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Oct. 10, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
34:14
America’s True Divide

Charlie breaks down an interview between classicist Victor Davis Hanson and Tucker Carlson, taking a six minute exchange and building it out in detail to explain America’s true divide. Rather than race, sex, or gender, Charlie makes the...

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The True Divide in America 00:02:09
Thank you for listening to this podcast one production.
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Hey, everybody.
Happy Saturday.
Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, we dive deep into the true divide in America.
The true divide isn't white versus black.
It isn't man versus woman.
It's not Republican versus Democrat.
It's a different type of divide.
It's one that will surprise you.
And you're probably on either one side of this divide or the other.
We discuss that and so much more here on the Charlie Kirk show.
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Are we divided?
Feels like it.
But how?
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
The Muscular Class Struggle 00:08:44
I want to start by talking about Victor Davis Hansen.
Victor Davis Hansen has brought more wisdom to the American conversation on politics than any other person I can point to in the last couple of years.
You see, Victor Davis Hansen is formerly, he still is a classicist, so he focuses a lot on the classic Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Greek and Roman classics.
He was a lecturer at Fresno State University and just started to get into the political space recently.
He's also a military historian, and he has been able to pinpoint exactly what's happening in our country better than people that are political experts for the last 30 years.
He understood Trump as soon as he ran for office.
He understands what he represents.
He understands the need for his presidency.
In fact, he wrote the book, The Case for Trump.
And many of you have probably seen Victor Davis Hansen on Fox News recently.
So I was driving yesterday evening listening to Tucker Carlson's terrific show.
And I heard Victor Davis Hansen go through chapter and verse, a better analysis in one of the most incredible cable news segments I have heard in recent memory.
And it's a very long segment, so we've broken it apart, but we're going to go piece by piece.
Because what Victor Davis Hansen was able to do to describe the landscape of our country was able to make a series of points that show that the real divide in our country is not based on race.
That is what the left wants.
The left wants a race war.
Instead, it's based on class.
And this idea of a class struggle is nothing new.
Karl Marx and Engels talked about this in Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto.
Karl Marx was not the original communist, by the way.
Communists predated Marx.
Marx was about the seventh or eighth choice for him to write the manifesto.
He was hired by communists in Europe to do it.
And Marx was largely sponsored by Engels.
Engels was one of, he would be almost a modern day equivalent of the Silicon Valley masters that we see, the techno-tyrants that live in Silicon Valley.
And so Engels and Marx together wrote Das Kapital, this idea of a class struggle, the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat, actually kind of fell flat on its face when Marx was alive.
He was never taken seriously.
And so then eventually Vladimir Lenin takes up these horrendous ideas, but Marx wasn't totally wrong about everything.
Marx was completely correct about how you're always going to have some class friction and some class tension.
Now, those of us that believe in markets and those of us that believe in individual initiative and entrepreneurship, a lot of that class tension, a lot of that class struggle just naturally erodes.
A lot of the kind of rich people versus poor people, there is some of that, but eventually a middle class gets created.
As Aristotle would call it, the golden mean.
Eventually people that are somewhere in the middle that earn $80,000 a year, they're able to take their family on a vacation or two.
They take a couple weekends off.
They go to football games and they're bought into the system.
However, Victor Davis Hanson stated clearly that this election is based on class, not on race.
He brought to light the criticism of something that I thought was so incredibly new and interesting and deep.
Let's play tape.
I think he's got to emphasize that this election's on class.
It's not on race.
There's 100 million people, muscular people, are out there every day taking a risk that they're going to be infected while they serve you at a store or they bring your DoorDash food to your curbside or they bring your oven when it blows up from Home Depot or they're trucking all night or they're producing food or they're farming.
And yes, they don't always have the correct mask and maybe they don't social distance, but they're keeping the country going for whom?
The Zoom and the Skype class that are in their basements telemarketing or teleworketing or whatever they do and making a lot of money and then hectoring everybody that they're politically incorrect or they're racist or their mask is an inch too small or they were one foot closer.
And Trump's got to say, you know, I'm one with these people.
I want to frack because that frees us from these Middle East quagmires and it gives your kids good wages and doesn't send your kid to Afghanistan or Iraq.
What VDH pinpointed right there is that the true divide is based on class.
Now, we as conservatives don't like talking this way.
I get it.
We don't like compartmentalizing people based on income level or based on wealth.
It's very dangerous.
But what Victor Davis Hansen mentions is so unique than any other person in the pundit class.
If you're listening to this right now and you've had the opportunity to stay at home and telemarket or telework, as he says, you're part of the Skype and Zoom class.
Have you ordered something on DoorDash or Postmates lately?
There's a whole class of people that have to wear that mask for nine hours a day.
They have to work their tail off to make sure that the Zoom and Skype class can continue to have things delivered to their home.
Those people, as Victor Davis Hansen describes them, are the muscular class.
And what you have is basically the Zoom and Skype class that live in a virtual world versus the physical world.
People that are working with their hands, they're making sure the supply chains are never uninterrupted.
They're making sure that the Amazon products are still delivered.
They're making sure that the food is still being replaced in grocery stores.
They're the ones that are at the checkout clerks, and they're actually the ones that are the most exposed to the virus.
They're the ones that actually are the most exposed to being infected.
But who is it that is making the decisions?
Is it the grocery store clerk?
Is it the box fulfillment individual at Amazon?
Is it the person working at Home Depot?
Is it the Uber driver that's driving seven hours a day with a mask on, just trying to make sure that he or she can make ends meet?
No.
The people making the decisions are the people that can roll out of bed five minutes before their Zoom call starts, never having to put on a mask, and all of a sudden they're able to earn the same sort of income level they were six months ago.
Now, that's not the case for every person, but it is for millions of people, and especially the upper-income people in this country.
And so while they're prognosticating, while they're virtue signaling, talking about how great of people they are, because they keep six feet a distance, well, yeah, you're able to stay in your home all day and you get all of the products delivered to you that you want.
You get all of the food delivered to you that you need by the muscular class.
And they're the ones that put the BLM signs out on their lawn.
They're the ones that are complaining that the person in the park who's 95 feet away from them isn't wearing a mask, isn't socially distanced.
Well, maybe that person was part of the muscular class.
Maybe that guy just got done with two weeks of trucking to make sure that you could get your delivery products and he just wanted to see his kid for 10 minutes play in a park without a mask on.
Maybe that's the case.
And what you see here, and there's a political truth here, is for the first time in the modern economy, you now have an entire class of people that are able to physically disconnect themselves from the costs, the vulnerabilities, and the potential issues that arise with having to produce.
It's never happened before.
It's obviously made possible thanks to the internet, faster, fiber optic speed.
But now the people making the choices can literally disconnect themselves from the sweat, from the toil, the exposure, and the difficulty of actually having to produce.
And so we believe in markets.
And that's exactly why the class struggle is starting, because we've stopped having markets.
As soon as you shut down the country, the markets disappear.
All of a sudden, you're going to have disruptions that none of us like.
Foreign Leaders and Lockdowns 00:03:15
When you have a government edict that is the most powerful totalitarian edict in my lifetime of telling people they can't leave the home, don't act as if you can map out every single decision that comes after that.
Victor Davis Hansen continued on the Tucker Carlson show by making a point that I think we need to lean into more.
Victor Davis Hansen argued that as we have this divide of the muscular class versus the Zoom and Skype class, that the muscular class is actually the ones that are exposing themselves to the virus.
Which of the two presidential candidates is more like the Zoom and Skype class and who is more like the muscular class?
Well, Joe Biden is, of course, more like the Zoom and Skype class.
Risk averse at any cost.
I won't do rallies.
I won't do events.
And I will stay in my basement.
We should ask ourselves the question: what heroic accomplishment or breakthrough comes in life without risk?
Are you able to achieve greatness without exposing yourself to a downside?
Play cut two.
You can say, I'm one with you, and I did.
I don't have any apologies for getting sick.
That's what the president's supposed to do.
You're supposed to take risks, meet foreign leaders, bring individuals into the White House, crisscross the country.
Yeah, even have a rally.
I'm not, and you know what?
When I get sick, I'm going to take risks by taking experimental drugs if I have to to get back on the job.
I am not going to stay in my basement and quarantine myself and isolate myself and pass judgments on others that you're not willing to take the same risk.
Meet foreign leaders.
Israel and the United Arab Emirates a couple weeks ago came to the White House to sign a historic peace deal.
Where do they say this virus originated from?
From filling a Supreme Court seat.
You see, Victor Davis Hansen, the reason why he has such clarity on these topics is he's a war historian.
He's not a political commentator.
He's not a creature of political science.
Instead, his entire life has been becoming the subject matter expert in Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Greco-Roman Wars, the birth of Athenian democracy, and then World War I, World War II.
He is probably the premier historian on World War II.
So when you study that form of literature and understand the type of people it takes to achieve phenomenal things, Victor Davis Hansen starts to build out archetypes of those types of people that actually get that stuff done.
And what Victor is saying here is that, of course, Donald Trump exposed himself to the virus.
How are you supposed to govern a country in crisis without playing into the risk a little bit yourself?
The same could be said for Winston Churchill walking the streets of London after bombing raids.
The same could be said for five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower exposing himself to military threats throughout World War II.
Victor Davis Hansen talked very quickly there, meeting foreign leaders, taking experimental drugs.
The Matthew Principle Explained 00:03:30
If you're listening to this and you're part of the muscular class, you're the ones that are loading boxes and you have to wear that N95 mask all day long and breathe on yourself, almost risk hyperventilation.
If you're a flight attendant and you have to wear that mask all day long, and yet the person that is telling you that what you are doing wrong is the person that gets to stay at their 8,000-foot home in Evingston, Illinois, or Highland Park, Texas, or Palm Beach, Florida, or Beverly Hills, California.
They're the ones that tell you what to do because it makes them feel good.
And what's really being created here is a political opportunity where President Trump is now able to say, for the 100 million people out there that are working with your hands to make the luxurious lifestyle possible for the virtual class, I'm with you.
And it is completely consistent.
In fact, it's harmonic with why Donald Trump ran in the first place.
What's now been more clear than ever after seven months of these shutdowns, of these government edicts, the wealthy are wealthier than they ever have been in our country's history.
This is something that Marx predicted, that when crisis hits, those with capital will get more and those with less will be crushed.
We call this the Matthew principle, actually.
It's a biblical principle, and it's a harsh teaching.
If you've ordered something recently delivered to your home, there are probably at least 10 human beings behind that.
There's people listening to this and watching this all across the country in different socioeconomic walks of life.
And interestingly, the edicts to keep our country shut down and lock down, the measures to keep our country in a perpetual state of fear are almost all being advanced by people that have the luxury, the capital, and the capacity and the ability to live a virtual life.
The 100 million people in the muscular class in our country that drive trucks and lift boxes and frack and work with their hands, they are the ones that have an ever-diminishing voice in our country.
Business insider, how billionaires got $637 billion richer during the coronavirus pandemic.
When people are calling to lock down our country again, there might be a reason.
It's because the wealthy, the elites, the ruling class, they actually have materially improved their life more so than any other period of time we have seen in recent memory.
We've mentioned the biblical principle that reinforces this.
It's called the Matthew principle.
And the verse in particular talks about how those that have a little will lose everything.
It's Matthew 25, 29, for to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance, but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
It's a vicious teaching when you think about it.
And it actually applies to economics as well.
Leftist Strategies Against Workers 00:15:27
And this is one of the main complaints of the Marxists.
And Karl Marx's policy prescriptions are horrendous, evil, and immoral.
But some of the observations he made on the landscape, hard to disagree with some of them.
And when you have a virtual class that hides in their 9,000 square foot mansion in Winter Park, Florida, or in Greenwich, Connecticut, or in the Hamptons, and they're the ones that are the loudest and the most invested, eventually the workers of the country are going to look for a voice.
And so as the workers of the country look for a voice, the question is, what voice are they going to choose?
Senator Kamala Harris probably received sequences of polling the night before the debate or the night, the morning of the debate, that reflected that the working class in this country has a great deal of anxiety of the current state of the economy.
The American way of life, where you work hard, you believe in the system, your kids get a better life than you.
You don't have to worry about criminals or thugs coming down the street to burn your house down or burn your church down.
A lot of that is being put in jeopardy.
Senator Harris leaned in on this.
It was one of the most effective lines for her of the entire debate.
I'm going to deconstruct it and tell you exactly why what she said is so remarkably inauthentic and transparently fickle and fragile.
What she said is important for everyone to hear.
Play tape.
We're looking at frontline workers who have been treated like sacrificial workers.
We are looking at over 30 million people who in the last several months had to file for unemployment.
Do you hear that?
Sacrificial workers, frontline workers.
She's not just talking about medical workers, by the way.
She's trying to do an overture to people that work with their hands.
This is something that the corporate class in our country do not understand.
And they're going to be in for a very rude awakening.
There are three political philosophies right now in our country.
Three.
Number one, you have Bolshevik Bernie Sanders, complete and total government takeover.
Believe it or not, most of those complete and total government control ideas are not exactly represented by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
They have agreement probably on opening the borders, destroying energy, taking weapons away.
But economically, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris disagree on quite a lot.
That's one school of thinking.
The second school of thinking is what President Donald Trump represents.
Recognizing the needs, wants, and the anxieties of the muscular class versus the Zoom and Skype class, and saying, I want fracking because it delivers meaningful work.
I want entrepreneurs because that's a bedrock of a society.
I want you to stay invested in this beautiful country that we live in.
This is in a lot of different ways.
I would brand it as patriotic free enterprise, unafraid to challenge the dogma of the corporate class, having the courage to criticize some of these transnational corporations.
President Donald Trump articulates that viewpoint very well.
And the more he leans into it, the more he'll benefit politically.
And the third category is the corporate class.
And that's who Joe Biden actually represents.
When Joe Biden says, yeah, I'll shut down the country again, who does that benefit?
Benefits Jeff Bezos.
It benefits Google.
It only makes us fall quicker into a virtual, non-physical, non-tangible, and quite honestly, unrealistic world.
Silicon Valley is one of the primary pushers for a Joe Biden presidency.
We know this to be true.
We know this through campaign donations.
We know this through social media manipulation.
We know this through a variety of different ways.
So Senator Harris is actually trying to make an overture to the workers of the country.
And no, I'm not going to go as far as say, workers of the world unite.
That is definitely a Democrat, socialist, Marxist phrase.
But what I will say is that if you're working with your hands and you feel as if you're losing faith in the system, President Donald Trump is your only political choice.
And here's the issue that almost everyone misses.
Tucker Carlson does not miss this.
If the box fulfillers at Amazon and the Chipotle order fulfillers and the Uber drivers and the Postmate delivery people and the overnight truckers and the grocery store clerks, if this continues as is and the billionaire class adds another trillion dollars to net worth and we get some form of inflation and you have an entire group of people that are $60,000 in debt and they don't have a mortgage and they have no equity,
eventually that 100 million people, the muscular class, they are going to say, forget it.
I don't care if I was a Republican.
I don't care if I was a Democrat.
I want a voice back in my government and my country.
And this is where Victor Davis Hansen, looking at this from a non-political perspective, the reason why he's so prescient, the reason why he has such wisdom is because he's been studying history his entire life.
And it's almost as if we just parachuted VDH into our period of time and we said, tell us what's going on.
And he said, I'm happy to.
And he articulates what is the greatest danger and fear ahead of us, those of us that believe in a market system and private property.
It is the greatest disruption that we have seen since the Industrial Revolution from the agrarian-based society to the Industrial Revolution, when Teddy Roosevelt had to manage the transition of tens of millions of people from the farms to the factories.
And mismanaging that transition for Russia meant that Vladimir Lenin picked up Marx's ideas and said, this will give me power, promised things he'd never be able to deliver, took absolute power.
One of the things that we get wrong as conservatives is we are convinced that Marxist revolutions are always purely ideological.
This is nonsense.
It's horsepucky.
It's revisionist corporate history.
Most Marxist revolutions, whether it be the revolution in Rhodesia to Zimbabwe with Mugabe, in Southeast Asia, in Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia, in Korea, China with Mao Setong, Eastern Europe, Vladimir Lenin, Cuba, Venezuela, or a pseudo-Marxist revolution in Argentina.
Every single one of them is because the middle class of that country stopped believing in the system.
That's why.
It wasn't because they were indoctrinated for 18 years beforehand.
Some of them were, and that helped a little bit.
But a country can go from a country that respects private property rights and has commerce to not if the middle class of your country or the muscular class of your country loses faith in the system.
And if the muscular class in this country are going to continue to be bossed around by the BLM Incorporated sign-waving Sierra Club donating Beverly Hills, Highland Park, Palm Beach, Greenwich, Connecticut, Hampton class, because they're able to sit behind a screen all day long and see their stock portfolio increase and their wealth managers able to find specific derivative opportunities.
So all of a sudden they've increased their net worth by 22% and they complain because their kale vegan salad and their celery juice is six minutes late and the Uber driver that delivered to it is all sweaty and not wearing their mask properly, you got a problem in your country.
And President Donald Trump incredibly is actually positioned to transition us from the farms to the factories, from the physical to the virtual, without a Marxist revolution happening in our country.
And if President Trump leans in on this and says, I'm actually one of you, I've walked job sites my whole life.
I believe that risk is a necessary form of living a fulfilled life.
I'd rather be brave and be wise than be safe all the time.
That's not to say you should sacrifice safety, but if you only cared about safety, you would check yourself into Rikers.
You'd go to Alcatraz Island if you only cared about safety.
Three meals a day in a prison cell, no capacity to hurt yourself, totally safe, no freedom, no liberty, no joy, no happiness, no capacity to create.
President Donald Trump leaning in on how Joe Biden is the autocrat and the techno-tyrant of the virtual class, the Zoom class, the Skype class, the why is my celery juice six minutes late class.
He can actually communicate to the economic anxiety that is happening in our country.
Senator Harris made a small overture to it.
And here's the choice that is ahead of a lot of these politicians up and down the ballot.
It's: do working people matter?
And we, as conservatives, get this wrong so often.
We only talk to workers on social issues, and we should.
Family creation, pro-life, church, firearms, free expression.
But wouldn't it be nice if we leaned into why Donald Trump was actually successful in the first place?
Which is that the middle class of this country is losing faith in the ruling class of this country.
That's why President Trump won in 2016.
It's because he was a throbbing middle finger to the Zoom and Skype class, to the virtual class.
Because he was willing to throw over the tables of the people that are unwilling to take the risk, but they're more than willing to tell you what they're doing, what you're doing wrong with your life.
I want to go to cut five here, where Victor Davis Hansen explains how the elite leftists have made a deal with a radical socialist, which means they won't answer any questions at all whatsoever.
Play tape.
Well, it was pretty clear what their strategy is, and you hit on a lot of the points: is that they're going to talk about race and they're going to talk about Trump as a mass killer.
And that means they're not going to answer any questions about fracking a new Green Deal or packing the court or who they would appoint because they are elite leftists who have made a bargain with desperate hardcore socialists.
And one of the ways that elite leftists seek to atone the fact that they've gotten wealthier and the fact that they have materially gotten better the last couple months is through the issue of race.
It's the issue of either white guilt or some sort of racial guilt that they've been told.
And so instead of talking about how the lockdowns were the greatest domestic intrusion of the American economy in the history of our country, which it was, it was the greatest government interference into commerce, into choice, into liberty.
They want to distract away from how the lockdowns are widely unpopular and talk about almost distraction issues, such as the color of your skin.
And they absolutely are elite leftists.
I want to go to cut four here.
They model themselves after Barack Hussein Obama, cut four.
And they take kind of a cue from Barack Obama, a guy who went to prep school, grew up in an upper middle class.
His grandmother was a bank official.
And then he told us he was part of the underclass and he had been a victim of racism.
And then he was actually a moderate.
He was going to balance the budget.
He wasn't going to let China be in debt.
We weren't going to be in debt to China anymore.
He said that he was opposed to gay marriage.
He was going to close the border.
We know where that was.
He had the most liberal voting record, like Kamala Harris almost in the Senate.
They will run as a moderate and govern as a radical.
So what happens when you give these people power?
What happens when you reward the camouflaged communism or the soft socialism that they are expressing?
Well, then all of the malevolence, the bitterness, and the deceit that we have seen will be institutionalized.
The arc of civilization can be described as this.
In the early stage and in the imperfect stage, it is the strong dominating the weak.
At its optimal level, it is the strong protecting the weak.
And at its disintegrationist level, it is the weak who dominate the strong.
And that is where we're headed in our country.
We're the people with weak ideas, the people that would not be able to possess power if it wasn't for a political system that rewarded demagoguery and insider favors and pandering to the donor class.
If those things were not options, Senator Harris and Joe Biden would be nowhere near political power in our country.
Strong protecting the weak would be a true strong person, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower becoming president from 1952 to 1960.
The weak dominating the strong is Barack Obama from 2008 to 2016.
And that's one of the reasons why Donald Trump's presidency is such an unexpected disruption in the landscape.
He's not supposed to exist.
He's not supposed to be saying the things that he's saying.
None of this was part of the plan.
You see, you have to understand that Democrats and leftists, they think sequentially.
It could be as closely tied in to something called the Hegelian dialectic.
Now, mind you, I am not going to talk about Hegel unless we got a six and a half hour time slot to fill.
The Hegelian dialectic can be simply summarized in political terms as a clumsy set of intervals towards a historical aim.
This is how the left has always thought.
They've always thought of themselves as a thesis and antithesis or antithesis going towards a synthesis.
Trump's Opportunity vs Biden 00:01:06
Hegel was incredibly influential to many of the mass murder movements of the 20th century that disguised themselves as benevolent Marxists.
So President Donald Trump has an incredible opportunity in front of him.
He's already showing more and more promise in a lot of these battleground polls.
But Joe Biden is the spokesperson.
He is the hired representative of the virtue signaling virtual Zoom Skype class.
If President Donald Trump becomes the champion of the muscular middle class, we win a landslide in this country, the likes of which we've never seen.
What a great episode that was.
Thank you guys so much for listening.
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Thank you guys so much for listening.
Talk to you soon.
God bless.
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