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March 22, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
33:53
The Patron Saint of Homeschooling with Raymond Arroyo and Gen. Anthony Tata
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Edison's Modern Legacy 00:11:21
Hey, everybody.
Raymond Arroyo joins us to talk about the Catholic Church and also a new book he has out.
And then a general who served in the Trump administration talks about his latest book.
And also, I asked the question: why should we consider Russia to be an enemy?
Interesting discussion.
Email me your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com and get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
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I have a lot of respect for our next guest.
It's very important to teach children history and to talk about the heroes of America.
And joining us now is Raymond Arroyo, one of my favorite people to see on television.
The unexpected light of Thomas Alva Edison by Raymond Aroro.
Raymond, welcome back to the program.
Great to see you so much, Charlie.
I'm delighted to be on the show.
So, Raymond, it's a very important topic, hilariously, because there's actually a campaign against Thomas Edison.
I'm sure you're aware of this to try to make it seem as if he stole his inventions and he wasn't all that smart.
Yes.
So, just can you address that out of the gate?
That's where my head went immediately before we get into that.
Yeah, well, no, no.
Look, I was just at the Edison Labs yesterday.
And again, my book, my focus here, this whole series, I call it turnabout tales, Charlie, because every one of us has, I think, a turnabout tale in their life.
And that's a moment when, usually in your youth, you face an obstacle or a crisis and a decision is made in that moment that not only changes and opens up your entire life, but changes all of history in some ways.
That is what happened with Edison.
That's what happens in many of these great American lives that for some reason people don't want to talk about or they don't want to revisit.
And I think we lose something when we do that or accept that.
I agree.
In the case of Edison, he was, and I think there's almost a discrimination of Edison because he was not university educated.
He was not lettered.
He was a kid, as I relate in the book.
His turnabout tale is he probably had ADHD, did not learn in the traditional way.
His mother, when he was thrown out of school at eight years old, she takes him home and says, I'm going to homeschool him.
And because they said he was adult-brained, couldn't be taught, she takes him home.
She homeschools him, gives him great books, feeds his scientific passions, his electrical passions with manuals and how-to guides.
And then she does something that I think not enough parents even today do.
She allowed him to experiment, to get messy, to make a mess, and to get his hands dirty.
So he was learning not only with his head, as Edison said, but with his hands.
And I think that is something all of us could profit from.
But I hear the complaints about he stole from Tesla and he stole from this one.
Look, Edison took the failures of others and he improved them.
He moved past the failure.
He tinkered until he broke the puzzle.
And then he was a great marketer, Charlie.
This guy had a combination of chutzpah with an amazing tenacity to find solutions where others had given up.
And some later said, oh, he was a genius.
Edison didn't like that term.
He said, genius is in sticking to it.
So it's staying in the puzzle, staying in the game and not giving up.
And he said, that's our greatest weakness.
We give up too soon.
You can always try one more time.
He also basically invented the modern research lab, which I think is really interesting.
And so just go through some of the inventions.
I mean, he just name them off.
How are life improved by him?
Well, look, everything we're doing right now, I'll just point out into the audience.
Everything you're seeing and hearing is thanks to Thomas Edison.
The microphone, the moving picture camera, the alkaline battery, which is really the precursor to the lithium batteries that all of our devices, including our cell phones, operate on.
Electrical communication.
You know, he improved telegraphing so four messages could be sent at the same time.
Again, a precursor to broadband.
All of the things in the modern age.
Oh my gosh, I'm blanking on them all.
The electric car, which people forget about.
Rubber, the manufacturing of rubber for tires.
All of that is Edison.
He was an amazing person who was deaf at 12, Charlie, which I didn't know.
And because of that, it afforded him, in his own retelling, the ability to read.
It drove him to books.
And it gave him the focus and the isolation to solve these big problems and see things others missed.
And you said he created the first research and development lab in the country.
I was there yesterday at the Edison Lab here in West Orange.
And I have to tell you, it's untouched.
It is just as it was at the turn of the century when he built it.
It's an incredible facility.
When you think, oh, the phonograph, I forgot to mention the phonograph, Charlie.
Minor detail.
Yeah, a minor, his big invention, the phonograph.
And he was really the first record label.
Edison in the upstairs part of his lab, the music room, he recorded hundreds and hundreds of bands and orchestras and singers of the day, which he released on disc.
And he, again, he wisely figured out what the public needed and then created it.
And when you go there and sit in the room, the two things that blew my mind.
One, he had a horn, an ear horn, because he was deaf.
That's how he heard the music.
And when that didn't work, when he really couldn't hear in his good ear, he would take a piece of wood and bite down on it, really forward-looking to those cochlear implants they put in the back of people's skulls where the sound reverberates.
He was using the wood to conduct the sound through his skull.
An amazing person, a light that continues to illuminate our modern age.
That would never have happened had it not been for the devotion of a mother who took Edison home and homeschooled him.
I say he should be called the patron saint of homeschooling.
And I hope we can restore him to that place.
Yeah, so let's go through some of the lessons that could apply today.
You mentioned several, allowing the kid to explore, allowing the, you know, the children to take risks, right?
What are some of the other lessons today?
I mean, and do you think that the current government progressive school system is maybe just tragically preventing the next Thomas Edison from finding that next innovation that could benefit humanity?
You know, I'll leave you with Edison's words.
We'll go to Edison himself, who said he hated the modern education system.
He said it's a one-size-fits-all bucket that doesn't allow the child or his ingenuity to grow.
And he preferred the Montessori approach, which was like the approach he was given.
Deep reading into multiple disciplines and then hands-on experimentation.
And most importantly, Charlie, and you do this every day.
I do this every day.
And I think great entrepreneurs do.
A sense of play in your work.
Edison didn't ever really create.
He had little groups, he called them muckers, his co-inventors, the people who worked in his shop and in his labs.
They had little units, and he would run from one to another, pollinating them, all encouraging them, challenging them, reshaping what they were working on and perfecting it.
But he said it was all play.
And these people were like his little playmates.
And when you get in that space, that creative space of play, whether you're in the theater or you're in a restaurant or you're doing a podcast or a television broadcast, that sense of play is infectious.
You can't fake it.
I think God creeps into those moments, into the space that you create, and you're in the zone, as some call it.
Edison lived there.
I'm not sure if the educational system today permits that kind of attention to the child to accompany the child in the best mode of learning for him or her, and then allowing that force of learning to proceed and grow.
The modern educational system is about checking boxes and fixed testing and memorization.
And that is why Edison was thrown out of school because he really couldn't memorize and he didn't want to answer the questions and he was bored to tears after the exploration and curiosity that I think that mind had absorbed as a child.
It's incredible.
And so let's just reiterate the name of the book.
And I'm going to buy it so I can read it to my daughter.
Oh, I hope you will, or I'll send you a copy.
Thank you.
The Unexpected Light of Thomas Alva Edison by Raymond Naroyo.
And you have a whole genre of these books, don't you, Raymond?
Well, this is the first.
This is the first in a series, but yes, I've written three others.
And again, they focus on great lives that I think had been neglected.
You know, everybody knows some of the things Edison did.
Few understand how the inventor got there.
And rather than a womb-to-tomb biography, these books, The Turnabout Tales, focus on, again, a crossroads, a crisis point in a young person's life, a person we all know.
And it shows that those obstacles are not really obstacles.
Those are portals to your future, portals to your vocation and your destiny.
And we need your contribution.
All of history, all of the country and the world may need that contribution.
Certainly, in the case of Edison, he himself said, if it hadn't been for his mother, he would not have done any of this.
And we'd probably still be in the dark and talking to each other via letter, Charlie, which would not be good.
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Pope Francis Complexity 00:06:16
Okay, so Raymond, let me ask you about, there's been a fair amount of stories here about Pope Benedict reevaluating the celibacy vows for priests.
What are your thoughts on this?
Well, my first thought is the media love stories like this, Charlie.
And the reason they love them is Pope Francis will sit for these interviews and he allows himself to be led down garden paths.
And the media keeps asking this question because they'd like to see an end to priestly celibacy in the Western right.
Remember, the Catholic Church has two wings, if you will, the Eastern wing and the Western wing.
The Eastern Church, Charlie, allows marriage.
They have married priests.
So technically, the Catholic Church already has Catholic priests.
Pope Benedict also welcomed former Anglican priests into the Catholic Church.
They came with their wives and families as well.
So this whole question is a bit of a misnomer.
What they're asking is: is the discipline in the Western Church going to change?
What Pope Francis said is it's a temporal discipline and it's not an eternal one.
Well, that doesn't mean he's going to open up and change the discipline.
He's just stating a fact, which is it is a discipline on earth and not for all time.
But it mimics Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ did not have a wife, did not date around.
He was a man who gave up his sexuality, if you will, for the good of his flock.
And so he could be a father to his spiritual children.
That's the thinking behind it.
And even Billy Graham many years ago wrote that there may be something to celibacy, he said, because he felt the conflict between his flock and his family.
You know, later in life, he wrote in his biography that bought.
And so it has wisdom all around.
It leaves a man free to be fully available to his people and to be a spiritual father to many more than you could father in life.
Pope Francis also has come out and said that gender ideology is one of the most dangerous ideological forces and colonizations of the day.
Your thoughts?
Yeah, well, the Pope's been very articulate and forthright on this issue of trans rights and he called it, I think, a cultural colonization.
It's interesting that that headline gets no coverage, Charlie, while the changing of the celibacy discipline gets all the front page news.
Whenever you're dealing with a figure, particularly like a Pope, it's important, I think, to report them in their complexity and in the totality of their comments, because it tends to all fit together.
Now, Pope Francis does freelance at times, and he likes to give interviews and say things in passing, which can be misinterpreted or open to misinterpretation.
But so far, he really hasn't changed anything, but he's talked many times about revisiting certain things that have been already closed, certain questions, female ordination, for instance.
But no changes have really happened.
So that's my general thought on that.
On the issue of life, on the issue of man and woman and the genders, he's been very clear on that.
So, and then finally, there was a memo, a disturbing memo, a couple of weeks ago that came out that said the FBI is trying to infiltrate Latin Mass.
This is extraordinary.
Are you one of those pre-Vatican II people, Raymond?
Well, I have been known to frequent the Latin Mass from time.
You're a troublemaker.
In fact, the Latin Mass brought my wife into the Catholic Church.
We don't go as frequently as we once did.
But here's the point.
If you go to those Masses, they are populated, Charlie, with young people.
That's very fervent, newly married people with little babies.
I mean, the church is full.
The pews are packed.
Why anyone would have a problem with that?
I don't know.
But as you know, Pope Francis recently outlawed and tightened the noose on the ability to celebrate that old Latin Mass, which I really don't understand.
It makes no sense.
It's a break with tradition.
But again, that's a discipline.
He does have the right to do it.
Whether it's right or not is a different question, but he has the right to do it.
But for the FBI to then use the type of worship you want to frequent as a believing Christian, to use that as a means of targeting you with a list, that is really beyond the beyond.
They claim these people were domestic terrorists or domestic terrorists in training or radicals.
That it was apparently out of the field office in Virginia, and that individual has been reprimanded.
But there should be an investigation into who did this, why, and at whose behest, Charlie.
This all seems rather convenient to me.
Check out Raymond's latest book.
It's really great about Thomas Edison.
And appreciate it, Raymond.
It's Thomas Alva Edison, the name of the book by Raymond Arroyo.
Thank you so much.
An expert on all things from Catholicism to Edison.
That's pretty important.
I don't know about that.
Both can be electric at times and can burn you.
Thank you, Charlie.
They have other similarities as well, but we won't go there.
Raymond, thank you so much.
Hey, everybody, this is Charlie Kirk.
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Russia Enemy Question 00:14:00
Joining us now is General Anthony Tata.
Hope I said that right.
And you did.
Author of Total Empire.
Welcome to the program.
Great to be with you, Charlie.
Thank you.
Tell us about your book, Total Empire, which is technically fiction, but feels more like reality every single day.
Well, you know, with all the breaking news today, Charlie, about China and Russia forming an alliance, well, Total Empire is all about China's ascendancy to global hegemony and their drive to do so at all costs.
And so the protagonist, which is a recurring series protagonist with Macmillan San Martin's Press, my publisher, Garrett Sinclair, finds himself chasing down his goddaughter in the Eye of Africa, which is an obscure terrain feature in Mauritania near Morocco in the Western Sahara and the annexed area of Western Sahara and Morocco.
And so what they end up doing is finding a Chinese hypersonic weapon in this area.
And of course, then it's a race to prevent hypersonic nuclear vehicles from attacking the United States.
And importantly, whenever I have a book that I'm writing, this is my 15th novel.
It's always what's that inspiration.
I was reading the article a couple of years ago about hypersonic weapons.
And if you put these on space shuttles, essentially, in orbit, we lose our ability to track ballistic signature, which is how we defend against nuclear threats.
So it's a big deal.
And so when you say Total Empire feels more like fact than fiction, there's a lot of that in there.
So, yeah, the book is Total Empire, and people encourage people to check it out.
And so, one of the dynamics in the book, and also something you dealt with, you know, serving in the Pentagon was this idea of obviously the two powers of Russia and China that under President Trump were they were friendly, but they were not as close as they are now.
Putin is now flaunting an alliance with Xi as dear friends.
How should we think about this?
Yeah, it's a rather breathtaking event that took place today.
Of course, the corporate media will give all the top cover to the current administration that they need.
And so, there won't be any real examination, except for venues like your show and other outlets that take a serious, hard-nosed look at this type of journalism.
And so, really, what we have happening is Russia being backed now by China makes this Ukraine fight infinitely harder because we thought that Russia,
we could do some economic sanctions, starve them off a little bit, use our ability to provide weapons into Ukraine and resources to allow them to defend themselves and then death by a thousand cuts on the Russian front there in Ukraine and let the Russians wither as they impaled themselves on the Ukrainian defenses.
That was the general strategy.
And now what we're seeing is that ostensibly China could be backstopping Russia to be able to buy more equipment, have better training, et cetera, et cetera.
And so it really makes it problematic.
And if you walk this all the way back, Charlie, this whole Russian invasion of Ukraine stemmed from the Biden administration's fumbling of the Afghan withdrawal and fractured NATO.
And that's another thing the corporate media didn't really cover.
NATO was fractured seriously because when I would see performing the duties as under Secretary of Defense for policy, we had a, you come into NATO, or NATO comes in together into Afghanistan, NATO adjusts together, and we're going to leave together if we left.
And the Biden administration just lit a fuse and said, hey, we're leaving.
And there was no lateral coordination.
There were 30 some countries in there with everything from 20 person provincial reconstruction teams all the way up to battalion size combat teams.
And so Putin saw that message, that strategic failure message to our enemies, we are not competent at foreign policy.
And that lit the fuse on what's happening today in Ukraine, our two biggest adversaries today forming an alliance under the strategic agreement.
It's rather breathtaking.
This will get painted over by the corporate media, and they'll blame, figure out a way to blame Trump, of course.
But this level of incompetence is breathtaking.
Antony Blinken, probably the most incompetent Secretary of State we've ever had in the history of this country.
He's messing up.
Just absolutely breathtaking what's happening today.
Yeah.
And so I'm losing confidence in our ability to do the most basic things.
You're not exactly restoring it, which is fine.
It's just the way it is.
I mean, Tony Blinken running the State Department right now is a total joke.
And so I want to get your thoughts on the Russia-Ukraine thing.
I mean, I'm sure you've seen or somebody told you.
I mean, I don't understand why Russia should be considered an enemy of the United States at all.
I'm just curious, what is the argument for that?
Well, so in our national defense strategy, which is predicated on our vital U.S. national interests, we list China and Russia as our primary adversaries, and then Iran and North Korea.
It's Russia's tendency for hegemony, at least in Europe, and their mischievous nature of poisoning their foes and try to put a stick in the eye of NATO.
That's a fundamental reason is they have illusions of grandeur beyond the current Putin at least has that beyond the current Russian border.
And we have NATO.
NATO's been a very effective alliance for us.
They don't pay their fair share and they're using Russian oil, two things that President Trump harped on and got improvement in, quite frankly.
But the alliance and NATO is an important alliance to our country because if you remember, it was predicated on the Marshall Plan that created the foundation for democracy in the wake of World War II and capitalist markets in the wake of World War II.
Sure, there are some socialist countries in there, but by and large, the European Union and NATO are a good trading partner with the U.S. Same with Japan.
And you saw the ascendancy out of the ashes of World War II.
And it's important that we keep that relationship.
And so I think from a military standpoint, the rotational brigades coming in to demonstrate U.S. resolve to NATO have been a good response.
I think diplomacy has been anemic and ineffective to the extent that there's been any tribe.
The economic sanctions are economic sanctions.
They rarely, if ever, work.
And then, you know, thinking of all the levers of national power, the information campaign has been rather anemic as well.
So when I think of diplomacy, information, military, economic, the real key levers of national power in our response to this, let's recall, Charlie, the Biden administration's first instinct on the eve of the war was to offer Zelensky a ride out of Ukraine.
Now, think about that.
They offered, President Biden and Anthony Blanken offered to decapitate the Ukrainian government in preparation for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Think about that.
That would be the headline if Trump had done that.
But the corporate media washed over that.
They got it completely wrong.
And it builds no confidence in our intelligence agencies that fed this wrong information.
And I was one of the few people on Newsmax, Fox, and others saying, we're going to be here a year from now.
Everybody, if you recall, was saying this is going to be a 36, 72-hour war.
And I said, no, you know, the Russian soldier is not 10 feet tall.
We learned that during the Cold War.
And essentially, I've commanded Ukrainian troops in combat in Kosovo.
And I had a West Point classmate who was Ukrainian.
And they're very passionate people.
So to the extent that getting to your original question, why do we care about Ukraine?
It's sort of like the Kuwait deal without the oil.
I asked, why is Russia considered a threat?
And you're right.
It is that the consensus is Russia and China are a threat, but why?
I get they poison their dissidents.
I don't like them, but I don't consider they've never attacked us, have they?
Well, I think going back, growing up in the Cold War and being a military officer, we had proxy wars with all the Soviet satellite nations, many of them.
It was constant push and pull.
And remember, they have a rogue leader, and then they have the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
And so it merits for us.
I think that would be a reason for us to not have them as an enemy.
Well, I think it's a reason for us.
I don't see that they view us, the United States, as long as we support NATO and we're involved in NATO, which is very important to our vitality as a nation.
I don't think that they would welcome any kind of outreach from us because think about it.
They were abandoning Open Skies Treaty.
They were violating the Open Skies Treaty.
They were violating the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty.
And President Trump wisely said, look, if you're not going to play by the rules, we're not going to play by the rules.
And again, the corporate media said, you know, Trump pulls out of these agreements.
Well, why should we let them see our training exercises if they don't let us see their training exercises?
So there's been some malintent on Putin's part.
I think the President Trump's effort to open a dialogue and have transparency with Putin and Helsinki was important, but that the undermining of the Trump administration by the corporate media and the left has had very serious national security consequences for our country.
And this idea that you should, you know, it's all important to destroy Trump irregardless of what happens to our national security, what happens to our allies and partners.
That's the burn, the house down strategy that I see in the left right now as a lifelong foreign policy and defense official.
It's a very frightening time in our country right now.
I encourage you to check out the book.
It is important, Total Empire, and it's very important.
Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and the Department of Defense and Deputy Commander in Afghanistan.
So, General, I want to ask you, I'll just read a couple of headlines here.
Military enrollment is down record numbers, 25% short in the Army.
Every branch fails to meet their recruitment and their enrollment goals.
Why do you think that is?
Yeah, I think there's this two real issues that have plagued recruiting.
One is, of course, the COVID vaccine issue, which did not resonate well with a lot of the typical population that would join the military.
And the second is this drive toward, you know, some people call it wokeism or, you know, whatever you want to call it, this, I call it a lack of focus on warfighting.
We should be recruiting and signing into service men and women that want to defend this nation.
And we should teach them the combat skills to do so, whether that's bayonet training or communications training and everything in between.
And that's really the net of it.
But we've really gotten sidetracked here with all this focus on things that divide us instead of unite us.
And we are a very divided nation right now.
And third, I think the Democrats have done a really good job of making people in general in this nation feel that this is not a great nation, that we've got a terrible history, that we're bad people.
We've done bad things.
And so there's this lack of value that people, well, why would I want to defend a nation that you're telling me is horrible?
So I'm going to go do something else with that.
So I think it's really those three things.
So, yeah, is there from any of your colleagues that are still in the Pentagon, do they think that maybe running transgender PSAs for Marines is probably not a good idea?
I mean, these people have no shame.
Yeah, I think, you know, they get told what to do.
Recruiting Nation Crisis 00:02:14
But they're in charge.
Who's telling them what to do?
Yeah, right.
Well, the political appointees come in and, you know, tell the generals in large part what to do.
And, you know, you're confronted with that age-old decision.
Do you throw your stars on the table and leave and say in protest?
Or do you try to do the best you can and continue to serve the people that you swore that you would serve, the Constitution and the people?
So at the end of the day, what we have in this country is the corporate media telling us how bad we are.
Meanwhile, you have all these people with blue and yellow flags on their social media profiles and wanting World War III, essentially.
And at the end of the day, they're not sending their kids clearly to this fight that they're doing.
Many of them don't have kids, but yeah, that's right.
Right, right.
Yeah.
So it's really bothersome because, you know, recruiting and retention is a real barometer of the health of the nation.
And what a 60 to 70% recruiting number tells you is we're not a healthy nation right now.
And it's the lack of leadership from the very senior levels of the chain of command with the commander in chief that I think has made us unwell.
It's tragic.
I don't know why the military leadership is putting up with this stuff.
But I mean, I see one announcement after the other of diversity, equity, inclusion.
I mean, there are announcements where the military says it's one of our top goals to make the military more diverse.
They can't even hit their enrollment targets, let alone get them towards an ability to win a war.
But we're out of time.
So General, thank you for the time and I encourage everyone to check out the book right now, Total Empire.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Charlie.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts.
It's always freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.
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