services in a lot of states.
The church has always been the moral center against Rousseau and French Revolution tactics, always.
And all of a sudden, you get rid of that.
We wonder, well, why do we have a French Revolution happening?
Well, maybe it's because we don't have church happening anymore.
Wow, that is wonderful connection.
I expect no less from you, Charlie Kirk.
Folks, I'm talking to Charlie Kirk.
He's with the Falkirk Center at Liberty University.
And hey, I also am with the Falkirk Center at Liberty University.
I love it.
Now, Charlie, you just talked about a whole bunch of things that raise many issues.
For example, if you will permit me for a second, I think let's talk about what's called stare decisis, right?
Stare decisis refers in Latin to the idea that when the Supreme Court makes a ruling, future Supreme Court rulings need or should take that into consideration rather than willy-nilly switch from left to right, from right to left, from this to that.
In other words, that they want to, here's the key: they want to continue to inspire confidence in the institution of the judicial branch.
Because one of the things that makes democracy work is that the people, we the people, have, generally speaking, confidence and trust in the institutions of government.
It doesn't mean that sometimes it doesn't go sideways or sometimes it doesn't get difficult.
But generally speaking, we're not cynical.
What Roberts has done recently and what other rulings have done recently and what's been happening in the country generally recently is things seem to have gotten so nakedly partisan, so nakedly political, and in the case of these judicial decisions,
so subjective that people begin to back up, begin to lose confidence, for example, in the Supreme Court and to treat it like any other political entity and talk about conservative justices and liberal justices.
And you think it should not be that way.
In other words, they ought to be very, very careful about rattling the populace.
Because in 1973, for example, when Roe v. Wade happened or when same-sex marriage was effectively shoved down our throat, the people feel like, wait a minute, whether I agree with the decision or don't, we haven't really been able to argue this through in a healthy way.
And so at that point, when the Supreme Court makes a decision, just as with Obamacare, when you have the legislature just throw down this law, people feel disenfranchised and that undermines every kind of freedom.
It has nothing to do with left or right.
It just undermines freedom.
Well, yeah, and it's a very important point, Eric.
And the founders didn't intend for this, but the Supreme Court actually has almost super governmental power if they so choose to use it.
Actually, more so than the legislative and the executive.
So we learn early on that there's checks and balances, right?
And that's true.
The only check that we have on the Supreme Court is future nominees and impeaching a Supreme Court justice.
If the Supreme Court decides to make their own law, which they have in recent years, what's our check against that?
Very little, actually, especially with a broken Congress and a legislature that is heavily divided.
So in the gay marriage decision, for example, where Anthony Kennedy wrongly decided just to be, to overturn over, I think, 28 state legislatures that held up that marriage is between one man and one woman.
All of a sudden, the Supreme Court made the law, and what was our check?
Nothing.
And so that's a very, we have been taught that all the branches of government are equal.
And that's correct in a theoretical sense.
But in a practical sense, the Supreme Court is actually the most powerful position of government because what's our check against it?
It's very little.
I mean, if Donald Trump decides to put up a Goya Beans tweak, they're going to impeach him for violating the emoluments clause, right?
I mean, the legislative and executive are so checking each other every single day.
The only check we have, again, is impeaching one of these justices, which will not happen.
And so the point is this, though, is that, yes, this is how you get people that feel as if the government doesn't represent them.
I mean, when you hear people complain about the ruling class, go look at those nine people in black robes that are supposed to be impartial.
And what you have seen, though, is a radical movement.
This is nothing new.
It's just grown and they've multiplied of people that have gone to the United States Supreme Court and decided that this is a wonderful workshop to be able to destroy America.
This is our ultimate opportunity.
Who cares if I have to be, you know, justice is blind or trying to be an interpreter of the law?
No.
I mean, now, and then you have John Roberts, for whatever reason, continually trying to pander to the Sotomayor Kagan Ginsburg Breyer wing of the court, where Clarence Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Alito generally do the right thing.
Kavanaugh's been amazing, by the way.
It's amazing how the two most principled people on the court are the people that they try to destroy most.
That's a different topic for a different time.
I want to shift to something even less pleasant.
I'd like to talk about the rioting that's happening, for example, in Portland.
I am aghast, frankly, because what it seems to me is happening in Portland is no longer mere rioting.
Forget about peaceful demonstrations.
That's a joke.
But there's rioting and there's rioting.
And then there is, how do we put it? Armed organized rebellion against the citizens of the United States.
We have Antifa and others who are obviously plotting in the way that militaries plot, not the way mobs behave, but in the way that militaries plot and they have supply chains and things.
And obviously the media are not reporting on this.
Well, you're exactly right.
I mean, it's so Orwellian the way the media is reporting on it, actually.
And I mean, I've been rereading 1984, and I feel like I'm reading the LA Times in real time.
I really do.
I mean, I don't feel as if this thing was written in the 1950s by a kind of a meandering socialist in the United Kingdom.
I feel like this is a columnist for the New York Times.
The New York Times had an article this last weekend that said, the real threat in Portland is Donald Trump's standing army.
It's like, this is so incredible.
This is doublethink.
This is the only way I could describe it or double speak.
And so, look, we have armed insurrection happening in our country right now.
And for 56, 57 days straight in Portland and Seattle, even the local police have called it a riot.
The left is perfectly okay with defending it.
And of course, we're supposed to believe this is all just because of the wrongful murder of George Floyd, which is outrageous.
And it's not true.
These are people that are bitter.
It's way more than not true, Charlie.
Don't be kind.
It is a desecration of the memory of George Floyd.
And it's a desecration of the memory of anyone who was ill-treated at the hands of corrupt police.
This has so little to do with that that it should no longer even be mentioned.
Let me explain your audience.
Let me explain to your audience how doublespeak works or doublethink works because I think it's really helpful.
So let's pretend, Eric, you're eating a couple, you're eating cookies.
I come up to you, Eric, how many cookies did you eat?
Let's see you ate 10.
You say, well, I ate three.
The Bitter Truth About Politics 00:04:06
That's a lie.
Let's say I come up to you and you're eating cookies.
I say, hey, Eric, how many cookies did you eat?
You have cookies all over your face.
I didn't eat any cookies.
You did.
No, no, I see you're eating the cookies.
Like, I promise you're eating the cookies.
No, you ate all the cookies.
It's the opposite of the truth.
And that's what's happening now, where it's even more sinister than a lie.
It's a complete reflection and deflection back to the actual accuser.
Go ahead.
No, I was just going to say exactly what you said in a different way, because this point you're making is really key.
Because Americans, my friend Larry Taunton wrote a piece and he talks about this Sololinsky tactics.
But what this is, I first woke up to this.
It must have been 1991.
I was taking a screenwriting course in Hollywood by the famous Robert McKee.
And as he talked about story and the structure of narrative, he says, there's good and then there is evil, but there's something even worse than evil.
It is evil masquerading as good.
In other words, a deeper level of evil is evil masquerading as good.
On some level, you could argue that's what every lie is.
It pretends to be the truth.
But there is a level of this happening now, and you just referred to it.
It's Orwellian.
And I think most Americans aren't used to it.
In other words, it's a level of cynicism involved that's freaky.
Well, and so Orwell warned against this in some of his later lectures, where he said the human psyche actually isn't prepared for double speak, where it's actually so incredibly different than how we process information.
It actually creates you to be subservient.
So, for example, when you go up and you're like, wow, maybe they should stop looting.
And they say, shut up, racist.
Like, no, no, no, can you please stop burning down the city?
Like, no, shut up, racist.
Like, we don't even know how to deal with that.
And we actually just kind of either walk away or we kind of just take the knee metaphorically or literally.
And it's so incredibly effective because we as decent human beings who actually want to see civil society and a stable country and a place to build a family, we look at this and we dare question it, right?
And those of us that aren't trained and able to spot it out, I can understand why certain people have remained very silent.
I can understand in a certain sense why people are so confused and why, and you're exactly right.
Just in a human psychological analysis, we are not equipped.
That's the best term, equipped to be able to confront this Orwellian approach, where I have to read in the New York Times that it's Donald Trump that is causing the chaos importantly.
Right.
It's hard.
And I think it's why it's worth our taking the time to talk about it.
The term used by the cognizanti, the chattering classes, who always invent new terms.
And most Americans, like my parents and stuff, they don't get this.
But the term gaslighting for the last few years, you know, younger people on Twitter and stuff talk about gaslighting.
That comes from a movie in the 40s starring Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotton, one of the greatest movies ever, Gaslight, in which the husband of Ingrid Bergman, he begins to play head games with her.
And he will hide something and then accuse her of being forgetful.
You are so forgetful, pola.
You know, he begins to plant these ideas and to drive her insane.
He's gaslighting her.
We use that term today.
That is what is happening.
When I watch, for example, somebody like a Chuck Schumer pontificating foolishly, they are saying precisely the opposite, but in such a way that it seems absolutely true.
And honestly, Charlie, what you're talking about, I mean, you've read these Orwell essays, which I've not read, but the human mind really needs to understand what is happening and to begin to understand that if you do not see what is happening, you're powerless against it.
So we're in a new realm right now.
I think we've only got 20 seconds.
So please respond and we'll come back.
It's a new realm.
We now have to train people to be equipped to fight it.
Sending Videos and New SIM Cards 00:02:22
And they are employing 84 doublespeak.
And it is a dystopian world we live in, literally and figuratively.
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We'll be right back with Charlie Kirk.
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Folks, talking to Charlie Kirk, who is with Liberty University's Falkirk Center, of course.
I, too, am with the Falkirk Center at Liberty University.
I'm a senior fellow.
Are there any junior fellows, Charlie?
Federal Power and Conservative Roots 00:15:47
We're trying to train some.
Let's just put it this way, that if there was a title that was higher than yours, then it wouldn't be a true center around faith and liberty.
All right.
Okay.
Well, then I will accept that.
I want to talk again about what's happening in Portland.
There's a lot of confusion about what the federal government ought and ought not to do.
Judge Napolitano has said very clearly that he considers Trump sending federal troops or marshals in as unconstitutional.
Why do you suppose somebody like Judge Napolitano would be saying that?
I don't know.
I know him, so that's very perplexing and puzzling.
He's issued some perplexing statements in the last year.
I'm beginning to lose confidence in him.
Yeah, that doesn't sound right.
But look, I mean, first of all, there is an Insurrection Act of 1807 that any president can sign and was used against the Whiskey Rebellion and was used many other times.
I think it was 1807.
Anyway, the point is that there is an Insurrection Act on the books that can be used.
Secondly, I mean, this is the broader question.
H.W. Bush signed it in 91, the Rodney King riots, and it actually quelled the rebellion very nicely, you know, very effectively in Los Angeles.
And I guess my question to Judge Napolitano is, was Dwight D. Eisenhower acting in his constitutional authority to send federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas to force, you know, to not basically force the bitter segregationists and racists to allow black children to go to school at the Little Rock Nine?
Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower?
Isn't that the question, right?
And listen, you and I, speaking as conservatives, we do not like the federal government to overreach.
We believe in states' rights.
So we don't take this lightly.
But there is a time, and it seems to me when people are being murdered, when you have a level of ignorance or malfeasance or partisanship locally, whether on the state level or on a city level, the government, the federal government has an obligation to step in.
Lives are being put at risk, and local leaders don't care.
I mean, when lynching happened in the South, when Bull Connor acted in the way he did in the South, it seems to me none of us would have a problem because you're dealing with constitutional rights, liberty, life, and the pursuit of happiness.
Yeah, I mean, I guess the Democrats are getting back to their roots of George Wallace, right?
I mean, that's basically where we're at right now, where George Wallace stared down federal troops and said, you will not segregate, you know, you will not desegregate the American South.
I guess that was a Democrat then, I guess, a Democrat today.
What's really perplexing, Eric, though, and I think you would agree with this, is how the Democrats hide behind our own doctrine of states' rights when it fits their own agenda.
But when they, and it's so, I mean, of course, they don't actually believe in states' rights.
I mean, they believe in hiding behind it in their own little mini city states called California, Seattle, Portland, and New York City when they want to defy federal immigration law, when they want to create their own little sanctuary areas absent of the federal rule of law.
But I guess the question here is, why would it be unconstitutional if there's already a law in the books that would allow it?
But let's sidestep that for a second because I think that's just a foolish statement.
I think it's perfectly constitutional.
The question is, is it right for Trump to do?
And the answer is, of course it is.
And some people say, well, this is good for Republicans, the more that our cities burn and blah, blah, blah, like the pollsters.
I just think that whole take is so ridiculously outrageous that you're going to sit idly by while we have the arson and terror in our country and do nothing.
So I think the president is right to deploy these kinds of federal resources.
And look, we know this, Eric, that problems that are not confronted multiply.
We saw what happened at the Democrat National Convention in Chicago in the late 1960s, I believe it was, either 1960, yeah, 1960.
1968, and a Democratic mayor, Dale, Jr., cracked down big time.
And it could have gone, it could have burned the whole city down.
It really could have.
And so, so, look, I am of the, I have no tolerance for violent outrage.
And I think that even some conservative media gets this wrong.
I've been reading some of this stuff over the weekend.
They say protests continued for the 56th day in Portland.
I said, you know what?
A protest is kind of what we did during the lockdown, where we didn't burn anything.
We cleaned up after ourselves and we got a permit and we were very respectful.
And they still brought out the Praetorian Guard to try to enforce measures against us when we protested the lockdowns.
An insurrection is when you use weapons and violence and physical retribution to try to overtake a government.
That's what's happening in Portland and Seattle.
Well, when we spoke earlier about gaslighting and about the newspeak of Orwell, it seems to me, you know, to put it in Freudian terms, and I hate Freud, but it's kind of projection, right?
Whatever it is that I'm in fact doing, I accuse you of doing.
And there's something I say it's demonic, right?
Because it's worse than a lie.
It's a very cynical lie.
And so the left has, for the last 50 and 60 and more years, portrayed conservatives as jack-booted thugs, right?
And in reality, they have been the ones who've been the jack-booted thugs.
And they've done this so effectively in the media over 50 years.
It's why I always talk about culture and the media: we are way behind in being able to portray the reality of what's been happening in America.
But they do this time and time again so that if a conservative or pro-Trump person sneezes, they portray it a certain way.
And if folks on their side are using lasers to blind federal officers, you know, that's just part of the way things go.
Yeah, and could someone explain or at least give me one example of an organized conservative, let's just say, activity that ever resulted in physical retribution ever.
That's the point, Charles.
That's exactly the point.
It doesn't happen, but that specter is raised over and over again, whether they have to go back to lynchings in the South, which, you know, even to call those conservatives gets ridiculous.
We know they were racist, but we also know that the Democratic Party was in the vanguard of that kind of stuff.
So we're going to go to another break.
We'll be right back with Charlie Kirk.
Don't go away.
Charlie, I've got to ask you about education.
A lot of people over this past weekend, as the chaos has continued and the violence has continued, they've begun to point the fingers at education.
Over 50 years, we have effectively indoctrinated young people with a worldview that is more pro-Fidel Castro, more pro-Soviet Union, more pro-conservative, sorry, a communist party of China than it is pro-American along the founders' vision.
Do you think that there's anything that this president or that the Senate can do?
Because, you know, you referenced Orwell writing a long time ago, many decades ago.
1950s.
You have to know, of course, that C.S. Lewis wrote very similar things.
In the book, The Abolition of Man, he talks about this.
He wrote this stuff 80 years ago, but it was prophetic.
Is exactly said what would happen and what we're seeing the fruit of now.
Yeah, and look, this is this is the issue that we struggle with right now.
And there's two factors to it because this is the price we pay for abundance and liberty.
Because what ends up happening is one generation fights to save the Republic and save Western society.
Their kids decide to rebel slightly and then end up getting somewhat on the most path, my parents' generation.
And then they are convinced that my generation has to go into these mind-warping indoctrination camps because that is what is needed to be an upper-middle-class individual in our country.
And this has been one of the great lies of America in the last 30, 40 years.
I'm actually working on a book on it.
And it's not that I'm anti-college in the sense of what it should be.
I'm actually pro-enlightenment.
I love it.
I love learning about Descartes and Marcus Aurelius.
I just wish that's what happened because it's not.
Instead, you learn about Nicole Hannah-Jones and you learn about white fragility, and you bathe in the nonsense of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that we need to be a primitive civilization, that civilized society is something that is wrong.
And that you look at this, it creates very ungrateful, unhappy people.
And you pair that with a very dire and real financial circumstance.
And this is the second part of this that conservatives don't always talk about, Eric.
And I'd love to get into this, which is for recent graduates, the amount of debt burden, the things that they're studying actually don't help them economically.
And since they don't see their well-being, and they also go into these overly flooded cities where things are so incredibly expensive that they're not able to build wealth, they don't get married, they're very miserable by the time they turn 28 or 30, that they're perfect for a revolution.
They're ripe for a revolution, actually.
That their net assets are $70,000 in the hole.
They're working minimum wage jobs that wouldn't have required a college degree in the first place.
And all of a sudden, that lecture that they heard five years ago about the need for a rebellion, you know, taking the spirit of Roba Spear, all of a sudden they act on it.
And we wonder, it's so funny.
I talked to some of these people in some of the best, you know, wealthiest communities across our country.
And I love doing it in the summer because these are kind of when the enclaves of the mountains and the upper east, you know, that's kind of where people gather and they kind of start to discuss how much money they should give to Yale.
And I start to ask, I ask themselves, I say, but why do you have to do that?
Not every, and you know, they're starting to, a lot of people are starting to wake up.
They say, oh, well, because we know we need more people to be able to go to our best institutions.
And I say, well, what have they produced?
I mean, you wonder why the statues are tumbling down.
You wonder why we have these revolutionaries.
It's large in part because whatever happens on college campuses, it's not like a nuclear spill where you could just contain it.
It's not Chernobyl.
It's a virus.
It spreads.
So that's what we fight for every day.
Look, again, to be clear, and I don't like to always reference myself, but there's just no getting around it.
I was at Yale.
I know, that's why I mentioned it.
I graduated 36 years ago.
Like, it's hard to believe how long ago we're talking the early 80s.
What we are talking about right now, this is why I'm bringing it up.
It was in full flower at Yale in the early 80s, going up to 40 years ago.
It didn't start 10 years ago or 20 years ago.
It was in full flower.
I was indoctrinated in the early 80s along all the lines we are talking about.
And then after I'd become a Christian and after I'd found my way back to the conservatism and patriotism of my dad, who raised me to love this country, I realized that William F. Buckley, the father of modern conservatism, wrote about Yale and about this in a book called God and Men at Yale, which was about his experience at Yale in the late 40s.
So we are talking about something that has been trickle down education, trickle-down culture in these elite institutions in America since the 40s.
In Europe, it goes back another 25 years after World War I.
So these are different ways of seeing reality, and they have finally come into the mainstream.
So we have young people believing these things, tearing down statues, trying to burn down federal buildings.
To my mind, without any question, education is the problem and not just college education, Charlie.
K through 12 has been doing this.
The teachers unions are as woke as it gets.
Yeah, and I'm working on this thesis as well, which I think you would enjoy, which is it's the educational foundation that's been laid.
And then it's also the American middle class that has grown more cynical about their economic well-being.
And so I've studied closely the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, why Castro and Che Guevara, why were they able to have residence in Cuba?
It's because the Cuban middle class basically lost faith that if they kept working hard and playing by the rules, things were going to get better.
And I'm really afraid for our American middle class because they're starting to set in with that kind of cynicism.
And that's because, for example, in the 60s and 70s, one of the reasons why the Soviet attempts to try to build up the communist revolution in America just kind of fell flat on its face is that the factory worker in Toledo is like, that sounds great.
I got to go back to work.
Okay, you can go study all this nonsense.
But now we've laid the foundation.
And if the American middle class does not think that their kids are going to be better off than them, whether it's true or not, it's just all kind of appearance is reality here, then all of a sudden they are perfect potential Bolsheviks.
In fact, they're ideal Bolsheviks.
Because if you just lose sense in the material well-being of your society, and I'm not an over-materialist, I'm not, but to say that it doesn't play a role, I think is not correct.
Where that if you do not think that if you work hard in 10 years from now, you're going to be richer and your kids will be better, then you'll either disconnect from the process or you'll tell your kids to go burn down the city.
There it is in a nutshell.
I think that, again, what we've been seeing very recently is the full flowering of this kind of thing.
When you have people shining lasers into the eyes, the blind federal marshals, I have to say that most Americans, I think, see where things have come.
They see that when you get to this level, it's all breaking down.
What might have begun as a peaceful protest has been hijacked.
And I think this election is going to hinge on that.
When we come back, I want to talk to you about the upcoming election and what we're facing.
I think it's, you know, I hate to say it, broken record, but it's the most important election in my lifetime for sure.
We'll be right back, folks, talking to Charlie Kirk.
Charlie, we've got to end on some kind of a positive note.
I think there are enough Americans who understand that Trump stands against this stuff and has the guts to do so.
And I think there are enough Americans that are waking up to the idea that a Biden presidency, you might as well turn the keys of the kingdom over to the Portland rioters.
That's exactly right.
And so, yeah, look, a positive note is that we still have a chance to do something about this.
I mean, the American system, thankfully, we still have elections, that we don't have to settle this thing through civil insurrection, no matter how much the left wants to do that.
And so, yes, I mean, the positive is that we can do something about this in November.
Now, will we?
I hope we will.
I really do.
And if we don't, then what would it take?
I mean, my goodness, if we do not, if we do not re-elect Donald Trump, that'll be a deathblow to the Republic.
I have no doubt that that's true.
I mean, I do everything I can.
I've written books.
My book.
If you can keep it, thanks to you and people who've interviewed me, David Rubin and others.
It's like sold out at Amazon, which I guess is a good problem.
But I try in that book to lay out the basics just so that people understand this isn't some partisan thing.
This isn't something we just woke up and came up with some ideas.
This goes to the roots of what it is to govern ourselves.
And if you like self-government and liberty, you don't need to be a conservative.
You just need to understand that America has provided me some opportunities where I have a voice.
You need to fight and you need to understand that unless Trump is replaced by someone, he is the guy we have to vote for.
And I'm very fond of him.
But if you're not fond of him, you have to understand the other side is going to take us so dramatically in the other direction.
Fighting for America's Future 00:02:42
I think people are beginning to see that.
And by the way, final comment: what about what is happening to Biden?
How is it possible that he could be doing well in the polls when he seems to be a shell of his former self and even his former self was a shell?
Well, you and I will have to do a whole nother hour on this, but he's he's he's in right now framed it as a referendum on Donald Trump.
And that's been very effective for him is that it's almost a vote of no confidence, not a Biden versus Trump election.
As soon as it becomes an actual election and it's a binary choice, it's a completely different set of decision-making matrixes.
Whether or not you like Trump or whether you want Trump to continue for four more years versus Joe Biden, two completely different things.
And they're being conflated as the same thing in some of this public polling.
I think that about says it, but I'm just wondering how in the next hundred days this is going to funnel down.
In other words, at some point, Biden has to come out of the basement and has to appear more like a conventional candidate.
Things are strange because of COVID, because we're not having the conventions in the way that we normally do.
But I really think it's easy to say I vote for Biden.
But as we come down to the actual voting day, he's going to have to do something that he hasn't done yet.
I just wonder how that's going to work out.
So if I was Biden, I wouldn't debate.
Things can change very quickly.
It's that old Hemingway quote.
It happened gradually than suddenly.
And do not be surprised if that happens.
I tell every Trump supporter out there, this thing could be a late breaker, the likes of which we have never seen.
Remember, Ronald Reagan was down seven points to Jimmy Carter 10 days before the election, and he had a late break, the likes of which no one has ever seen.
Pat Cadell, may he rest in peace, had told me that story at least 22 times.
He's like, we in the Carter campaign.
We saw it happen and we couldn't stop it.
We could not stop it.
People were showing up and they were just the late break is a real thing.
It happened in 2016.
And so when you look at the summer polls, it almost always tilts in the favor of the establishment Democrat.
I know we're running out of time.
God bless you, Eric.
Thank you for everything.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
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