The Superiority of July 4th with Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College
Charlie welcomes the president of Hillsdale College, Dr. Larry Arnn, who is also one of the preeminent scholars of American history and the Founding Fathers. Charlie and Dr. Arnn sit down for a deep dive into the significance of America's birthday, July 4th, when the Founders proclaimed to the world a series of universal truths about the life and liberty of man, and pledged that "solemn acts of devotion" would be performed for "from this time forward." Why did these brave patriots pledge "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor" on this great day in 1776? As pride in America reaches historic lows, allow Dr. Arnn to remind you of our great inheritance. Next up, Charlie welcomes Pedro Gonzalez, associate editor of Chronicles Magazine and whose writings are also available at contra.substack.com. "Friday thought crimes with Pedro" explores a recent, viral clip from current Biden administration official and Blackrock alum, Brian Deese, claiming that Americans must continue to sacrifice in the name of the international liberal world order. Pedro recounts the promises of neoliberalism, how those promises have short changed the American experiment and everyday citizens, and why the ideological underpinnings of this ideology are being manipulated to great effect by those in power in Washington. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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TurningPointUSA and College Chapters00:03:09
Hey, everybody.
Happy Saturday.
Conversation with the great Larry Arn, president of Hillsdale College, about July 4th and its historical significance.
Check out all things Hillsdale, charlieforhillsdale.com.
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Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
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I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
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We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
The president of the best college in America, Hillsdale College, Dr. Larry Arn.
Dr. Arn, welcome back to the program.
Good to be with you, Charlie.
And aren't you a phenomenon?
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
And I have now completed half of the Hillsdale online courses.
And the problem is you keep on adding to them.
So I have to keep on taking more to keep on saying that I'm at half.
So before we get started, how are things at Hillsdale College?
It seems as if it's just boomtown USA.
Can't open enough charter schools, can't let enough kids.
How are things at Hillsdale?
Yeah, they're thriving.
There's not a house to buy in Hillsdale, Michigan.
It's a land rush here now.
Hillsdale Online Course Progress00:03:19
And people are trying to get away from these cities and these bad schools.
And a lot of people want to be around the college.
And we can't beat them off with the stick.
Applications have become so important that I did an event with Governor Lee of Tennessee.
And for the first time, I've been the victim of a hidden camera.
So they tried the James O'Keefe tactic, I guess you could say.
They did, yeah.
Yeah, and it just happened yesterday, so I don't really know.
I don't care.
But Kevin Williamson of the National Review said, you know, everything they quote him saying, he says that all the time in public.
And this is a mark of a, let's say, a wise man.
He's the same in private as he is in public.
And so not much to hide.
And I know you're opening a bunch of charter schools in Tennessee.
That's probably why they're so nervous.
The teachers.
Yeah, it attacks.
You know, if you just think, if you study politics, as you are doing now, avidly, you'll find out that politics can be understood.
It's a coherent thing.
It proceeds according to principles in every country, by the way, all through history.
And it has forms.
that are related to those principles.
And so we have the old principles and they give rise to the Constitution of the United States.
And I'll show today that that's even outlined in the Declaration of Independence.
But we have new principles and new forms.
And the new form is the bureaucratic form.
And that means experts make the rules in a central place.
And that activity concerns, consumes a large part of the gross domestic product of the country.
And education is the heart of it.
You know, more than half of every state's budget is in the public schools.
And that means, you know, and then the federal part is not very big as federal spending goes, but it's controlling it.
And so it's, you know, if you're a poor governor of a state where the people want the schools to get better, you've got to go through them.
And then they generate the teachers' union and other public employee unions are much the largest contributors to left-wing causes.
And so there you go.
You've got now a interest, a principle, that is to say, experts can rule better than ordinary people, even their own lives.
And you've got an institution.
You've got expertise.
Studies show.
Every time you read that, whatever follows is bound to be false.
And that's something that's interesting.
And then one of the online courses that I took for Hillsdale, actually several of them, talk about the progressive era and Woodrow Wilson, who tried to create almost this new founding and was almost criticizing the founding fathers.
Not almost, but was criticizing the founding fathers for not being as enlightened as Professor Wilson.
Founding Fathers vs Wilson00:10:12
Let's talk about what the Founding Fathers argued.
And I want to just plug your book, The Founder's Key.
I was actually just rereading it the other night in anticipation of this.
And what I love about the book and the speeches you give about the book, the lectures, is that you're refuting a common talking point that has really is prevailing over academia, which is there were kind of two founding events.
And one was kind of more liberal in nature and one was more conservative.
And they're just separate.
And the Declaration, you know, it was just founding fathers saying that they don't want to be part of Britain anymore, but the Constitution fixed a lot of that.
And they were kind of these separate deals.
You make the argument that they're actually tied together, that they make claims about the universality of humanity.
Can you talk about that?
I find it to be so interesting.
Yeah, you know, there's a liberal scholarship 80 years old now.
And it says that the Constitution is a reaction against the radicalism of the Declaration of Independence.
And the Constitution is a different kind of thing from the Declaration.
It is.
It has to be, too, because in our lives, in your life and my life, we have purposes we want to accomplish.
That's one thing.
And we have ways of going about it.
And we try to adapt the ways to the purposes.
But the ways are different from the purposes.
You know, you're a burgeoning young conservative scholar and personality and influencer, but your show is cameras and microphones.
Anyway, so for there to be a founding and it to be coherent, all of that has to be covered.
And it actually gets covered in both documents, in the Declaration and the Constitution, although the weight is different between the two.
In the Declaration of Independence, there are three parts.
The first part is very beautiful and also emphatically universal.
And the middle part is 30 paragraphs, 29 paragraphs of details.
But if you just read those details backwards, if you just say all the stuff the king has done that justify the revolution, then you would need a constitution that forbids those things.
And the Constitution does forbid those things.
They group into the main features of the Constitution, which are representation, separation of powers, and limited government.
And those three things give the Constitution its structure.
And it's a very coherent document.
But the point is, absent such a Constitution, you would be justified in rebelling.
And that's what the Declaration says.
And, you know, the first part, I mean, like the best celebration you could make for the Declaration of Independence is to study it for an hour because it's an extremely interesting document.
It begins purely universally when in the course of human events, right, that means any time, it becomes necessary for one people, that means any people, to dissolve the political bands that have connected them with other and to assume among the powers of the earth a separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them.
Those laws are, if they exist at all, they are simply eternal and universal.
And it's the name of those that the document begins.
And then the next paragraph is about some self-evident truths that establish our right, any people's right, remember, not just ours, any people's right to choose the government, consent to it, and get rid of it if it goes bad.
And that's, you know, that's a, that's nothing to do in particular with the American people, any people, they say.
And then this middle part where they talk about the bad stuff the king has done, which condemnation supply the main structure of the later Constitution.
And then at the end, it's just gorgeous.
I mean, it's, and so you have to picture the situation.
Understanding history means being able to do that.
And this is 2 million people along the eastern seaboard.
They didn't have an army to speak of, right?
They were all, they found out they were all the army in a way, but it wasn't organized.
There was nobody in America who had ever moved a large body of troops from one place to another.
And that's one of the reasons why Washington lost lots of battles, especially early in the war.
They were just incompetent.
They never tried it before.
And so it's in that situation.
And they're writing to the king of England an act of explicit treason.
And they take that very seriously.
And it becomes, it's very universal right at the beginning.
But at the end, it's a mixture of the universal and the particular.
It mentions that they're appealing to the supreme judge of the world.
Supreme and judge are capitalized.
That means God, right?
It's one of four places where God appears in the Declaration of Independence.
That's him as the judge.
He also appears as the author of the laws of nature and nature's God.
He appears as divine providence, that's the executive branch.
And he appears as the creator, which is like a founder.
And then they make the particular declaration that is the act of treason.
We are and of right ought to be free and independent states.
And then they make a personal commitment, and that's in the last sentence.
And I always think that's just riveting.
You know, you can go to the room where they sat when they voted this, you know, and there were warrants out for their arrest already.
And the warrants were not to be served by a policeman.
They didn't have them.
There was a general with an army who was looking for them.
And if he had found any of these ones, and he did find many people, they were going to take them into custody in a military force and they were going to send them back to England, a trip of two months, and they were going to be tried by strangers for their lives, right?
And they know that when they're in the room and they write, and for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, the last mentioned of God, and the last universal statement, we mutually pledge to each other, to each other.
That means Thomas Jefferson is pledging to John Adams and vice versa.
And that means everybody who was there who signed that document placed their reputation in the hands of everybody else there.
Mutually pledged to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, which is all that a person's got to give.
And so step outside, you know, the debate about this thing today, because, you know, it's condemned, right?
Some of them were slaveholders.
That's a fact.
Every one of them who was a slaveholder condemned the practice of slavery.
And that means they were not hypocrites.
They were sinners, we all are, but they were not hypocrites.
And they inherited this institution and they got rid of it, 60% of the union, within 20 years.
And then it got stubborn, but that's a longer story.
A lot of people died to put an end to it.
So, yeah, this is a very beautiful document and it's worth studying.
And if you study it and see its greatness, then you can follow John Adams' advice about how to celebrate it.
On the 3rd of July, it took three days to get the Declaration of Independence ratified.
The second, third, and fourth.
You know, they had to agree on the first, and then they had to type it up and get it set in type.
And then they had to meet again and vote on it.
And then they had to meet a second time.
And they did that on the fourth.
And that's why we celebrate the fourth.
But Adams is anticipating.
On the 3rd of July, he wrote to his wonderful wife, you know, you and I, Charlie, both married above ourselves.
That's right.
So did John Adams.
He's writing to Abigail, he says.
I am apt to believe that it will be that the 2nd of July, turned out the 4th, will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.
It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.
It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, with games, with sports, with guns.
I think it says cannons too.
Yeah.
Yeah, with balls.
Can't read this, bonfires and illuminations from one end of the continent to the other from this time forward, forevermore.
Now, that's another testimony that they knew they were doing something wonderfully significant.
America as Last Best Hope00:04:10
And you have to remember, they didn't have any idea how it was going to work out.
And, you know, the war was very hard and mostly it went badly.
And, you know, until, what, nine years later, they signed a peace.
But they, they, and, you know, they didn't know.
They're very ambitious.
You know, George Washington names his army the Continental Army.
But at that time, and until about 1870, when Lewis and Clark came back, at that in 1776, nobody had ever been across the continent back.
They were just guessing how big it was or what was even out there.
You know, and they and they thought, this is going to be a great republic of liberty, and it's going to be the biggest.
And they just wanted that.
And they thought, for good reason, that if it was big and strong, it could defend the liberties of the people who live in it.
So yeah, it's a and see, another thing is this can never happen again.
I mean, other people, of course, can adopt their Declaration of Independence.
Some have.
But there isn't any new world left.
And what happened in the founding of America is just one of the most significant things in history.
And I'm talking about by objective standards, right?
Nothing like this, right?
There was this migration from Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.
And the migration is a bunch of people who are mostly from Europe.
They're mostly Christians.
They bring with them Western civilization.
But they didn't bring anything else.
They didn't bring titles of nobility.
They didn't bring structures.
They had to figure all that out once they got here.
And the principles by which they did it were developed as they went.
The Declaration of Cyprus comes 150 years after the first English settlement.
And that means in that 150 years, they figured out a lot of things.
What they did, you know, when they like Jamestown and Plymouth Rock were early ones, and they were mostly Calvinist.
And they came here and they set up institutions of religious conformity.
They thought it's a bit enforced.
They thought it's a big old place.
And therefore, we can each have our community and we can all be in the same church.
And we can make everybody go.
But they found out after a while, that had never really been tried before.
They found out after a while, it doesn't matter how big it was, it wasn't big enough to make that work.
Because, as you know, Christians are like what Churchill said about the Jews.
Wherever there are three Jews, there are two prime ministers and one leader of the opposition.
So that's well said.
You know, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, who signed this document, very great man.
He is one of the innovators to say, look, come and worship as you wish, right?
And I think that's the reason why Christianity has thrived even up to the current day compared to the continent to Europe, that is.
And so that, you know, there's a bunch of marvels happening here.
And the point is, not only are they unprecedented, it's also true in this way they can never happen again.
And that's what gave rise to the saying that Jefferson said and Lincoln repeated: America is the last best hope of mankind on earth.
You know, I hope for a great revolution in China because there'll never be peace in the world while there are big tyrannies.
And we can't fix that by our own might and effort.
Nation Captured by Ideology00:15:13
They have to fix it.
But I pray they do.
But they won't be like us, even if they do, because they're not starting from that.
They're very old.
They have all these structures.
And so there, you know, the 4th of July is the greatest American holiday.
And good reason for that.
You know, you said something once that really moved me where you said, the fact we have a birthday is a big deal.
What is China's birthday?
You could approximate somewhere within it, maybe a thousand years, Great Britain's, maybe within a couple hundred years.
But the fact we have a day where we didn't stumble into existence, but we were summoned into existence, that's a big deal.
So I want to ask you, and be respectful of your time, Dr. Arne.
What do you believe as a scholar of the Declaration of the Constitution are the lessons we now need to implement today?
We're in crisis.
Our country is more fragile than ever.
The latest poll shows that only 39% of Americans are proud of their country in its current form.
I'm definitely proud to be an American, but it's hard for me to be over the top excited about where we are currently.
What can we learn from the Declaration and apply it to our troubles and our difficulties today?
I focus more and more in these times on this.
There are two statements: one from Tocqueville and one from James Madison.
Tocqueville says that America is unique.
He comes in 1832.
He was a French aristocrat.
France was the first centralized nation state.
And he says there's more government in America than in France.
It's just different because it's mostly local and voluntary.
And that means, you know, in the management of Hillsdale College, I don't believe in rules.
I believe in goals.
And, you know, because goals, we all adopt them and then everybody can figure out how to serve them.
And the rules need to be very few and they need to be boilable down to be good.
And just think what bureaucratic government is like.
Think of the rules that govern the schools, for example.
Nobody can read them.
Nobody does.
But they can be used.
Whenever there's a dispute, the person who gets to interpret the rules.
Exactly right.
More laws, the less justice, as Cicero would say.
Madison said something similar, too.
The second thing is men are not angels, and angels do not govern men.
And that doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter then if Anthony Fauci, to name an example, has been there for 400 years and wrote the textbook on epidemiology, which he did.
Give him power.
He's just like the rest of us.
And therefore, there's no solution to the human problem from empowering experts.
Those two things, and those are the clearest examples of the prudence of the American Revolution.
And if we followed those two, we'd be on the road back.
That is very well said.
And they talked about things that are always true.
And I just want to make a final plug.
Everyone can go to charlie4hillsdale.com to go on the journey of discovery of what that means.
Take the online courses.
Take Dr. Arn's Aristotle course, the Constitution 101 course, the intro to the Constitution.
Some of the courses are pretty tough and it takes work.
You're not just going to breeze through them.
You got to take notes.
You got to take the quizzes, but it's worth it.
Any closing thoughts, Dr. Arne?
Yeah, you're a really great student.
He texts me every time he gets a certificate for completing.
Because I'm proud of it.
And I mean that because you feel like you're making progress in your intellectual and spiritual development.
So it's something that I'm proud of.
Proud of you, Charlie.
I've been watching you grow up for a while now.
Well, thank you.
And you continue to play a big role in that.
So, Dr. Arne, have a wonderful Independence Day and thanks for your comments.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Very much.
Joining us right now is Pedro Gonzalez from Chronicles Magazine.
We have him on Fridays to say controversial things.
So people over the weekend have something to listen to.
Pedro, welcome back to the program.
Charlie, thanks for having me back.
They shouldn't be controversial, actually, when you think about it.
No.
No, not at all.
So I'm going to play a piece of tape here.
It's cut 148, and I want to get your response to it about the liberal world order, cut 148.
Sustainable.
What do you say to those families who say, listen, we can't afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years.
This is just not sustainable.
What we heard from the president today was a clear articulation of the stakes.
This is about the future of the liberal world order, and we have to stand firm.
Your thoughts, Pedro?
What is the liberal world order?
If I have to choose between the liberal world order and bread and the ability to feed my family, then I'm sorry that I'm going to have to incinerate a liberal world order if that's what's standing between me and being able to provide for and take care of my family.
But I think the funniest thing about that is it's a kind of admission that all of this is actually on purpose.
It's not a set of circumstances that the Biden administration, that the people in charge of this country just couldn't have foreseen or couldn't have predicted.
It's a kind of implicit admission that actually this is all controlled and you have to suffer through it because that's what it takes to preserve this abstraction, this liberal world order, whatever that means.
And I mean, in my mind, what comes to mind is the United States, the federal government of the United States subsidizing the rape of Afghan boys through our so-called allies over there, basically forcing American taxpayers to subsidize that, right?
I mean, name your atrocity that the federal government does without your knowledge, without your consent, with your money, and sometimes with your blood.
And that, in my mind, is the liberal world order.
And so it seems to go unchecked.
Let's play that Biden clip as well, but it's bipartisan as well, isn't it, though, Pedro?
That's what's interesting.
And I think we could change it as it's more kind of the neoliberal world order, was what they're talking about, which is open borders, no sovereignty, uniformed language, one currency.
It is really kind of this World Economic Forum, World Health Assembly against the idea of a sovereign nation.
Now let's play Joe Biden, who happened to be with John Kasich, by the way, on this very topic in 2017.
This breaking down of the international and national norms is the glue that holds the liberal world order together and holds together our system.
That is what is being attacked now.
And that's what's most dangerous.
That's him and John Kasich agreeing as John Kasich cuts lettuce.
When John Kasich talks, he's always cutting lettuce.
So let me ask you a question, Pedro.
Actually, let's go back into some history here.
Post-World War II, this kind of idea of a neoliberal world was created.
What is that?
What were the promises of neoliberalism?
And what were the catastrophic results?
Well, I think an important thing to understand is the unipolar moment, right?
So basically, and this is important because NATO is very prominent right now, right?
I mean, NATO is the thing, unfortunately, on everyone's mind right now because of this war between Russia and Ukraine that NATO seems to be provoking and benefiting from.
And of course, NATO is led by the United States.
So basically, NATO was created by Western nations and led from the beginning by the United States to do primarily one thing, which was act as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.
Yes.
And the Soviet Union, as an ideological nation, a nation that was premised on ideas, viewed every other government, every other non-communist government as an existential threat to itself.
Any state that did not share its ideas, its presuppositions, its beliefs, was a threat, right?
So it was on a kind of maximal war footing with the entire world constantly trying to replicate itself, to influence the world, to basically spread itself and reproduce itself all over, right?
So that, I mean, there's no debate that that is what the Soviet Union was.
But the problem was, or I should say the historical irony of this is that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States itself emerged as a kind of ideological nation itself.
In other words, the United States kind of became the thing that it was fighting.
It became a kind of version, a bizarre version of the Soviet Union that instead of Marxist-Leninism, it's promoting transgenderism and LGBTQ rights.
I don't know what that means and like homosexuality all around the world.
This is the, again, the historical irony of the story of the Cold War is that the United States kind of became what it set out to fight.
And sometimes there are admissions of this.
Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called, yeah, The End of History.
That's right.
And he famously broke with neoconservatives because he viewed neoconservatives as basically Leninists in the United States and the other side of the coin of neoliberalism.
But Fukuyama famously said that these Leninists had emerged first as tragedy in the Soviet Union as Bolsheviks and now as farce again in the United States as neoconservatives.
And so rooted in neoliberalism is a couple promises that I once believed because I was naive and young.
And it was also so dominant, Pedro, in the conservative movement in 2012, 13, 14 for kind of new people that were entering into it, which is that all international trade is good no matter what, that any trade barriers will actually make you go into recession and immediate depression, that there really isn't a better thing about your nation.
You could believe in American exceptionalism, but you only believe in American exceptionalism because of our ability to espouse neoliberal ideas.
That was the only type of American exceptionalism that was okay.
For example, there was kind of talking points on the right that says, you know, America is such a great country because we're more tolerant than other countries.
And of course, if we read Aristotle, tolerance and apathy are the two dying signs of a society.
And so it's also open borders is a big part of neoliberalism.
And there's also another one, which is who are we to judge?
That's a big part of neoliberalism, right?
And it's a lie, obviously, because the people doing the judging are the ones telling you not to judge, but it's kind of a live and let live phenomenon, right?
Which is, you do you, and I do me, which of course is nice.
It sounds good until the person on the other side wants to tell you how to live a certain way, which is inevitable.
Can you talk about the ideological underpinnings of this quote liberal world order that now the Biden regime is saying we must suffer high gas prices, food shortages, and breadlines potentially to execute the finishing touches of that?
Help me through that.
Yeah, well, I think the key thing here is that because we're talking about ideology, that means it's not really connected to reality.
So, I mean, if you look at the United States right now, let's focus on the military.
Right now, the military is having a really difficult time finding bodies to fill roles.
Recruitment is at some historic lows right now, which is why they're relaxing all of these standards to get people where they need to be in the military, right?
At the same time that that's happening, you've got these neoliberal ideologues talking about how the United States needs to prepare for a simultaneous war with both Russia and China.
I mean, that is insane.
But you can read this article in Foreign Policy Magazine by Matthew Kroenig, who's saying that the United States has to be ready to defeat Russia and China in overlapping timeframes.
There is, I don't know anyone who actually has their feet on the ground and looks around with open eyes and sees that they think that that's possible or that we should do that.
I mean, Kroenig is saying not only can we, we should.
That, again, ideology is extremely dangerous because it has nothing to do with reality.
And so, yes, if you're an ideologue, it's perfectly normal to say, well, a few million Americans are going to have to starve or lose their homes or not be able to support their families.
That's the price that we have to pay to support this ideology.
And I think this is the consistent thing with any ideology, is that it subordinates reality, the facts on the ground to the idea.
I mean, again, look at the Soviet Union, this kind of denialism all the way up to the end among the ruling class, right?
That everything's fine.
At the same time, that in fact, everything is crumbling.
And I think, again, the United States is this kind of bizarro version of the Soviet Union with this or under the spell of the liberal world order, the neoliberalism ideology, whatever you want to call it.
People give different names.
But I think it's the same kind of thing.
And you're seeing this kind of come to a screeching halt and the cracks starting to emerge in this.
Yeah, and that's such a good point, which is at its core, it is about denial of material reality, whether it be biological reality, geopolitical reality, human reality.
And Alexander Solshenitsyn, who actually helped take down the Soviet Union, he warned America about hyper-ideological movements.
And so Alexander Solzhenitsyn actually said the Soviet Union became what it did thanks to ideology.
That was his quote.
But then what was so interesting is Solshenitsyn came and gave the Harvard commencement address, I think in 1980 or 81.
We actually read it in our Claremont deal that we did last summer.
It was so interesting is that he was admonishing the West.
He's like, you guys think you're better than the Soviet Union?
That's right.
You have your own kind of messenger RNA equivalent of a virus of ideology that will capture all of you guys.
And Harvard in 1978.
And Harvard, they're like, whoa, how dare you say that?
Who are you to say, you gulag person?
It's like, okay, well, you guys loved him until he called you out.
And boy, was he right.
No, it was an extremely pessimistic speech.
It was an extremely pessimistic speech.
I think for Harvard, these young optimistic people, it was shocking for them.
But I think we'll come back to an important point about what happens if you believe that your nation is an ideological one and how that connects everything else.
What do you do when you recognize or realize you're living in a nation captured by ideology?
Is that correct?
Yeah.
So basically, if you believe that it's possible to take a nation and reduce it to an abstraction, basically to just a kind of set of ideas, then it follows that that's going to apply to every aspect of life.
I mean, everything, down to the most obvious one, which is that simply men can snap their fingers and become women.
Everything, in other words, becomes an abstraction or susceptible to abstraction.
The Danger of Modern Abstractions00:04:48
So there is no such thing as gender.
There's no such thing as even when we say things like American culture.
Well, there's no such thing because to be an American is simply a kind of subscription to a set of ideas, the liberal world order.
It's basically just the reduction of life to a bunch of buzzwords, which on the one hand sounds absurd because it is, but on the other hand, it's also how you get totalitarian societies.
Because in an ideological regime, everyone has to subscribe to the ideas.
That means it's not enough for you to simply just keep your head down, mind your own business.
Yeah, so let me ask you to go ahead.
No, no, no.
I mean, I totally agree, but can you differentiate for our audience?
Because some people would probably say, well, I'm ideological.
I believe in liberty and I believe in family.
Can you build that out for us of how actually we as conservatives reject the kind of meandering ideas of the clouds and abstractions?
We talk about things that have worked, that are rooted in provable truth.
Can you build that out quickly for us?
Yeah, I mean, there's a difference between saying, like, liberty is nice.
I like the idea of liberty.
And the difference between that and saying that the United States has a kind of moral obligation to build democracies around the world.
That we can simply turn men into women by using different language, pronouns.
I mean, I think the funny thing about pronouns is they're actually much more totalitarian than people realize because it's you kind of denying that reality is a thing and kind of acquiescing to this lie.
So I think it's not so simple as saying, well, if you believe in the idea of liberty, if you believe in the idea of family, we're not talking about ideology here.
We're talking about something very different.
And again, the problem with ideology is on the one hand, again, like I said, everyone has to believe in it.
But on the other hand, it's always changing.
There's always a kind of new addition, a new thing that you have to believe in in order to stay up to date.
Otherwise, you end up like J.K. Rowling, who was basically fine with a lot of things that we would identify with neoliberalism or the liberal world order, again, whatever you want to call it.
But she broke with her liberal friends on transgenderism and they completely cannibalized her and people like her because she's not keeping up with the latest aspect of this.
So it's very different from saying, again, like, I believe in freedom and liberty and this kind of totalitarian ideology that demands complete fealty to it, complete subordination to it.
Yeah.
And I also want to add, though, that ideology is different than philosophy.
They're just different words, right?
So philosophy is actually the love of wisdom.
So we should love wisdom.
We should love things that are always true.
We should design systems around things that could take scholarship and reflection, reading of the classics and of the Bible.
Ideology, though, tends to be things that spring in the modern or postmodern sense.
They're usually at war with antiquity.
They're at war with things that have been written before or that have been articulated before.
Talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
Ideology is kind of a modern invention.
That's exactly right.
And the important aspect of ideology is that it's completely unaccountable to facts and logic, we could say.
It's completely pointless to debate with someone like Sam Brinton, who now works in the federal government at the Department of Energy.
We have a picture relationship to nuclear waste disposal.
Yeah.
So Sam Brinton shared a picture of himself in address and heels celebrating his new job in the federal government.
There's no arguing with Sam Brinton about why everything he believes in is untrue.
You will never be able to penetrate his ideology, his thought with any amount of facts or logic.
It is completely pointless.
So yes, it's the exact opposite of philosophy, which is philosophy is, I mean, ultimately, we're really just talking about a willingness to kind of subject everything to interrogation.
It is the opposite of ideology.
It's completely self-contained.
That's exactly again.
It is totally impervious and external.
You can't cross-examine it.
You can't question it.
You can't reason with it.
Where philosophy is rooted in Socratic pursuit of truth or in the love of wisdom, things that never change, things that all people can understand, not just be captured by a certain hallucination or delusion.
Thank you so much.
Great commentary as always.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always.
Freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
God bless.
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