Escaping California and Defining the Two Americas with Michael Knowles
Friend of the Charlie Kirk Show and fellow podcaster from the DailyWire, Michael Knowles sits down with Charlie backstage at Turning Point USA's Student Action Summit 2020 for an in-depth exploration of the genesis and the future of the two emergent Americas. After so many conservatives have fled the oppressive lockdowns and the exorbitant taxes in California, Michael explains his own experience leaving as the DailyWire relocated to Tennessee. The two ask: Is there any saving the national consensus and our shared identity? Or have progressive America and traditional America become too divided to ever be brought back together in a unified, cohesive whole? Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hey, everybody.
Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, a super special and exclusive conversation in person at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit.
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Without any further ado, buckle up.
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.
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Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
Mr. Knowles, welcome back.
It is so good to be here.
Thank you for having me.
So where does the world stand?
The world stands on its head.
It is completely upside down.
I just got to Palm Beach for SAS.
Very excited about that.
And, you know, I have a subtle protest.
They make you wear the masks on the planes.
They will kick you off.
They'll ban you if you don't wear it.
And they'll audit you and destroy your family.
I mean, seriously, they will go and they will wreck you.
So I wear the stupid mask, but I put it below my nose.
That's at least my sort of subtle protest.
And it occurred to me how backwards this is.
If you now, within just one year this happened, if you walk around like a normal person, if you walk around not like Bubble Boy with like a bunch of filthy cloth all over your face, you are considered the conspiracy theorist.
You are considered the crazy person.
It gets back to something that you and I talk about all the time.
Things happen gradually.
Then suddenly.
Then suddenly.
I've ripped you off so much, you have no idea.
It's all right.
I ripped off Ernest Hemingway.
And actually threw Andrew Clavin.
So it's all, you know, great writers steal.
You're always re-referencing.
Always.
This is the suddenly.
We are in the suddenly.
Can you imagine, not even how crazy it got, how quickly it got so crazy.
It's been nine months.
It's 279 days of 15 days to summon.
Well, and it's become pseudo-religious, is what it is.
Yeah.
Is that if you do not wear the mask properly, you're a bad person.
And I'm a better person than you.
And it is my obligation to go find you.
If you think masks work, then fine.
Go wear a mask.
Whatever.
However, if you think it works, I mean, that's what Liberty is all about.
Right, yeah.
Wear the mask.
As Dennis Brugger says, I'm mask agnostic.
Like, I don't know if it works.
I don't know if not.
Do not mandate me to wear one.
That's where all of a sudden you are imposing.
Oh, yeah.
I was on this airplane.
I'm sleeping on the plane.
So I've got my mask on here, a little below my nose.
I've got my eye mask on above my nose.
I look like I was wearing goggles.
Yeah, I mean, I looked at least 80% of my face was covered up with cloth.
I'm lying there, I'm sleeping.
And I, sir, sir, just ignoring him.
Someone starts shaking me.
It's one of the stewards.
He says, sir, you have to pull another quarter of an inch.
You've got to pull up the mask.
I thought, if you were really afraid of coronavirus, wouldn't you maybe not touch the guy?
Don't you think that is going to spread it a little bit more?
Maybe.
The logic is a little bit different.
So I used to wear a face shield instead of a mask.
I love those, yeah.
But epidemiologically, they're way better.
I mean, you actually have a plastic barrier, and it's also a lot more comfortable.
Yeah, you can breathe.
I got in this very long, pointless, frustrating conversation with a flight attendant who woke me up when I was sleeping with my face mask on, like, sir, face mask, you have to wear a face mask, not a face shield.
I said, you understand that this face shield is a lot safer.
Yeah, this is some real stuff here.
This is strong.
You know what it is, though?
It's actually what you just got to, this idea that it's pseudo-religious or it's a new religion.
What it really is, it seems to me, is a new set of standards.
It's this issue.
I think this is what political correctness does.
This is what wokeism does.
There was an old set of standards.
I don't know, you'd dress up for church on Sunday.
You'd go behave in a certain way.
You'd speak a certain way.
You wouldn't say certain words.
You would say certain words.
There was the old set of standards.
Then the left comes in and just tries to destroy those standards and replace it with a new set of standards.
And I think the problem that we've had, this is what's kind of set us back in fighting against this, is we took the bait whereby we denied all standards altogether.
So we basically just said, do whatever you want.
Do what it's okay.
I don't have any stance about, you know, this gender theory or this crazy thing with the family, whatever.
And as a result of that, we denied the necessary existence of certain standards, and that's why we're playing by the left's rules.
And we don't even explain why the standards existed in the first place.
Exactly.
And we don't talk about how, well, maybe it's a good thing that men are men and women are women.
Just basic.
You're not allowed to say that.
No, you're kicked off of campuses for sanity.
And I mean, there are actually many conservatives, I think, who would refuse to say that.
They say, well, listen, I'm not saying there's necessarily a difference between men and women.
Well, you're exactly right.
Most conservatives, and they never actually confront me directly, but they'll say this behind my back, and they say, Charlie, you're so provocative.
I'm like, what exactly am I saying that's so provocative?
Right, right.
And so what we try to do here with this event is people are texting me like, it's so bold what you're doing.
I said, what exactly am I doing that's so bold?
I said, okay, it's kind of very much of an annoyance to deal with county government.
I get that.
That is.
But what's the bold part?
Well, Charlie, it's in the midst of a pandemic.
I got that part.
Everyone here, I think, knows that there's a pandemic.
You know what's so amazing?
What you are doing this year, it looks great, by the way.
Thank you.
There actually have been some improvements here.
But the thing, it's always been great.
Thank you.
What you are doing this year is the same thing you did last year.
It's amazing.
But now this is considered an offense against established religion.
Do you want to know the great irony?
The virus was probably here a year ago.
That's right.
You know, I don't know if I had it or if I didn't have it.
When I came to Florida, when I came to Palm Beach a year ago, around late December, I developed all the symptoms of coronavirus, did not come back as the flu, did not, which would explain, because I've ignored all these lockdown rules for the past year.
As best I can, I've ignored them.
In Los Angeles?
In Los Angeles?
You live in Nashville yet?
So I left La La Land.
I left Nussalini's feudal kingdom.
So you live in Tennessee now?
I have all my exes in Texas, so I hang my hat in Tennessee.
That's right.
So you do live in Tennessee?
I do.
Okay.
It's the sweet era of freedom.
And so I guess that's a very quick pivot tangent.
So you guys are now in Tennessee?
Oh, yeah.
We moved the whole company out to Tennessee.
And I tell you, at the time that they brought this, I really like Nashville, but they said this to me.
They said, hold on, you're telling me I got to move my entire life to Tennessee within a month.
They said, yes.
I said, that's going to be too expensive.
That's a terrible idea, guys.
LA, it'll be fine.
Within two weeks of us getting there, L.A. completely shuts down again.
They're talking about a wealth tax for people, even after they leave California.
Tennessee has a 0% income tax.
0% income tax.
California is going to have a 16% income tax soon.
It is, everybody's fleeing.
Corolla's fleeing.
Elon is fleeing.
Joe Rogan already fled.
So I want to ask you about that.
Are Democrats there noticing that all of a sudden that the 405 is maybe a lot easier to drive on?
Or do they not care?
Or is it kind of like, this is how we get rid of them type thing?
I think they're not going to care.
They're actually generally curious for the leftist who lives in Malibu.
Say, I want to get rid of all the conservatives.
They're doing a great job.
Good riddance.
Get out of here.
I think, though, they're going to notice.
I think they're going to care when all the tax receipts come due, when they realize.
I mean, just even think of Daily Wire leaving.
How many millions of dollars does that take out of California's?
Economic activity, too.
Yeah.
Not just in tax revenue.
That's right.
Of people going to the shop, of people paying their rent or their mortgage or whatever.
And that's just one company.
Think about Elon Musk leaving.
Think about all these huge companies, Joe Rogan.
Yeah.
Charles Schwab moved.
Yeah.
Oracle moved.
Right.
Which is a massive financial services company going to Texas.
Yeah.
Because why wouldn't you?
I mean, it is actually wrong to your shareholders and employees to keep your company.
And it's a weather tax.
I mean, the only reason you stay in California is the weather.
Yeah.
But, you know, that's fine.
I was actually willing to pay the weather tax.
If I'm not allowed to go to the beach or to the bars or to the restaurants, what am I there for?
I'm there to live in some shoebox apartment and pay.
So you actually believe the Democrats are finally going to eventually going to notice that they've successfully created a one-party state.
Well, so they've noticed, I think they've already noticed that.
And they've followed the kind of wrong strategy here because they've woken up to that.
What they should do is make the state more attractive to business and less punitive for conservatives.
And then maybe they'd stick around.
Instead, what they're doing, though, with this proposed wealth tax is they just want to punish them even after they leave.
They say, good riddance, but keep giving us your money.
Yes.
And that's the way they've treated us for a long time in California.
And I just don't think that's going to work.
Yeah.
I think that the California example and many others across the country kind of go to show the creation of truly two Americas, as Jonathan Edwards used to say before he did some other very, very bad things.
Yes.
But I'm very worried that, and Ben talked about this, and I know you agree that we're headed for a national divorce.
And I mean, and Rush talked about this correctly the other day, and people attacked him, but he actually was spot on.
And we've been talking about this for quite some time, but you're not allowed to talk about it, which is what do we have in common with the people of San Francisco again?
Right.
We share nothing in common.
Well, this is the biggest issue of all because you always hear Rush gets blamed or Fox or you or whoever, you know, anyway.
I talked about it freely.
That was a great day.
And yes, I mean, we all get blamed for it.
Who caused it?
Who caused it?
Well, we're not inciting it either, by the way.
We're not inciting it.
We're observing it.
We are observing it.
You know, I think the actual proc, like the cause of this whole thing is Colin Kaepernick.
He's the symbol of it.
I love this.
He is the cause.
Because we disagree on abortion.
We disagree on taxes.
We disagree on whatever, foreign wars.
We disagree on this.
We disagree on that.
Only in the last few years do we now disagree on the flag.
The flag is not.
Colin Kaepernick pretended he was protesting police brutality.
Then he started protesting the Betsy Ross flag.
Then he starts protesting.
It's obviously he's protesting the country.
The flag is a symbol, not of the cops, not of the KKK.
It's a symbol of the whole country.
When you protest the flag, you are stating in no uncertain terms, I hate the country.
And if that is, we don't have a common language, we don't have a common religion, we don't have really common anything in this country, and it's worked out fine as long as we share some civil allegiance, some loyalty to our country.
If you lose that, there's nothing keeping us together.
Not only that, they want to rewrite the history they are.
And so there's only so long this continues, and all of a sudden the people in Texas are saying, the only thing really I have in common with a Menlo Park person is a unified currency, and that's now worthless too.
So what exactly do I have in common here?
And because if you look at what the people in Menlo Park believe, the people in Berkeley, California, or the people in Calabasas or Malibu or Manhattan, you understand kind of the argument is this country is awful.
We need massive, aggressive, one-size-fits-all policy to undo racial injustices and all social injustice, regardless of what the data demonstrates.
And where does that end, by the way?
Let's say we granted the premise, okay, we're going to pass some new tax.
Actually, in California, they want reparations for slavery because they don't realize California was a free state.
The admission of California to the government.
Guilty-ridden white liberals that have way too much time on it.
Yeah, I guess.
I just think, guys, at least read a history book.
But let's say you did, okay, we're going to pass some tax.
It's going to be a reparations bill.
That's going to correct the historical injustice.
When?
At what point?
At what point?
Who gets the money and how much money?
And then we're good.
Give me a date and give me an amount.
Frankly, I'll probably give you the money.
But of course, there's no amount.
There's no date.
It just is about power and it's about hatred and it's about antipathy for the country.
And so I'm very concerned.
And I said this many months ago and really no one took it seriously.
I think people take it seriously now that there will be a fracturing.
I don't mean a civil war.
I actually don't think it might.
I don't think it'll look like that.
We're too sort of bloated and lazy.
Yeah, it's also just going to go to that.
I think people are going to be like, is there an easier way we can do this?
Where I just, I think that it's not out of the realm of conversation where a national divorce will come, where all of a sudden a couple states will say, let's sever.
Like, we're done.
Well, think about it this way.
And it's coming in the next two years.
I mean, I think the divorce analogy is a really good one because if you've got a couple and they're maybe going to go through a bad period of their marriage, maybe they're looking at divorce.
One way they can try to fix it is say, you did this and you did this, and 10 years ago, you did this to this guy, and now we need to, and it's tit for tat, and I was right and you were wrong.
That will never fix a marriage.
That is so beyond the point.
You need to have a bedrock level of love and respect and care, selflessness.
We have none of that in our country.
That's gone.
So it doesn't matter.
You say, well, actually, in 1860, it's neutral.
I don't have respect for them.
Right.
This is the problem.
When somebody comes up to you, says, I hate your country, you, by virtue of just who you are.
Your very existence is an affront to me.
You're evil.
I hate your guts.
And you're a Nazi.
And everyone else is a Nazi.
And Ronald Reagan's a Nazi and Trump's a Nazi and whoever.
Everybody's a Nazi.
If someone says that to me for long enough, I'm going to stop liking them.
I'm going to stop caring what they think of me.
I'm not going to feel that fraternal connection to them as my fellow countrymen.
Look, it's Christmas season.
A lot of you guys are emailing us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
How do I give back this Christmas season?
Look, I know it's been a tough year, but those of us that are Christians, we are called to help and to assist regardless of the circumstances around us.
Whether we had a blessed year or a tough year, it's time to step up and do something.
I think we all know that.
That's why we are partnering with Angel Tree.
Angeltree is great.
They help kids whose parents are in prison.
It's not even about the fact of what their parents did.
It's the fact that the kids are alone.
And the kids, if they do not hear from their parents, they're more likely to also get involved in crime in the future.
So let's really communicate the love of Jesus Christ with a personalized note from their dad and an access to a Bible in either Spanish or English.
And that's what the Fellowship Angel Tree program does.
Last year, the Angel Tree program blessed over 300,000 children of prisoners all across America.
What's so cool is that if you give directly, it doesn't go to overhead or all that stuff.
It goes straight to the kid, especially this Christmas season.
And so let's just keep it easy.
Just go to charliekirk.com.
There's a banner on the top of it, charliekirk.com, and we are getting behind it.
We're donating a little bit of money from the Charlie Kirk show to Angel Tree because we really believe in what they're doing.
There's an Angel Tree banner there on CharlieKirk.com.
You guys can check it out and support what we are doing.
And I think that's really important because for a gift of $220, you can bless 10 children of prisoners with a personalized Christmas present and a personal note from their incarcerated parent.
Plus, every Angel Tree family is also given access to free, easy-to-read copy of the Bible in English or Spanish.
So check it out at charliekirk.com.
Very, very important.
Thank you guys so much for that.
Right.
And so then the other part of the divorce analogy that I think is appropriate is that there's mediation, there's terms, there's alimony, and then there's a closure date.
Right, right, right.
And what's really interesting, though, is that the post-World War II, we had kind of unification, if you will, East and West Germany, things were coming together.
And I think there was this desire to try and create some form of almost a forced globalist experiment.
The European Project's a great example of this.
And it was a complete and total disaster.
And I think that America always stood in defiance of that because of a unified culture.
The flag, a big part of it, literally 50 stars, unified under a shared history and language.
And now we have half the country that wants nothing to do with the other half.
And here's where it's actually going to hit a breaking point, though.
And no one's talking about this, is now that you're in Tennessee and I'm a resident of Florida and spend a lot of time in Arizona, all of a sudden we are going to be forced to bail out the states we fled.
Yeah, right.
Well, they're actually trying it right now.
No, no, no, no, but it's only going to accelerate.
So in Illinois, there's no way they're going to make it work.
No, no.
And we've been saying this for years and it's been ignored.
It's beyond worse than ever because of the lockdowns.
And so they're going to come and all of a sudden the 0% income tax Tennessee and the 0% income tax Florida with a lot of former residents of Illinois and California are going to say, no, no, no, no, I'm not going to do that.
And so just like in marriage, in a marriage that goes wrong, the financial aspect of this is going to accelerate it.
Yeah, I think.
Because all of a sudden they're like, why am I going to be bailing out these states?
There's also this philosophical issue, which is, this was part of the logic and problem of the actual Civil War, which is the minute that you secede or you kind of break up the union because you lose political power, you don't get your way, you sort of permanently undermine self-government, right?
Because the premise of self-government is we're going to have different interests in the country.
We're going to have different points of view.
Sometimes you're going to win, sometimes I'm going to win.
We will respect one another's victories and losses, and then we'll keep going on together.
If we're in a situation, and by the way, the Democrats are explicitly promising this.
They're saying if we win the Senate and the White House, we're going to pack the court, we're going to end the filibuster, add new states, you're going to have a permanent Democratic majority.
Republicans are dead as a national party.
So if you're in that sort of situation, you say, well, hold on.
I have no role now in the federal government, at least.
And yet if we pull out, the self-government is undermined because the very agreement that undergirds self-government is we'll respect each other's wins and losses.
So you're already at this crisis.
And people, I don't think, quite realize it yet.
But we are there right now.
And when you talk to people, they're like, yeah, I'd love to have the new America.
Yeah.
If you said that two years ago, they'd say, I'm calling the FBI for secession and treason.
Yeah, right.
But it's so bad.
And people don't get this.
It's going to happen.
And the problem is that Democrats are not going to want it at first because they're wholly dependent on the Republican productive class.
So if you play the thought exercise out to its furthest extent and you have two Americas, let's say like the Dakotas, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Tennessee, and the South create a country, and then the East and West create their own country like Canada.
Yeah.
All of a sudden, you're going to have a brain drain.
No one's going to want to live in California, become like Brazil.
Yeah.
Well, there is that.
You will still have some plutocrats, probably, who can live there.
But this is kind of how it ties in with the global empire, where you call it globalism or whatever.
These guys don't need American workers.
It actually doesn't matter if there are any manufacturing factories in the new leftist stand of America because they were already outsourcing all the labor.
That's right.
So they're already part of these sort of international transnational agreements.
That is their vision for the world order.
We have a different vision of the world order that has national sovereignty, American traditions, American culture.
Did you see the meme that was going on right around the election?
It divided up Canada and America, and it carved out the liberal places and it said, this is going to be the United States of Canada.
And then in the middle of the South, it said, this is going to be Jesusland.
No, I sent it to Connor, and I was like, this is what's about to happen.
Yeah.
Well, the left made the meme.
It'll be great.
No, but I thought it was great.
Well, that's the thing.
If you have told me, do you want to live in the United States of Canada or Jesusland?
It's like, is this a trick question?
I think I'll take the Jesus land, please.
Totally.
Sounds great.
They think that's, no, these backwards people.
Oh, that awful backwards.
Now you believe in that weird guy that probably maybe or not didn't live?
Yeah, that, you know, all those long times ago.
Yeah.
What?
You probably like Gothic cathedrals and Caravaggio.
You don't even like gender theory.
You're going to celebrate Christmas.
That's right.
You better not.
That's illegal.
I realized not only is this gathering clearly violating the rules of Dr. Fauci, but it's intentionally.
That is outrageous.
And you're doing it around Christmas time, which is canceled.
So why haven't more people stood up and done stuff like this?
I mean, I'm not trying to say like we're such bold and courageous people.
No, it is courageous.
It is courageous.
But why is that?
I'll be honest, Michael, and this is something that I think has been the most disappointing realization throughout this calendar year.
We are a nation of cowards and a nation of people that are so fearful.
We forget that courage is a virtue, first of all.
Second of all, and this actually ties back into the standards conversation, we can no longer articulate what we stand for.
We say, okay, people can choose whatever they want to do, or I don't really like that.
But we can't actually articulate, as you mentioned, the moral reasoning for our points of view and our old standards.
The other one is that it's just easier.
It's easier not to.
The term I use for these conservatives who aren't willing to stand up or go out or break the rules or whatever, I call them court jester conservatives.
I have another term.
Yeah.
It's a little more Vichy French.
Vichy French.
I thought you were going to use some four-letter words or something.
That's the term I use in private when I talk about these people.
That's okay.
Yeah, the Vichy or the court jester conservatives, their job.
I'm not going to name names, okay?
Some of them might be senators from Utah.
I'm not going to name names.
No, I named them from the stage of CPAC.
Did you?
I just say the name rhymes with Rit Momney, but I'm not going to name, I don't want to call him out.
But these sort of guys, their job is to play the court jester in the kingdom of liberalism, right?
Their job is to go out and put up just enough of a fight to legitimize the liberal establishment.
And then the minute that it ever comes close to threatening anything, they roll over.
That's their job.
And there are a lot of guys who do that.
And then when you go out there and you say, Yeah, I think we're going to host zillions of young conservatives at Christmas, and I don't give a damn what Dr. Fauci thinks, you're an outrageous provocateur.
You're not part of the high-minded, noble conservative tradition of losing.
What I find, yeah, exactly.
I mean, how dare you interrupt our long and proven track record of being a failure, honorable failure.
We do it really well.
It's like the French.
And so they lose better at battle than any other country in the history, and they publish awful ideas.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Michelle Foucault, Jacques Derrida.
Those white masks.
That is the flag of the French army.
That's correct.
They've only invented two things: the flag of surrender and the tourniquet.
And the tournament.
That's true.
Wow.
That's quite a legacy, isn't it?
And you're seeing that being emulated by too many conservatives.
And this is why I love it.
When people come out and they say, you're a fool, you're racist or a sexist or whatever is, you know, is fashionable that week.
You're uneducated.
I just think, bring it on, baby.
These terms mean absolutely nothing.
They mean nothing.
And if going along like lemmings with some preposterous sort of theories makes me educated, count me ignorant.
I'm more than happy.
So what's starting to happen, though, is I think the smart leftists are starting to realize that we actually don't care anymore.
Yeah.
And I think they're resorting to now more aggressive tactics.
They are.
I think now all of a sudden they're starting towards physical intimidation.
They're trying to use the rule of law to try and intimidate their opponents because they hate the rule of law otherwise, but they like using it for their own purposes.
And I think that some of these kind of, you know, the Vichy French conservatives, and if anyone's listening or watching, they don't get their reference, just look it up.
Not on Google, look it up, and you'll know exactly what I mean.
You know, it is funny.
And again, I'm not equating just Media Matters listening.
I'm not saying the American Democratic Party's National Socialist Workers' Party of 1930s.
Yeah.
I'm just saying.
But you're not saying that.
No, I'm joking.
I did joke.
I'm instead of saying.
No, you can't laugh.
That's not allowed.
Instead, I'm saying that the moral argument is trying to pander to the force of evil and trying to act as if I want to preserve my own life.
That's what the Vichy French did.
Right.
And by the way, I give credit to the woke people, the aggressive kind of woke life.
I actually give them credit.
I do, because I feel that the liberal consensus, first of all, is completely incoherent morally and politically.
I think that it's dishonest.
I think there are a lot of squishy conservatives who go along with that too.
You'll notice now the kind of popular term on the left for people waking up into this, it's woke, right?
Literally waking up.
And what's the one on the right?
You hear red pill or base or based.
And actually both of them.
You know, you kind of go crazy when you make folk etymologies of slang terms, but you realize red pill and woke both refer to waking up out of a dream, the matrix, right?
But also based.
Where does based come from?
Who knows?
My read on it, this is completely, I'm pulling it out of the.
Is it a mathematic or a geometric thing?
No.
Well, sort of.
That it basically, to be the base is to be the fundament, is to be grounded in reality, not up here in the abstract fantasy land.
And that there's something about that which says we have been living in a dream for at least three, four decades.
Or simulation, yes.
Yes, a sort of simulation that isn't real.
And actually, this is something Trump did really, really well.
When you hear politicians speak, you listen to them speak, typically, and you say, okay, I just heard those words.
Now I have to interpret what they mean because I know this guy's lying to me.
And he's using all these silly kind of phrases.
And no one ever believes them, but that's how they all talk.
And Trump comes in.
He doesn't do that.
Trump comes in and he says, I'm going to move that embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
You say, okay, I've heard this before.
I know what that means.
He's going to give more money to Israel, but he's not going to.
And then he goes in and does it, the fool.
He's not supposed to do it.
But then he goes on about the type of marble he's going to purchase and the type of trimmings he's going to put on the windows and how bad of a deal it was beforehand and how the real estate's going to look.
So you're like, he actually might get that done.
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You know, Megan Kelly, when she said, you've called women all these bad names, you know, fat and ugly and whatever.
And the political answer is, you've completely taken that out of context.
That's why, you know, I would never.
What's he saying?
He says, only Rosie O'Donnell.
Perfect.
You know.
He won the Republican primary, right there.
He did.
And, you know, it's not the most polite thing to say.
It was the funniest thing I've ever heard in politics.
Which means it's true.
And it was extremely effective.
Because any other politician would have kind of played around in that fantasy world of jargon and political correctness.
That's right.
He says, I don't have time for that.
Sorry.
Whoops.
I think Trump accelerated a lot of the trends that have been very negative to our country.
And also, I think he's finally liberated a discourse that's been lacking in our country.
I want to ask you about this because I think that there's kind of a coming struggle on the right here.
I think there's actually more agreement here than not.
But I'm starting to see that the establishment wants to strike back and the establishment wants to kind of re-assert control over the political power of the Republican Party.
But I want to ask your opinion of kind of where do you personally fall on some of these discussions of how are we supposed to interpret corporate power at this moment?
How are we supposed to analyze who exactly in the Republican Party is really representing what's best for our country?
Should Trumpism go away?
Because there's some people that have literally given 30 consecutive days of their best attempt eulogy.
Yeah.
I know.
And they've been really doing it for about three and a half years at this point, but they ramped it up afterward.
Trumpism, if the GP.
And I don't love the term.
Yeah, well, because it's just a placeholder, right?
It's a placeholder.
But it's because of him.
Yes.
Well, this is the key to it, though, right?
The reason it's Trumpism and nobody can seem to define that term is because of Trump's, in my view, greatest political insight, which is he's anti-ideological.
Yeah, we said this yesterday with Tucker.
Did you?
Yeah, this is.
He literally said that exact word.
This is the key because, you know, the people who can write their political philosophy on a napkin and five bullet points and say, this is it.
This is all it is.
And look, the left does it.
We do it too sometimes.
I love free markets, for instance.
When we make an idol out of free markets as though this is the be-all and end-all moral maxim, we've gone crazy.
I mean, that is just ideal.
That's the movement you and I grew up in, though.
Right, it is.
In the 90s, yeah.
Yeah, no, but like the conservative movement we grew up in, we'd walk into think tanks with massive pictures of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman.
Right.
Right.
Yes.
And there, you know, I remember when we were discussing this, gosh, what was it, a year or two ago?
And you said, oh my gosh, Michael, we've been kind of wrong about trade.
We got trade a little bit.
That's correct.
We weren't totally, but we were somewhat wrong.
Yeah, the whole conservative movement was.
I couldn't say that publicly because I would have ended up like Galileo.
Yes.
I know now, though, that has been proven.
I mean, Trump, that is one of the heliocentric theory of.
He didn't prove that.
The Earth is still flat.
That's completely.
It's still the center of the universe.
All the orbs are revolving around it.
That's correct.
We can go into the greatest.
We can, obviously.
I'll take the Catholic.
Yes, I'll take the Inquisition stance on this all the time.
But that's...
Listen, I'm no scientific.
You're going to take the anti-Galileo stance.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Perfectly.
I actually, you know, very easy to defend.
A note on Galileo.
This is just a sidebar.
People always, I just reread Galileo the other day, the dialogue concerning the two chief world systems.
The thing about Galileo is, I'll grant he was, other people had made systems.
You'll grant he's right.
I'll grant that he's so.
Do you know why he went to jail?
Because of heresy.
No, because he was a jerk.
Seriously.
The reason they put him in jail.
And by the way, yeah, absolutely.
If you're as big a jerk as Galileo, he, so, by the way, his jail was like at a beautiful villa with all his students.
But it is true.
What he did, if you read the thing, he's talk about bad politics.
The guy's writing his dialogue on the chief world systems.
Actually, what's funny is the main thing he's writing about, tides, he actually got wrong, but the rest of it he got right.
And so he's writing about it, and it's a dialogue between all these smart characters.
And then the character defending the Pope's position, he called him Simplicio.
He called him Simpleton.
That's impolitic.
You would not do, if you're trying to have influence.
You would use the word heretical.
Well, it's not even that it's here.
It actually wasn't heretical.
The issue is he was just a big jerk.
I mean, you know this in politics.
If you want to get something done, is it good to go out and make enemies with everybody?
No.
No.
You got to make some enemies.
But we all know Galileo's name.
Very few people know the name of the pope that he was writing about.
That is true.
Yeah.
They call him Simplicio.
But this actually, this does relate to kind of the political moment we're in right now, because whenever you're in these times of political crisis, you all go to war with each other.
This is something, conservatives love this, more so than the left does.
If you put 100 conservatives into a room, they agree on 97% of things, they will all find a way to disagree with every other one.
They will do it.
I promise you they will do it.
It's even worse with libertarians.
And libertarians, of course.
I want to get into libertarians in a second.
Yeah, I'm more than happy to.
My libertarian listenership has plummeted.
Yes.
Incredibly.
Yeah.
Because I've taken the most anti-lockdown stance ever.
I was like, this was your moment.
This is literally why you exist.
And I see these libertarians walking around with two masks on.
I'm like, you're for doing heroin on the side of a street with a prostitute and an AR-15 around your back.
And you want the country locked down.
You have the mask on.
Yes.
I know.
This is, well, this is an issue too, because, you know, we're always saying, oh, the libertarians, this, and the trads, this, and the neocons, this, and whoever, you know, all these different kids.
And the neocons.
And the neocons are a big problem.
And the libertarians sometimes are, too.
But, you know, we've got to focus on exactly what we're talking about.
Because I think there's actually quite a lot to learn from the great liberal thinker.
Now you would call them libertarian writers.
Oh, I love Hayek and Friedman.
And going back further to the liberal writers, there's something to learn from John Locke.
There's something to learn from these guys.
But now when we use that term libertarianism or something, it's like a bumper sticker.
And all bumper stickers are wrong.
So you just think, like, talk about baste.
I was just the other day reading John Locke's letter on toleration.
Right.
So John Locke, this is a definitive letter on why we should tolerate all these things.
And in it, he says, we should not tolerate atheists.
They should not basically not be permitted into the public conversation.
That's a very based John Locke.
I think a lot of people.
Sounds like a good Scottish Presbyterianism.
That's right.
Yes.
He was.
A lot of people who invoke these terms and these kind of ideas, they got to go back and read these guys.
There's a big critique of the founding fathers now saying they were kind of too liberal and had this America had the seeds of its destruction and from the very beginning.
Who says that?
You kind of hear it from the more reactionary right-wing.
It's easy to criticize Jefferson, for instance, easier than to criticize Adams.
However, go back and read these guys.
I don't know these people, but okay.
You see, they kind of crop up on Twitter, and they actually have a lot to offer.
I don't want to spend time on there anyway.
I'd love to hear this critique, though.
Well, the critique is basically liberal modernity was always headed this way.
There was no way to freeze it in 1776.
I've heard this.
Right, it's always going to be.
Frankly, there's some truth to that.
However, we should be fair to the founding fathers.
Read the words they actually wrote.
They hated licentiousness.
They had serious standards that they enforced according to the law.
They were extraordinarily sophisticated thinkers that took a lot of great ideas from classical antiquity.
And, you know, I think we become like the left when we say, as conservatives, we got to just erase that.
Erase the past 200 years.
Start over.
You can't start over.
Yeah, but even if you read Burke, Burke was understanding of the American Revolution.
Yeah, well, Burke's the man.
Of course he is.
But I would say the people that were offering that specific indictment you just said would be very much fans of Burke.
Yeah.
Or even sometimes a little more, even a little more trad than Burke.
But yeah, there are probably a lot of Burkeans there.
And so, but I think that if you are too much in the school of thought that the American founders were too neoliberal.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, some small L-liberalism actually I think has been good for the West.
I don't know, like the whole abolitionist slavery thing.
Yeah, no, I mean, you know, and it's also women's suffrage.
You can't.
It's probably been a good thing.
Have you asked Anne Coulter about that?
She has decided views on this subject.
I am aware.
I don't share those views.
You know, the thing about the tradition is things happen.
And we try to siphon them off, and we say, okay, this four-decade period was really bad with this idea.
All we can do is build.
And so when I look around at all the...
It's very Hegelian of you.
Well, don't forget, Hegel.
History has an endpoint.
Well, you know, but Christians believe this.
They don't believe it the way that he believes it necessarily, right?
We share that in common.
And it's interesting, you know, if you think about Marx, right, Marx basically just flips Hegel on his head.
He has a very, very fixated endpoint in what it looks like.
Yeah, of course.
And if you, you know, the Marxist version is material, right?
It's all physical.
It's all about economics and class conflict, right?
But we Christians understand there is an endpoint.
There is such a thing as policy.
History has a purpose.
History has a purpose.
Well, everything has a purpose.
Physical objects have a purpose.
That's correct.
Yeah, and I just think we have, in a way, I give the left much more credit.
I think the left, even the radical left, has been much more serious than we have been.
You know, Marcuse, who is this radical leftist professor, Herbert Marcuse of Frankfurt School of critical theory.
And Angelo Davis.
Yes, he moves out to California.
He's a total numbskull.
He's the father.
He's a result of really bad immigration policy.
You know, I actually, I don't think he's a numbskull.
I think he's...
Well, I mean, his.
Here's my, it's not a real defense of Marcuse.
I mean, you know, the effect of what he said was evil and it ruined a whole generation.
He was the father of the new left.
But he was serious enough.
He gets criticized for this essay, Repressive Tolerance.
And he said, we need a liberating tolerance that basically won't tolerate right-wingers and it only tolerates left-wingers.
And people thought this was absolutely abhorrent and indefensible.
He does make a lot of sense.
By his logic, you can't tolerate intolerance.
The only thought that ought to be stopped is the thought that stops thought.
And he makes a fair point.
John Locke said you can't tolerate atheists.
John Milton, who wrote the most famous English defense of free speech, Areopageticism.
It's a utilitarianism.
Utilitarian school of thought.
So, John Milton comes out and he says, okay, we've got to have all free speech, except for Catholics.
And frankly, he had a point at that time in England.
I say this as a Catholic, but he made a real political point.
And I just think we need to be much more serious.
There's nothing infinite among the finite things of this world, by definition, right?
And so we have to be able to say, okay, here are the standards that we have.
Here's the way we want to behave.
Here's the way we want to look at society.
Here's the way we want to look at the family, the bedrock political institution.
And I think that is a result of modern liberalism.
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Yeah.
I think that without the guardrails.
Yeah.
And there's a great quote in Harvard Law School.
They're probably going to take it down very soon, which is, the law is the wise restraints that keep men free.
So you think about it, it's the exact opposite.
So the prevention of doing something actually is what keeps you free.
Right.
Well, you know, even more provocative is Lord Acton, who is a great hero to libertarians.
And he says, I'm paraphrasing slightly.
He says, Liberty is not the ability to do whatever one pleases, it is the freedom to do what one ought.
Oh my, you could imagine if you said that today in almost anywhere, on the left or the right.
Well, you couldn't say that.
That's where I think the right needs to reassume kind of our position, which is we need to be unafraid to talk about what ought is for human beings, not to say, well, it's really your own truth.
You do you.
You do you.
I don't want to yuck your yum, man, whatever, as long as it doesn't bother anybody else.
I mean, that is the irony of that sort of cowardly.
But also, that framework that you and I grew up in, which legalized weed and legalized everything.
All that's except for political speech.
All of it was turned out to be the greatest fraud I ever lived in.
Yes.
And I used to kind of believe in sort of that stuff.
We all did.
The kind of Ayn Randian.
Yeah.
No, we all did.
And I actually think Ayn Rand's a really interesting author, and I think there's a lot of things she got right.
And we can leave it there.
Yeah, well, you know, but I agree.
I went through that same phase.
I really liked her.
Yeah.
And then my point, though, is that this year showed me they're the most unserious people ever.
100%.
Because I am more into the liberty thing than every one of those people ever were.
Of course.
But real liberty.
Real liberty.
But just, for example, how about I want to go to church?
Yeah.
Not a cannabis dispensary.
No.
But Charlie, you can look at porn all that time.
You can go get an abortion and smoke a lot of pot and look at porn.
That's freedom.
You're not going to be a slave to those sins.
Yeah.
Exactly.
But if you want to dare host an event trying to pursue truth, you're a terrible and awful person.
You're not.
Well, and because it's not needed, right?
This is their argument that they usually don't say out loud: look, we need to go buy pot.
We need to look at porn.
Look, I have a natural right and need of online porn.
You don't need to go to church, do you?
It's just, come on, it's this old superstition.
Nobody really, we got to pretend for the bumpkin bitter clinger idiots, but nobody needs to.
And the irony, of course, is you need to do that more than anything else in Buddhism.
That's correct.
So I want to ask you about that.
Where have the Catholics been fighting to reopen the country?
I thought the Catholics believed that it was the literal body of Christ.
Well, talk about subsidiarity.
And I say this is provocatively.
No, I know, you make a good point.
You are not required to receive the Eucharist, the communion, the literal body and blood.
You're not required to do it every day or every week.
And you're supposed to go to confession and discern the body and all these sort of things.
However, I think you're right.
The idea that we don't need to go to these churches seems to undercut the central fact of the religion.
And what you're seeing now is, and this is true.
You see it in government, you see it in politics.
The bishops have gone really, really weak.
They shut these things down before the government.
I'm going to be honest.
I don't think they believe it's a literal body of Christ.
No, it depends.
You have to say that.
There's no way.
There is no way if you believed it was the body of Christ, you'd shut your church.
Well, impossible.
If I believed that he's actually Christ, I wouldn't even, I don't care what would be, you could be the blitz I'd be doing kingdoms.
But you know, they can still celebrate their own private masses.
It's just not public masses in some places.
But if they don't want to give it to other people?
Yeah.
Well, because the argument is, I see some of what you're saying, but it makes me think that there's no way they believe this.
But no, I think that's too harsh on them.
I think a lot of them are cowards.
To be nicer to the bishop.
That's the body of Christ.
What could you be afraid of?
Well, because there's still...
It's not a symbol.
It's literally Christian flesh.
But it doesn't mean you won't get sick and die.
It doesn't mean that the government won't come and shut down your church.
I mean, I do think there's a prudential aspect to it.
But what you've been seeing is the bishops refuse to stand up, most of them.
And so the priests secretly hold their masses, celebrate the mass.
And in some ways, you feel like you are in the French Revolution because I kid you not in Spain.
They are the spears coming down the street to cut your head off.
Jacobins.
They'll pull the windows down.
They'll do it in the private parish office.
I mean, there is a really, and by the way, people aren't wearing masks at those masses.
But there is a big divide.
And you see, I mean, this actually is where the kind of big government worries are pretty legitimate, which is that the higher you get up the ecclesial food chain these days, the more frustrations there are.
But the parish priests, in my experience, are still doing a pretty good job.
Just like in politics, very often the local people, the people who actually have some responsibility to their constituents, they're pretty serious-minded.
And you get up the food chain, and those plutocrats, whether they're in Menlo Park or they're in Washington, D.C., they just don't care.
Yeah, it's just been, it's been a very telling year.
And we're ready to be conquered because we already have been.
Yeah.
It's a devastating way to put it.
But how do you argue against it?
Yeah.
In some ways, it's exactly where we are in our country.
How can people learn more about what you're doing in my life?
I want to end on a happy note.
I'm so depressed now.
Well, because we've been talking about truth.
I know reality is a little too depressing.
We could talk about some optimistic stuff.
Well, you know, here's the one thing.
Put thousands of kids in the next room, right?
That's our country back.
That makes me feel a lot better.
And the other thing is what the left is counting on right now, especially you look at the Georgia Center races, they're talking about this.
They're banking on our despair, right?
They are banking on us just.
And that's why this is the biggest middle finger to them ever.
Yes.
No, it is.
Because what they're banking on is we're going to say, look, they cheat, they steal, they rob, they violate the Constitution of Pennsylvania.
Why do I even vote?
Why do I even show up?
And the trick of that is that the minute you don't show up, they don't even have to cheat or steal, right?
You just give it away to them.
And the thing we've got to remember is despair is a sin.
We've been talking a lot about sin and grace.
Despair is a sin.
Hope is a virtue.
It is a demand.
And courage is a virtue, too.
And I tell you, a thousand kids in the next room in complete defiance of every single established authority on a planet Earth right now.
It's literally the biggest gathering on Earth.
You know that.
Yeah.
This is, man, you know, I never thought of it that way.
You're right.
Like on the entire planet, I never thought Turning Point USA would be ever to accomplish something like this.
If that doesn't give you hope, you know, I don't know.
But also, the left is embracing wildly unpopular ideas.
I believe that if we can fix the tech issue, the distribution of information issue, then we have an inevitability we're going to win.
Yeah.
If we don't, then we're going to lose.
It's that simple.
If we can't get our message out, but we have better arguments.
We have so many amazing voices, yours, Candace, Ben.
There's so much creative energy in the conservative movement right now.
It's never been a more robust roster.
Right.
That's right.
And all we need to do is get some chutzpah.
But we also need to be able to have the channels and the means of communicating.
Well, that's what I mean.
I mean the chutzpah to go in and not just have this narrow view of politics where we need to break up the tech companies.
We got to break up the tech companies.
We absolutely do.
Politics is a lot bigger than I think we grew up thinking of it, you know, because of some flawed ideological.
It's way bigger than that.
That is very exciting that we can do it.
I was saying the other day about President Trump.
I hope he lives a good long life, but someday when the inevitable comes, he may donate his body to science.
I want him to donate his spine to the Republican Party.
He's one of the few guys in the party in my lifetime who's had one.
And I think if we take nothing else from the Trump administration than that, that's a game changer.
Second most votes of any person ever running for president.
Most ever for a Republican.
Yeah.
Unbelievable of blacks and Hispanics.
Everyone did well.
And Italians.
I speak from experience.
The Italians voted for Trump.
I think broadly.
I'm willing to.
I don't look at statistics, but I'll double-click.
I don't look at statistics.
Every Italian I know did.
Most of them.
Great.
I don't know how the Italians in New Jersey voted for Trump.
Probably pretty well.
New York, yeah.
Yeah.
But I think better.
Good enough.
I don't know if the Cuomo family, the Pelosi family.
No, I don't know.
They must have been from up north or something.
I don't know where they're from.
But I think that the reason I have hope and optimism is despite all of this nonsense is that the left is trying to build institutions that will crumble.
It's the Genesis 11 thing.
They're building their own Tower of Babel.
It will fall.
And we as conservatives are more motivated.
We're more focused.
We're better organized than we have ever been.
I know it doesn't feel that way, but because of how tough the left has been on us the last three years, we have the toughest conservative movement I've ever seen.
I'm the most serious.
Without ever scripting any of our speakers, ever.
I say, go up and say, every speech has had the same sort of undertone, which is, it's time to fight.
The left hates you.
We're going to win, and we're going to bring it to them.
I'm like, this is.
Right.
But it is funny.
I've never, I've given a zillion turning point speeches.
No one has ever said, talk about this.
No, we don't do that.
You don't do that.
And look what you get out of that.
Look at what you get out of what is, I think, naturally occurring to a lot of conservatives, right?
But I like that, though.
It's helpful because I want the students to hear and feel and see what the speakers really believe.
And also, you kind of have this tapestry of does anyone stand out?
Or, oh, wow, everyone's saying the same thing organically.
And look, we're going to win.
It's going to be a very, the next decade is going to be the toughest fight in American history, nonviolent fight.
And it will determine whether or not we have a national divorce or not or whether, you know, and look, there is a chance.
If we get, if we get the vote by mail thing done, like figured out, which is the dumbest thing we've ever allowed to do.
Yeah, I mean, if it if it remains, if that remains entrenched, we're toast.
Vote by mail and technology.
Yeah, if we fix vote by mail and tech, the left's and the Democrats' positions are so wildly unpopular, we're going to win everything.
Yeah, I think that's true.
I think that's very based.
But the issue is that when we win, we don't know how to govern.
And that's a whole different issue.
Yeah, well, and it's part of the courage issue, too, because we're afraid when the people give us power.
You don't want to lose the terrain.
That's right.
That's right.
Michael, good to see you.
Good to see you, Charlie.
I can't wait.
I'm excited to go to the largest gathering on Earth.
The planet.
On the planet.
All right.
Thanks, Michael.
Thanks.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Please email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to support us, go to charliekirk.com slash support.