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Sept. 16, 2021 - The Charlie Kirk Show
42:14
How to Win America’s Cold Civil War
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Win The War You Are In 00:01:56
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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
With us today is Thomas D. Klingenstein, who is the chairman of the board of the wonderful Claremont Institute, where I spent a week in Las Vegas as a Lincoln fellow with some wonderful people there.
Tom, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Well, thank you.
Happy to be here.
So you gave a speech and also wrote an article that really caught my attention, which was the reason I wanted to have you on this program, because I have not heard anyone in recent memory put it so bluntly and concisely, and I say bluntly in a good way, where you say we're in the middle of a Cold Civil War.
Defining Our Cold Civil War 00:15:45
And it's just the question of whether or not we want to win it.
And we need wartime generals to kind of make that happen.
Please summarize your argument, kind of why we're in a cold civil war, and then we'll go from there.
I will.
And I'll proceed it by saying, you know, to win a war, you have to know you're in one.
And I think we have a lot of particularly Republican leaders in the Senate who haven't figured that out.
Now, the enemy, the enemy I call woke communists, you know, people in the past have called it identity politics and multiculturalism.
But woke communism, I think, suggests a totalitarian regime.
And this regime has different goals than America.
This regime has a different understanding of justice.
It's something like in the Civil War, the South wanted to grow slavery, the North contracted.
Well, those were differences of ends, and ends cannot be negotiated.
So what is the end of woke communism?
Well, it's group outcome equality, right?
All groups having proportional to their representation in society, the same amount of prisoners and CEOs and, you know, school suspensions and all the rest, right?
The problem there is that America, whose understanding of justice is individual freedom, there will always be group outcome differences between men and women and also among various subcultures.
So to eliminate, the only way to eliminate those outcome differences is by force, by tyranny.
And so that's why we can have no peace with the woke communism.
And my, I guess the pitch of that speech was directed at the Republicans.
You know, their job is to explain all this.
American people, I think, many have a sense that there's something grievously wrong with America, but they might not be able to give a good accounting of it.
And that's what we need our leaders to do.
And so far, they haven't been doing it.
I totally agree.
So when I talk to the police officer or the taxicab driver or the welder, the normal man, they say, man, we're losing our country.
And if I press them, which I don't, because I don't want to be a jerk, but sometimes I do, they kind of fumble around a little bit because it's more just kind of a cascading effect, right?
They're not even able to articulate it as well as you would, not even close, but they can see it.
They can feel it.
They know it's happening.
So in your piece, which is very well organized, we're going to put the piece up at charliekirk.com.
We'll link to American Greatness to that.
You start with this question.
The first sentence of your piece is: We find ourselves in a cold civil war.
So I just want to stop there.
What some people would take exception with that type of language.
I don't.
Make the argument that we are indeed in the midst of a cold civil war.
Well, it was the argument that I, part of which I answered, I think, in the last question.
We are fighting a regime that has a different understanding of justice and a different end.
Again, the analogy I gave was slavery, right?
One side wanted to grow, one side contract.
Those are differences in ends, and ends cannot be negotiated.
Now, there are a lot, you know, what does the enemy have to do?
And this gets, I think, more closely to your question about war.
Well, it has to remake everything in American society, and it has to remake it to comport with their understanding of America and the future.
So you got to change the history, right?
So that means you got to take down statutes.
You have to teach critical race theory.
You have to teach 1619.
You have to teach America that in its race, in its DNA, is racism.
It's not freedom.
It's racism.
You have to teach Americans that America is systemically racist.
And we hear that every day.
And what that means is, or what the implication of that is, if you think America is systemically racist, if you think racism has insinuated itself into all nooks and crannies of American life, then you have to throw out the American way of life.
So some of this is just the way they're thinking and talking now.
Tech censorship is another big one, right?
If you're going to perpetrate lies like America is racist, then you have to shut up the people who challenge the lies.
And I don't think most Americans have any doubt that they're being shut out.
Even a speech I gave, you know, we had to think long and hard about what to say.
Where are we going to get censored?
We couldn't put it on YouTube, right?
This stuff is just unbelievably dangerous.
Well, and what we do on our show is we have a pre-show meeting and we literally have to go through what stories are we going to describe in a certain way to not get censored.
We have to use different words.
We have to phrase it differently.
And we're already living under that tyranny of not even political correctness, but it is a tyranny of a one-party state.
You write in this article here, and you just mention it, and I want to really zero in on this.
Every time Joe Biden accuses America of being systemically racist, he is, though he doesn't know it, calling for the overthrow of the American way of life.
Now, you mentioned this earlier in the piece, but I really want to zero in on this.
As soon as I heard that phrase American way of life, which originated from the Claremont Institute, might have been from you, I loved it.
What is the American way of life?
What's the best way you could describe it for someone listening to this right now?
Well, at root, it's a commitment to individual freedom, the right of all individuals to pursue happiness generally as they see fit.
And that underlying philosophical statement gives rise to certain attributes, right?
We're hardworking, we're self-reliant, we're colorblind, we believe in American exceptionalism.
You know, we think we're good.
You know, you were referring to the welder, the normal person who can't quite articulate what's going on.
And the way I articulate it, the simplest way I can think about it is some people think America is good and they want to preserve it.
And other people think it's bad and therefore want to throw it out.
And that, by the way, was the appeal of Trump.
Trump is unequivocally, unapologetically pro-American.
He never qualified.
You know, if you listen to his COVID, you know, everything was incredible.
You know, our doctors, our military, our this, everything was incredible.
And that, I think, is what, you know, those plumbers and welders want to hear.
And it's a message that they can get.
And I think, you know, I'm sitting in Maine and, you know, people even in Maine, out in the sticks, you know, they're pushing back against critical race theory because it teaches that America is racist.
Well, most people don't think America is racist, but our leaders have to say so.
That's part of my part of the speech is when they say we're systemically racist, we have to say absolutely not and provide some evidence as to why not.
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So you say here in the piece, education, corporate media, entertainment, big business, especially big tech are to varying degrees aligned with the Democratic Party.
So let me stop here.
We don't know that we're in a war on our side.
To what extent does the other side realize that they're on a crusade or that they're in almost a cold combat setting?
Or is it that some people at the top realize that and the underlings don't?
Or maybe it's the intellectuals in the universities who understand it.
Biden certainly doesn't understand it.
Biden doesn't understand it.
As you quoted me, when he says America is systemically racist, he doesn't know what he's saying.
He doesn't know the implication of what he's saying.
And most people on the right or left kind of go along, don't they?
Yes.
And they follow, they follow whatever is progressive and they follow the next thing.
So, you know, people drift.
Most people drift.
And I think we are drifting or we are wandering over a cliff and we need leaders.
And we need obviously people like you, you know, who have a national voice.
But it has to be more than you.
It has to be more than Tucker Carlson, who's one of the, I think, most articulate.
He gets it, but he's not running this country.
Yeah, and it needs to be thousands of people like that.
And so you continue.
I love the description woke comms or woke communism.
And I want to emphasize this because this is an important point, which is you, woke communism is built on a particular understanding of justice.
And that really is the most important question when you think of how you're going to design a government or put together the appropriation of power.
And the classics teach us a lot about this question of what is justice and is it what every man is owed to their due and what their action is?
Or is it group or is it tribal?
And so can you expand on that even more?
You mentioned it a couple of times, but that really is the critical component here, right?
The other side believes it needs to be redistributive.
Abolition of private property needs to be based on group or identity, things that cannot change, which is at direct odds with what has always been embedded in our country up until recently.
Yeah, I think you actually did as well this job as I could.
You know, I think social justice, as I said before, though I may not have mentioned the term, social justice is group outcome equality.
So all groups having the same of everything.
That's social justice.
And that can't exist with American justice, which again, individuals pursuing happiness generally as they see fit.
So because we have different understandings of justice, we have a different understanding of what constitutes a just society.
Yes.
Right.
And that, by the way, you know, Republicans tell the Democrats to follow the Constitution.
Well, that's well and good, but the Democrats don't believe in the values the Constitution seeks to protect.
And this is what happens in a war.
In a war, one side breaks the rules because they don't believe in the rules.
And then the next, and then the other side breaks it because they have to survive.
So you can see this all over the place.
We're breaking rules.
Again, because one side doesn't believe in the rules.
Sometimes I use the Kavanaugh hearings as an example.
You know, Republicans think, well, they weren't playing by the rules, but they were playing by different rules.
And, you know, they thought Kavanaugh should be assumed guilty.
And that's a function of their understanding of a just society.
And we have to look at the world through that lens.
We need people to stand up and explain to people, well, here's what was happening in that hearing.
We were seeing a regime class because we were seeing two understandings of justice.
And again, our leaders have to help us understand this kind of stuff.
I just want to reemphasize for everyone listening, the kind of binary choice of the two different ways to interpret justice.
I think it's the best way to describe really the divide in this country.
It really is.
And everything else kind of flows downstream from there.
So you say we don't have generals.
So let's pretend that a couple of the generals in the culture war are listening or you are one of them.
What needs to be done then to mount a successful counteroffensive in this cold civil war?
Obviously voices, things speaking out, but you say this wartime requires very different rhetoric, strategy, and people than peacetime.
And so I was just sitting in a meeting with a conservative group and they said, well, Charlie, our philosophy is we don't like to personalize things.
We want to take the high road.
We want to continue to build bridges because we will not stoop down to the level of the left.
What's your take on that kind of moderate Republican belief?
Are we past that?
Are we now in a combat theater?
You know, that's what is going to get us killed.
In the piece, I talked about libertarians.
Yes.
And that kind of libertarian point of view.
They say, okay, just let us live our way.
You can live your way.
But that's not what the opposition is doing.
They're saying, you got to live our way.
If you don't live our way, we'll punish you.
And so this is where we need a sense of urgency.
I can't tell you all the policy things.
You know, I got some ideas, but have no particular expertise.
But I know that we're not going to adopt the right policies unless we get serious, right?
Unless we think we're heading for a cliff.
If we don't think that, we're going to, you know, we're going to do what we have.
And again, within the Republican Party, I don't know anybody except maybe Trump, who has the necessary urgent C and then has the courage, right, to say things like the media is fake and, you know, to get rid of CRT once he figured.
No, he's not a great explainer.
And we need a great explainer, but we also need people with courage.
And, you know, people have to stand up and say America is not racist, period.
I'm not going to debate that.
And, you know, if somebody accuses you of being a racist, you know, my response, how dare you?
You know, F you.
It doesn't require a lot of explanation.
So it starts with our leaders explaining to us where we are and explaining why, for example, it's so important to get rid of critical race theory.
Why Diversity Is Suicidal 00:07:10
Now, so Tom Cotton made a big deal of that in the military.
Okay, that's good.
But that was one senator one time.
I think this has to be the platform of the Republican Party.
In fact, I think that the party should be united around woke communism or anti-woke communism, right?
In the same way, the Republican Party in earlier times cohered around communist anti-communism or anti-slavery.
And especially in the 1980s, it was really the defining characteristic of how Reagan kept the Republican Party together was anti-Soviet communism.
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And so I love that you say we must minimize the influence of libertarianism.
And libertarianism only would work if you live amongst only other libertarians.
As soon as a tyrant or a tyrannical or authoritarian party starts to rise up, then all of a sudden this kind of live and let live mentality becomes increasingly unrealistic.
And so what I want to read from your piece here, you say, how should Republicans respond?
What should we do about all this?
The essential thing, as I've tried to stress, is for Republicans to understand we are at war and then act accordingly.
Well, I want to get your thoughts on this.
Most baby boomers I talk to, they don't want to admit that because it might change their lifestyle.
Is there also a problem where it's like, no, no, no, I'm going to try to convince myself otherwise, regardless of the body of evidence and the destruction of the country around you?
I think it's true, but I think it's always true, right?
To get people really motivated to fight, that requires hardship, right?
That's difficult.
Most people don't want to confront that.
That, again, is why we need leaders.
And I don't think it's going to come from the upper classes.
It's going to come from your welder and Painter, right?
But again, I mean, Trump mobilized a huge army, right?
People are amazingly enthusiastic, but it needs direction.
They're the ones that are unhappy.
They're the ones I think that are willing to fight.
And they're the ones that could actually push this forward.
You say here, whoever the candidate is, he or she and other Republicans should tell the truth as Trump did.
They must rebut the lie, starting with the big lie.
America is racist.
And failing to rebut this lie, as virtually every Republican has, Republicans are conceding the basis premise of woke communism without saying any names.
But one of the largest think tanks in the country, Tom, came out and said last summer that America is systemically racist.
Do conservatives actually believe that?
Or is it that we just, we live in this kind of overly idealistic and utopian thing?
This is, I can make friends with the other side.
I'll just kind of be progressive conservatives.
This is also a temperamental issue, though, isn't it?
A lot of conservatives don't actually want to fight.
I think it's that.
And, you know, most people have to exist in a certain kind of social environment, and it's become taboo to say America isn't racist.
Well, that's why it's so important for politicians to do that.
Yeah, no, I agree.
I think that's really well put.
You say wartime, war is a time for assertions.
They must, as Trump began to do, defeat critical race theories.
You say, the military, businesses, and everywhere else.
We simply cannot teach our citizens, current and future, that their country is no good except to have a country for very long.
No country can survive on a diet of endless self-loathing.
We need to teach our citizens to love and cherish their country, and we need to stop wallowing in our sins of racism.
We are talking ourselves into ruin.
And I agree with all of this.
Are you starting to see any sort of movement that people are waking up to this?
And I'm just asking for you personally, how long have you believed we've been in a cold civil war?
When do you think that started?
And how long have you been saying this out loud?
Well, at least since before Trump's first term.
But I don't know how long before that.
But what I've always been concerned about, and I mean for the last 30 years, is breaking up the country by race, right?
We started out colorblind in the mid-60s, then we evolved to black separatism and pitting races against each other is just not going to end well.
So that's, you know, we just can't, you know, people say that diversity is America's greatest strength.
And they're referring to ethnic and racial diversity, but that's absolutely, excuse me, wrong.
Our greatest strength has been to transcend race.
And the one time we failed miserably, obviously, was the case of blacks.
So given our history and the history of the world, the idea that you're going to separate along racial and other group lines is just suicidal.
I can't, you know, I sit here sometimes and I think how stupid can we be?
This is the greatest country the world has ever seen.
We have given more prosperity, more freedom to more people than any other country in the world.
And yet we are gratuitously throwing it away.
This is about the biggest unforced era that I can imagine.
It's just absolutely criminal.
Well, and I think part of it is apathy.
Asserting The Opposite View 00:06:16
Part of it is complacency.
And part of it is also, as Christopher Caldwell writes beautifully in his book, Age of Entitlement, that we prioritized short-term gratification over actually preserving the country.
How much of this do you actually put on the leaders and the elites for the last couple decades who seemingly seem more interested in international trade policy and mass immigration and invading a country that most Americans couldn't identify than actually being able to understand the domestic threat and making sure we still have a nation?
Right.
You know, if I could bring this to the presidential next 2024, you know, this is, you know, this is what I'm looking for is someone who understands that foreign policy, our ability to defeat China, is not going to occur unless we have confidence in ourselves.
So if you take somebody like Mike Pompeo, I don't know him very well.
I'm having dinner with him shortly.
You know, my question to him is not foreign policy, which he's obviously very good at and talks about, but how does he understand America and its problems today?
I'm looking for someone who understands where we are and then of course would be an effective fighter.
I don't mean to keep pushing Trump and I think it's way too early, but I think of all the talked about presidential candidates, I think he understands the stakes.
Again, not always so great explaining it, but he understands the stakes and he has the courage.
You know, Trump would probably be the worst president we ever had in any other time, but this time.
But he has the attributes, the commitment to America, the courage, right?
The willingness to attack political correctness, which is really a defense of America.
And that's what we need.
It'd be nice if we could combine that with somebody, you know, with a little more strategy and forethought and ability to explain.
But he has the essential things.
And I do think that the people are with you and with this kind of idea that we're in this cold civil war.
I was just in Fargo, North Dakota, with 1,500 people were there, and they were locked in, but they've been betrayed by their political class.
I mean, their senators are negotiating multi-trillion dollar infrastructure packages behind their back.
Their governor has gone totally COVID crazy, and they're wanting someone to actually fight for them.
And that's why I called Donald Trump the bodyguard of Western civilization.
He was the only one that was willing to actually defend our civilization against threats.
And you don't hire a bodyguard for cocktail party conversation, right?
You don't hire a bodyguard to go sit at the state dinner.
You hire a bodyguard to protect you against the thugs that are going to try to burn down your family, your neighborhood, your home, or your business.
And Donald Trump was good at that.
And he brought the fight straight into the streets.
And too many Republicans miss that because, again, Tom, there's this idea that Republicans always resort to, well, we must be decent.
We must try to build bridges with the other side.
The other side doesn't want to build bridges with us.
They want to defeat us.
They want to run us over.
They want to eliminate us.
As I mentioned, I sat down with this group of conservatives.
They said, it's a mistake to try to personalize things.
We need to always take the high road.
What do you have to say, though, to some conservatives that say, that's not who we are?
We're not going to go down to the levels of the left.
We're always going to just kind of just do the right thing.
And if we lose, so be it.
Do the people that we point to in history as heroes, is that what they did?
Yeah, I mean, one, first of all, I agree with all that.
You know, one easy analogy is General Grant, right?
He was a drunkard and deficient in many number of ways, but he understood we had to fight and he fought, right?
And to your, this conservative group you're talking about, I would tell them just what you're saying.
It's all very nice in a world where we kind of all agree on what justice is.
But if we don't agree, then we have to employ very much different rhetoric and strategies.
Just like, again, I come back to the Civil War.
Between the North and the South, there were only two options.
We fought or we parted, right?
And I think, you know, here, parting, we're beginning to do.
Obviously, people are talking about it.
Obviously, it's a lot more difficult.
And I don't expect a hot war.
Who knows?
I mean, the riots were a hot war and they were promoted by the Democrats as well as promoted by the cultural business complex.
So I don't know exactly how you convince a group like that.
I think what you, again, comes back to leadership.
Somebody's got to explain that this really is a war.
And in a war, we abide by different rules.
You know, I frequently say America is not racist, period.
Now, do I think there's some racism in America?
Of course.
Are there racist?
But I don't want to concede that.
Right now is a time to assert in the same way they assert that America is systemically racist.
They have no evidence for that.
We need to assert the opposite.
So I agree completely with you.
As we said earlier, live and let live.
We'll lose to do it our way or else every time.
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Seeking Urgent Leadership Now 00:06:31
Well, and this is what people don't understand is that the live and let live attitude is fine if you're in the hills of Vermont with 50 people and you have a commune, until all of a sudden someone says, you know what?
No, I actually want to call the shots.
And that's what's happened here.
Is that or here's or here's another way to look at it.
Maybe you can do this, live and let live stuff.
If all the population generally agrees on an understanding of justice yes, and what a just society looks like.
But if all of a sudden it's happened now different understandings of justice, different understanding of a just society, then you got to fight.
And in fighting you don't necessarily compromise, because if you compromise you're likely to end up on the enemy's turf, and the Republicans seem to do that all the time.
You know when the moderate Democra Uh, Republicans agreed, have a commission to study January 6th.
I couldn't imagine a dumber thing.
And that reflects, I think, of a lack of appreciation of where we are and failure to understand exactly how these moderates, Liz Cheney, for example, how they're going to be used.
I mean, I think that was about the dumbest thing I can imagine.
And so I want to ask you, and it's a very obvious question to you, but it won't be to our listeners.
What happens if we lose?
Well, it depends.
It's not so obvious what happens if we lose.
And what exactly losing looks like, I don't know.
I think if you have, you know, the extreme case is that you have really a totalitarian regime.
Some people describe what we have as kind of a soft totalitarian regime.
But in a totalitarian regime, the state uses violence, right, to make, to control all aspects of public and private life.
So we can't have the traditional family.
We can't have religion because religion supports other values.
That's right.
Right.
Obviously, education has to be destroyed.
So all the institutions that support the American way of life will be destroyed or made woke.
Right.
So that's what people understand.
And it's necessary.
The woke comms have to do this to affect their agenda.
And so people should understand that we're going to denigrate and eliminate the traditional mother, father, family, religion, education, which we've mostly eliminated.
Period.
You end the peace, which I love with Abraham Lincoln, of whom I'm a massive fan of, because Lincoln was willing and he was prudent to do what was necessary to achieve something that was deemed impossible.
You write, perhaps one of the people who voted to keep Lincoln's name on that San Francisco high school remembered that Lincoln at 30 years old, unknown beyond central Illinois, wrote about an aspirational fantasy, which was, I suspect, inspired by his heroes, George Washington and Henry Clay.
If ever I feel worthy, Lincoln once said, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country deserted by all the world, and I standing up boldly and alone, hurling defiance at our victorious oppressors here without contemplating consequences.
I swear eternal fidelity to that just cause of the land of my life, my liberty, and my love.
But if after all we shall fail, be it so, we still have the proud consolation of saying to our consciousness, conscious, we never faltered.
Elaborate on Lincoln.
What can Lincoln teach us and also Churchill in times like this?
He can teach us who we are, what we stand for.
He can educate us on specific things like the founding, right?
But basically, what he did was he explained what we were fighting for, why it was necessary to die for this cause.
A cause, by the way, necessary not just to preserve freedom in America, but freedom around the world.
Lincoln understood if democracy died here, it died everywhere for a long, long while.
Now, Prue, you know, that quote that I used, which was supposed to be motivational, right?
We're looking for a Lincoln at the moment.
We're looking for someone with the sense of urgency that Lincoln communicates.
This is what a great souled man looks like.
Now, you said something that was very important, and that is Lincoln's prudence.
He not only knew what was right, he not only knew the end goal, he knew how to get there, right?
So he, he, it's kind of like Trump in a way that I think it's prudent to favor Trump at this moment because he fits, as I said before, the current circumstances.
He may not even be prudent himself, but it may be prudent to vote for a man who fits the circumstances.
So prudence is very, very key.
And as you no doubt learned from your Lincoln fellowship, you know, prudence is the central aspect of statesmanship.
And that is something that Churchill did about 100 years after Lincoln, not even about 80 years after Lincoln, in a totally different set of circumstances, but also eerily similar, where there was only a couple options, surrender or fight.
And Lincoln had a very similar set of options in front of him.
So in closing here, any specific marching orders for what people can do?
Because you talk a lot about generals here, right?
We need a Lincoln.
We need a Churchill.
We need a general.
What about the infantry?
What can just the someone that's at like, I agree, I want to do something.
Any specific action items?
Stop Apologizing When Canceled 00:02:06
Well, one of the things we might do is get on that critical race theory bandwagon.
It's already beginning to develop.
As you know, there's a bunch of national groups, not national political, but national not-for-profit groups who are organizing people running for school boards, local council, right?
That's aptly critical.
It's happening here in Maine, not so well.
Public may be.
People are actually protesting.
They're on the streets.
And hopefully, hopefully, that will inspire their leaders to participate because education is real complicated.
It's not just school boards, a lot of other moving players.
It needs support from above.
But we need, before we get that support, then we need the CRT pushback.
We need people standing up and when they're canceled to stop apologizing.
Most people, when they get canceled, they say, oh, I was terribly wrong.
I'll never do it again.
That's nonsense.
People in their own little way, standing up at a meeting and saying, this is nonsense, and then incurring the wrath or incurring the charges of racism.
This happens one by one.
And everybody can do a little thing.
Obviously, some people can do more.
I think that's really well said.
Everybody, winning the Cold Civil War.
Check it out.
We'll have it posted on charliekirk.com.
Thank you so much for the wonderful conversation.
Again, check out the Claremont Institute or AmericanMind.org.
It was terrific.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to make sure you're subscribed to all of our podcasts, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
God bless.
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