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April 20, 2022 - The Charlie Kirk Show
42:10
Finding the Political Will to Crush the Left and Save America
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Building American Institutions 00:01:40
Hey everybody, Tana Charlie Kirk Show.
One of the smartest people I know, Arthur Millick, from the Center for the American Way of Life from the wonderful Claremont Institute.
We talk about what does success look like?
What do we need to do to actually solve America's problems?
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Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
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With us right now is Arthur Millick, who is the executive director at the Center for the American Way of Life at the Claremont Institute.
Arthur, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Thank you very much, Charlie.
Reframing Conservative Strategy 00:04:44
So, Arthur, we've been kind of framing the conversation, if you will, right now, around how a majority of the political discourse is around things that are patently insane, the woke, if you will, and that there needs to be kind of a recentering around team reality, and that only conservatives can help make that consolidation possible.
What are your thoughts?
Well, I think that's true.
But, you know, when you look at some of the polling, some of which is honest, I suspect, and you see that there's actually strikingly little support for a lot of these very radical left-wing ideologies.
And then you wonder, well, how on earth is it that these remain the center conversations of the nation if there's so little public support?
And then you begin to think through how much money and institutional support there is for these causes and the immense disproportion in power on the left versus the right.
And then you start seeing how many conservatives over the last generation have been snoozing at the wheel.
They've been fighting on some very irrelevant issues.
One kind of trick that I like to think about is: if you implemented the full agenda of many of the think tanks on the mainstream right, nothing would change about America.
Not a thing.
It would all be a total domination of the left's institutions.
And so, what we have not thought through is trying to win back territory in real ways, trying to repeal the immense power of those institutions.
We like to do lawsuits.
That's fine.
But when we lose in the courts, we just say, oh, shucks, you know, we'll try again.
We'll try to do the same thing again.
Whereas when you look at the immense, as I keep saying, institutional power of the left, they own the universities, which we refuse to defund.
They own a lot of K-12.
These are American tax dollars that are being used against patriotic Americans.
It's an astonishing thing.
And nobody ever really does anything about it.
It's a really interesting and thought-provoking take, which is if the agenda, if the, you know, the wishes of the think tanks were actually implemented, would the country look any different at all?
And the answer is probably no.
I mean, we might have lower tax rates.
Arthur, please continue.
Yeah, sure.
Let me just keep kind of riffing on this a little bit.
Look, the universities in K-12 is low-hanging fruit.
And, you know, there have been some outrages, some actions on the K-12 level not long ago.
But when you start to look at the funding, you start to see that states, which is where I think the main game is, are funding a lot of these state-based institutions.
And, you know, we live in this dream world where we think that college improves everybody.
Everybody ought to go to college.
Well, in 1970, something like 20% of the college-age population went to college.
And today it's 40%.
Why?
Why should it be that number?
There are alternatives that states need to start thinking through about pipelines, internship type, apprenticeship type programs, where you can learn real hard skills that actually the country very much needs.
In fact, needs so much that the left says, well, that's why we have so much illegal immigration.
It's good for us because we can't fill those jobs.
The key is to start thinking creatively and seriously in a way that we haven't done regrettably in about a generation.
And there's a lot of very interesting things to be done once you reframe your mind and start thinking about the territory that the right holds, the institutions that it has to recapture at the level of the states, so as to build themselves up and make them resilient in a real way and not just in a, I wrote an op-ed way.
There's that.
Didn't we win?
That's such an important point of actually building institutions and building new things that actually matter.
Can you give any examples of where that is happening meaningfully of any good news or positive movement in that regard?
Well, the state that everybody is now looking at, which is Florida, what DeSantis has done is he has thought through this problem and realized that the real power, the real stakes for the future of the country are at the level of the states.
Biblical Responsible Investing 00:03:01
Now, he's not the only one, however.
He today announced that he's going to figure out what the pension fund in Florida can do to remove itself from Twitter in case Elon Musk doesn't win that perfectly legitimate battle.
But he wasn't the first one on this.
It was actually the state of West Virginia.
The treasurer said that he is removing something like $8 billion that's saved up that's managed by the state treasurer in the West Virginia Pension Fund, removing that money from BlackRock.
This is a first step that I hope continues to rev up.
This is a step that should lead to many states pooling all of that money, the pension plan money together and creating various EPFs to start protecting, bolstering, growing businesses that are patriotic.
That's such an important point.
And being unafraid to use political power towards a desired outcome.
And I want to explore that with you, Arthur, of what does success look like?
So many conservatives kind of just fumble over their words and they just say, corporate taxes.
They're like, okay, I got that.
But what is the country you actually want to live in?
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So, Arthur, you know, what does success look like then?
What is the country we actually want to live in?
How should we be able to articulate that?
Well, it's a good question.
Look, what we want, what we always have been, is a constitutional republic.
The question is, what precisely is in the way of that?
Pursuing Political Liberty 00:15:26
And there are many things in the way.
And what we're after is political liberty.
And as I said before, I don't see any other way than through the states, at least for now, that that can be safeguarded, protected, and expanded.
The right has simply defaulted.
It has not really fought a political fight in a way that it ought to have done, to the point where it has lost institutions that it thought it worshipped and it thought it owned forever.
Just as an example, I mean, you know this and your listeners know this.
It would have been unimaginable 20 years ago that the Fortune 500s, which the right made its main client, would have gone the other way and laughed in the face of the right after all of the innumerable endless benefits that were given to them.
It's also unimaginable that they would have lost the military, which is teetering, but its leadership right now has very clearly sided with the left on anti-racism, on identity politics.
These are very strong signals to the right that it has lost those elements of society.
It would be one thing if we were just at this point the normal nation and, you know, we were still basically 20 years ago where the parties disagreed in marginal ways.
But what the left now wants is, you know, a very different thing while it has the military in its hands, while it has, you know, a trillion dollars in of corporations in its hands.
The stakes are very different and it's a very dangerous situation.
Yeah.
And so I suppose this is the question that, you know, conservatives need to need to answer.
And this is something that I think attracts me to the candidacy of JD Vance, amongst many others, which is, are we willing to use political power to try and get our desired outcome, right?
Our desired outcome would be increased church attendance, a stronger family unit, middle-class wages going up, a happier country, right?
Lower suicide levels, less drug use.
These are outcomes that I think are necessary.
And one of the things that really bothers me about kind of some of the libertarian think tanks out there in Washington, D.C., and if you really drill them down, they will admit they are outcome agnostic.
They think that outcomes might be nice, but they're not willing to do what's necessary to get that outcome.
Instead, they would rather have an ideological framework that is quote unquote consistent, even if the country might be led to serfdom or some sort of oligarchy.
Can you help expand on that and riff on that a little bit?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, you know, these are deeply unpolitical, small-souled people that want, that are okay with tyranny, that are okay with losing the country so long as the divine doctrine, whatever they have in mind, is fulfilled.
And this is a big problem of how the professionalized right has structured itself over the last generation.
It's promoted these kinds of people rather than donors looking seriously under the hood and saying, what exactly am I spending my money on?
And then asking questions like, what do you think this op-ed actually accomplished?
You're losing institution after institution.
And when you win elections, it doesn't matter because the institutional power of the left is so overwhelming that your candidate, your congressman, your president can't do anything.
He'll just be basically like it was with Trump, steamrolled by the administrative state, stimmied, humiliated, leaked on, while the press carries the water.
Why have those institutions grown to such a degree while the right was allegedly watching out?
So it's partly a donor problem, a not looking under the hood, but it's partly just a living in a big city and not seeing that there are people out in the country suffering who are your constituents, who you should be fighting for, while you have your tidy, cared for, sinecure job.
But the last point is the most important one, which is that the left lives inside the mainstream right's heart in a way that is not true in the opposite way.
The right does not live in the left's heart.
The left has contempt for the right.
Sometimes it's scared.
Sometimes it puts on hysterics, but often it just has contempt.
Whereas the right deeply cares about what the left thinks, the right deeply, the professionalized right, anyways, deeply wants to be quoted in the New York Times.
That psychology has to change.
Why do you think that's the case?
That's always, I mean, I used to be that way, and now I'm not anymore.
You know, I was 19 years old and I'm not anymore.
I used to be like, wow, I'd really love to have like the affirmation of the Washington Post or whatever.
Why is that?
Yeah, well, look, it's a part of human psychology.
You know, you look up to who rules you.
And they all, by virtue of that, admit that those institutions actually do rule them.
And so they're satisfied with, you know, a five square inch sandbox where they can play and talk about occupational licensing reform as though that's nothing against that issue.
It's just not a civilizational level issue.
You can have that, and then nothing changes about the trajectory of the country.
Yeah.
And so that's, and that's, it's just also like a psychology thing, right?
Which is like, I don't, I think I could save the country without having to get my hands messy, right?
Is that there is, is there like a, is there a idealism that has plagued the conservative movement that somehow we're all just kind of in this, like not this continual Socratic debate with one another, when in reality, we're closer to political warfare?
Yeah, it's partly just the prejudices of the last generation that, you know, ideas win the day.
Well, sometimes they don't.
You know, if that was true, then a lot of the left ideas, which are, you know, being pounded into many minds, would lose.
So the thesis is so easily falsified, not seeing that that was true at one point in America when the majority of the country was unabashedly on the right and conservative.
And almost all of the major national institutions were that way too.
So it's not just a matter of debating.
It's not a matter of writing an op-ed.
It's a matter of controlling institutions or working to lessen the power of the left institutions.
And once you get into that paradigm of thinking, there are many, many things that can be done.
I have a question here that I think is really important.
And this is something that I get asked a lot, which is, you know, the duration of the fight.
For whatever reason, a lot of conservatives, you know, they kind of have this timetable that this can be over in a summer.
I'm sure you've experienced this phenomenon.
Is that true?
And I think we know the answer to that.
And if, of course, it's not, where does that phenomenon come from, where we just have to win one more election and we can get back to the country of our grandparents?
Yeah.
Well, when the left said, you know, a generation ago, you have to politicize everything, they did.
And they thought that we are going to take over this country, at least its major institutions and a lot of its populace, and we're going to own it.
And everybody understood that they, in their own lives, have marching orders, not just at the top, not just the institution builders, not just the members of Congress, not just the journalists, but even the day-to-day people who, you know, made it a symbol of their pride to hassle people on the right, just normal people minding their business.
So they have successfully politicized everything.
And the right in turn has done the opposite.
It's withdrawn.
It's felt reasonably that like this country may not belong to me anymore.
It's not a right-leaning country.
All the institutions are hostile.
So I am going to withdraw my kids from school.
I'm going to homeschool them.
I'm going to move away to the rurals.
And, you know, we'll try and hide there.
But that doesn't work.
You will not hide there.
Yes, that's right.
And so there needs to be a mindset shift.
And I think it was you that might have said on Tucker Carlson's show, and I wrote it down in one of my notebooks that I have where I hear things I like.
And correct me if I'm wrong, it wasn't you, but I'm 99% sure it was you that we just have now started to fight.
In some ways, the clock is now starting.
Can you elaborate on it?
I think that's really interesting.
Yes.
I don't know if it was me, but I agree with it.
Okay, good.
Well, it's you.
So why not?
So look, look, we haven't really fully fought.
What I keep talking about, and I hope at some point we'll get into it in more detail, on the level of the states, we haven't fought.
We haven't even done the kind of psychological rejection of many of the left's concepts that live in the right's mind, many of their moral doctrines that live in the right's mind.
I mean, when you go to a mainstream conservative think tank, you talk to people, they're to a great degree morally on the left side.
But which is why they just defend things that they're never attacked for.
It's easy to be that way.
You agree and it's safe.
Those are safe spaces.
So while the country is being ruled on your behalf, you have your little safe space there.
But the real issue is: look, I'll just give you an example.
I mean, so much federal money is spent on left-wing causes.
It's appropriated by Congress.
It's siphoned off through the executive agencies, and then it's given to NGOs or to school districts who indirectly give it to NGOs.
So, this is just one tiny example.
And I don't mean to bring this up as like you solve that, you solve the country, far from it.
But that's just one example of the extent to which there has been no fight.
You haven't even taken the money away.
I mean, the idea that you have right-leaning or deep-red states with these huge campuses that you, right-wing taxpayers, are funding so that they can teach your children to despise you, to despise the country.
The money hasn't even been taken away from them.
And then there is a whole assortment of laws that should be examined, should be thought through, that would help the middle class, help the working class, and would cut down on all of the many noxious things that the laws currently allow.
I'll just give you one example.
Why is it that you can just have mobs of antifa running around in states?
Why aren't there laws that say, no, you are assembling with a view to do violence?
Your openly declared group doctrine is to overthrow the U.S. government.
And this is allowed in the states.
So, when I say we have not begun to fight, I mean these types of things, and there are many, many of them.
We just live like browbeaten children within the morality, within the little sandbox allowed for us by the left.
So, it's a psychological liberation.
And once that takes place, you see the multitude of tools available to us.
So, yeah, that comes back down to this idea of the Overton window and what is permissible.
But let's talk about, you said something interesting to the left morally.
What do you mean by that?
What spectrum of moral kind of right and wrong are you articulating there?
Yeah, well, look, here's an easy, here's a very easy example.
Many on the right don't even believe in the equal rule of laws.
That's a foundational civilizational principle.
Without that, the country's through.
Without that, what you end up having is what the left is kind of building up now, which is, you know, some strange racial hierarchy that is used to evaluate qualifications for all sorts of jobs.
That's just in conflict with the rule of law.
And yet, or letting mobs get away with it, or letting the elites get away with it.
I mean, this is kind of one of the amazing things is that I haven't heard for any calls in Congress to investigate the very obvious, I mean, it's like known to everybody except journalists, abuses of power inside of our intel state.
No serious investigations taking place, but yet that's one of these rule of law issues that protects elites, protects people behind security clearances on the one hand, allows, on the other hand, mobs to get away with it.
And the middle class that is, you know, to a great degree right-leaning is crunched relentlessly by various laws, by their jobs being shipped away.
I mean, by so many things.
So this is what I mean by we haven't begun to fight.
This is what I mean by living within the left psychology that you can't even defend the most basic thing like the rule of laws.
I know that that's not a sexy issue.
I know that that's a boring issue.
But when you explain it the way that I did, you see everything is actually at stake on that.
Yeah, I mean, it's fundamental.
And so other moral questions, though, would be this idea of is there some form of absolute truth or is truth inherently subjective?
This is something that I encounter all the time.
For example, when I went to Berkeley recently, I kind of sat at a table and talked to students at length, and they were insistent that truth is merely an opinion.
It's just what you believe it to be.
Is that an important topic for us to be thinking about, Arthur, or is that just kind of a silly philosophical thought experiment on a college campus?
Does it have civilizational implications?
Yes, it does, obviously, but I'm of two minds on this.
Look, we are a liberal democracy, which is to say that these things are private.
However, there are public, obvious truths on which the nation was founded, like human equality, like natural rights.
And so it's those truths that I'm most concerned about.
And it's protecting them, it's fighting for them, and it's cutting off having the capacity to cut off the various forms of dissent from those things.
I mean, you know, half of the country has already dissented from the fact that we are equal in our natural rights.
The current teaching is, no, you are an oppressor group member.
Defending Natural Rights 00:02:40
That's exactly right.
Why should you have any rights?
You've used those rights only to harm people.
And maybe even psychologically or maybe biologically, I don't know at the end what they think on that.
There's some evil to you.
And if that's true, then you can't have the same amount of rights as these innocent and morally pure people.
That's right.
So.
Well, and so, but let me kind of go a step further though, but doesn't that rejection of natural rights, it happens earlier if you believe that there isn't anything objective at all?
I mean, that's an objective, like, that's a moral statement, right?
That is that there is an equality of what a human being is.
We can define that.
But if you believe that, for example, I heard this at Berkeley, which blew my mind.
I never knew Pier said, we don't know what a human being is, right?
A dog and a human being, no different.
One might have consciousness that's elevated.
So doesn't that, it starts earlier, doesn't it?
It's a philosophical question at some level.
Yeah.
Well, look, I think that there's a lot of mouthing off and showing off going on.
Just as one example, they say there's no absolute truth.
You know, they say that they're atheists.
They don't know what atheism means.
Atheism means everything is permissible.
And they don't live their lives that way.
They always believe in justice, in morality.
In fact, their whole lives are often devoted to justice.
And they would be deeply unsettled if you were to say, well, then justice doesn't exist.
And therefore, you know, it's really just the strongest that get the better of the weakest.
And right now, you're actually weak.
They don't think these things really.
I will say, though, Arthur, I agree.
If it was three, four years ago, what I saw, and it could be just a very inaccurate sample size, mind you, was there was a nihilism and a darkness of a philosophy that did articulate some of that, which threw me off.
But I think you're right.
I don't think most people on the left actually believe that.
I don't.
Because at some point, you must have a standard of what is justice.
Yeah, if anything, I think that they're pretending to be atheists to be sophisticated.
And just because you hate Christianity and this seems like the opposite of that.
But in reality, they're moral fanatics.
Yes.
But look, Charlie, the truth is, I think that the real game is about showing people the way rather than just confronting them on these big issues.
Exposing Moral Fanaticism 00:02:59
That comes later.
Right now, they are in a psychological state of total obstinacy, total hatred.
When you look at some of the just interestingly, you know, when you look at some of the Socratic, the Platonic dialogues, you see that Socrates doesn't fully engage with everybody.
Sometimes the conversation just trails off because he sees that this person can't be convinced and it's not worth his time.
Yeah, that's interesting.
So a lot of people will come our way, the skeptical, the open-minded, the open-hearted, once there is this play to create our own institutions and to have institutional power, because that's how things sell.
I mean, you can use this as an analogy to science.
Nobody knows.
I mean, few, very few people, like real scientists actually know, you know, some of the laws of physics.
But what you see is the works of physics.
And that's the focus, the works of what we're trying to do.
So the powerful institution.
Yeah.
Yeah, let's use some examples.
Are you encouraged by the rise of Rumble, for example, or University of Austin, this new university that's coming?
Or is that just kind of thrilling on the edges?
Are you talking more kind of like a center right Marshall plan that's going to require hundreds of billions of dollars?
Like let's talk scale, right?
So let's get less abstract and more concrete.
What does kind of building your own institutions look like?
Yeah.
So you're right.
It's a very important correction that you make to the vagueness of that word.
Because, you know, in America, we say that the family is an institution and also that universities are institutions.
It's like that's such a difference.
It's like, what on earth does that mean?
What I'm actually talking about are powerful, wealthy assets that are right-leaning, that are in the states, and that are assisted by the states.
So let me give you an example of what I have in mind.
I think that DeSantis should nominate basically some kind of like private equity czar who should go to blue states, scout out real productive capacity and help those companies move to Florida.
I don't mean moving, you know, a wing of Goldman to Florida.
I don't wish that on Florida.
I'm talking about like real manufacturing, real value creation, and bringing those to red states, bulking up red states.
So what I'm getting at is that I think that there is this two-fold strategy on the level of the states.
Number one is a policy of de-wokification.
That means getting rid of all of the funding that goes to these things, getting rid of, thereby getting rid of those institutions.
It also means doing laws like some of the ones that DeSantis has passed.
De-Wokification and Growth 00:02:15
It's obvious that states should be in control of their education system.
It's like the lesson number one of constitutional governance.
At the same time, it means building up.
It means attracting people.
I think that red state governors should start openly making plays for citizens to move there.
Not this tacit thing that has happened during COVID, which has been awesome.
But I mean, speaking to American citizens, you're a red person trapped in a blue state.
Yeah, but do you want the San Francisco person to move to Dallas?
Is that what we want?
No.
No, I don't.
But I also think that there are ways to slow that down.
Social policy being one of them.
When they see pro-life laws, it's a repellent.
Absolutely.
And that's how you got to think of them.
Prayer in school.
All of the laws that DeSantis is working on right now on LGBTQ issues, those things look, and you know, those are our fellow citizens, and they don't want to live in such a place where their kids are educated in that way, but we do.
And so they can stay in New York, they can stay in San Francisco, they can stay with their mobs, and that's fine.
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Self-Governance and Bitcoin 00:09:21
The question will be then: outside of the kind of governmental action, there does have to be a private sector institution buildup, right?
Or you're saying that the government should aid and assist that alongside kind of the this is one of the things that I think, um, and I'd love your take on it, that is attractive and is exciting about Elon Musk's potential takeover of Twitter, right?
Um, look, I don't want to live in a country where an oligarch has to save us to defend Western values, but I want to win, and therefore, my commitment to winning, I'm all for it.
Can you help unpack that?
Yeah, well, no, I mean, state assistance, um, uh, property tax assistance, subsidy assistance that would help create the essential infrastructure that states need to wean themselves off of the woke regime that rules a major part of America.
So, for example, uh, there should be protections for state banking systems, there need to be banks that are there, there need to be channels of communications that are assisted by the states.
So, why doesn't Texas and Florida have its own servers when companies, people are taken offline?
Um, these are just two examples.
Um, but you see, the key is to start thinking in these ways, to start thinking about de-wokification, uh, and to start building up our own infrastructures in those states.
I'll give you one last thing on this.
Look, this is a bit of a controversial take.
Maybe you and I disagree, maybe some of your listeners will disagree, but I think that what happened with the Canada truckers and Bitcoin should be a wake-up call.
That I don't understand the technical side well enough, I have my hunches, but it in my mind has proven that this escape valve that everybody hoped would get you out of the system once and for all-untouchable money that is yours in perpetuity.
Turns out it doesn't stand up well to state power.
You need this is one of our side.
You know, you asked me a moment ago, well, can we solve some of these problems in a summer?
That's the problem.
This is how the right thinks.
Yeah, that's right.
Is one of those things like we found our safety valve, we found our silver bullet, it's going to get out of it.
It's like, no, you need real banking systems.
And I don't know enough about the technology of Bitcoin to disagree the Bitcoin defenders, of whom some are your Claremont uh colleagues, by the way.
Absolutely, I think it's James Poulos, if I'm not mistaken, is a huge advocate of Bitcoin, and he knows it better than I do.
But I think you're right, and I also would say, in its ideal, Bitcoin probably had that, but we've allowed the government into the Bitcoin universe by having to declare cryptocurrency on tax forms and all these things.
They're more like crypto assets.
But there is something in the psychology of a conservative patriot, and I think it's rooted in our nostalgia, which can be healthy.
That since you lived it, you think it can be easily redone.
Like, people think that the past can be easily revisited in the future is more difficult, if that makes sense.
It's just part of human psychology because it's a memory, therefore, you think you can go back to it.
They're like, oh, yeah, just one summer.
I mean, Trump can get us back to how the country was in 1980.
Like, come on.
Actually, you're like, yeah, that's actually hard.
It's harder to go to 1980 than it is to go to 2030, right?
Or wherever they want to lead us.
It's more likely things will actually unfold than go back to how they were.
There's a psychological component to that.
But building new stuff is hard.
Conservatives would much rather be laissez-faire about it.
Let the market figure it out and just kind of let the chips fall where they may.
Yeah.
And Trump himself was a romantic on this too.
You know, all the generals, because they're all normal patriots, like the generals that I grew up seeing when I was a boy, they're all the same.
There's no path back.
There's only forward.
And forward means creating these kinds of genuine bulwarks, not the bulwark of an op-ed, but a real bulwark that is institutional that gives you independence.
You're talking about power.
You're talking about power is what you're talking about: we must have the ability to be self-governed.
And look, this is a provocative view for a conservative.
I believe in it 100%, by the way.
And this is why you and I hit it off: is that you are admitting that we are in the midst of a power struggle.
Conservatives don't like admitting that, right?
It's a postmodern view.
It's built into kind of the Nietzschean belief of struggle.
Like basically, you're going to have one person stronger than the other.
And like, we're kind of like, yeah, we agree.
We don't want to live in that country.
I want speech to be supreme.
I want dialogue to be the way we solve things.
But if it comes down to power struggles, we're going to win and we're not going to be taken by surprise.
Well, yes, but I wouldn't say it's Nietzschean just because it's in the service of political liberty.
What I'm proposing is that there's no way but this.
There are no silver bullets.
There's no dreaming back a past America.
It still exists in pockets.
And so what I'm asking is to reclaim those pockets, to make them fully yours and to expand them.
That's the only way that this works.
It's what the left did so successfully.
I mean, you have to marvel at the left.
You know, you have to just marvel at some of what people.
Yeah, for sure.
But the problem people have, though, is the tension between their ideology and what needs to be done.
Because you said some things that are thought crimes, Arthur.
You just violated the Ten Commandments.
You talked about subsidies and you talked about state power.
So how do they reconcile that, right?
So they say it's in the service of political liberty.
Do the ends justify the means?
Are we all Machiavellians?
Now, like, walk us through that.
It's interesting.
Yeah.
Well, look, as I said before, look at what has happened over the past 40 years.
Look at how every single institution was taken from the right.
Look at now what the ideology is that is being used to govern those institutions and govern the public.
It is an ideology that basically says that There is a sacred, unfalsifiable class of citizens who cannot be contradicted, who to whom all things should be given.
And then there's the oppressor class who has to be punished at every turn, who has to be punished through the laws, who has to be humiliated, who has to be crushed because he illegitimately ruled this country.
When that's the dynamic, if you're not struggling for political liberty by understanding that you cannot have political liberty without powerful institutions on your side, then you are just living in a romantic fantasy and you will lose.
And that is exactly where most conservatives live: a romantic fantasy of a country that no longer exists.
And I want to get back to that place.
I want to get back to a place where the better argument wins.
I grew up in that country.
It's dead.
And it's going to require us to be more powerful to be able to defeat these people.
And I believe, you know, if you want to, if you want to broker a détente, if you want to broker a ceasefire, if you have servers, banking systems, schools, then all of a sudden, what can they do to you?
Then all of a sudden, they might all of a sudden take you more seriously.
Final thoughts?
That is exactly it, Charlie.
That the right will never be taken seriously until it has these things.
And that's how some kind of, if it's possible, that is how some kind of return to normalcy takes place.
Yes, that's exactly right.
And the right never looks, you know, they're constantly being interviewed with all these history books behind them.
And, you know, they claim to have read them.
And I take their word for it.
And if they really did, then they would know that a lot of incredible countries have fallen in the past.
And they think somehow that can't happen here, but it can.
And the only thing that prevents it is smart people who think through the actual politics of this.
Not the talking for the sake of, you know, one little clip because you're in Congress and all the cameras are on you or on the campaign trail, but like a real single-minded focus on building up these institutions and peeling back the other ones.
That's how you get to some kind of return to normalcy ceasefire.
And that's what will save us.
Arthur, thank you so much for joining us.
Claremont Institute, Center for American Way of Life, Arthur Millick.
Thank you so much.
We'll have to have you back on.
Thank you.
Thank you, Charlie.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.
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God bless.
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