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Aug. 26, 2021 - The Charlie Kirk Show
48:35
Diversity is Not Our Strength with Chris Bedford
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Downside of Diversity 00:02:36
Hey, everybody, what happens if diversity is actually not our strength?
Are you allowed to say that?
Thought crime imminent?
Chris Bedford from the Federalist, very smart guy and good friend of this program, makes the argument that diversity is, in fact, not our strength.
That diversity can, in fact, be a weakness.
Now, before you all of a sudden send off this episode to the cancellation crowd mobsters, the Media Matters soulless dimwits that run that website.
Just hear us out.
Hear the articulate case by Chris Bedford on why diversity is not our strength.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
With us again is Chris Bedford backed by Popular Demand.
Chris, I'll tell you how this whole interview came to be.
I was doing a podcast last week on the downside of diversity.
Unity vs Fascism Attacks 00:08:49
So I typed into a search engine, not Google, diversity is not our strength.
And your piece popped up.
And I said, oh, we're thinking the same thing.
And so I sent it to Andrew and he's like, oh, we love Chris.
Let's have him back on.
So just so you know, some people out there are typing into search engines.
Diversity is not our strength, which is a rather provocative thing to say nowadays.
We're living under a diversity regime of kind of this diversity industrial complex.
Your piece is brilliant.
It's very well written.
Some would say it's provocative.
I think it's perfect.
Why is diversity not our strength?
Oh, well, thank you for that.
Thanks for the compliments.
I will tell you that people from my neighbor to my mother were very nervous when they saw the headline of my article that was just so straight up saying, oh my gosh, what's he done?
And then they read it and found that it was a pretty compelling case.
Diversity is our strength.
It's just something that's just repeated over and over again.
All the children are made to repeat it.
All the corporations are made to repeat it.
There was a big mural at the local butcher I like to go to across from them that said, it is our differences that bring us together.
Now, that's what originally struck me about the whole thing is just the opposite, the opposite of the truth.
Now, there's a lot of things that were complete differences in background, in perception, in abilities, in language, in culture will actually make a huge difference.
For example, with a police force, where there may be some neighborhoods that are very inward focused, very suspicious of outsiders, maybe a different culture, maybe a different language.
They're going to be a lot more comfortable speaking with someone from that culture, from that language who's a police officer than just someone who's an outsider.
It's always worked, whether it's South Boston or downtown Detroit, that's been the case.
However, what makes that police officer a good police officer?
It's not simply that they are different.
That's not what makes them a good police officer.
It's that they are both united with their fellow officers of all different races and creeds and backgrounds and educations to try to come forward and protect law and order.
They believe in that badge.
They believe in this country.
They believe in justice.
They believe that they are a force for good.
Example I gave that some people connected to was the Burger King Kids Club.
Now, that's a pretty diverse group of people.
It's obviously just corporate marketing.
You've got a red-headed kid in a wheelchair.
You've got a tomboy.
You've got an Hispanic older teenager and a black older teenager.
You've got a nerdy little guy.
You've got a dog with a helmet.
It's a completely diverse group of people.
But what brings them together?
They don't all just hang out because they're different.
That would divide them normally.
What brings them together is they're all children who love cheeseburgers and adventure.
That's what makes them the Burger King Kids Club.
So stressing our differences, our differences are at best a feature.
And more often, they're a problem.
They cause a lot of negativity.
They cause distrust and dislike between people.
It's universal.
It's ancient.
It's across the whole planet.
It's just human nature.
But when we're united under one flag, under one banner, when we have to share in our common defense together, when we share in our inheritance, my black neighbors, my Hispanic neighbors, and me, we're all in this together in the city.
We all come together in that.
It's what we have together that makes us stronger.
So where did this incantation of diversity being our strength come from?
I mean, it's obviously a third rail issue because no one wants to be called a racist, obviously, because what they're really saying is that we need to focus on what can possibly divide us.
And anyone who actually looks at this analytically, you're like, this really doesn't make a lot of sense, which is what you wrote in this piece.
And Tucker Carlson said something like this, I think, two years ago, and the world lost its mind, where he did kind of a monologue.
He's like, you know what, actually, it's not our strength.
And everyone just, including on the right, said, you're not allowed to say that.
Where did this come from?
We've all heard it.
It's on bumper stickers.
It's almost religiously embraced.
Where did this come from?
Because you're not even allowed to possibly question it.
It's been, we've been lied to.
It came from the universities.
It came from the academics.
It came from the kind of people who came up with critical race theory.
And before that, came up with multiculturalism.
The idea that I was taught, for example, I saw it starting to change when I was a younger kid, and I thought it might be over.
When I was taught as a young child, that we're a salad.
America is a salad.
It's made better by its different ingredients.
Salad's more vibrant.
It's got lettuce and tomatoes and onions, all these things.
Yeah, sure, that's absolutely true.
Of course, what brings them together is they taste well together in a salad.
You wouldn't add hot fudge to that unless you were particularly hungover.
But later on, they taught a melting pot idea because that had been rejected.
We see the impact of this all over the entire planet when you mix societies.
Basically, United States, until the 50s or 60s, was the only Western country that was truly multiracial in any kind of a way that had that multiracial history.
Europe likes to wag their finger at the disgrace of the civil rights disorders that we had in this country in the 60s, all the race riots, all the hate.
They like to say, look at America.
They're so hateful, not like us.
Well, they'd never have dealt with anything like that.
And after the great migration that they had after World War II, it started to absolutely happen.
It's still happening to this day.
These folks are trying to push this as some kind of religion because they want to make us different.
They want to make us divided.
It's really just the simplest answer there possibly can be.
A lot of these folks, whether you see the labor left in England that's been cheering on the West's disgraceful defeat in Afghanistan, or some of the people over here who've been cheering not just for our withdrawal, but for the manner in which it's being done, which is shameful.
They don't like a strong America.
They don't want a proud America.
They don't want one that is united and strong because they think that's a supremely dangerous global imperial power and a capitalist power that can bully the world.
They want us to be an equal member of the global community and they believe in more of an equitable equity member of the global community who needs to get their oil from Saudi Arabia and Russia as opposed to from the Midwest and from the North and from our neighbors in Canada, who needs them for all of these things, who needs Europe's defenses and protection, who needs France in order to defend itself.
These are the countries, that's where they want this country.
And by dividing us, by taking away every single thing that unites us, even baseball and football, they're trying to achieve it.
Yeah, I mean, that's a good explanation.
And I can't really remember the first time I ever heard this phrase.
I have, I mean, it's hard to escape it.
And politicians say it all the time, just kind of as a catch-all to kind of just get people to start clapping.
And then you don't have to explain what your beliefs are or anything actually significant or meaningful, right?
Like, vote for me.
Diversity is our strength.
Thank you so much for having me and see you later.
Kind of like, okay, well, that's okay, sure.
They made me feel good, I guess.
But isn't it in some way sort of appealing, though, right, Chris?
Because within the statement, and I don't want to go too much into the statement.
I want to actually get into the philosophy, but I think the statement, there's something here where there's kind of a virtue signaling component to it.
There's kind of a moral righteousness that I'm a better person than my grandfather because he didn't think diversity was our strength.
He thought that continuity was a strength, or he thought that he thought that unity was a strength.
And I am more enlightened.
I am in the postmodern era.
Isn't there kind of a part of this in that phrase where like we are now going to say that strength actually doesn't come from achieving anything meaningful, but just having a bunch of people that look different?
Yeah, I think there is.
And it's part of the new secular religion that we're seeing from a lot of folks who don't believe in this country.
They don't believe that it's blessed by God.
They don't even believe in God.
They don't have any kind of other Christian morality to come to.
It's typical.
Of course, it's not across the board, but it's typical of my neighbors at least.
Everyone who's got the biggest, most obvious virtue signaling sign in their front yard probably isn't going to church.
They probably don't have that much outside of their political religion that makes them feel a lot better.
They think that they're so advanced that they don't need America, that they're citizens of the world.
They've always had people who are kind of like this in some way, who didn't feel any kind of fealty to their country or to their city or to their clan or whichever group you want to go back with.
But now it's infected our upper classes, affected our ruling classes, one of the things that makes it absolutely particularly dangerous.
And they've tried to make every kind of defense of this country into some kind of toxicity.
If you defend the United States and say it was great, you're not talking about the country that defeated fascism.
You're talking about slavery and you're talking about evilness.
You're not talking about the country that eventually ended slavery worldwide along with England.
You're talking about all of the evils that we've done.
Ridiculous Historical Assertions 00:02:18
They do this over and over again.
And when you say diversity is not your strength, I had people from Media Matters for America putting my quote up next to David Duke, that idiot Klan leader, wannabe, down there in the South, who said, diversity is not our strength.
They say, well, you can't say that because he said it.
Who says I can't say it?
Because it's absolutely true.
It's got nothing to do with that idiot.
This is a fact.
They try and turn and feather you.
If you say that unity is something that holds us together and makes us stronger, an undeniable statement that compare you to Mussolini and the fascism, this is the kind of attacks they want, but it's a constant shaming thing.
And at the end of the day, it's ridiculous.
If you go through all the different things that they're willing to call racist, whether they're Jimmy's on top of your ice cream cone or sandwiches because some cultures use pitas or use tortillas instead, the sandwiches are apparently racist now.
You go through it all, it just exactly deserves that reaction.
If there's laughter and it deserves scorn.
Now, the people themselves who are trying to tar you as a racist are absolutely worthy of your scorn and contempt.
But the people, the things that they're saying, just dismiss them and laugh at them.
They're only as powerful as the mob is willing to make them.
And if you just look at them and just straight up say, you know, this is a ridiculous assertion you're making, it takes a lot of that power away.
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You bring up an important point there, which is when you immediately say something that is against the regime, they'll say, oh, well, you do know that Hitler also said that.
So my favorite response is, well, you know, you have a dog and Hitler had a dog too.
And so I have a lot of questions about you.
Again, that's not a unique take, but it's the whole Hitler has a dog thing, right?
And you do know Hitler ate.
He ate food.
Fighting Death with Relief Factor 00:15:11
So do you.
And that's a really that's right.
They don't realize that fascism is not really a thing that's going to be repeated.
Like, fascism is a very unique period in government in the interwar period between World War I and World War II.
We'll have lots of different states in the future, and a lot of them may, in some ways, approach what we want to call fascism.
But I think George Orwell was right when he said all that fascism means is something we don't like.
Yeah, I mean, and the argumentation side of this is they don't actually want to say whether or not something is true or not.
They would rather just use this kind of facade.
And I want to get your take on this.
I mean, the economic plunder that is occurring in our country is real.
Normal people are suffering and they're about to suffer a lot more.
Inflation is about to kick in.
It's going to be a very disturbing couple of years, I'm afraid, for a middle-class America.
But the hyper-racialization of our country is almost like a hypnotic.
It gets people to focus on things that really don't matter while there's real issues that are occurring they don't want you to actually talk about.
Can you talk about, can you speak to that where we're not properly ordering really what's happening in our country and instead focusing on seemingly kind of not just fringe, but just kind of settled issues that they want to resurrect for political power?
Absolutely.
We can see the proof in all of the polling that this country has done over the past 15 years or so, for example, on racial relations in this country.
15 years ago, a majority of black people in America thought that race relations were good and were improving.
An even bigger majority of white people, unsurprisingly, thought the same.
Now both of those numbers have been halved.
There is a minority of both groups of people who think that race relations are good.
And why wouldn't they think that?
We've had an increasing, unceasing march to racialize every single incident.
We are literally reintroducing segregation as a policy.
Humans have always segregated just on their own through options.
You see that in crowds typically.
You see that in front groups that at lunch tables.
We're making it a school policy to make people different, to come down from the top, to order them to sit across from each other, to not make friends, not understand each other.
This is evil.
This is the kind of policy that plays up on human evils.
This is something that's also been going on for a long time.
It has finally taken root.
And I think to your point of...
Why we've seen this so much is because the socialists and the hard left have always tried to divide people in the world over class differences.
When you were in Europe or you were in Tsarist Russia, or you were in Asia, or even in India to some extent when they had some early successes, you were able to do that because there absolutely were class differences, differences that were marked by your accent, by who your parents were, by the peerage, by your land.
They were classes of serfs and there were classes of civil servants, et cetera, and there were classes of knights and lords after that.
The United States never had that.
We don't have a culture of envy.
We've seen that when we were unwilling to elect Mitt Romney, people thought it was because he was a rich guy.
No, it's because he was a wimp.
We were willing to elect Donald Trump, who brag unendingly about his wealth, because it's not about wealth.
It's about who do we think is going to be a good strong leader.
But this country does have a weakness for racism, especially if you teach it and inculcate it into our children.
If you propagandize them and make them the little red guard to go around and turning their parents and their friends, and it's horrible what we're doing to them.
What they were unable to do with class, they have done with race.
They're doing it to great effect.
And at the end of the day, this country, we've learned in Afghanistan, all we've learned is what we largely already knew, that a lot of the rot that we're experiencing, the military is not immune to it.
It's also in there.
That's right.
We have failures in our healthcare system and our insurance industry.
Our corporations have turned on us.
We have failures in our military.
We have failures in our politics.
Our media was broken.
Some of our churches still haven't even opened their doors for fear of human diseases.
It seems like a lot of our institutions that are so essential to this country are failing.
And this racism stuff has just masked it over and tried to make it seem like it's systemic.
There was a stupid superintendent just nearby from Washington, D.C., who said that they had to close the schools last year, but now they're welcoming them back, welcoming kids back.
They closed them, he said, because of the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism.
That is a patent stupid thing to say.
This person should be fired, but instead, this person is in charge of teaching your children.
They should be teaching your children math.
They're not.
They should be teaching them literature.
They're not.
They should be teaching them biology.
They're not.
Instead, they're just trying to raise them in their own ideology.
They're taking the job of parents away from them.
And fortunately, because of COVID-19 and all the stupid school closures, all the cameras are now in the classroom.
And parents all over, non-political, apolitical, liberal, conservative, have woken up and seen, holy smokes, these teachers are taking my job away from me and they're indoctrinating my kids and they're standing up and it's great.
Yeah, it's hopefully the beginning of a real political movement.
We're seeing that in Scottsdale right now, where the Scottsdale Unified School District will not do in-person meetings.
They only do virtual for safety.
And I mean, they're, yeah, of course they are.
They're mandating masks.
They're sending out these guidelines to parent to kids saying, tell us about your parents, right?
Tell us about what the conversations are happening at home.
It's like the Junior Anti-Sex League in 84, right?
It's exactly the same thing.
Similar to the little red guard in China.
This all acts in a pattern, unfortunately.
But we don't know how this will end because there's so many different variables and also kind of moving parts to this.
So we do have this weakness for racism and white people in particular and white conservatives, they get really anxious whenever this conversation comes up.
I'm not one of those people.
I went to a high school that was really racially diverse.
I was a minority as a white kid.
So I've never like, we need to have a conversation about race.
I've always been like, what are you talking about?
Like, I don't, it's never kind of phased me.
How much of this, Chris, and the reason I'm saying this, I didn't grow up in Winnetka.
I don't know if you know Chicago.
I grew up in Wheeling, two totally different, you know, areas.
How much of this is driven by kind of white liberal guilt or even white conservative guilt of being around nothing but white people and being told that's the worst thing ever?
I think you're completely right.
The vast majority of the people who are driving this are white liberals.
And they've got, it's part of this weird, strange new religion, this secular religion that they have, where in the Christian tradition, the only person, except for God and through his grace, that can get you through heaven is you and your works, at least in some of the Christian traditions and some of the things that you do.
If you've committed a sin, you must confess.
You must do penance.
You must make up for that sin.
We saw it on hysterical display with Ralph Northam in Virginia.
Yes, that's right.
He got busted for dressing like a Klansman.
And he came out and said, as my punishment, all of your children will take racial sensitivity courses.
Now, I don't think a 10-year-old could have come up with a more ridiculous punishment.
That seems like something that I would say to my dad, well, I guess I'll only have one helping a dessert tonight.
Yeah, exactly.
I got in trouble.
It's completely insane.
But over and over again, from Nancy Pelosi to Joe Biden to the Cuomos to whoever, they come up with punishments for the entirety of society to atone for the sins that they refuse to.
We see it in their, we originally just thought it was blank hypocrisy when people would take their private jets to these global warming things.
People would shut down coal mines, fly in like Bloomberg on a jet, tell all the poor people who are now unemployed and prone to alcoholism and drug addiction and child abuse that they just saved their kids from asthma and then fly home to New York and they're living their mansion.
We thought that was just hypocrisy, but it's worse than that.
It's something that makes them feel good.
It's their version of prayer.
It's super creepy.
And that's what I'm saying.
Yeah, so I want to talk about that.
So I'm really big on the vaccine thing.
I don't expect you to be.
The vaccine mandate thing.
I think it's so well.
Yeah.
And I'll be honest, Chris, how many conservatives that are playing along with this has just disgusted me, to be perfectly honest.
And so I want to talk about that, but to kind of, can you talk more about how it's not just hypocrisy?
Because the, you know, Jen Psaki comes out on Friday and she says that we're not mandating the vaccine for White House staff.
Meanwhile, I just got an email right here that says, my son-in-law is a West Point graduate and he has three and a half years to fulfill his obligation to the Army.
He's against the vaccine, yet they're being told that if he doesn't get it by September 15th, he's going to be dishonorably discharged for refusal to take it.
He'll have to go back and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, liable dollars of education.
How do you advise?
I have no good advice to this one listener, but can you talk about how this contradiction, this hypocrisy is actually something a lot different?
Can you help explain that?
Because that's really interesting to me.
Absolutely.
They always appropriate the different languages of actual religions when they're trying to preach their fake religion.
So the things like love thy neighbor was a code for inform on your neighbor if you see them outside or talking to your children, telling the local priests.
These are the things love thy neighbor is.
Snitch on your neighbor.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And Republicans are so incredibly weak and so pathetic on this issue with very, very reasons.
It's so disgusting.
This whole thing has really exposed that all of the Republicans who said that they were now down with the populist conservative agenda were actually just afraid of Donald Trump and they weren't actually down with anything.
We spent the last five, six years talking about how if a factory shuts down in a small town that has no other options and that family is destitute.
They cannot sell their home anymore.
They can't get out of there.
If someone hasn't had access to a grocery store for 30 miles and they've got three kids and have to work two jobs, that hurts them.
We've taken a renewed interest, at least lip service to these people.
Now we're turning around and saying, yeah, if your local factory, your local college, your local, this or the military or whatever wants to tell you, you must take this, you must inject this largely untested, at least not long-term tested, no matter what the government's saying right now.
You're seeing inject it into your blood, despite the fact that you are a low-risk young person or someone who might have religious problems, or you're fired, or you can't shop at this store.
You can't go into this Walmart.
That's just an example.
I don't know if they're doing that.
Or other restaurants.
other places.
That's the kind of thing that politicians living in wealthy suburbs and cities say, well, yeah, there's 50 restaurants in your hometown.
There's five grocery stores.
There's a ton of jobs.
Just work for another lobbying firm.
But they've completely already forgotten these lessons.
And then they go ahead and have the absolute gall to blame Ronald Reagan for this and say, well, Ronald Reagan would say that we shouldn't ever get in the way of having private companies force people and children to take injections that aren't fully tested into their bodies against parental rights because freedom.
That's completely insane.
It's just stupid, stupid thinking.
And we see that over again for the David Frenches and other pathetic people who've just come out and said, essentially, I don't believe in critical race theory or I don't believe in forcing someone to do this, but I will fight to the death for your right to teach that religious indoctrination.
If I have to hear that Voltaire quote again, I'm going to vomit.
Yeah, right?
No, but it's so cliche and it's sloppy and it's lazy and it's just quite honestly ignorant.
It really is.
It's kind of like this bumper sticker conservatism.
Like, yeah, you know, I don't like your degenerate lifestyle, but I will fight to the death to make sure that other children can become degenerate.
Like, really, that's force it on my children?
Yeah.
He's like fight to the death for you to do that.
Yeah, like, actually, I'm not going to fight to the death for Drag Queen Story.
I think that's really disgusting.
And like, David French is a distraction, I think, largely.
I think it's like a psych, I think it's a psyop campaign for us to not worry about actual Republicans.
And because every, you know, kind of in our world, I can't tell you how many times David French has brought up at the Claremont Institute.
It was like every 45 minutes.
David French.
It was like, yeah, okay.
But yeah, he is kind of like the intellectual vanguard, I guess, of like these super weak Republicans in the sense of this.
It's like he doesn't have a lot of power, but he says out loud what a lot of the Republicans won't say out loud.
Does that make sense?
Like he will say out loud that, oh, yeah, I think that private companies should be able to mandate vaccines.
And you said something super interesting, and I wrote this down, that they were afraid of Donald Trump.
That's why they gave lip service to the populist movement.
Talk about that.
That they were never on board for actually a re-renaissance of American manufacturing or self-sufficiency agenda or family values.
They were just afraid of the political power that Donald Trump had in the moment.
Talk about that.
Well, we knew that that was true for some of the people.
For example, it was fairly clearly true that Mitch McConnell was going to do what he was going to do, whether it was President Romney or President Bush or President Trump in there, which is confirm federal judges that he liked and work and protect his campaign finance laws while screaming MAGA and pumping both fists in the air.
And it totally worked on a huge amount of people.
They just went along and said, okay, I guess you're not passing any of the things that we asked you to pass, any of the things that we were elected on passing, but you are saying MAGA.
A lot of the other politicians at least did a more convincing job than he did of saying, of running on it, saying, I support president.
I'm with the president.
I can name so many examples.
I mean, one after the other in so many different states.
And sorry, go ahead.
I mean, I could go through an exhaustive list of people that, you know, did the whole kind of rally thing.
And the next thing you know, you're like, what?
I mean, they go to the rallies, they say all the good things.
And they go to D.C. You're like, really?
That's like Shelly Moore Capito from West Virginia is an example, right?
Tom Tillis is another example who would show up at every single rally imaginable.
That's probably the best example.
But talk about how it was never an embrace of the Trump movement.
It was like, I hope he doesn't try to primary me.
Yeah, I think that was essentially it.
And just like you said, you'd see them going to all these rallies that you were going around and visiting as well yourself and speaking at.
You see them at these rallies, and it's because they're not leaders, our politicians are weak and pathetic followers.
They just are going with whatever they think is in charge.
The right was hoping that they were standing up for something that had reawakened, that there was this shifting of the parties from regional northern parties, essentially, to southern parties to ones that are based on ideas.
That the left's complete insistence on forsaking all of the working class people and all the American citizens for foreigners and for the elites was going to sink it.
The Republicans would actually be able to be a party that stood for something.
You could be proud to call yourself a Republican, which it's very rare that I have been in our history.
And it turned out that unsurprisingly, all of those guys weren't for it.
Now, I thought that it was going to continue, that with forces like Ron DeSantis, who's one of the biggest forces in the GOP, former President Trump still around, with some of his close allies still really pushing for this stuff, like Senator Josh Hawley and others, still really raising a clamor on this, that they would actually stay in line a little bit longer.
Protecting Private Businesses 00:08:35
But it shows you that even though some of them are still somewhat staying in line a little bit, they're willing to punish Liz Cheney and others who are complete fools and everything that touch turns to garbage.
When it comes down to that, do they actually understand what we're talking about?
It exposes themselves with the COVID-19 passport, vaccine, passport, corporatism, and this new regime.
And when they enforce this, you know, it's only a matter of time before that changes.
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Well, and so this is a great segue.
I'm sure you've read Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell or heard of it, maybe.
I've heard of it and read reviews.
Yeah.
So I have it right here.
I've become his like biggest book promoter.
I'm going through it meticulously.
It says on the front cover, Tucker Carlson, one of the smartest things I've ever read.
And so at Claremont, we went through this in great detail.
And the argument he makes is that the Civil Rights Act ushered in a new regime that no one ever wants to talk about.
That it was a regime of the destruction of private property.
And so I was at a church yesterday and someone said, well, Charlie, how is it that I have a private business, this restaurant owner, right?
Super desperate guy, quite honestly.
He says, why do I now have to be enforcing vaccine passports for my customers?
And I have to wear masks and going through all these measures.
And I said, well, who's ever to say that you were a private business?
He said, what do you mean?
I said, we ended private businesses in the 60s.
And so talk about that, Chris.
That was a transformation.
It was a third founding of the country.
And that's not to say that the intentions of the Civil Rights Act were wrong.
That is not what I'm saying.
But there could have been a much more prudently way to execute the intentions of trying to have non-discrimination laws versus a whole regime of the eradication of private businesses.
And that's what Senator Barry Goldwater's opposition to the 64 Civil Rights Act was based on.
Senator Barry Goldwater is someone who, in his private business, had desegregated his furniture store before anyone else in the state really had, who'd been helping out different charities, who was a big giver to the NAACP.
He was someone who was at the forefront of trying to be a member of his community.
And what he saw in the Civil Rights Act was true, which is that it's a very dangerous line, as sad as it is, and as good as your intentions might be, to tell people that they're not allowed to discriminate against people.
Where does it end?
And what are the protected classes?
Of course, we've never contained no shirts and no shoes or rules like that.
And people are allowed to discriminate against or age restrictions in businesses.
That makes sense.
But skin color, rightly, has repulsed us.
However, they've stepped over our line here when they say, well, you can't decide who your customers are.
That's exactly right.
And when they change the definition of discrimination going from there on to, well, you have to make cakes that make a mockery of sex and truth and religion, despite the fact that they're grossly offensive to you and are blaspheme against your God, then you have to do that because now the customer is in charge, not the seller.
We're in charge of society.
You're basically a public utility.
When they say that you have to give your COVID-19 19 vaccine passports, you have to check the health papers of customers before they come in.
That's the fruit of this.
So that was that a lot of people meant well, and not very many people at the time were starting up to notice how dangerous this was.
But it's gone off the rails and it's a very big problem now because they change it over and over again.
And before long, your church, your deacon, your rabbi, your priest will not be able to give marriages because they're going to lose their right as a civil servant who can even sign off on marriage documents.
Before that, they might lose their tax documents if they're willing to stand against the gay marriage regime.
Well, and what's so important about what you just said is that the way we ushered it in, and Caldwell does the scholarship on this that no one's ever done, was that it was done hyper-aggressively, super quickly, and a one-size-fits-all.
He goes through all the different titles of the Civil Rights Act and all the divisions of the DOJ that was created.
And it even goes through some public polling that shows that most Americans did not want a fast implementation of this.
They wanted to make sure that private businesses were not going to be steamrolled just because of some sort of an accusation or investigated.
And look, Barry Goldwater was obviously attacked greatly as being a racist for it, which he, of course, wasn't.
In fact, Goldwater was, he was an anti-segregation guy.
If you actually study the history of Goldwater, what's important is Goldwater said, wait a second, once you usher in this new belief system that the federal government can come into private businesses, and he made a slippery slope argument.
People said it was a logical fallacy, but we're learning slippery slopes are not logical fallacies, okay?
They're just not.
They're just, it's kind of the way things are working now.
That, yeah, all of a sudden your church is going to have to marry a homosexual couple.
Like, that's where this is headed.
And so, anyway, I just, I find that to be a elites.
Talk about that.
Yes, because they could always go somewhere else.
It didn't impact the elites.
You could still have a country club that doesn't allow in Jewish people.
There's a lot of, there's country clubs all over the country that don't allow in black people.
There's a ranking Democratic member from an island that apparently wants to join his beach club.
Although the funny thing about that is there were no actual complainants, just a newspaper article that was angry.
There were Jewish country clubs, Christian country clubs, male college fraternities, female college sororities.
Those people weren't impacted.
Now, Barry Goldwater was not allowed into his local country club in Arizona because he was part Jewish.
He'd actually experienced this.
He didn't want to join a club that wouldn't have him in the end.
But just like in all of these things, it was punishment for you, but not for me.
That's exactly right.
Well, and so the elites were always able, in fact, they wanted the discrimination.
What's interesting, though, Chris, is that the Civil Rights Act regime is actually going to come under great attack because blacks now want their own dorms.
They want their own stuff, which is against the Civil Rights Act.
You can't do that.
And so if they want to go scrap it, then that's a different conversation.
Now, what does give me hope, Chris, is this conversation used to be a thought crime five years ago.
The fact that two conservatives in 2021 can talk about the Civil Rights Act with at least some sort of a critical lens, pretty remarkable.
That used to be like a forbidden conversation.
But I also think that part of it, I want to ask your question about this, is that we're able to have more of these enlightened conversations and bring people back towards views that I think are more real because we don't care about being called a racist anymore.
Isn't that really the true release mechanism?
Once you kind of release that, then you're really able to kind of speak your mind.
I think that is what keeps people handcuffed in most of these situations.
I think you're right.
Once you're willing to call everything racist, whether it's being on time or even working hard and disciplined, like places like the Smithsonian have called racist, which is an incredibly racist statement or the ability to get an identification as apparently racist.
Once you've called everything racist, then nothing is actually racist.
You're able to talk about this.
It's important for people to remember that there are some certain third rails.
The chances of the United States ever repeals the Civil Rights Act.
No, and I'm not even recommending that.
I'm simply giving a critical analysis of the unintended consequences of what the law did.
Hope in Conservative Florida 00:11:02
Yeah, I mean, that's life.
Sorry, but go ahead.
Yes.
You're able to actually have these conversations.
I had an interesting conversation at the end of a Culture War podcast I did on this, on the subject of diversity is not our strength with David Azarad, who's associated with Hillsdale.
Exactly.
And he said that we actually don't know if we're able to win yet because we've only just begun to fight.
We've been on retreat for decades now, but that's because we've been afraid to fight back.
There's no way that 10 years ago or 15 years ago, a governor like Asa Hutchinson would have been pilloried by the right and called on the most powerful show, Tucker Carlson, to be stripped down because his thing of just appealing to racism.
That's exactly right.
To go sit on some Walmart board so that he can get another yacht in Jamaica while his country burns.
Like, leave our party.
Thank you.
Thanks for shopping.
Yeah, it's exactly right.
And it gives me hope how many times recently we've seen Republicans who've tried to just go back to their corporate BS and they've been pilloried and they haven't gotten away and they've had their careers damaged and destroyed.
Well, people like Megron DeSanis, who's largely at the forefront of this, as much as his legislature will let him be on all of these issues, who some under the Democrats know that they should target because they might win or lose in 2024 based on if he wins or lose in this next governor's race, that he's a hero and the other ones are not.
And it's because he's speaking up loudly and saying all the things that the Republicans pretended to believe in, but don't actually believe in.
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Yeah, I had a Republican operative ask me, he said, why is it that the base loves Ron DeSantis so much?
I said, well, first of all, the fact you have to ask that question is that you should go find another job.
But I said, look, I said, first of all, he's in a battleground state, which all of us recognize.
He doesn't have to be this base.
Yet he has not done one thing to betray the conservative promise.
He signed bills prohibiting men from playing in female sports.
He signed anti-rioting bills.
He's been phenomenal on the virus and the lockdown.
He's been on all of it.
And that speaks to us, not just from a policy standpoint, like you and I are similar.
It's like the policy stuff is fine, but also from a tonal standpoint and from a philosophical standpoint, he's unwavering in his commitment to his voters.
He has a willingness to defend people that put him in political power and also kind of keep Florida nice.
You go there.
It kind of works.
You know, there's police officers.
There's not widespread crime.
It's enjoyable.
And I think that's kind of the characteristic.
So you would say that we haven't even started to fight.
That like, actually, the real test is what are things going to look like 25 years from now?
Exactly.
And, you know, I tell you, Florida does look nice.
My folks spent half the year down in Naples.
I just lost my neighbor and your friend Benny Johnson to Florida.
And I, on dark weeks after our drive-by tunnel that's completely impassable because of tents run by the men's ball and the drug addicted, I get on the internet and I start looking at houses down in Florida.
That's right.
Sarasota is really nice.
I'm telling you.
Sarasota is very conservative, voted for Trump.
No anti-rioting laws, BLM is not welcome.
But yeah, I mean, look, it just, and what's really interesting about the Florida model is that because it has so many senior citizens, it ends up being more conservative.
And now there's this new influx of like 20, 30, and 40-year-olds that are all conservative.
And so Florida's kind of like Alabama now.
It's actually more conservative than Alabama in some ways.
Definitely more conservative than Arkansas.
But yeah, I have nothing negative to say about Ron DeSantis, despite everyone's best efforts.
You know, I kind of sit, I sat down with, I won't say his name.
He's a very, he's a hard sell.
He hates all politicians.
You would know who it is.
And I said, we were talking about it.
I said, okay, tell me one thing Ron DeSantis has done wrong.
He said.
He hasn't banned abortion yet.
I said, okay.
I mean, all right.
Okay.
I said, that's all you got.
You know what I mean?
That's true.
That's important.
There's no laughing matter, but that's true.
He hasn't gone all out on certain things, but he's fighting this culture.
And people don't remember, or sometimes people forget that he was about 50,000 votes from us having Governor Andrew Gillam, someone who was later caught in an extremely compromising and inappropriate position involving drugs and nudity.
That was how close they were to Florida being an entirely different state.
And the legislature there ought to wake up.
And the Republicans out here ought to wake up to the fact that this has largely been pushed by one person and the voters who support him and the movement that's behind him and those ideas that he is really latched onto.
For the last 20 or so, 30 years, the or 40, 50, 60 years, a lot of the Republicans have been arguing from the left sandbox, using their facts, using their ideas, using, oh, yeah, diversity is our strength.
Of course, we admit that.
We're more diverse than you.
Yeah, exactly.
Pale pastels as opposed to bold banners and just shameful imitations, mirror images of what the left is doing.
That's starting to change.
We're starting to, as opposed to just being defensive, being on the offensive.
And that is a great and important moment because every time the Republicans come in, they roll back a couple of the things temporarily.
Every time the left comes in, they absolutely bulldoze and get and get another couple miles of front space for themselves.
So it's been a constant retreat.
And that might be what we're doomed to as a movement's trying to conserve as opposed to destroy.
It's difficult to conserve, but at least now we are on the offensive and trying to build something that's positive and that is trying to make this country a better place.
So when people decide are they going to vote for whichever Republican nominee it is, are they going to vote for Republican congressman or senator in this next election?
They're going to look at what Ron DeSantis is doing because he's one of the governors out there, one of the Republican leaders who actually building.
That's what the GOP ought to be doing.
I totally agree.
And the last question I want to ask you, and this also gives me hope, is that it seems that right-wing intelligentsia is going more in this direction, too, right?
Where like the Jonah Goldbergs, Jonah Goldberg used to be considered to be like the preeminent mind on the right.
I will say his book, Liberal Fascism, is pretty good.
And that was considered to be profound back then.
Now it's just considered to be common sense.
But that kind of world of intellectual neocons and neoliberals, I will say that from you to Seth Davis to the Federalists to Tucker to others, the energy and the thoughtful commentary is kind of all around this idea of American renewal and of a sovereign nation and strong families and social conservatism.
Sean Davis, and not Seth Davis, I'm sorry, I'm doing too many things at once.
So can you help?
Would you agree with that?
Or is that just kind of a self-created echo chamber that I live in, which is kind of nice, actually?
Thank you for including me in that austere group of people.
It's an honor.
I feel the same way.
I think a lot of the folks, I mean, Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism, which was good, is only worth reading right now because it's obvious.
And to see how far and how pathetic he's become as a person, he's living his character.
He is.
That's the crazy thing: you are the liberal fascists.
A lot of these people, whether you're George Willow and his bow ties and his martini, ordering his assistant to change his party affiliation from his townhouse in Georgetown, he wrote that publicly.
That's not even a comic.
Jonah Goldberg, yeah, he literally wrote that in the Washington Post.
I informed my assistant to change my party registration.
I don't even know how, well, I don't know how I would do that.
I guess go to the DMV.
Is that even legal?
Don't you have to sign the documents yourself?
There's no shot it's legal.
Yes, servant, go change my affiliation.
They've become complete and total characters of themselves.
And because of that, they've become less impactful.
Some of the people who are out there right now who are writing, who are starting to come up, who are getting some voice out there, are doing absolutely phenomenal work for it.
And it's the conservative intellectuals right now, where it is, is more vibrant, in my opinion, as well, than it has been in a very long time.
And at the same time, it's not worshipful of any one person, like, or just fearful of any one person, like it seems the GOP has been without getting the ideas.
A lot of the writers and a lot of the reporters and a lot of the thinkers of these days and a lot of the organizations like GAF and TPUSA seem to be actually getting a much better idea of this is what we stand for.
This is what we believe.
And this is the party that we want in this country.
I agree.
Well, Chris, thank you so much for joining us.
The Federalist is a wonderful publication and you do great work.
This is going to get a lot of people listening.
What do you want to plug as we're titled the episode Diversity is Not Our Strength?
So that should go over wonderfully.
Yeah, right.
I think you can tune into our work at thefederalist.com and you can follow.
We have a weekly show on this where you'll see stories like this called The Culture War, which is out in BPTV and The Federalists.
Awesome.
Chris, thanks so much for joining, man.
Have a great day.
Thank you.
You too.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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God bless.
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