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July 14, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
49:55
Socialism: The Two Thousand Year Failure with Bill Federer and Blake Neff
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Rome's Rise to Kingship 00:14:46
Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk show, Blake Neff and Bill Federer, we talk about Roman history, history in general.
What can it teach us today?
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Okay, welcome back, everybody.
Email us freedom at charliekirk.com.
Very special hour.
We have Blake Neff, fan favorite, and Bill Federer.
Welcome back, Bill.
Hey, Charlie, great to be with you.
So I have two minds that have IQs off the charts that know history very, very well.
I'm going to do my best to try to keep us on topic while also getting our audience educated on history, philosophy, and what we are living through.
Bill, we've had you on the show many times, and I was actually just rereading Socialism, The Real History from Plato to the Present.
Tell us about this book, Bill.
Right.
So Plato was the first one that talked about everybody owning everything in common.
And it sounds good until you think it through.
Somebody has to be in the government handing out the common stuff.
And they're always going to be tempted to want to funnel a little extra to their family and friends on the side and hold back from someone they don't like.
And before you know it, it gets discretionary.
And the saying is, he who holds the purse strings has the power.
So every attempt at everybody owning everything equally always ends up with a deep state bureaucracy passing out favors to their friends with the most corrupt guy at the top, a dictator.
And then I go in the book to how these different attempts to institute socialism over the years.
And people say, well, wasn't the early church socialist?
No, the early church was the early church.
Socialism is counterfeit early church and the difference is between the word voluntary and involuntary.
So early believers voluntarily sold their property, laid it at the feet of the apostles.
They didn't have the government take away their property and laid it at the feet of Pilate.
And then when the children of Israel went into the promised land, every family was given property.
If you own property, you can accumulate stuff, the Bible called that being blessed, and you can give away some of your stuff.
The Bible called that charity.
Well, if you don't own any property, how can you be charitable?
How can you give away what you don't have?
And so the idea is that Lenin said socialism is a transition phase to communism.
And Karl Marx says communism can be summed up in one sentence, abolition of private property.
So one part of this I'm going to focus on because I'm going to try to do my best to connect this history to today.
And you've talked about it, is this idea of a permanent bureaucracy, almost like a praetorian guard, right?
You talk about this in the book.
Is this a characteristic we see manifest time and time again, that if you have a dictator or despot, a non-small R Republican form of government, by definition, you're going to have to have almost a permanent leviathan that issues the decrees, the orders, and that are somewhat untouchable.
Is that fair to say historically?
Yeah, the default setting for human government is gangs.
And all a king is is a glorified gang leader.
And if there were no police tomorrow, what would happen?
Well, it'd be fine for a couple of days, and then people would start stealing stuff from stores.
And then when the stores are empty, they'd start going house to house.
And then you would get your neighborhood together and say, we need to defend ourselves.
And Joe here, he's a little bit better at knowing how to fight than the rest.
And so we'll all elect Joe as our captain.
And it's good.
You fight, you win.
But over time, you're going to be indebted to this person.
And that's how kings developed.
And so you'd have a good king and the bad king.
And so the default setting for human government is kings.
And it's hierarchical.
If you are friends with the guy at the top, you are more equal.
If you're not their friend, you're less equal.
And if you're their enemy, you're dead.
It's called treason.
Or you're a slave.
People say, I thought slavery started in 1619.
No, wherever you had the first king on top, you had slaves on the bottom.
And so that's the default setting is gangs.
So you have Nimrod Tower of Babel and Pharaohs and Caesars and Kaisers and Sultans and Tsars and Maharaj, Gangeskan, Julius Caesar, Child the Hunt, kings of Spain, France, and Austria.
That's the norm.
And so what's rare is people getting a chance to rule themselves without a king.
Self-government, which the Hebrews were the first example that we know, at least for some period of time, they had some form of self-government.
So Blake, I want to connect this.
Is there an example ever of, and Bill, you could chime in once Blake answers, of successfully challenging, disrupting, or dismantling an administrative state?
Well, I mean, they tend to crash rather spectacularly when they do fall apart, which is the whole civilization crashes with it.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So you get these, if you have, you know, a very rigid order, like it is inherently unstable.
And it kind of, it, it makes probably everyone involved with it worse, I think you could say.
So it's like when you compare like English society with French society before the revolutions, where English society has a stronger tradition of decentralized government, self-government.
And so it's like it means that their revolution even is more orderly.
Like we're able to have the American Revolution.
We don't literally behead every single person connected with the king in America.
Whereas when the French Ancient regime comes down, it is an extremely bloody affair.
And it's not, you know, everyone involved kind of comes off worse as a result of it.
You know, the people who are upholding the regime are more violent.
The people overthrowing the regime are more violent.
So we have this permanent deep state.
We can all agree at that right now running the country.
Bill, what historical precedent can be instructive of how to dismantle and or correct this creation of the progressive bureaucracy?
So as more power concentrates into fewer hands globally, God's counterbalance is to get more people involved locally.
Right?
So it's a counterbalance.
So if we're going to be fewer hands globally power, our response is get more people involved locally.
I mean, there's more people that go to a church than vote in a school board election.
You just get out there and start getting involved.
And that's the only way.
The counterbalance has to be local action.
Yeah, yeah.
It has to be more people involved, fewer people with more power, or lots and lots of people with little bits of power, but we need to each take our little bit of power.
Now, you know, can we turn it around?
I'm just hoping we slow it down.
So whenever you have people ruling themselves, two things happen.
It works, and people get a chance to be all that they want to be and become creative.
And they either become so successful, they become targets of attack by kings, and then they get co-opted, or they get bigger and bigger, and it builds this bureaucracy.
And if you can imagine trying to float on top of a beach ball with suntan lotion on, it's really hard.
And then all of a sudden you slip off and the beach ball pops up.
So the people trying to, but what happens is once it gets top heavy with too big of a people, it flips instantly into a dictator.
And that's what happened with Rome.
So Rome was a republic from 509 BC up until 27 BC.
From Romulus to.
Well, they had seven kings, and the last king was Tarquinius.
Tarquin the Proud.
And Tarquin the Proud, and he had a son named Sextus, what a name.
And Sextus raped a virtuous woman named Lucretia.
And she was so distraught, she gathers the Roman leaders together, and she commits suicide right in front of them.
And the rape of Lucretia, there's all kinds of artwork, you know, with Michelangelo.
And, you know, this is a theme that's been, even St. Augustine mentioned it, the rape of Lucretia and the city of God.
So she kills herself.
These Roman leaders get so upset that she killed herself right in front of him.
What do they do?
They go out and drive King Tarquinius out and they set up a republic.
And in the republic, you have the people that are the king.
And they made a rule.
Publius was one of the leaders.
And the rule was: if anybody ever would make themselves king, anybody else could kill that person without any repercussions.
So for 500 years, nobody in the Roman Republic wanted to come anywhere near being called.
Publius was building a mansion, and rumor spread that he was thinking about being king.
When he heard the rumor, he destroyed his own mansion.
And so you have, over time, you have 600 senators, and they're representing their little areas.
And it gravitates into three parties, right?
So we have Democrat, Republican, maybe Libertarian.
Well, their three parties were led by Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus.
The triumphant.
The triumvirate.
The first triumphant because there's a first triumphant.
So Crassus is over there in Haran, Turkey.
Did he get his head cut off or something?
He decides, I'm going to be this general.
And, you know, he's like, Pompey conquered Syria and Judea and a lot of other places.
Caesar's off in Gaul.
I just have a giant pile of money.
I need to prove that I'm this great general.
And so he gets this big, expensive army, pays for the whole thing himself, walks five miles across the border into Parthia, and they kick his butt and cut his head off, and they pour, I think, molten silver, molten gold, I can't remember which, down whatever's left of his head.
And so then that destabilizes the triumphant.
Yeah, and removed a third of it.
Before that, there was the famous Spartacus, and these are gladiators.
Yeah, they got tired of having to kill each other.
And so they decided to leave.
And these gladiators are going to the toe of Italy, and they got some pirate ships that they've arranged to pick them up.
Crassus pays the pirate ships not to come.
And so these gladiators, what do they do?
Well, they start marching back to Rome.
And Crassus is like, I'm going to defend Rome.
And he goes out there and kills them, but he doesn't get the glory for the win anyway.
Okay, Bill.
So then what happens?
Caesar's up in France or Germany or whatever, and Pompey takes the day.
And Caesar says, not so fast, my friend.
Right.
So Crassus dies in the Battle of Carna, 53 BC.
And so now you have two people left, Caesar and Pompey.
And Pompey's in Rome, but he leaves, goes to the Adriatic, and Caesar marches into Rome.
Now, in Rome, they had a treasury, and it was called the Temple of Saturn.
And it was like their Federal Reserve.
Every country would use the temple as their storage for money.
Even in Jerusalem, right?
All the gold was stored in the temple.
And so it was sort of a given that nobody would touch that, except Caesar doesn't care what the traditions are.
He goes to the treasury and takes 15,000 bards of gold, 30,000 bars of silver, 15 million sesters of coins, and he uses the money to buy antipharioters.
He says, use money to get men, use men to get money, right?
So he buys them, then they're supporting him, and then he ends up chasing Pompey, and then eventually Pompey.
He meets him in the Middle East somewhere, right?
Persia or something?
And so it's sort of interesting.
William Henry Harrison in his inaugural issue.
He's the shortest serving president?
Correct.
28 days or something.
And shortest term, but longest inaugural.
But he says the executive department has become dangerous, appointing power to bring under its control the whole revenues of the country to stamp this monarchical character on our government, but the control of the public finances.
The first Roman emperor, in his attempt to seize the sacred treasure, silenced opposition of the officers there at the Temple of Saturn, to whose charge it had been committed with a significant allusion to his sword.
So you got these Temple of Saturn people.
We're supposed to guard this gold.
And Caesar says, okay, I'm going to kill you with my sword.
And so he takes this money, Caesar, and he uses it.
And Will and Ariel Durant wrote in their Lessons of History: In Italy, rival factions competed in wholesale purchase of votes.
In 53 B.C., one group of voters received 10 million successors for its support.
And so that's Julius Caesar buying votes.
And then after he kills, or after Pompey's Pompey was wanting to preserve the Republic, even though it had gravitated to these parties, and Caesar was representing the popularis or the populist party.
So Caesar was saying, I'm defending you common people against those rich Republicans.
I'm defending the common people against the...
But once he gets rid of Pompey, instead of him going back to the Republic and giving the popularis stuff, he just makes himself a dictator.
When did the Praetorian Guard deep state bureaucracy start to get formed?
That's a little bit later.
So Caesar gets assassinated.
On the Eides of March.
On the Eides of March.
He gets assassinated.
There's a second triumvirate.
This takes a long time to unwind itself.
About 15 years or so before the final civil war is over, his nephew, Octavian, who renames himself after Julius Caesar gets formally adopted.
He becomes Augustus, which is a title they give him.
And he mentioned that you could never call yourself a king in Rome.
So he doesn't get declared king.
And our very word emperor sort of comes from imperator, which just means like holding command.
So his actual title is princips, first citizen, basically.
And so he's the first citizen of Rome, the first man of Rome.
And sort of like in Russia, they would call him comrade, Comrade Stalin.
But everybody knows that he's not.
He's the guy in charge.
And he just has, the way he runs things is sort of, it's a constitutional fiction where he just holds every high office.
So he's the Pontifex Maximus.
He's, I don't know if they were still, if they were consul every year, but they sort of were above the consuls, which were the old executive.
The Patronage System Emerges 00:02:22
Cicero was.
Yeah, yeah.
So they would, I think they still appointed consuls, but it was just a total fiction.
So the deep state emerges over a period of time.
And eventually, is it fair to say the deep state starts running the government?
The government is not running the deep state or the emperor or the heads.
It's a bureaucratic operation.
So he has this praetorian.
What I'm getting at is what we're living through in America right now is nothing new.
We've seen this pattern manifest before.
They call it the patronage system.
So it's the guy at the top that gets to decide who gets the government bailouts.
And then they get the money.
They end up giving money to their friends.
It's like BlackRock, right?
If you do the DEI, then you get loans.
And so it's using the money from the guy at the top, but through this bureaucratic system.
It's like electrons all have to line up before lightning strikes.
It's like you get everybody to submit, but you're establishing this dictatorship.
There's an interesting quote from William Henry Harrison.
He said, Caesar became the master of the Roman people under the pretense of supporting the democratic claims of the former against the aristocracy of the latter.
So he's saying, I'm going to support the people against those terrible rich people, even though once he gets in, he makes himself a 100% absolute dictator.
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Theater as Political Weaponry 00:05:26
We've talked about the administrative state.
I haven't really figured out the answer to my question.
I don't think there's a good answer to it, which is: can you disassemble this thing looking through his story?
But you want to talk about Philip of Macedon.
How does that all connect, if at all, to these themes?
Well, I wanted to throw one more thing.
Caesar stacked the Senate.
There were 600 senators.
He appointed personally 300 more.
So they still kept the title of Roman Republic, but since he had 300 senators that were just doing his bidding, it more or less switched to him.
SPQR changed to.
And they were like foreign senators in some cases.
He would have been up in Gaul, modern France, which he conquers.
And he appoints some of these Gauls to the Senate, which is highly controversial.
And he even named a month after himself, right?
So the beginning of the year was March 22nd, right?
It's the spring economy.
July was his month, right?
July.
And then Augustus Caesar named the next month after himself, August.
But Philip of Macedon, so before the Roman Republic, but before Caesar and the triumvirate, you had these city-states.
Now, an easy way to explain democracies and republics, demos means people, crossing means rule.
So in a democracy, the people rule.
There were 6,000 citizens of Athens.
The word citizen is Greek.
It means co-ruler, co-sovereign, co-king.
Every citizen had to be at every meeting every day to talk about every issue.
And if you didn't keep up with what they're talking about, you're called an idiotus, an idiot.
Interesting things, because the people are in charge, if you have an agenda, how do you pitch it to 6,000 people?
They invented theater.
And you would get the whole city together and you would put on plays, comedies, tragedies, satires, where you would ridicule and buffoon certain points of view and honor and extol other points of view.
And you read Aristophanes and these different comedies.
It reads like Saturday Night Live.
I mean, they're literally making fun of living politicians by name.
And you would leave the theater saying, I don't want to be like that poor guy that was ridiculed.
And you back away from him and everything you stood for.
And then in the tragedies, they would make somebody noble and remembered.
And so I want to be like him.
And so from that time until now, theater is always political in a country where it's the people that are the rulers.
So think of your favorite sitcom or movie.
There's a character you identify with.
First couple episodes, they're upstanding.
And then the writers begin to have this character make morally compromising decisions.
A little cheating here, a little lying there, a little lust, a little revenge, a little approving of different lifestyles.
And you find yourself apologizing for him, saying, you know, I know James Bond is with a woman he's not married to, but he's about to save the world.
So can we get on with the story?
And it minimizes something that used to be important to you.
And then they portray people that hold old traditional values as simpletons and bumpkins and idiots.
And you turn off the TV saying, yeah, that person, they were old-fashioned and stodgy.
And the other person, they were cool.
And I want to wear their tennis shoes.
And so, from Athens till now, theater, media, Hollywood, it's always political in a country where it's the people that are the king.
And so, we have Athens.
We have the people that are the king, 6,000 of them, and they would call them out of their homes to the marketplace.
Then you have Philip Amacedon, and he is conquering Thebes and Thrace and the Pangonian hills where there's gold, and Amphipolis that controls those gold mines.
And Philip of Macedon takes money and buys citizens of Athens.
It's called the Macedonian Party.
And so Philip's conquering.
And so the citizens get together and say, man, we got to get our navy going.
We've got to get our army going.
Philip's conquering.
And these paid liars would stand up in the market and say, wait, wait, wait, let's not get carried away.
I hear Philip's not such a bad guy.
I hear he's not conquering city.
He's liberating them.
And they would gather around them people that believe their lies, who Lenin later referred to as useful idiots.
And it so confused the city that when Philip marched up to the walls, they just opened the gates and he came in and took over.
This is exactly the same as China going to countries and finding politicians in these countries that they can give money to.
And then when they all get together in their legislatures and they're like, oh, we need to do this and that.
No, no, no, wait.
And they're bought, they're paid for, right?
And so then when you're trying to get, well, we got to get our defenses going.
We got to, you know, defend our allies, Taiwan.
It's like, oh, no, no, let's not.
I hear it.
You have a thoughtful.
There's just another very fun example of this in kind of 1500s, 1600s, Poland.
They had their like old medieval legislature and it had a problem.
You had to be unanimous to do anything.
And so one person could derail everything.
And eventually all of Poland's neighbors realized that this was an incredible thing they could hack.
And so they would just start, you would pay off your one guy, your couple guys in the Polish legislature, and they could literally just.
What year was this?
This would be like the 1600s and early 1700s.
It was called the liberum veto, free veto.
And so any one guy who showed up at their legislature the same could just break the whole thing with by just essentially vetoing everything.
And it started off as a rare deal.
And then by the 1700s, anytime they wanted to do anything, imagine if any one senator could just dissolve the U.S. Congress at will.
And we might kind of like that idea a little bit, but you do need Congress to do things sometimes.
So in the book here, I want to try to keep focus on a couple things here.
Socialism, the real history from Plato to the present.
One of the things that you touch on, Bill, repeatedly is the rise of the tyrant.
And you wrote a whole book on that, right?
The Liberum Veto Crisis 00:15:08
So if you were to say, what are a couple things that tyrants throughout history have in common?
What are characteristics that most tyrants share?
Do they have a pattern from either from Nero to Stalin to Lenin to Mussolini?
Yeah, it's selfish human nature.
And so St. Augustine called it libido dominanti, the lust to dominate.
You put some kids on a playground, one's the bully.
You put some junior high girls in a clique, one's the diva.
You put some people in the woods, one's an Indian chief.
You put them in an inner city, one of them is a gang leader, and all a king is a glorified gang leader.
And so they usually say that they want to get more power to do good.
A Bible of story is Joseph in Egypt was a godly guy, and he concentrates power into the hands of the Pharaoh.
And this Pharaoh does good, right?
He feeds the children of Israel.
So the next Pharaoh.
And then there's a new Pharaoh that does not know Joseph.
Yes, that's right, who did not know Joseph.
And he throws him through.
That's the turning point of Exodus, yeah.
And so that's the dilemma.
You get our guy in there, and you sort of let him concentrate power that he shouldn't because he's pushing our agenda, but he's not in there forever.
And it all gets handed over to the other party, and they use this power for evil, right?
They're pushing their agenda.
And, you know, you look at William Howard Taft was the one who pushed through the Supreme Court getting their own building.
And he's the first one to hire a staffer, and he federalized the court system.
He's a Republican so that used to be different federal courts could make decisions, and they didn't always jive, and you sort of knew this part of the country acted this way.
Well, he wanted to make it so when the Supreme Court said it, it's the law of the land.
Well, he's a Republican, but who comes after him?
You get Woodrow Wilson.
Yeah, well, no, this is Taft is the 27th president, but afterwards he becomes the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
But then you have Franklin Roosevelt.
And Franklin Roosevelt says, okay, the Supreme Court says it's the law.
We're going to push all these New Deal things.
And then it gets passed on to, you know, the whole, you know, pro-abortion and changing marriage and so forth.
But it was a Republican that said, hey, let's centralize power because we can do good better, not realizing that you're going to pass it over to the other party and they'll use it for wrong.
And so that's, so one of the trends is you get somebody that says they wanted, and even the Lord of the Rings, there's a scene where the little Gandalf or little Frodo offers the ring of power to Gandalf.
And they do the special effects and Gandalf says, don't tempt me, Frodo.
I dare not take it.
Not even to keep it safe.
Understand, I would use this ring from a desire to do good, but through me it would wield a power too terrible to imagine.
It's like, what does he mean?
I would try to do good.
So that's the problem is if you get anybody in power, you would tend to prefer your family and friends.
You got a family member that's in trouble.
You're like, okay, you know, I talk to so-and-so.
I'll get it taken care of.
And you get them off the hook.
But if you're not a family member, you don't get that special treatment.
And that's the norm.
And if somebody wants to point out your favoritism, you're going to be embarrassed and want to shut them up.
So power corps and absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
And so that's why it makes ancient Israel coming out of Egypt so amazing that you could have millions of people for 400 years not have a king.
And it worked because every citizen was taught the law and they were personally accountable to God to follow the law.
So you're about to steal.
Nobody's around.
Then you think God's watching me.
This was the Joshua generation onwards?
Right.
Is that correct?
So post the people of Egypt, their children from that point forward, correct?
It would be Joshua entering the promised land up until King Saul.
So you got it, that 400-year period.
Law has been delivered.
The old generation dies.
The new generation enters the promised land.
Yeah, and it worked as long as the priest taught it.
And then when the priest stopped.
They were supposed to be a nation of priests, right?
That was the idea of Israel.
And then when the Levites stopped teaching the law, it fell apart.
And you think they stopped teaching the law?
Well, here's a story.
Eli, the high priest, his own sons are sleeping with women in the tent where the Ark of the Covenant is.
And then there's another story of a Levite with a concubine, and the law says the Levites to marry a virgin of his own tribe.
So he's not following it.
And then they're traveling in a house surrounded by sodomites.
Something about that behavior, this casting off of self-restraint, this abandonment to passion.
And it turns into this chaos.
The poor girl dies and raped to death.
And they go to Samuel the prophet.
They say, this self-government system is not working.
We want to be like the other countries.
We want a king.
And then they go to Samuel and...
Give us a king and be careful what you wish for, basically.
Yeah, and Samuel cries, and the Lord tells him, they did not reject you, they rejected me.
So God's original plan for ancient Israel was to not have a king, have millions of people taught the law and personally accountable to God to follow the law.
And that's that period's called the Hebrew Republic.
And that was what was looked to by America's founding fathers as the model.
That's why they taught Hebrew at Yale and Harvard.
I mean, to this day.
It's a requirement to graduate, I think.
Yeah.
To this day, Yale has Hebrew characters on its coat of arms.
And so really, King Saul is the divider between Europe and America.
You think, King Saul?
Right.
So the kings of Europe looked to the Bible for their authority, but they looked to the King Saul and on.
The Calvinist Puritans that founded New England, they looked to the pre-King Saul period, this 400-year period where you have millions of people and no king, but everybody's taught the law and personally accountable to God to follow the law.
Light and truth.
Let's read the Urim and Turim was on Yale.
Bill, you flagged me in Boise.
You would have thought of something in Deuteronomy, of something I said about God knows the plans before you, but he gives you a chance to act.
Do you remember what you told me?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So God knows the future.
In a sense, he knows all the possible futures, and he tells you what they are, and he lets you choose.
What is the biblical evidence of that?
And then he's smart enough to know how you're going to choose.
So you have Deuteronomy 28, and he says, if you hearken to the voice of the Lord, this will be your future.
You'll be blessed coming in, blessed coming out.
If you do not hearken to the voice of the Lord, this will be your future.
The diseases of Egypt will come upon you.
The stranger will come in amongst you and rise up above you.
You've got Jeremiah going to King Zedekiah saying, if you go out and surrender to the king of Babylon, Jerusalem is going to be spared.
If you do not go out and surrender to the king of Babylon, Jerusalem will be burnt to the ground.
So here are the two possible futures.
You choose.
Please choose life.
Please choose around.
But you choose, and God's smart enough to know how we're going to choose.
But this is a concept that I develop in a new book called Believe.
And it's, how can God give us free will yet still be in control?
And it gets to the thought God created light and Einstein's theory.
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second.
And Einstein's theory of relativity is if you could travel the speed of light for you, time would stand still.
We'll never comprehend that, but there's a verse that says a day with the Lord is as a thousand years.
Imagine experiencing a day as if it was a thousand years.
In other words, God exists in the ever-present now.
I am that I am.
And we're moving in slow motion compared to him.
And so we get to make our little free will decisions, but he can readjust every electron in the universe.
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Bill, you wanted to make a final thought on that?
Yeah, just the fact that it's our limited free will inside the context of God's unlimited sovereign will.
And it works because he's outside of time.
All right.
And so we make our little free will decisions, but he can readjust every atom in the universe.
So it's sort of an interplay.
I use the example of a GPS on your phone.
You make a wrong turn.
It recalculates.
Make another wrong turn.
What if the guy in the car next to you is making wrong turns?
His is recalculating at the same time.
What if everybody in the world's making wrong turns and it's recalculating, right?
So we make good decisions, we make bad decisions, but God's outside of time.
He can recalculate every electron in the universe.
So his will is going to take place.
So it's our limited free will inside the unlimited context of his sovereign will.
But we must act obediently.
That is.
So we have the chance of letting him use us as a vessel for his goodness.
So the book is Socialism.
Well, it's one of your many books, Bill, and you have several.
One other thing I want to ask you about, and Blake, you can chime in.
Socialism, a monarchy makeover.
What do you mean by that?
So it's a bait and switch.
It promises heaven delivers hell.
I tell people, what if older fish could tell younger fish to stay away from shiny things dangling in the water?
But they can't.
So every new generation, younger fish sees the shiny thing.
It's a hook, and they get caught.
Socialism is a shiny thing dangling in the water.
Free food, free clothes, free education, free welfare.
Free is attractive, but there's a hook.
You give up control of your life.
And so I was reading how to catch pigs in the wild.
You put a post in the ground and you throw some corn down.
Pigs come, eat the corn, ignore the post.
And the next day, there's two posts.
Next day, three posts.
You start putting them in a little semicircle.
Pigs heat eating the post, eating the corn, ignoring the post.
So finally, they're almost in a closed circle, but there's a little opening and the pigs squeeze through the opening and they're eating their corn.
You close the gate and you caught yourself some wild pigs.
And so this is the idea.
You get people dependent on the government, dependent, dependent.
And then you begin to say, okay, if you want to continue this, you're going to have to incrementally give up your freedom.
Let us track you.
Let us, you know, get your digital IDs and everything.
So socialism is a bait and switch for dictatorship.
It sounds nice, but the thing they leave out is human nature.
And human nature is selfish.
That's why the founding fathers took the power of ruling and broke it into three branches, executive, legislative, judicial.
I use an illustration of explaining our Constitution with a brownies, right?
So I'm one of 11 kids.
I have five brothers and growing up and five sisters.
So one time we came in from playing, my mom had made brownies.
There was one left in the pan, and my little brother and I were about to fight over it.
My mom had an idea.
One of you cuts it and the other gets to pick the first piece.
Now, the one cutting it doesn't know which piece they're going to get, so they're going to try to cut it exactly equal.
It works great, unless you did it with my little brother, because he spit on him and got both pieces, but I punched him.
Anyway, but if you can imagine a big brownie, three hungry boys, you give me each a job.
First one is to trace out on the brownie where it's going to be cut.
He doesn't know which piece he's going to eventually end up with.
So he's going to try to trace those pieces exactly equal.
Second one's job is to take the knife and execute it, right?
Actually cut it.
And the third one's job is to judge and see who gets which piece.
So you have the legislative branch tracing and laying out the laws, the executive branch signing it, cutting it, putting it into law, and the judicial branch judging the law.
It's a stroke of genius.
Selfish, greedy people keep another selfish, greedy people from becoming selfish and greedy.
It would be like a Sunday school assignment.
Design a system of government where sinners keep other sinners from sinning.
That's what our Constitution is.
James Madison said, there's no angels on earth to govern us.
We're all human.
We're all selfish.
We'll all prefer our family and friends.
So what do you do?
You take the power of ruling and make a three-way tug of war.
And George Washington, in his farewell address, warns the only thing that can short-circuit this is parties, right?
So if two or more branches of the government belong to the same political party, why should we pull against each other?
Let's team up against that other branch.
And it loses its dynamic tension and it falls apart.
But our founders were preoccupied with how to take the power of a king and separate it.
In other words, our Constitution is basically a way to prevent a president from ruling through mandates and executive orders.
Should I say that again?
Our Constitution was intentionally made to keep a president from ruling through mandates and executive orders.
Take the power of one person ruling and take the Tower of Babel and scatter it.
Yes, and decentralize it.
They wanted the legislature to be the most powerful arm of government, which would be most responsive to the people.
And we haven't held up that portion of it terribly well.
Not at all.
No, we have a fourth branch, an administrative state, that's been created.
They are by far the most powerful, by far.
They act almost as this monarchy dictatorship within our own government.
Well, obviously we lost our own.
They intended for legislative supremacy, like have the legislative be the most powerful branch, have the House be the more powerful of the two chambers.
And this has decayed over time in the U.S. to the point where the House is probably the weakest.
Of the four components of the federal government, or five, if you want to include the bureaucracy, the House is probably the weakest one.
And it's very difficult to see how we can rebuild that.
And that's probably one of the big pictures from the big sweep of history.
Athens had a democracy.
It eventually failed.
And it basically took 2,000 years before you got to make another shot at that.
As bad as monarchy can be, as bad as these concentrations of power can be, they can be very, very durable.
And the alternatives to it can be very fragile.
And it's very difficult to rebuild.
Self-government is extremely rare, isn't it, Bill?
And it's slipping away.
And there's no guarantee we'll get it back for hundreds of years.
Because right now, self-government, I mean, India is not really self-government.
And that's kind of, I mean, maybe, maybe not.
But I'd say out of the, what, 170 countries, 170 countries, right?
190, 190.
Maybe 10 have legitimate self-government.
Is that fair?
Maybe.
Right.
And usually if it's smaller, it works.
But one of the things, teeter-totter.
So the less external restraints requires the populace have more internal restraints.
Right?
So if we're going to be a country with lots of freedom and few laws, the population needs to have more internal laws.
Virtue.
Plato called it virtue.
And so ancient Israel called it following the Ten Commandments and the morals.
But it's like the parent gives the teenager the car keys and says, you're a good kid.
You've got internal morals.
You can come home anytime you want.
But if you don't follow those internal morals and you drink and drive and party, you're going to be pulled over by the police and put behind bars and control.
So teenager, you are going to be controlled, either voluntarily from the inside or forcibly from the outside.
It's the same way with the nation.
We're either going to be voluntarily controlled with internal morals.
And what motivates us to follow those is we're accountable to a just God, or we're going to get rid of God, get rid of our morals, tell everybody there's no right and wrong.
Just give into your passions.
Moral Decline and Chaos 00:03:26
You don't even know if you're a boy or a girl anymore.
You can kill the baby in the womb.
And we shove these kids out on the street and like, there's no morals, there's no guidelines enough.
I feel like killing you.
I feel like hitting you on the head.
I feel like taking your...
And it turns into chaos.
And what happens after chaos?
You have a tyrant arise.
And it happens every time.
You know, one of the things, a visual illustration, if you drive into a city, they're doing construction.
There's a tall crane.
And your eyes are drawn to this high part of the crane.
But there's something very important on the other side you don't notice.
It's called a counterweight.
And the higher the crane goes, the heavier that counterweight has to be.
Otherwise, the whole thing tips over.
So the high part, that's a person's success.
Maybe an athlete, maybe a politician, maybe an actor, and they're really visible and really successful.
But if they don't have private moral virtue on the right, if they start doing all kinds of sin and drugs and stuff on the side, guess what?
At some point, that thing is going to crash in a day.
It's just going to fall over.
They're going to be caught in some kind of scam or some immoral stuff.
So the higher that God lifts someone up, then they need to have a counterbalance of more private internal morals and virtue and spend time with the Lord and the Bible and so forth.
And yeah, the question is you need both, right?
And currently, I do not think we have a virtuous citizenry.
So that's decline.
And so then you get the government that reflects that.
And so to try to rebuild the government, you also need to kind of rebuild the virtue in this society.
Yes, and the temperance and the prudence and the wisdom and the discipline.
Get back to this, you know, you think of it, you're a spirit, mind, and body.
So your mind is like a super fancy computer.
It's more than that, but it's at least that.
And your body's like the computer case, which makes it silly for people to argue over what color the computer case is.
Imagine if I were to say blue computers or better than green computers.
It's like, it doesn't matter what color the computer.
What matters is what software is, what apps are on your phone.
And so it doesn't matter what color somebody's skin is, is what behavioral software is running on their brain.
And so, for the longest time, we were putting Judeo-Christian morals, treat everybody fair, but now we've surrendered the programming of the children to people that want to put viruses and malware and spyware and corrupted files on their brain so they don't even know if there's a right or wrong.
They can feel like a fuzzy and it turns into chaos.
And once you have societal chaos, that's when people say government come in and restore order.
And the government's going to say, okay, we're going to take away everybody's guns.
We're going to take away your freedom of speech because you might say something that sets somebody off.
And so we're going to limit you rather than them.
And we're going to track you.
And so when there's chaos, that's the precursor to a dictatorship.
And do you find that chaos to be intentional at times, Blake?
I lean less that way than a lot of people do.
Like, I just, I think as conservatives, it's always our disposition to see everything as like planned, hierarchical, intentional, because we respect hierarchies generally.
But I just think typically things are not as planned as we often want to believe they are.
It's almost comforting to believe that, you know, there's one person who planned this because then you can remove that person or you can change their mind or otherwise, you know, displace them.
And it's much more troubling to imagine that there is no plan and rebuilding from this will be enormously difficult or even impossible.
It might, it often is that the only way you can restore, you know, the civic virtue we talk about is you might need some massive cataclysm that you have to rebuild from scratch.
Choosing Between Self and Others 00:06:40
It's like those Course of Empire paintings, you know, where you see the primal state and then the apogee and then the decline and fall.
And the fall is very, very painful when it takes.
Well, and so the question, I mean, without getting too blackpilled, has there ever been an example of a civilization that has turned itself around?
Slowed down, maybe, I don't know, if turned around.
So I like the story of there's this wicked king Manasseh in Judah, and he's sacrificing children to Moloch.
And the prophets come to him and say, look, you're doing the same thing that the people that were in Canaan before Israelite came and did, sacrificing children.
And so because they were doing it, I brought Israel in to judge them and drive them out.
And because you're doing it, I'm going to drive you out.
So judgment was pronounced.
Manasseh dies, has a grandson named Josiah, eight years old, starts to seek the Lord and 16 years old.
And then he's around in his early 20s.
He tells him to clean out the temple that his granddad had trashed.
And they find the law of God.
And the priests read it, said, We've never read this before.
Pretty unusual.
They take it to this young 26-year-old king, 24-year-old.
He's never read it.
And so he rips his garments and repents and sends to a prophetess in town named Holda, the wife of the king's tailor, to ask what's going to happen.
And she says, tell the man that sent you that judgment will come, but not during his lifetime because he repented.
And so for the rest of the 31-year reign of Josiah, there's peace and prosperity.
He tears down these sodomite temples, even some of them that Solomon had built because he had a thousand wives.
And then he has this huge Passover, bigger than anyone before.
And then he sends the Levite priests out to teach the law all across Judah.
And this is the revival that Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, right, got turned on.
And so my feeling is that we deserve judgment.
But if we repent, and all repentance, all liberty is individual, all repentance is individual.
It's not somebody out there repenting.
It's each one of us individually.
And so I think that it's an exciting time.
And in a sense, we wouldn't have it any other way.
I mean, imagine being in heaven talking to Moses and David and Gideon.
They're like, you know, telling all their exciting stories.
And imagine if you lived and it was all done.
Like everybody knew the Lord, all the diseases were cured, all the babies were fed, and you're like, I didn't really do anything.
It's like boring.
So for the rest of eternity, you'll be known as the boring story guy.
You know, if we want another example of some degree of comeback, we have our own English political history.
And England goes through cycles of being much more tyrannical versus much more free.
Like Henry VIII, nowadays we just make TV shows about him, and he's this like fat guy who has a lot of domestic drama.
But he basically was like running this incredibly violent tyranny in which anyone who stood in his way would get executed.
And we go from that in the 1500s to the 1600s.
England has a very vicious civil war over the powers of parliament, the glorious religion, and then they have the Glorious Revolution.
And, you know, the end state of this is we have 1700s England where they're, you know, blossoming all these ideas that the American Revolution further develops.
You know, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, separation of powers.
This grows out of, you know, England has a very tyrannical moment and then a much more liberty-minded moment where they do cultivate a lot of these virtues, you know, all the virtues that the Puritans are giving their kids as names, you know, prudence, charity, all of that.
And, you know, and then we also get out of that the abolition of slavery develops out of this English political tradition.
And so I think you could definitely argue that's a good example of a moral cultivation that there were painful moments.
You know, they have a very bad civil war, but they do get through it without a total collapse of civil war.
History is a teacher.
What is one thing that people need to do that is currently not being done that history tells us can improve our chances of revival or victory?
Well, every generation has had a crisis.
At the Hun, Genghis Khan, bubonic plague, Spanish flu.
And if we get through this crisis, there'll be another one.
We get through that crisis, there'll be another one.
Jesus said, wheat and terrors grow together until the harvest.
There's always going to be crisis.
And the crisis is an opportunity for people to reveal what's on the inside of them.
And some people's response is to run away and hide.
Others people's response is to step up and say, okay, God, where do you need me?
And historically, Christians have been on the front lines saying, you know, okay, there's a plague.
I'm going to step forward.
You know, in Hawaii, the statue that they have in our U.S. capital is Father Damien.
Who's he?
Well, whaling ships, Hawaii, diseases, and they'd get leprosy and they'd put them on an island of Molokai.
And they're just dying there.
And so this priest named Father Damien goes there and ministers to him for decades.
And he eventually dies.
But he ran to the need and it so ministered to the people of Hawaii that they chose to put his statue in Honolulu and in the U.S. Capitol.
But Christians have this reputation of there's instead of staying away, I might catch something from you.
It was like, no, let me.
And so, you know, freshman chemistry class, a teacher has a beaker with a solution and pours in a catalyst that causes a reaction.
And some stuff precipitates and gets heavy, settles to the bottom of the beaker.
Other stuff gets effervescent and bubbly and floats to the top.
The time period we're living in is our solution in the beaker.
The crises of our time period is the catalyst that's poured in and it causes a reaction.
And some people's reaction is to run away and hide and drop out and think about themselves and how am I going to survive without the government and even take the mark of the beast if they tell them to, right?
And other people's response is to say, okay, God, where do you need me?
Where's the crisis?
I'm going to run to the need.
You know, I'm already dead and my life is hid with Christ and God.
Where do you need me?
And so it's a dividing that's taking place.
And I can't help but think that, you know, from a spiritual point of view, we're the bride of Christ.
And every romance novel builds up to a decision-making moment, a forsaking of all others and choosing the one.
I feel like the world is being pushed to a decision-making moment.
And some people are going to choose the all-others.
They're going to be liked and friended and followed.
And others are going to say, I don't care about the all others.
All I care about is what God thinks about me.
But I think that the world's being pushed to this moment.
And I just would encourage people, take a stand.
Realize that the situations that we're facing is the opportunity for you to take a stand.
I mean, if people say, God knows my heart, and it's like, yeah, he knew what was in Abraham's heart, but he wanted to see him be willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac.
And it's like imagine a guy watching football.
And you say, when was the last time you told your wife you love her?
And he's like, I can't remember, but she knows my heart.
It's like, well, when was the last time you did anything to show your wife you love her?
I can't remember, but she knows my heart.
It's like, dude, we need to have a little talk.
It's like, God knows your heart.
Personal Agency and Love 00:02:05
Yeah, he does.
And he wants to hear some words out of your mouth and he wants to see some action.
Blake, what historically can we do that we are not currently doing that can improve our chances of victory?
I feel like this is going to sound weird.
Like we need to maybe like, maybe log off is the right term or whatever.
Like we're very much, I think a lot of people are very passive consumers of what is happening around them.
They'll, you know, they'll watch TV.
They'll be very informed.
They'll watch the news.
But it is almost like, it's like one of those dramas he talked about in ancient Athens at the start, that they are watching it like a TV show.
And you actually have to view, we have to view ourselves as characters and what is happening around us.
And that increases our amount of agency.
Like one of the temptations towards like these, this monarchical impulse is like, oh, we need to have one great person who will just do snap their fingers and fix everything or restore our problems.
And what we actually need is the realization that you, on a local level, can act to improve what is going on around you.
And that is something where you have personal agency.
You can make sure that your family is fine and your town is fine, even if the country is getting worse.
And that is what you, as an individual person, can do best to survive any bad things that happen in the future.
Because whenever a cataclysm comes, it's going to strike down the weak and vulnerable before it takes down the strong.
So make sure you're one of the strong people who stick around.
And make a choice to be strong.
I don't think the Amish will be destroyed if America has a disaster.
Email us freedom at charliekirk.com.
Bill Federer, thank you so much.
Thank you, Charlie.
And Blake.
Book is Socialism: Real History from Plato to the Present.
You can also listen to Blake on our Thought Crimes episode as well.
God bless you guys.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts as always freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening and God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.
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