A Catholic, a Jew, and an Evangelical on Saving the West with Sohrab Ahmari and Josh Hammer (Part 2)
Following an exciting and thoughtful conversation in front of thousands of students attending the 2021 TPUSA Student Action Summit, Charlie is joined again by New York Post Opinion Editor, Sohrab Ahmari, and Newsweek Opinion Editor, Josh Hammer, at for part 2 of an illuminating, inquisitive, and enlightening discussion on religion, tradition, education and ultimately—saving Western Civilization. The question is asked, for both Catholics and Jews, why would a religion which places such a strong emphasis on tradition so ardently and faithfully support & promote a party led by cultural arsonists? Compelling answers from both the Catholic and Jewish perspective are in store for you. All of that, PLUS–an extended conversation on the urgent need for a resurgence in classical education, how the left is always in search of a new transformative movement to get behind, and so much more. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Cornerstone CC Support00:02:39
Hey everybody, part two of our episode of An Evangelical, a Jew, and a Catholic trying to figure out what's wrong with America.
This is the private behind-the-scenes part of this.
So share this with your friends.
It's a lot of fun.
I want to thank Amber from Indianapolis, Indiana for supporting us at charliekirk.com/slash support.
Robert from Chesterfield Township, Michigan, charliekirk.com/slash support.
Rebecca from 20inps at charliekirk.com/slash support.
Jenna from Fullerton, California at charliekirk.com/slash support.
I want to thank Rick Warren for supporting us.
I think it's a different Rick Warren than from Saddleback Church.
Maybe he is.
I mean, San Ramon, California.
I don't know where that is.
CharlieKirk.com slash support.
Maybe Rick Warren has really become a monthly supporter.
Maybe so.
A Jew, a Catholic, and an evangelical try to figure out where we're going.
Get involved with TurningPointUSA, tpusa.com.
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.
If you run a conservative or faith-based business or organizations that accept credit cards for donations, events and merchandise or anything, listen carefully.
Do not expose yourself to being shut off because of canceled culture.
The Charlie Kirk Show relies on Cornerstone Payment Systems to provide uninterrupted credit card processing for all of our work.
We trust Cornerstone for our processing because I believe, and I think you will too, you'll benefit from their solutions, their low costs, and most importantly, their commitment to safeguard your transactions.
Cornerstone provides all types of credit card solutions, including e-commerce, retail, donations, crowdfunding, and text to give.
Please contact Cornerstone Payment Systems today and let them know you heard about them on my show.
You can reach Cornerstone at 714-912-2617 or online at cornerstone.cc slash Kirk.
Again, that's cornerstone.cc slash K-I-R-K.
Let them know I sent you.
Hey, everybody, we are now in the overflow conversation from our Turning Point USA Student Action Summit.
Josh and so, Rob, welcome.
And I want to get right into it.
Enlightenment Liberalism Tension00:10:30
So, Rob, is this idea of liberty that we founded our country on, the Enlightenment principles, is it inevitable to result in authoritarianism and totalitarianism, the erosion of our rights?
Is it possible to actually sustain it?
So, I kind of go back and forth on this, that what we're suffering now, the woke totalitarianism, is it a natural outgrowth of some of the enlightenment ideas embedded in our founding?
By the way, our founding, as Josh said in the main conversation, had other strands, including the Puritan one, which makes it more complicated.
And so, I don't condemn the whole founding, but it certainly had some of those kind of enlightenment elements.
Is it a natural outgrowth?
Or is it, as our friend David Azarad said, there is some natural disposition because precisely because it's willing to tolerate any view, eventually it'll tolerate views that would destroy a decent society.
Do you think it's like the second law of thermodynamics?
Like, eventually it's going to decay if we don't have a real strong principle around it.
Well, it's like this: my friend Adrian Vermeule calls it the ever-receding horizon of liberalism.
What that means is, if you've noticed, as soon as liberals won, let's say, abortion, then it became gay marriage.
As soon as they won gay marriage, then it became trans stuff.
As soon as they won trans stuff, it became a new racial politics.
There's always, there's something in this ideology of you always have to be liberating something, liberating yourself from some dark past, and that there's always more to overcome.
There's no limit.
So you said that on our podcast, and I thought it was the best point I've heard, and I have used it repeatedly, sometimes with reference, but I forget.
So, Josh, do you agree with that?
And are you as harsh on the founders as Sorab?
I'm not saying you're harsh, but you know, you have balanced it.
Do you think that this idea of the Enlightenment has an inevitable kind of conclusion in chaos?
Like, it starts kind of somewhat excitedly, gets to this point of kind of this society that we're enjoying, but then eventually you're going to end up in chaos.
So, part of the problem is that we on the American right speak of the capital F founders as if they were one kind of monolithic school of thought.
It was actually an immensely complicated and intellectually diverse school of thought, right?
Many of them were pious Christians.
John Adams, perhaps chief among them.
Many of them were deists, Thomas Jefferson, of course, being the leader of that camp.
The deists, who really were just intellectually downstream of kind of like a strong form of kind of Locke and Enlightenment liberal thinking, did kind of think that America was a true revolution in like the truest sense of the term.
It was effectively kind of synonymous.
We kind of the French Revolution.
It was kind of just, you know, it was these self-evident truths that we can just use pure reason, unadulterated reason with no sense of tradition whatsoever.
And then we just kind of go out there and kind of build our utopia.
But the other strand of thought, this John Adams, kind of Alexander Hamilton, kind of the early era Federalist Party and the first party system, was a very different strand of thought.
It was kind of much more Anglophilic.
They took a much stronger view of the common law.
And for a lot of these statesmen, the American Revolution really wasn't so much a quote-unquote revolution insofar as it was kind of a restoration of the 1688 English Bill of Rights that the Englishman or excuse me, the Crown had actually cracked down upon on the American colonists, who, you know, because they were still Englishmen, deserve the rights of Englishmen.
So it's very complicated stuff here.
To go back to what Saurabh was saying here, though, look, there is a kind of this tension between kind of, you know, I guess Patrick Denin would be a good example, who basically says that kind of liberalism is kind of inherently kind of, it was corrupted at kind of a get-go, that we were going to get this kind of woke, illiberal authoritarianism.
David Azarad refers to it, as Saurab said, as kind of liberalism's genetic predisposition.
I also go back and forth on this.
I'm closer to the Azerad view, but the reality here is that it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to have a purely quote-unquote neutral public square.
This utopic fantasy of kind of liberalism in its purest form, that there will be no such thing as kind of substantive values, that everything will be pure kind of proceduralism and values neutral and live and let live, was always, always, always a lie.
Because human beings in our core, we know this from both the Bible and from the Greeks, from our reading of Aristotle, we are moral creatures who strive to lead moral lives and we strive to kind of inculcate those moral teachings unto others.
So I really like what Saurabh said about how Adrian frames this kind of the receding tide of liberalism or whatever the exact line is.
Horizon.
Horizon.
Okay.
So that makes a lot of sense to me.
I mean, it's true they obviously went from gay marriage to the transgender stuff.
You know, Joram Hazzoni, Miami Burke Foundation colleague, wrote a fabulous essay at Quillette just about a year ago, last August, kind of a, he called the challenge of Marxism.
And the point of this essay was just to show that what's happening right now in terms of kind of the woke movement is literally just Marxism under a different name.
It's just not economic class warfare.
It's a different kind of kind of identitarian warfare.
So these problems don't go away.
And a lot of it is kind of baked into the equation of liberalism, no doubt about that.
So, Saurabh, what would you say about a critic who says, look, well, some of the liberalism has been rather helpful for humanity.
Women's right to vote, Civil Rights Act, freedom of speech.
These are some of the fruits of the Enlightenment.
Should we say that those things would have happened without this kind of movement towards more of a Lockean philosophy?
Because that is the greatest selling point that small L liberals have: look how far we've come.
In fact, you hear this quite often.
And most people don't even realize they're saying it, honestly.
It's become so...
It's like an ambient assumption.
Yes, where it's like, look how far we've come.
We're not who we were in 1619.
Look at us now.
Is there some truth to that as well as some danger to that?
So here's what I would say is that a lot of the things that liberal ideology takes credit for has its roots in pre-liberal, pre-modern achievements of Western civilization, right?
The idea of regular, predictable administration is not something the liberals invented three, 400 years ago.
It is found in ancient China.
It is found in a lot of even non-Western civilization.
The idea that power has some limits and it should, in its treatment of people, it can't go beyond certain limits, especially limits imposed by spiritual authority.
That was an achievement of the church.
You know, the Magna Carta is pre-liberal and decidedly pre-modern.
So I think that liberal ideologues do this kind of trick where, as you said, people take it for granted and it's ahistorical, where it's like, well, if you lose liberalism, then you're going to lose everything.
We're going to go back to barbarism.
And in fact, that's not the case, right?
I mean, a lot of these institutions that we cherish have pre-liberal, pre-modern roots.
Therefore, it means that if we transcend liberal ideology, it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to go to some tyranny.
And of course, then you look at society as it exists today, and there's a tremendous lot of tyranny meted out by liberals themselves.
So I just, I think it's basically a psyop when they say for our listeners, we're talking about small L liberalism, not the kind of liberalism that you might think is your kind of double mask wearing, weed-smoking liberal who is constantly screaming at your children and burning flags.
We're talking about the small L classical liberal, this idea that although a lot of them were kind of like that for the 18th.
They were basically the double mask wearing weed smoking of the 18th century.
Did you talk about that?
Yeah, I mean, a lot of them had 18th and 19th century.
I mean, John Stewart Mill had a degenerate life.
The father of utilitarian ethics.
You know, a lot of them were childless and unmarried in a weird way.
You know, Rousseau didn't lead a wholesome life.
He kind of bragged about it, though.
I mean, his whole philosophy.
Sure.
You know, kind of just read confessions.
So I guess my question.
That was a side joke.
Sorry.
No, it's fine.
We talked about Rousseau Rabbit here.
He was the worst of the social contract theorists.
So I guess here's where this, and Josh, I'd love to get your take on this.
The way that American history is told, even by conservatives, is this arc of progress and self-improvement.
And the bad guys have always been standing in opposition to it.
And therefore, then we take that story, implement it to today, and therefore we say, if you actually stand against our current campaign to liberate whatever group, you would have been against all these other things as well.
It's a very, it's a very disarming tactic.
So Josh, I want you to talk about something that really got my curiosity.
You mentioned Leo Strauss earlier, which, of course, I love.
And I think Harry Jaffa was probably his best student and the most prolific.
And you're a good Claremonster, Charlie.
Not yet.
No, we're getting there.
I'm actually going there in a couple of weeks.
So Lincoln Fellowship and all that stuff.
But the point is what you made, which is really interesting, is what we're taught in our schools that the American founding was strictly enlightenment.
Can you talk about this tension of actually how the founders wrestled with tradition and keeping things the way they are and then also kind of throwing the tables up as we know it?
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, we really do kind of, we are really told, I think, like in elementary school and high school, I mean, frankly, at most university campuses, I'm sure.
I didn't take that many U.S. history courses in college, to be honest with you, but I'm sure if you did, they would tell you the same thing, which is like the American founding was just straight up enlightenment liberalism.
You know, the whole point of what I was saying earlier is there obviously was that strand of thought, okay?
The Jeffersonian school definitely viewed this experiment as basically being kind of Thomas Paine, you know, famously wrote his pamphlet, Common Sense.
In 1776.
Yeah.
He very much was also kind of a traditional, well, it's kind of an oxymoron, but a strong form enlightenment thinker.
I was going to say traditional Enlightenment thinkers.
Well, and Locke was the early 1700s, just so people, everyone understands.
This was building up for decades for this literature to really saturate the psyche of the West.
Real Meat for Muscle00:04:19
Right.
But like, again, the men who became, we in the right, I can't emphasize a point enough.
We talk about the capital F founders as if they are one monolithic block.
It's just so silly.
I mean, I could tell you as a lawyer, like, I have poured over the first, second Congress and looked at the intensity of the debates they had.
They disagreed on almost anything.
There's this infamous exchange called the Helvidius Pacificus debates between Madison and Hamilton, where they're debating kind of various constitutional clauses.
That was kind of in its most academic setting, in its most kind of, you know, a visceral kind of animalistic setting.
You got kind of the election of 1800 between Adams and Jefferson, where there's all sorts of, you know, terrible things being said in the newspapers.
They were not one block.
They disagreed about a lot.
And the point is kind of this: John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, probably the most famous person in this camp of the men who largely became the Federalist Party in the first party system.
They really were not straight liberals.
I cannot emphasize that point enough.
Go back and read George Washington's first inaugural address.
It's amazing.
He literally talks about how the future of the national whole, how America will not sustain itself unless it begins in private morality in the home.
That is not kind of Jon Stuart Mill, Anthony Kennedy, mystery passage, living.
John Adams famously said the Constitution was written solely for immoral and religious people, totally inadequate for the people of any other.
Absolutely.
That without that kind of foundation, this idea in self-government will fall apart.
So when's the last time you think you had American meat?
Well, I could tell you last time I had American meat.
You see, good ranchers, they send you this box.
It's a big box.
And every time it arrives to the office, it's almost a ceremony of eager expectation.
You see many people that work on the Charlie Kirk show, they're wondering, maybe, will they get a T-bone filet, stripper, gourmet burger as a reward for their good work?
And the answer is usually no.
Not because they don't do great work, but because I want all that meat for myself because it's so good.
Big box of meat arriving to your home.
Sounds too good to be true.
Well, it's all American-made meat.
And did you know that over 80% of the grass-fed beef sold in America is imported from overseas, like China?
You don't want Chinese meat?
Well, look, goodranchers.com delivers American craft beef and better than organic chicken.
I could tell you, it's summertime.
So you guys want to be grilling and cooking and having real meat.
Look, I'm a big believer in getting meat back in the diet of young people.
Too much of this fake stuff.
You need real meat so young people can build muscle mass.
It worked for our ancestors.
It can work for you.
So just go to goodranchers.com to buy now or subscribe today to save 20% off each box of mouth-watering meats.
Again, it's super simple.
You order this box, it comes to you, and it's a very exciting experience.
Goodranchers.com slash Charlie, or use the code Charlie at checkout.
You get all this meat, and quite honestly, all of your grocery store shopping is done.
You guys can freeze it.
I don't recommend that, but you can do that.
But the cuts they have that you've been craving, T-bone strips, fillets, gourmet burgers, boom, it's all right there.
And you know you support.
Here's three things that gets done when you go to goodranchers.com slash Charlie.
Three things.
Number one, you get food.
Everyone listening to this needs food.
Okay, unless you're in a fasting cycle, eventually you're going to need food.
Number two, you get American food and good food.
Number three, you support the show.
How cool is that?
So if every person listened to this, says, hey, I want to eat, well, I hope you want to eat.
I want to eat good food, obviously, and I want to support this show.
Trifecta.
Eat food.
Good food.
Support the show.
Pretty simple.
It's good meat.
Goodranchers.com slash Charlie and save $20 off.
Or better yet, subscribe and save each box of mouthwatering American meats.
We get it.
My wife and I, we get the boxes.
It's a whole ceremony.
We text our friends.
Mikey knows about it.
Jake knows about it.
It's meat day when Good Ranchers arrives.
So get involved.
Support the show.
Support American meat.
Goodranchers.com slash Charlie right now.
So, so, Rob, I want you to put our audience at ease because I can tell that there's some people that have maybe of a libertarian leaning.
Economic Substrate and Survival00:16:19
That is it ever right to change things?
And if so, when?
So what should our process be to change things?
Because I think you would agree, of course, Civil Rights Act was a good thing in our country, that the, you know, that there has been legislative adjustments and passages that have been done.
So we, so how are we supposed to use prudence and practical judgment?
Because it's not saying that we're saying all change ever has always been bad, or maybe you are saying that.
Just help us do that.
No, I mean, look, not everything that's been handed down is good.
So tell us how do we differentiate that then?
So in order to do that in a prudent way, as you said, you have to have the benchmark of some other sound tradition.
So, for example, the natural law, right?
The natural law is a great mechanism for judging the changes of the past two, 300 years.
And so, for example, it would look at the abolition of slavery, and the natural law would immediately say, of course, right?
Because men are born equal.
And so to institute slavery is an offense against that.
And let's wage war, if need be, to eradicate this evil.
If there's going to be voting, if that's the system we want, then to withhold it from some people just by mere dint of their sex or their skin color is against, again, it runs against our sense of justice.
So you have to have some ultimate standard of justice.
And then you can make those, you can make kind of prudential judgments.
You can make debates about it and so forth.
I think the much more dangerous threat today is the idea that all change is good.
Well, that's the cult of progress.
And you were saying, you were mentioning it earlier, too.
Well, this is the ever-receding horizon that we were just talking about, right?
I mean, there is this kind of liberal impulse, even a classical liberal impulse, say nothing of the modern progressive movement, to constantly find.
It's funny.
I think back when the gay marriage fight was still kind of a fight, well, to be clear, we're still fighting.
It's just, you know, the Supreme Court to say what it said.
But before the court affirmatively ruled on this, I'm thinking back to like 2014, 2015, right around then, there was this Atlantic essay that I remember reading.
I don't remember who wrote it, but it was talking about how the gay marriage by the time was kind of like the new generations, I guess the millennials' version of like their Selma march.
Look, I find that analogy abhorrent, frankly.
And reprehensible.
Yeah, I mean, it's utterly, it's ridiculous, frankly, for lack of a better term.
But there is this impulse in kind of the leftist, both progressive and, frankly, more classical liberal mindset to find your next Selma.
And that is like the way that you fulfill yourself.
Totally agree.
But, you know, it's funny.
Dennis Prager's most recent syndicated column, he actually takes this head on.
He says that there is kind of this impulse, frankly, for a lot of people to best fulfill, best kind of maximize your potential to best serve kind of the nation to the extent liberals even care about that anymore by finding kind of the social justice cause du jour, like the hot cause of the day.
And, you know, what Prager says, he outlines kind of five concrete steps.
I could not agree with this more, to actually meaningfully improve your life in a way that you don't need to have these kind of abstract goals.
And it's his column is profoundly conservative.
He talked about the imperative of marrying, raising children, of providing for your children, providing for your parents when they get eligible, something that a lot of conservatives, frankly, have forgotten.
It's a potential commandment.
It is only with a promise.
Absolutely.
No, in the Jewish liturgy, we literally, that is in our liturgy every single day, actually, is the imperative to care for your parents.
He talks about going to church or synagogue and just morally improving your own life, which, by the way, is straight out of that George Washington quote that I said earlier, right?
This is the traditional mindset: if you want to take action on a broader level, on the nationalistic level, or even your true utopian mindset to the global level, it all starts in the home.
It starts in your private life.
So I want to ask you more about Judaism in a second.
So don't let me forget, because I have something I'd love to have you walk me through when it comes to Judaism and liberalism.
And I want you to explain to me the ever constant mystery in my mind and how those things seem to be happily married together.
But first, because it just seems that is the predominant view.
First, I want to ask you, Saurob, about this idea of constant change and things around us.
Let's just talk pragmatically and concretely and kind of get out of the clouds.
Not that there's anything wrong with the clouds.
I think it's, you know, nice to kind of live in Plato's world, but let's go into Aristotle for a second.
Of things we can see and things we can know and things we can understand, which is what is it going to take for people to want to re-embrace tradition?
Is it going to take this kind of just really unhappy existence, just kind of the chaos of the moment?
Is that the only way to get us back to tradition?
You have to hit metaphorical rock bottom before you can start to rise up again.
That's a point I often make.
People say, what do you have hope in?
And one of the things I have several answers.
One of them is gravity.
No, precisely, you're right.
That's the sense where I always make this point, you know, because if you're a populist conservative, if you're opposed to big tech, some of our critics will say, well, but this is a free society.
You know, what are you going to do with freedom?
It's like, do you feel free?
Do you feel free really?
I mean, again, the three of us around this table do, but lots of the people at this conference do not.
Well, it's also like, I just have to interject.
I'm sorry.
It's just becoming more and more unenjoyable to live in this country.
Or I can't even watch baseball anymore.
That's just like a very basic.
No, I know exactly what you're doing.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
It's like, I don't want to live in this country.
Some things got to happen.
I have to kind of police my sports decisions now.
That's not a fun place to live.
Yep.
So, and then you go into like much deeper social crises, the opioid crisis.
No, no, no, but that's part of it too.
Baseball's part of it because it's part of the American kind of American tradition.
That's the feminine story.
But then you have opioid crisis.
You have what labor arbitrage has done to the working class for this country.
Two and a half million jobs maybe lost in the heartland to offshoring in China.
What has that done to families?
So the point I'm trying to make is, I think I do get hope from how bad things can get, because at some point people, you hope, will say, well, how else have people organized their lives?
Just one more point.
The only point I was going to say is, as a political movement, though, the constant change, much of it is baked into how we organize our economy, right?
Our economy is designed for people who are kind of college graduates, super mobile, and they like being in mobile.
They gravitate toward urban cores.
They leave their families behind.
They don't have a filial piety.
And they just sort of thrive in these environments.
And they're like that.
But there's lots of other people who either don't want to and or can't live that kind of a kind of overclass lifestyle, as my friend Michael Lynn calls it.
But the economy that the overclass has created creates constant change.
If you want tradition, if you want people to go to church or synagogue, if you want them to show filial piety, that needs a level of stability, a level of calm.
If your job is always at threat of being shipped off overseas, if you're constantly under these kind of pressures that a neoliberal economy creates, you don't have time to worry about tradition.
If you're working for Jeff Bezos and he only gives you 20 minutes time off task, and in order to relieve yourself, you have to use a bottle because that's not enough time.
There is a kind of material substrate to being able to live a fulfilled life.
And that's what we have to think about, what is that ordinary American who works in these kind of exurbs of large cosmopolitan cities and has, you know, is his livelihood is ever at threat of being threatened by automation or free trade.
What does he need or she need to be able to live a virtuous life?
And so there's some of the work we have to do has to do with political economy.
Well, I totally agree.
I'd go a step further and say it has to do with space as well.
I think a highly centralized way of living concentrated, you're going to have people that then, by definition, start to become more in the direction of collectivist and totalitarian when you're more likely to rent than own.
Well, then of course it's the tragedy of the commons.
Why would I conserve anything?
It's the public park.
It's the public elevator.
But if you're spaced out by a mile from your neighbor, you've got a lot of acreage between you and your neighbor.
By definition, you have to have self-government.
You also have a lot of time, time of travel, more to ponder and reflect.
So I think that the kind of concentrating our population in smaller and smaller areas has been really bad.
And it's happened because of our economic policy, because then all of a sudden the family from Hubbard, Ohio, they're going to tell their 16-year-old kid, look, get out of town.
Go work in Detroit.
Go work in Chicago because it's not going to happen here in Hubbard.
We're going to sell the home in a couple years and move to Florida.
And the next thing you know, that happens over two generations and Hubbard, Ohio becomes kind of a skeleton of what it used to be.
So Josh, I want to ask you about something unrelated, but somewhat related to all of this, which is that one of the most reliably liberal groups in America is the American Jewish population.
I've heard a lot of different explanations for this.
I've asked everyone from Dennis Prager to Ben Shapiro.
Super fascinating to have you explain this.
I get this question a lot from our listeners.
I don't think we've talked about this for quite some time.
But it's the way I've heard it explained is the more religious you are, the more conservative you are.
And some Jews aren't that religious.
Which is true in basically every religion.
Yeah, which that's right.
And so, but can you tell me, though, that in a religious tradition, which has such an emphasis on things that are passed down, on doing customs and meals and even names that existed thousands of years before, why is it that that group seems at times even the most enthusiastic about deconstruction?
Charlie, you're getting at one of my biggest pet peeves in all of life, I would say.
I have been frustrated by this question for virtually since high school.
I mean, I first identified as someone right up center, broadly speaking, in like seventh or eighth grade.
And basically since high school, I've just been utterly baffled by this.
I mean, obviously, like immense amount of ink has been spilled on this very question.
Lots of books have been written about it.
Look, the shortest answer that I can give is that most American Jews today, you know, we're in the year 2021, are frankly 100 years.
I mean, no more than 120, 125 years removed from their ancestors from the great Ellis Island immigration wave, right?
I mean, speaking personally here, I mean, you know, my great-grandparents mostly came in an immigration wave.
You know, they grew up in kind of those traditional like Lower East Side tenements in New York City.
My great-grandfather, my father's side, was an immigrant from Poland, kind of worked the graveyard shift overnight six days a week deep in the heart of Brooklyn.
So there was kind of this scrappy kind of working class mentality that kind of naturally inured itself to kind of FDR style welfare state liberalism, I guess you would say.
And I think just kind of subsequent generations of Jews, especially obviously the less Orthodox, the less religious ones, just imbibe this like it was mother's milk.
And you can't disentangle the two, right?
The more often like a Jew will stop being a traditional Jew will be the kind of Jew who, you know, their Judaism is effectively watching Seinfeld, eating bagels, going to Shul once or twice a year.
That is naturally going to be the kind of Jew that gravitates towards a political party that doesn't care about tradition.
Because Judaism, as we said on the panel earlier, Charlie, I mean, it's the oldest monotheistic religion in the world.
I mean, the reason why the anti-Semites ultimately end up hating Christianity as well is because without Judaism, there obviously is no Christianity.
I mean, Karl Marx was the grandson of an Orthodox rabbi.
I mean, Karl Marx was probably the most famous self-hating Jew in Jewish history.
But he, of course, despised Christendom.
He, of course, despised Christian civilization.
The two cannot be disentangled.
So look, what's happening in the Jewish community, I think, is very sad and is tragic.
You know, Ben Shapiro, my former boss and friend, he uses the crass term, or he has in the past, he hasn't used it a while.
He used to use the phrase gino and stuff like instead of rhino for Republican name only.
He would say like Jew in name only.
I read Ron Baum.
That's what we call Maimonides on the Mishneh Torah, who speaks pretty clearly about not speaking ill of other Jews.
And I would never tell Ben Shapiro, who's a better Jew than I am, frankly, how to observe Judaism.
So I would not go quite that hard as far as kind of rhetorical barbs are concerned.
But that obviously is true to an extent.
There are very, very, very few kind of observant Jews.
I think the Orthodox Jewish community broke for Trump like 83 to 17 or something like that.
That's literally a higher percentage than evangelical Christians.
And they're winning demographically, aren't they?
They are.
I mean, they're having three, four children.
The Reformed Jews are intermarrying.
They're by definition kind of breeding out.
So I am hopeful over the long term, but I'm frustrated how slow the movement is.
So I'm going to throw it now to Saurabh.
Why are Catholics so liberal?
And I heard the JFK explanation, but another religious belief that has a heavy emphasis on tradition.
Why is it that the American Catholic population at least largely tends to be more to the side of gay rights, whatever that is, you know, to abortion?
Help us through that.
Yeah, I mean, I think the assimilationist pressures that Josh talked about with respect to Jews is also a factor.
That's JFK, essentially saying, in order for me to seek political power, I will reassure you that I don't take my views, my beliefs, my most dearly held beliefs that seriously.
That was his bargain.
And again, we see it with now President Biden as well.
I think it's partly because the bishops over a very long time have relinquished their role of trying to discipline, because Catholicism is a public religion.
It is most definitely a public religion.
It cannot be relegated to just like a, meaning it makes claims on public life.
It has an account of the common good of what society should look like.
And certainly it's kind of its moral teaching.
And so what that means is that, but that requires an element of the bishops disciplining Catholic politicians.
And they've, over a very long time, maybe starting really with Mario Cuomo, Governor Cuomo's father.
I think he really pioneered the idea that, well, I oppose abortion personally, but I support it as a lawmaker.
They really relinquished the role of disciplining him.
And now I think the bishops are kind of trying to do that with Biden.
I don't know if you've been following them.
Oh, I've been following.
It hasn't happened yet, though, because they have to appeal to their, I don't know, the hierarchy as well.
I had someone explain it to me.
But the bottom line is, I think that's been part of the process.
You know, it's that assimilation.
I mean, the American Catholics gave up with enthusiasm their ethnic ghettos where the religion was thick and the priest was taken very seriously to move to the suburbs and kind of become kind of like wasps and they kind of settled in.
The last factor is, I think, more recent is unfortunately the sexual abuse crisis.
There used to be a time, and this is the tragedy because the Cardinals in the big cities were a great restraining force on urban liberalism, right?
Rockauto Parts Catalog00:02:00
They were kind of pro-working class, support workers.
That's so true.
But Cardinal Law, for example, could pick up the phone and be like, hey, cut it out with this, whatever.
In Boston.
In Boston.
Or whatever.
You could go in Chicago.
And then after the sexual abuse crisis, especially in Boston.
They lose that power.
They lose that authority.
And so urban liberalism has no restraining force.
With the ever-increasing numbers of makes and models like Fiat, Kia, Pacifica X-T Vive, and more, it is now impossible to stock all the parts you need in a traditional chain storefront.
Why endure often pointless or seemingly intimidating questioning and wait while the counterman orders the parts on his computer, choosing the only brand his warehouse happens to carry?
You have computers with access to rockauto.com at home and in your pocket.
One reason to repair and maintain your cars is to save money that you can then use for other important things.
Chain stores have different price tiers for professional mechanics and do-it-yourselfers.
Rockauto.com, a wonderful family-run company, will always offer the lowest prices possible rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear like airlines do.
Rockauto.com is for everybody and does not require membership or an account login.
Rockauto.com is a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
Go to rockauto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.
Rockauto.com catalog is unique and remarkably easy to navigate.
Go to rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck.
Right?
Charlie Kirk in the how did you hear about us box so they know we sent you.
Amazing selection, reliably low prices, all the parts your car will ever need.
Rockauto.com.
Neo-Puritanic Hierarchy Shifts00:06:13
Do you think that there's this kind of younger Catholic community of priests that didn't grow up in the shadow of this kind of sexual crisis, which it was a crisis and is disgusting, quite honestly, it was institutionally handled in a lot of different ways.
They're kind of like, you know what?
I don't have to apologize for something I wasn't involved with.
And they're kind of going to be more bold.
Do you see that in the Catholic Church among some of the younger priests?
Not just priests, but the laity as well.
There's a lot of based Catholics, if you will.
But I hear this term a lot.
But you know what?
And by the way, they don't line up easily with GOP Orthodoxy either.
This is the refreshing part of it.
They certainly disagree with Biden on abortion and sexual matters, but they're not so easily like kind of rah-rah-rah free marketeers or foreign policy neoconservatives as they were maybe a comparable generation in the 80s and 90s.
So it's this kind of combination that we're going to take the church's kind of moral and sexual teaching seriously, but we're also going to take its economic teaching seriously, which is far more kind of corporatist and concerned.
Corporatist is badly used in American discourse, but the idea that society as a whole should be organized with various units kind of aiming at the same end, including private sector, labor, government, this kind of tripartite alliance of all working for the common good of the whole.
But anyway, they take the economic and social teaching seriously.
They take the moral and sexual.
And so they're going to come up.
And this is a very important thing.
I see that happening.
I'm sure you see it on Twitter, but in minor ways.
Yeah, I see it in other ways too, just kind of private conversations.
When I do these events, and I'm not Catholic, but we talk a lot about how we have such a respect for the Catholic Church in a lot of ways, because at least they won't waver on some of these issues.
And I go to these events and these priests show up.
Like, I'm a huge fan of yours.
I'm like, really?
You are?
Like, I'm evangelical, like Protestant.
They're like, oh, yeah, I love, when you talk about abortion and all this, it's like, there's something happening here that I think is really unique.
In Judaism, do you see that same sort of trend?
Do you see that kind of Orthodox conservative ranks increasing or decreasing outside of kind of the Hasidic community that you mentioned demographically?
Do you think some of the younger Jews, are they becoming more secular Jewish or more kind of...
Yeah.
So at a sheer demographic level, you know, like we were saying earlier, I mean, the average American Jewish Orthodox home, I think, has between three and four children.
The Hasidic black hat community is obviously even higher than that.
You're right, exactly.
Yeah, it's somewhere in that range, right?
It probably is right around six or seven, actually.
And the Reformed Jews are intermarrying at like a 50, 60% rate, which is really quite tragic.
You know, there was a recent, there's a recent chief rabbi in Israel.
I think he was a Sephardic, not as Kennazi rabbi.
I might be wrong about that.
But in any event, he referred to intermarriage as kind of a silent Holocaust.
And it kind of really kind of shook a lot of American Jews up, which is like.
Is that Rabbi Sachs?
I don't think it was Rabbi Sachs who said that.
So let's just make sure we're defining our terms.
Intermarrying, which means that a Reformed Jew will marry a non-Jew and not carry on the Judaism to the children.
Is that correct?
Yeah, exactly.
Specifically in Jewish law, halakha is what we call it.
Through the mother.
It's through the mother, exactly.
It's matrilineal descent.
But intermarriage, you know, I would endorse that.
I do think it's a silent Holocaust.
I've seen in my own life.
It is tragic every time I see it.
But based purely in the demographic data on the one hand, obviously, I think Jews will get more conservative over time.
I am saddened that it hasn't happened more quickly.
But there are other factors at play here too, which is, look, the Democratic Party, which is increasingly a woke, illiberal, authoritarian institution, whatever you want to call it.
You say illiberal like it's a bad thing.
It's funny.
I literally was like thinking as the words coming out of my mouth, it's like, authoritarian.
Yeah, okay.
Totalitarian.
Yeah, I mean, like, woke is.
To a word that Sir Rob doesn't like.
Wokeism.
Look, let's just define wokeism as a substantively abhorrent strand of anti-liberal thought.
I guess would be the best way to quickly say it.
But in any event, the woke ideology, and it is an ideology.
It is an ideology that kind of takes the place when you have kind of a heathen, godless civilization.
Oh, it's religious.
Yeah, it is absolutely religious.
They condemn the heretics.
They shun them from society.
It is, frankly, it's neo-puritanic.
Yeah, they have rituals.
Yeah.
It really is neo-puritanical zeal.
They kneel together and all this stuff.
That's right.
It's a liturgy.
And they also have a hierarchy.
And it is a religion.
That's exactly the point I was going to make, though.
So when you get to kind of intersectionality, this is intersectional hierarchy in its truest form.
The Jews are always at the bottom.
I mean, what we saw in the most recent Israel Hamas skirmish in May, hold aside for a second, the predictably abhorrent rhetoric from AOC and people like that, Israel apartheid state, all this total garbage.
But Jews were being beaten up on the streets of America.
And this is no longer like just an anti-Zionism, is not anti-Semitism kind of thing.
The proof is now in.
The jury is out.
And they obviously are effectively synonymous with one another.
Because when you are taking it out, when you are punching Jews in Midtown Manhattan or in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles because what's happening halfway around the world, you are an anti-Semite.
Yeah, but then we have to be lectured by ADL that the biggest threat to the world is Tucker Carlson.
Like, spare me the swan song, okay?
You know what I mean?
And it's just, it creates this kind of pent up, like, you don't actually care about the real problem.
Look, the American Jewish establishment is completely corrupt in myriad ways.
I probably need to write like a long form essay just smacking these clowns, basically.
But what we're seeing here just in general is that as the intersectional identity politics mentality reaches its logical conclusion, even holding aside those demographic data about higher Orthodox birth rates, I think we will see more and more less observant Jews who even have like a vestige of fidelity, of pride in their tradition and their inheritance.
Even some of them will come around and see that this is a threat to my life because the Jews who are getting beaten up, they're not all black hat Jews.
They're going around smacking even like some Reformed Jews too.
So for sheer survival reasons, if we want to think like it's like basis, like more pure form, I do think we'll see more Jews of all stripes come around to see the light.
So here's how I want to close.
Aquinas and Religious Strength00:10:57
Talk about whether or not adhering to your religious tradition personally has enriched your life.
A lot of young people right now that are listening that are straying and they know it.
It would mean a lot if they heard from you.
Maybe not.
Maybe the more you adhere, you find it to be frustrating and kind of puzzling.
I don't think that's the case, but we'll start with you, Sir Rob.
We'll go to.
And what can I say?
I mean, I found it so enriching that I wrote a memoir about it to try to explain what is.
What's the name of that book?
It's From Fire by Water.
As you mentioned, my new book is called The Unbroken Threat.
That's right.
Unbroken Thread.
That's why we discussed it.
But no, it's this sense of security, right?
It actually is a really great feeling that set aside salvation, which is no small thing.
But to know that you're walking on solid ground, that if you stumble, the church is there to salve your wounds.
And again, I personally find I can leap into what's really important in life as a professional, as a husband, with this sense that there's a kind of cosmic order.
I fit into it in my own way, you know, where I'm supposed to be.
And I don't need to kind of, again, anxiously, I mentioned this in the main program, anxiously, constantly self-examine what I really believe.
So, for someone listening right now that's maybe 20 years old and they grew up in a secular home and they're really confused about what they're seeing, they might have self-identity problems, they might be all of a sudden dealing with all these kind of quasi-nihilistic thoughts, nothing matters.
Does the church and your experience religiously, does it help you make sense of the world?
I mean, of course.
Yeah, I mean, it's obvious, of course, for you.
Yes, exactly.
That's a fair point.
Yeah, I mean, I'll mention my 20s.
I was, I mean, again, career-wise, it was successful going from strength to strength, if you will.
But there were these moments of, you know, where you suddenly face, feels like an abyss, like life itself is kind of being drained down.
And if there's no meaning, if there's no God, the abyss goes all the way down.
Not just culturally, but personally.
Yes.
But luckily, I mean, there is a solid ground.
And the first you begin is: forget about the Bible.
Forget about Revelation.
You don't have to go there.
Just stick with reason.
And the classical proofs for the existence of God.
Aquinas's.
Five books.
I think are still extremely persuasive.
So if you're an intellectually-minded 20-year-old and you think religion is just revelation or superstition or what have you, read the five proofs.
I totally agree.
Summa Theologica is the best.
Yeah, I mean, no, no, no, but it was a much shorter book by a professor called Edward Phaser.
And it's titled like Aquinas.
I think he teaches it.
I actually teach at a college in California.
But anyway, the book is Aquinas: a Beginner's Guide.
And the title makes it sound like it's intelligent.
It's time to read the Summa.
Well, I mean, look, you can graduate to, but start with Phaser.
Start with Phaser.
And if you're intellectually minded and you're like, yeah, no, the thing that people believed is reasonable too.
And a lot smarter people than you have believed.
And I totally agree with that.
And I was just having this conversation with an evangelical, spirit-filled Protestant pastor, and their son has recently started to kind of get into deconstructionism, right?
And I sat down with this Protestant pastor and I said, your son is a very smart, high-IQ guy.
I said, has he ever read Aquinas?
And this guy was like, I really am not familiar with Aquinas.
I said, here's the problem with evangelicalism right now is that we don't know how to deal with this kind of deconstructionist stuff because we have no idea what classical education is.
And so the way that evangelicals and Protestants educate their kids is they will tell a five-year-old the Bible is true, it's inerrant, and if you disobey, you're going to hell.
Now, that's effective with a five-year-old.
For a five-year-old, a 10-year-old, a 15-year-old, but it's not effective when that 23-year-old opens up Instagram and all of a sudden gets introduced to Christopher Hitchens or to liberal theology.
The 23-year-old who is classically educated in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, Aquinas, Augustine, and the church fathers, the five proofs of God, all of a sudden has already naturally grown to that place where all of a sudden that doubt, they're like, oh, no, no, no, I know how to kind of work through this.
And that's the crisis right now in the evangelical world.
And I'm dealing with that personally.
Josh, has your, and I'd love to sidebar with you on that because I think it's just really interesting.
Definitely.
Your specific religious tradition, the way you eat, right?
You honor the Sabbath, which is kind of my most, the thing I'm the most jealous of in the world is how Jews have like an awesome reason to kind of just rest for a day.
We're trying to find our best to do it.
Has that given you a sense of purpose and a sense of clarity in this ever-increasingly confusing world?
So Ariana Huffington of all people wrote like a beautiful like, let's imitate the Jewish Sabbath essay like a year or two ago.
That's right.
She had the book on napping or rest or something, right?
Sleep or something.
The essay was timed around that, yeah.
Saurab recently wrote a, he excerpted your book in the Wall Street Journal, if I'm not mistaken, about the Sabbath as well.
It was a beautiful essay.
I would highly encourage listeners to check out that as well.
Look, I mean, we talk about this in the main program a little bit as well, but I firmly echo what Saurap said.
In order to go out there to do what the three of us do every day, we are all engaged in the battle of ideas.
We have chosen this as a profession.
It's a pretty fun profession.
I happen to be having a good time.
I mean, it's a lot of fun.
I love speaking in conferences like this.
But in order to kind of have the fortitude, the spine, the backbone to go out there and be confident in your convictions, in order to have just, not just the confidence, but just the, frankly, just the personal strength in order to not like be pliant and bend easily when someone presses the first, you need something to point to.
It literally is just that simple.
You need something to fall back upon.
You need a personal anchor.
And for Jews, that's obviously the Torah.
I mean, you know, God Torah Israel is the Jewish trinity.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's basically right.
That's what Prager says.
So if you've got a problem, you could.
No, that's fine.
I mean, it's a little simplistic, but like, it's totally fine for my purposes.
But the point is, yeah, you need something to fall back into.
And, you know, look, I mean, as I've gotten more observed in the past few years, you know, as I travel in my suitcase with my prayer book and my tefillin and what I wrap myself with, it's very powerful when I wrap myself in tefillin, when I put on my kippah, when I'm kneeling during the Shimona Esra, the Amidah, which is the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy.
I feel that.
I feel that strength.
And that does give me a backbone to then go out there and do what I do, whether it's writing, speaking, podcasting, anything along those lines.
So it's very powerful.
Can I tell you what I love about Jews?
Please.
I have a theory.
Only one thing, though?
A lot of things I love about Jews.
One of the reasons why Jews are so smart is it's in Isaiah 1, where there's this idea of let us reason or debate or argue with each other.
If you go to a Jewish meal, which you grew up in, you always have to have your argument pretty well articulated or else someone's going to run you over.
From a seven-year-old, an eight-year-old, a 10-year-old.
So these young kids are experiencing very informative, rational arguments.
And even if you're an eight-year-old and you're not articulating your opinion, you're going to kind of like, yeah, okay, come back next week, Jacob.
Right?
And so it increases the kind of mental, kind of how alert they are.
It's kind of ingrained in our tradition, actually.
So just a quick point on this.
The Talmud, which is our oral Torah, is the written Torah on the oral Torah.
There's a program called Dafiomi, which is you read one page of Talmud every day.
It's a seven-year, roughly seven-year cycle.
I started the Dafiomi cycle for the first time about a year and a half ago.
So January 2020.
So I'm a year and a half into the seven-year cycle now.
So I've been kind of going through this now for a year and a half.
The rabbis, and the Talmud is basically rabbis kind of hashing out various elements of Jewish law.
They disagreed about everything.
I mean, they disagreed about Jewish law probably more vociferously than like Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed about like, you know, American founding stuff.
Right.
And the way that they did that is because they ultimately had, for the most part, a certain level of respect for one another.
But, and here's, I'm going to take it back to my good friend Sorba over here.
This is a really, really, really interesting thing.
They respected one another, but they were not afraid to be uncivil if need be.
In fact, I published a beautiful op-ed in Newsweek a number of months ago from Rabbi Ari Lamb, who's one of my favorite new thinkers.
Oh, I run him too.
He's absolutely fabulous.
He's based in New York, Yeshiva University.
Joshua Project is his new kind of pan-faith kind of think tank of sorts.
Anyway, so Rabbi Lamb's op-ed for me, I can tell the op-ed was like against civility.
And he was basically saying, like, if you read the Talmud, if you go into a yeshiva, you know, Eshatora, which is like this big Baltashu yeshiva in like the right next to the old city.
It's in the heart of the old city of Jerusalem.
Yes, I know exactly.
I've been there numerous times.
You go in there and like, it's loud.
People are arguing.
They're like, they're not, they're not afraid to like hurt someone's feelings if need be.
There's a baseline level of respect, but there's a line you don't cross.
There's a line you don't cross.
You're not going to dominate.
It's not going to be right up to that line.
Right.
But you will not be afraid to get in there to pursue the truth, which is kind of the whole point, obviously, of SORAP's kind of fuselage against David French's, which is that civility is, I guess, an overstated principle, which is exactly right, of course.
The goal here is to find out.
It's a WASP culture for sure.
Yeah.
I could get into that.
In WASP culture, you didn't win the game.
Your team won the game.
Big difference, right?
And it has great virtues, by the way.
Oh, no, no.
Our WASP elites were a lot better than our woke elites.
That's totally agree.
But our WASP elites, to talk about my people, they made some awful mistakes in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, especially corporately and with capital flows.
We are over time.
What do you want to plug your book?
Yeah.
Unbroken Thread from Preserving Tradition in Age of Chaos.
I get that.
Yeah, Discovering Tradition in Age of Chaos.
Really close.
It's close.
It was good.
Josh Hammer, Newsweek.
Yeah, I've got no new book out.
Follow me on Twitter at Josh underscore Hammer.
You got to write a book about some of this stuff.
It'd be super interesting.
It is my next-to-do item, Charlie.
I'm telling you, this idea of the Jewish culture of debating and arguing, I think would be really fascinating.
We'll take that to heart.
All right.
Thank you guys so much.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.