The Charlie Kirk Show - The REAL Way to Dismantle the Deep State, with Curtis Yarvin
Aired: 2024-01-17
Duration: 01:17:13


=== Charlie Kirk Show Intro (01:49) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, today on Charlie Kirk Show, a wide-ranging conversation with Curtis Yarvin.
[00:00:04]  Super smart.
[00:00:05]  We talk about a lot of different stuff, and you get a history lesson here.
[00:00:08]  Listen to this, and I'd love your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:12]  Agree with some of it, don't agree with all of it, but I'd love your feedback, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:16]  Become a member at charliekirk.com and click on the members tab and get involved with turning pointusa at tpusa.com.
[00:00:23]  That is tpusa.com.
[00:00:25]  Start a high school or college chapter today at tpusa.com.
[00:00:29]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:00:30]  Here we go.
[00:00:31]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:32]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:00:35]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:38]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:00:41]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:00:42]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:00:43]  His spirit is love of this country.
[00:00:45]  He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
[00:00:50]  Turning point USA.
[00:00:52]  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.
[00:01:00]  That's why we are here.
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[00:01:24]  Go to noblegoldinvestments.com.
[00:01:29]  I've been following this guy for a while.
[00:01:30]  He's extremely smart, and the media covers him a lot too.
[00:01:34]  And he's something.
[00:01:36]  It's Curtis Yarvin, also known by the pen name.
[00:01:40]  You're going to have to pronounce the first word for me.
[00:01:42]  Minches Moldbug.
[00:01:43]  Very, very prolific.
[00:01:45]  That's one way to say it.
[00:01:46]  And he has thought-provoking ideas that I just love.

=== Curtis Yarvin and Moldbug (12:52) ===

[00:01:49]  I don't agree with them all, but it's just, it pushes boundaries and makes you reconsider things.
[00:01:52]  Curtis, welcome to the show.
[00:01:53]  Thank you, Charlie.
[00:01:54]  It's a pleasure to be on.
[00:01:55]  So, Curtis, how about a brief introduction?
[00:01:57]  How'd you get into this?
[00:01:58]  You have a unique approach to how you think about some of the problems the country faces.
[00:02:02]  Yeah, so I started blogging about this stuff about 15 years ago, and I sort of grew up as a very normal kind of blue state American, really.
[00:02:11]  Actually, my dad was in the Foreign Service, which is kind of the elite of the deep state.
[00:02:15]  So you might say that I grew up inside the deep state, and after a while, I sort of stopped believing in it.
[00:02:20]  And then I kind of tried to believe in some of these alternatives to it.
[00:02:25]  And it's sort of, I came to the conclusion that there's really a lot of fakeness there on both sides.
[00:02:31]  And maybe to a certain extent, you're watching the Harlem Globetrotters against the Washington Generals.
[00:02:37]  And so what do we do about the Washington Generals is the most important question, I think, in the world today.
[00:02:43]  So who's which side is which?
[00:02:46]  The generals would be the Republicans.
[00:02:48]  Oh, is that right?
[00:02:49]  That is right.
[00:02:50]  And the Harlem Globetrotters are the Democrats.
[00:02:52]  That's right.
[00:02:53]  So you write analytically, and I just want to make sure I give credit where credit's due.
[00:02:58]  You said a line in one of your writings where you said, every time the bad guys say democracy, just replace it with oligarchy.
[00:03:05]  That's right.
[00:03:06]  That's right.
[00:03:06]  Because what they're talking about there, sometimes you'll see like the Soros people use the phrase civil society.
[00:03:12]  That means oligarchy.
[00:03:14]  And what you mean, what oligarchy means is the rule of the administrators, the rule of the experts, the rule of the Fauci's.
[00:03:21]  That's the sort of, you know, Fauci is more invulnerable.
[00:03:25]  He retired recently, but, you know, his job tenure was considerably safer than George III's.
[00:03:32]  And, you know, if somebody passed a law saying we're not going to have gain of function research and Fauci and his friends want gain of function research, that's not going to stick.
[00:03:41]  And so you're looking at absolute power here.
[00:03:45]  It's very important to sort of recognize the power of all governments is absolute.
[00:03:50]  They can do anything they want.
[00:03:51]  The question is how power is spread around that oligarchy.
[00:03:56]  And what you have is these little pieces of absolute power in the hands of the Fauci's.
[00:04:02]  And sort of for every kind of policy area, there's someone like Fauci, there's someone in the academic community, someone in the New York Times who basically has a lock on that policy.
[00:04:15]  And what we've seen is that those policies get more and more deranged until we had this incredible pandemic that they basically literally went out and invented to basically get more grants.
[00:04:28]  And realizing the sort of just one example of the rule of these people and how sort of Soviet it's become, COVID was like Chernobyl, but like killing 100,000 more people times as many people.
[00:04:47]  And I guess one of the positives is that people now have a face and a name where they can now see the face of the quote-unquote deep state Fauci.
[00:04:57]  But the point you're making is there's hundreds of these operatives.
[00:04:59]  There's hundreds of these operatives, and it's the structure that they're in that is actually often people sort of think that it's these people's ideology that is sort of the cause of just the craziness of their decisions.
[00:05:15]  I would say that actually the structure is the cause of the ideology.
[00:05:20]  That progressivism is something that you're going to get inherently out of any system of oligarchical rule.
[00:05:26]  Is the design of the American system, does it lend itself to inevitable oligarchy?
[00:05:32]  There have been many American systems historically.
[00:05:35]  When you look at, there's something they do in France where they number the republics.
[00:05:39]  They have the first, second, third, you know, around the Fifth Republic, I think.
[00:05:43]  In the U.S., basically, we see the present system of government really dates to Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.
[00:05:52]  And whatever happened before that is basically ancient history.
[00:05:55]  So that's interesting.
[00:05:56]  You don't would you say Woodrow Wilson started that cause set in motion?
[00:06:00]  I mean, I give at least the Claremont Hillsdale people would put a lot of blame or credit on the Wilsonian historicists.
[00:06:12]  Sure, I think that the Claremont people tend to place a little more attention on ideas and maybe on personalities than I do.
[00:06:23]  And I'm sort of more interested in the kind of structure of historical movements.
[00:06:28]  That's interesting.
[00:06:29]  But, you know, certainly Wilson and FDR come out of the same early American progress.
[00:06:32]  But you would say FDR created the actual architecture of the modern administrative state.
[00:06:36]  That's right.
[00:06:37]  Okay, so let's dive into that.
[00:06:38]  There's so many topics.
[00:06:39]  By the way, you're super well read, and this is so interesting.
[00:06:41]  So FDR was the longest serving president, served a long period of time during a quote-unquote depression that lasted significantly on.
[00:06:49]  But did he knowingly build an administrative state for decades and centuries of power?
[00:06:56]  Or you don't really care?
[00:06:58]  What we have, what we call the administrative state, as academics say, or deep state, as we like to say on TV, is essentially FDR's personal administration without its head.
[00:07:10]  So FDR was really operating, not quite as a dictator, but really almost as a dictator.
[00:07:15]  He was certainly a dictator in foreign policy.
[00:07:17]  Confiscated.
[00:07:18]  In gold.
[00:07:18]  Yeah, in domestic policy, you know, he, there were some areas of resistance to him.
[00:07:24]  He wasn't Stalin exactly.
[00:07:26]  He couldn't order people shot.
[00:07:27]  But he was basically in charge of the federal government.
[00:07:30]  And essentially, and the way he was in charge of the federal government, he created many, many new agencies in DC, the so-called alphabet soup.
[00:07:40]  He used every lever he could, many of them very informal levers, to take over the old agencies.
[00:07:47]  And then when he dies, he's replaced by Harry Truman, who's basically a nobody.
[00:07:52]  And what happens is all the power that he'd held in his hands sort of goes down into this administrative state that he created.
[00:08:00]  That's an interesting, I've never heard that theory before.
[00:08:02]  So you're saying that it was almost a fracturing and it went down all these separate tributaries.
[00:08:07]  And so when FDR broke, the power center decentralized within the B.
[00:08:11]  And it never has been able to consolidate.
[00:08:13]  It never has been able to consolidate because nobody, especially, I think personally, the theory and it's impossible to prove is that FDR, certainly in 44 when he runs for election, knows he's dying.
[00:08:24]  The American people don't even know he's in a wheelchair.
[00:08:26]  He knows he's dying.
[00:08:27]  And so as his successor, he picks this literal nobody from Missouri.
[00:08:31]  From Missouri, you know, who's a machine politician from Missouri, not even a New Dealer.
[00:08:35]  And people are like, why did he pick this nobody?
[00:08:38]  And the answer is that nobody will ever have that much power.
[00:08:41]  So he almost, you can't prove it, but your speculation is that the succession plan was that my power will be broken to a million pieces.
[00:08:47]  Exactly, and therefore it will never be destroyed.
[00:08:50]  And the thing is that it's amazing.
[00:08:52]  And, you know, this guy really did conquer the world, right?
[00:08:53]  It's like Voldemort from a Harry Potter reference.
[00:08:55]  Like, I will scatter my power.
[00:08:57]  Exactly.
[00:08:58]  Exactly.
[00:08:58]  And, you know, this guy really did conquer the world.
[00:09:01]  You know, at the time that he dies, he really thinks Stalin is working for him.
[00:09:05]  And so he doesn't quite realize that the Cold War is about to break out.
[00:09:09]  He still thinks Stalin is his guy.
[00:09:11]  He's conquered the world.
[00:09:13]  And the thing is, you've got to understand, as you go back in D.C., in time in D.C., it becomes more and more monarchical.
[00:09:19]  Things go more from the top down.
[00:09:21]  It works more like a company, less like a bureaucracy.
[00:09:25]  And the people are actually really good.
[00:09:27]  These really are the best and the brightest in D.C. in the 30s.
[00:09:30]  Now, they have a lot of bad ideas, but they're very, very capable.
[00:09:35]  Yeah, they are that idea of a civil servant.
[00:09:37]  They have families.
[00:09:38]  They're invested in the country.
[00:09:40]  They're not overly ideological.
[00:09:41]  They're all the best Americans.
[00:09:42]  And so if you're looking at the business.
[00:09:44]  If you're looking for people with the Scandinavian model of American people.
[00:09:47]  If you're looking for people with that level of talent today, you're mostly not going to find them in the government.
[00:09:51]  You're going to find them in Silicon Valley.
[00:09:53]  You're going to find them in various areas of finance.
[00:09:55]  But people that good can't stand working in Washington today.
[00:09:59]  Do you think that they gravitated towards D.C. in the 30s out of duty or honor or the prestige of working for the government?
[00:10:05]  Or is it just because the country was a better country?
[00:10:08]  All of those.
[00:10:08]  It was an incredible experience.
[00:10:10]  You know, it's like the experience of being like, here's one way to convey the experience of being in FDR's early New Deal.
[00:10:17]  It's like you graduated from Harvard with his degree in this new field of economics.
[00:10:22]  Somebody, you know, you know somebody who knows somebody who knows Felix Frankfurt or something.
[00:10:25]  You get a phone call.
[00:10:26]  Your friend is like, hey, why don't you come to D.C.?
[00:10:28]  You're like, what would I be doing?
[00:10:30]  You're like, he's like, I have no idea.
[00:10:31]  You know, just come.
[00:10:32]  You show up.
[00:10:33]  They give you a desk, an office.
[00:10:34]  You're like, here's $6 million.
[00:10:36]  Go electrify Arkansas.
[00:10:38]  That is not the experience of a young man coming to D.C. today.
[00:10:41]  Or yeah, here's a thing called the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority.
[00:10:44]  Good luck.
[00:10:46]  And they go.
[00:10:47]  It's kind of empowering.
[00:10:48]  It's incredibly empowering.
[00:10:50]  And they go out and they do this stuff.
[00:10:52]  Yes.
[00:10:53]  And they have like...
[00:10:54]  Super authority.
[00:10:55]  Super authority.
[00:10:56]  And, you know, the thing that really, you know, in all of my like historical research is one of the things that struck me most is there's a classic book called The Making the President 1960 by T.E. White, T.H. White, T.H. White, I think.
[00:11:10]  And he's talking to someone who, you know, is part of the Kennedy machine.
[00:11:15]  And we remember Kennedy as this era of like the new frontier, this bright optimism.
[00:11:19]  We're going to do everything.
[00:11:20]  At least Libbs remember Kennedy that way.
[00:11:22]  And he's talking to one of these people, and then he talks to like a New Dealer.
[00:11:27]  And the New Dealer is just like after the New Deal, like everything is bland, everything is boring, everything is dead, right?
[00:11:32]  You know, and like the distance from the new frontier to now, if you're working and you're like, like you had all these people come in in the Obama era who'd all like watch the West Wing and they all wanted to like West Wing it.
[00:11:43]  Yeah, they were LARPing as West wingers.
[00:11:46]  So Curtis, the only other president I would ask you about that tried to combine the distillation of power was Nixon.
[00:11:52]  Did he get close or not?
[00:11:53]  Or was it a good question?
[00:11:55]  That's an excellent question because I think that, you know, no, he didn't get close.
[00:11:59]  And a distant second?
[00:12:01]  Well, Nixon, you know, Nixon, of course, is coming from the right rather than from the left, you know, which is obviously very important.
[00:12:09]  And Nixon's theory, Nixon was probably, I'd say, in terms of IQ, maybe the smartest president of the century.
[00:12:16]  Maybe it was Nixon, maybe it was Wilson.
[00:12:18]  You know, this is a really smart, capable guy.
[00:12:21]  You know, comes from sort of deep America.
[00:12:23]  He's a California Quaker.
[00:12:25]  And Nixon's idea is that he's going to come in.
[00:12:28]  He's going to be the president of the silent majority.
[00:12:32]  He's going to take all this like crazy, hippie stuff, and he's going to show Americans how a government that works works.
[00:12:39]  He's going to take over Washington, run it like a grown-up, and do all this grown-up stuff.
[00:12:45]  The problem is that in order to take over Washington and run it like a grown-up, basically, you know, so Nixon, for example, in 68, Cronkite declares the Vietnam War is lost.
[00:12:55]  The Tet Offensive is won.
[00:12:56]  Nixon's like, you know what?
[00:12:58]  I can come in and I can run the government so well, I can both win the Vietnam War and pull American troops out of Vietnam.
[00:13:05]  And he does.
[00:13:06]  The Viet Cong are completely defeated by 72, 73.
[00:13:10]  This has been sort of retconned out of history.
[00:13:12]  He beats Ho Chi Minh.
[00:13:14]  He creates the South Vietnam that basically relies only on American funding and American air power.
[00:13:20]  Congress is like, okay, you think you won the war.
[00:13:23]  We're just going to pull, you know, the funding and the air power.
[00:13:26]  And then North Vietnam is going to conquer South Vietnam in a massive conventional ground invasion.
[00:13:31]  Wow, we basically won't even sell the South Vietnamese bullets.
[00:13:34]  And then we're going to retcon this so that everybody thinks Walter Cronkite was right in 1968.
[00:13:42]  And that's how most people think the Vietnam War.
[00:13:44]  That's amazing.
[00:13:45]  Isn't that amazing?
[00:13:45]  Isn't that just an amazing level of power?
[00:13:47]  And so he's going in there.
[00:13:48]  And I was at a seminar recently, like new discoveries on Watergate.
[00:13:53]  And I actually talked to some old Nixon aides, you know, Dwight Chapin and Jeff Shepard.
[00:14:00]  Amazing guys in their 80s, still sharp as tacks, and basically really reflecting.
[00:14:05]  I mean, the whole Watergate thing was really the start of Lawfare.
[00:14:09]  I don't want to go too deeply into this, but it was like Lawfare 1.0.
[00:14:12]  Yes.
[00:14:13]  And basically, Nixon acts as if, you know, he'll make these great speeches.
[00:14:18]  He'll be like, the enemy is the professors.
[00:14:20]  The enemy is the journalists, like really base stuff, right?
[00:14:22]  And then he'll go out and behave as if the enemy is Ho Chi Minh.
[00:14:26]  That's amazing.
[00:14:26]  And so, I mean, and Nixon, in some ways, was a geek of the administrator.
[00:14:32]  Exactly right.
[00:14:33]  Exactly right.
[00:14:34]  But even he was not able to bring back these pieces.
[00:14:41]  Bring back these pieces.

=== Lawfare Origins with Nixon Aides (02:36) ===

[00:14:42]  Shatter it.
[00:14:44]  Pull the cables together.
[00:14:46]  So the other, the only other, I know this is from the right, but the only other person that attempted that was the closest thing was Dick Cheney in Bush.
[00:14:54]  Is this not maybe over some pieces of the national security state?
[00:14:58]  Yeah, over some pieces of the national security state.
[00:15:01]  And so you see sort of the national security state, definitely like the Iraq War and that stuff was sort of the last gasp of a DOD that thought differently from the State Department.
[00:15:13]  Nowadays, it's all state all the time.
[00:15:15]  You know, I mean, state didn't want the Iraq invasion, right?
[00:15:18]  You know, and so you see, like, when you look at people who survive from sort of the Nixon period with the Nixon mindset into today, into the Trump administration, you're looking at guys like John Bolton or William Barr.
[00:15:34]  Right.
[00:15:34]  And the thing is, you know, Barr, you know, it's a pity because these are very capable people.
[00:15:39]  But the thing is, they're still, and they know these systems very well, but they're still operating on this kind of Nixon theory.
[00:15:46]  Yes.
[00:15:46]  So Barr comes in, and basically he's like, we're going to stop this Russiagate stuff.
[00:15:51]  But he's not like, oh, wow, like, you know, Andrew Weissman's 15 guys all deleted their cell phones.
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[00:17:03]  Finish that thought.
[00:17:03]  So Barr said, we're not going to go after Weissman.
[00:17:06]  Yeah, Barr is not like, we're going to clean out DOJ, you know, can't basically like clean out DOJ and basically sort of stop this incredible kind of lawfare against the executive branch from the executive branch.

=== Pre-Born Donation Appeal (09:21) ===

[00:17:19]  He's just like, okay, we're not going to do this anymore and we're going to make DOJ work on behalf of the American people.
[00:17:25]  And like the time for that is really over.
[00:17:28]  Like you just can't like you can't imagine doing that.
[00:17:31]  You know, you don't have the power to do that in so many ways.
[00:17:35]  And you're not, you're basically not doing what the American people asked you to do when they elected Trump.
[00:17:41]  So I want to get to this other baseline conversation, then we can get to the more current.
[00:17:46]  Can you explain to our audience then who calls the shots, who's in charge?
[00:17:51]  This is a question I get a lot.
[00:17:53]  And my experience is that it's kind of unclear.
[00:17:58]  It's kind of a culture almost.
[00:18:00]  Yeah.
[00:18:00]  The question is almost an error.
[00:18:02]  The question is almost an error because you're basically looking for like who's in charge.
[00:18:07]  And the closer you get to like talking to the center, talking to the people who really matter, they're just like, oh my God, no one is in charge.
[00:18:16]  Well, so that's what's important because I'm not faulting anyone that believes this because there's some truth to it.
[00:18:21]  But there is this Wizard of Oz type belief that there's someone just calling shots.
[00:18:26]  Yeah.
[00:18:27]  And it's Barack Obama from Martha's Vineyard and says, investigate, indict.
[00:18:32]  Yeah, and there are pieces of that, I'm sure.
[00:18:34]  But the bureaucracy operates completely differently than that.
[00:18:37]  It operates completely differently from that because the whole thing, the bureaucracy is like, basically, the fundamental problem, if I had to say one thing to your audience of patriots, like that I wanted them to remember that, you know, it's not when they say democracy, they mean oligarchy.
[00:18:54]  That's really, really important.
[00:18:56]  People should really get that.
[00:18:57]  The second thing to say, and I love going around to saying this, people that are really in the loop and in deep in DC, because I've never heard anyone disagree with this.
[00:19:06]  We don't have an executive branch.
[00:19:09]  We have a legislative branch.
[00:19:12]  It's almost like a legislative judicial branch in some ways.
[00:19:15]  And the way, because when you look at the so-called executive branch, what you see is that the personnel, the policy, and the budget of this are set by the Congress, which is a completely non-democratic and non-political, you know, the Congress is a buffer against politicizing the deep state, which means democratizing the deep state.
[00:19:39]  And so if you look at the influence that the president has on the executive branch, basically, what is an executive order?
[00:19:47]  It's basically a tweet.
[00:19:48]  There's really not terribly big difference between an EO and a tweet.
[00:19:53]  And the ability to, like, you know, even by, you know, you have this org chart that looks like the org chart of a private company in which basically control flows from the top down, but it's completely illusory.
[00:20:07]  And if you stack that whole system with like patriotic Americans, and you support, which unfortunately was not really done in the last administration, but there's something called the plumb book, do you know the Trump plumb?
[00:20:20]  Of course, the 5,000 positions and the 5,000 positions that Trump gets to appoint, right?
[00:20:27]  And you basically put 5,000, I don't know where you'd find these people, but you put 5,000 really, really capable, you know, people who really see the world the way you do, Charlie.
[00:20:38]  And want to work for the federal government.
[00:20:39]  And you want to work for the federal government.
[00:20:41]  If you take these imaginary people and put them in and make them exist somehow and put them, you know, my friend Sir Rob Sharma is trying very hard to do.
[00:20:49]  No, he's doing a great job.
[00:20:50]  He's doing a great job.
[00:20:51]  But the thing is, you know, here's what's going to happen.
[00:20:53]  They are basically going to parachute in there.
[00:20:56]  They're going to find that they have no way to constrain the permanent staff who nominally work for them.
[00:21:04]  And every one of these people is going to be offered a choice.
[00:21:07]  First of all, either you turn coat immediately, you become a traitor, or we are going to destroy your professional life.
[00:21:15]  We are going to saddle you with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills because this lawfare industry that we're seeing is just ramping up.
[00:21:22]  We're going to saddle you with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills.
[00:21:25]  You will never have a career in this space at all again.
[00:21:31]  And like, we're going to do everything to destroy you personally, but certainly professionally.
[00:21:36]  Or you can just turn coat and maybe after four years, we'll trust you and you can get some jobs.
[00:21:41]  You can kind of burrow into the bureaucracy.
[00:21:42]  I have heard this story hundreds of times of people that go into the bureaucracy and they are confronted.
[00:21:50]  And if they choose incorrectly, within a month, hell is unleashed upon them.
[00:21:56]  And I can tell you, whether it be in housing and urban development or whether it be in the Department of Interior, it is systemic across the board, right?
[00:22:04]  There is not an inch of turf that they will concede, not anywhere.
[00:22:09]  And it was as bad, Curtis, and I want to get into this.
[00:22:13]  Trump would say, I want to do A, and the bureaucrats would say, huh?
[00:22:17]  Yeah.
[00:22:18]  And they would just throw away the order.
[00:22:20]  It would take four, five, six, sometimes eight follow-ups, months, until you could even get 1% of what the order would say.
[00:22:28]  There was daily subversion.
[00:22:30]  And by the way, this is a huge challenge.
[00:22:31]  What can you even do about that?
[00:22:33]  What can we even do about that?
[00:22:35]  Well, I have an answer, but you may not like it.
[00:22:38]  Okay.
[00:22:39]  And your audience might not like it.
[00:22:40]  No, we want the truth.
[00:22:42]  Yeah, the truth, the truth, the truth.
[00:22:45]  And I think that I feel like Americans are really like one of the things that conservatism, American conservatism sort of may not be quite there yet, but like it's waking up a lot.
[00:22:56]  I call it the great melting.
[00:22:58]  It's finally this ice age of these old ideas are melting away.
[00:23:01]  It's not there, but you can start to see these new things.
[00:23:04]  And you're just starting to see DC for what it really is.
[00:23:07]  Like most, you go like in your 11th grade civics class and you like read about how a bill becomes a law or whatever.
[00:23:13]  It's so ideal.
[00:23:14]  And then there's a budget.
[00:23:15]  And then you, you know, like even the freaking omnibus bills, like, you know, it's so, it has no resemblance to, you know, Congress isn't even a parliamentary body.
[00:23:26]  Like it's not, you know, it's not a talking shop.
[00:23:29]  People don't actually like debate there.
[00:23:30]  It's this bizarre system of committees, right?
[00:23:34]  You know, and so, you know, the idea that like you're, you know, like if you could bring the founders back and basically show them DC as it is today, they would just be like, what does this even have to do with the thing we created?
[00:23:48]  Like, how are you basically using these 18th century documents to justify this?
[00:23:53]  Well, that's the tragedy, is that they don't need to rewrite the Constitution.
[00:23:58]  They've just ignored it.
[00:23:59]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:24:00]  Just kind of built their own.
[00:24:01]  They've made it a dead letter.
[00:24:03]  And the thing is, you know, you know what else is a dead letter?
[00:24:05]  The Articles of Confederation.
[00:24:07]  Yes.
[00:24:07]  Nobody ever abolished the Articles of Confederation.
[00:24:09]  They just said, well, you know, this isn't a thing anymore.
[00:24:12]  This is not working out.
[00:24:12]  And they essentially sort of abolished the Constitution within sort of, well, nominally adhering to it.
[00:24:20]  You know, of course, about Chris Caldwell and I did a whole show on MLK.
[00:24:24]  I'm a believer that we actually have two American foundings.
[00:24:27]  The second was in the 1960s, and MLK is the George Washington of the Constitution.
[00:24:31]  Sure, sure.
[00:24:32]  I don't want to get too far down.
[00:24:33]  I would say that that was a minor founding compared to the founding of the 1930s.
[00:24:37]  But the modern elites honor that one more than 1776 or 1786 is sort of unrecognizable from this world.
[00:24:50]  And so, you know, like, I guess I would say that, you know, stepping way, way back and looking at kind of the grand sweep of American history, I would say one of the most brilliant things, you know, actually, like, you know, the founding generation is sort of very different from the abstractions that people see.
[00:25:12]  These are real people with real flaws and real, you know, in a real situation.
[00:25:17]  And yet, you know, they were brilliant.
[00:25:21]  They were in the real world.
[00:25:22]  They were doing real things.
[00:25:24]  And one of the things they did in the Constitution that was kind of a work of genius that I think we can really learn from is they never specified which of the three branches is in charge.
[00:25:36]  And so...
[00:25:37]  But wasn't that part of the brilliance?
[00:25:39]  That was part of the brilliance.
[00:25:40]  I'm not questioning their wisdom.
[00:25:42]  That was part of the brilliance because basically what that allowed to have happen, you know, as Aristotle described, you know, 2,500 years ago, there are three sort of forms of government and modes of power.
[00:25:56]  These are democracy, the rule of the many, oligarchy, the rule of the few, and monarchy, the rule of the one.
[00:26:03]  And what we see in American history is about every 75 or 80 years, sort of like the San Andreas Fault, you basically get a presidential government.
[00:26:14]  Your government goes from being, you know, sort of the rule of the many is pretty hard to pull off these days.
[00:26:21]  The rule of the few is pretty normal in this system.
[00:26:24]  That breaks down and you get a president like Washington or Lincoln or FDR who is really personally in charge of the federal government in the way that Elon Musk is in charge of SpaceX.

=== Presidential Government vs Oligarchy (03:15) ===

[00:26:40]  That's a great analogy because I'm reading the Walter Isaacson book on Elon.
[00:26:44]  He is the closest thing to, and I don't mean this pejoratively, he is a dictator over those companies.
[00:26:50]  He is a king.
[00:26:50]  He is a monarch.
[00:26:51]  He is a CEO.
[00:26:52]  What he says goes, and he is the arbiter of what success is and what is not.
[00:26:57]  And when you look at how everything that works in our world works, whether it's a restaurant with a chef, whether it's a movie with a director, whether it's a company with a CEO, you see this pattern sort of repeated everywhere where you basically put one person in charge, you make him or her accountable, but you don't let anyone micromanage that.
[00:27:20]  And basically, authorities flows from the top down.
[00:27:24]  So in Washington, there's a saying that personnel is policy.
[00:27:28]  And so, you know, whereas so if you want some policy to run, get the right people in charge.
[00:27:34]  That's not how SpaceX works.
[00:27:39]  Hey, everyone, Charlie Kirk here.
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[00:28:42]  That's not how SpaceX works.
[00:28:45]  Great example is the first, the Falcon rocket that Elon Musk sent out, did it with a ragtag team of 500 people on the fourth attempt to the competitor, NASA, or even Boeing's division that was working with NASA, 50,000 employees, and they couldn't get it.
[00:28:58]  That's right.
[00:28:58]  That's right.
[00:28:58]  Because basically, NASA is full.
[00:29:01]  When you look at an oligarchic system at a bureaucracy, the way it works is by process.
[00:29:06]  Everything has a process.
[00:29:08]  Nothing is left to individual discretion.
[00:29:11]  And if there is individual discretion, like, you know, Fauci has some individual discretion.
[00:29:16]  The way he uses that is by ganking the process.
[00:29:19]  He manipulates procedural outcomes.
[00:29:21]  He's like, I want this procedure to let my friends do gain of function research and get more grants.
[00:29:26]  So how can I make this come out to say, oh, my friends and, you know, a Duke in China are going to go and find all the bad coronaviruses and mutate them to make them more dangerous.
[00:29:36]  And that's literally how we got COVID, right?
[00:29:38]  You know, and so you have all of these process-based systems.
[00:29:42]  Everyone is covering their ass at all times.
[00:29:45]  There's no accountability in a process-based system.
[00:29:48]  No one can ever be held personally accountable.
[00:29:50]  Who's been held personally accountable for COVID?
[00:29:52]  No one.
[00:29:52]  And no one will be.
[00:29:53]  No one will be.
[00:29:54]  And that's a bitter.

=== Procedural Manipulation by Progressives (03:04) ===

[00:29:55]  That's a black pill.
[00:29:56]  That's a black pill.
[00:29:57]  That's a bitter pill to swallow, right?
[00:29:59]  And so, but the thing is, here's the important thing.
[00:30:01]  When you're a libertarian, you basically think of this like, oh, you know, the private sector, which is operating on libertarian principles, is good.
[00:30:10]  The public sector is bad.
[00:30:12]  This is why SpaceX operates better than NASA.
[00:30:15]  Well, if you go all the way back to the Apollo project or the Manhattan Project, we just saw Oppenheimer, right?
[00:30:22]  Pretty good movie.
[00:30:23]  Portrays the, you know, Oppenheimer is a bit more of a communist than that movie portrays.
[00:30:27]  Otherwise, pretty accurate, and it portrays the scene pretty well.
[00:30:30]  And the thing is, you know, you look at the Manhattan Project, that's the most successful engineering project of all time.
[00:30:37]  It's a government project.
[00:30:39]  It's pretty much carried out almost exclusively by progressives, or as some people say, communists.
[00:30:46]  You know, communists is just a euphemism for progressive, you know, and vice versa.
[00:30:51]  And my grandparents were American communists.
[00:30:53]  They always said progressive.
[00:30:54]  Always that way.
[00:30:55]  Yeah, back to the 30s.
[00:30:57]  The meaning of the word has never changed.
[00:30:59]  And in the 20s, it meant something different.
[00:31:02]  In the teens, maybe, not since the 30s.
[00:31:04]  And so, you know, you have this system where you're just like, wait a second, whether it's public or private isn't the determining factor.
[00:31:14]  Whether people are libertarians or communists isn't the determining factor.
[00:31:18]  What is the factor that makes the Manhattan Project work?
[00:31:21]  And can you imagine trying to do a Manhattan project with the way like government-funded science works today?
[00:31:26]  The way NASA works today, it'd be impossible.
[00:31:28]  It would take 100 years.
[00:31:29]  And it is, again, I love the Elon Musk analogy because it's illuminating.
[00:31:33]  And it is kind of the buried lead of the Walter Isaacson book, which is, he doesn't acknowledge.
[00:31:37]  Walter Eichen's a lefty, right?
[00:31:38]  He's even kind of attacked Elon in the interview subsequent from the book.
[00:31:41]  But the buried lead is, oh my goodness, how did he get it done?
[00:31:44]  Oh my goodness, he also had Tesla.
[00:31:46]  And the buried lead is because he went in, he had full, complete authority and control.
[00:31:51]  Absolutely.
[00:31:52]  It so happens he's a genius.
[00:31:53]  No joke.
[00:31:54]  And he also has his own demons and all that.
[00:31:56]  But imagine Elon having to work through a committee.
[00:32:00]  Yeah.
[00:32:00]  Yeah.
[00:32:00]  There is no Tesla.
[00:32:01]  There is no Tesla.
[00:32:02]  There's no SpaceX.
[00:32:03]  It got so bad that there is a chapter in the Walter Isaacson book on Elon.
[00:32:06]  It was Christmas Eve.
[00:32:07]  SpaceX was bankrupt.
[00:32:08]  Tesla was bankrupt.
[00:32:09]  He put all of his own money in.
[00:32:11]  He was calling bankers.
[00:32:12]  He was throwing up.
[00:32:13]  He was nauseous.
[00:32:14]  He hadn't eaten for two weeks.
[00:32:15]  Literally, true story.
[00:32:16]  He had five kids that he wasn't even able to see.
[00:32:18]  He was going through a divorce.
[00:32:19]  And he had this like Churchillian grit where he had to all of a sudden be the guy that birthed it.
[00:32:27]  It wasn't a committee.
[00:32:27]  It wasn't democracy.
[00:32:29]  It wasn't democracy.
[00:32:30]  It wasn't Superman.
[00:32:32]  They didn't take a vote of all the SpaceX engineers to say, what are we going to do?
[00:32:36]  There's one guy on Christmas Eve that took out a $20 million non-secured loan.
[00:32:40]  And if you look at basically everything around you, like look at everything in this studio.
[00:32:47]  It was made by a monarchy.
[00:32:49]  Your computer there, Apple, made by a monarchy.
[00:32:51]  Steve Jobs is a jerk.
[00:32:53]  I was going to use other language.
[00:32:55]  He is a completely.
[00:32:55]  He and Elon have the same sort of Caesar-ism.
[00:32:58]  I'm in charge.
[00:32:59]  You're not.

=== Elon Musk's Churchillian Grit (13:01) ===

[00:33:00]  Here's the thing.
[00:33:00]  These are not like, these are not good people.
[00:33:02]  They are not nice people.
[00:33:04]  They are not people you want to be around.
[00:33:06]  They are useful people.
[00:33:08]  They are useful people.
[00:33:09]  Think of them as tools.
[00:33:10]  Don't be jealous of them.
[00:33:12]  Don't hate them for being like narcissistic jerks.
[00:33:15]  Yeah, they're narcissistic jerks.
[00:33:17]  But you know what?
[00:33:18]  Basically, if it wasn't for Steve Jobs, you wouldn't have that laptop.
[00:33:21]  No, I mean, so here's your historical genius.
[00:33:25]  And is history defined by a small group of mostly men, sometimes women, of quote-unquote useful jerks that assume power and do the impossible?
[00:33:36]  There's a lot of that.
[00:33:37]  The end of history, as Hegel would call them, right?
[00:33:39]  Yeah, there's a lot of that.
[00:33:40]  And the thing is, and when you're looking for, I wouldn't say the, you know, enormous power has come out of collectives in various ways.
[00:33:48]  Enormous power has come out of the masses.
[00:33:52]  The problem is the masses, like, and this sort of goes back to this sort of essential kind of thing, there's a kind of rock, scissors, paper thing going on with democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy.
[00:34:03]  And one of the things that we have to cope with in the real world today, if you go back to the 18th century and you look at sort of why America became a democracy, then you're looking at, you know, this nation, especially in like Massachusetts where all this kicks off, you're looking at this nation of incredibly virtuous people.
[00:34:22]  Well, that's right.
[00:34:23]  They're Anabaptists.
[00:34:25]  Yeah, they're incredibly godly.
[00:34:27]  They're incredibly.
[00:34:28]  By the way, the state-based laws are like the most based, like no homosexuality.
[00:34:32]  Oh, yeah.
[00:34:33]  And they organize, they organize instantly.
[00:34:36]  They form these committees of correspondence.
[00:34:38]  They form the Sons of Liberty.
[00:34:40]  Like, these are, you know, this is a world in which, I mean, even more than 1776, America, did you know that there was a color revolution in America in 1689?
[00:34:49]  There was, really?
[00:34:50]  That was before the CIA.
[00:34:52]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:34:53]  That was the original idea.
[00:34:55]  Tell me about it.
[00:34:55]  When James II is overthrown by a Dutch invasion in England, James II, who, of course, is basically, he's not quite a Catholic.
[00:35:04]  Well, he is a Catholic, actually, but he's not governing as a Catholic.
[00:35:08]  But, you know, he's on the cavalier side of the roundhead-cavalier divide.
[00:35:12]  And of course, Massachusetts is this kind of like roundhead, you know, colony, right?
[00:35:18]  And so he creates this thing called the Dominion of New England, where they're, you know, they're going to put bishops in America or whatever.
[00:35:23]  He's overthrown by this like Dutch invasion.
[00:35:26]  As soon as they hear the news about it in Boston, they just arrest the government instantly and restore their old kind of religious dictatorship form of.
[00:35:36]  And the thing is, basically, the important lesson for today is a lot of people think, if you remember the Tea Party, do you remember the Tea Party?
[00:35:45]  I was part of it.
[00:35:46]  What did it accomplish?
[00:35:48]  The best spin is it might have paved the ideological for Trump.
[00:35:51]  It might have.
[00:35:52]  It might have.
[00:35:52]  That's the best thing.
[00:35:53]  And it might have.
[00:35:53]  Legislatively, nothing, politically next to nothing.
[00:35:55]  We maybe got a couple good senators, maybe.
[00:35:58]  But it did open people's eyes to challenge paradigms that gave us Trump.
[00:36:02]  Yeah, it basically.
[00:36:02]  It made Trump possible.
[00:36:03]  That's my theory.
[00:36:04]  It made show.
[00:36:05]  I can go with that theory a little bit.
[00:36:06]  Okay.
[00:36:07]  Because basically what it did was, you know, the Tea Party was people are like, this is America.
[00:36:13]  If the people, the good salt of the earth, patriotic people in America just like all get tired of their government at the same time, something's going to happen.
[00:36:23]  Yeah.
[00:36:23]  And what they discovered is that nothing happens.
[00:36:25]  And that's a really important lesson is that if you get a lot of people together, nothing happens.
[00:36:30]  Whereas if you look at people in Massachusetts in 1689, these are like, from today's perspective, not only are they incredibly virtuous and civic, they're also incredibly violent and energetic.
[00:36:44]  And that is a weird combination that doesn't exist today at all.
[00:36:48]  No, it doesn't.
[00:36:49]  So Curtis, I want to isolate on this because I'm obsessed with this, which is why I'm consuming the Elon book from a different approach.
[00:36:57]  Because people read it like as a business book, I said, no, no, you're missing.
[00:37:00]  You're missing.
[00:37:00]  This is the administration of power.
[00:37:02]  This is a guy that has built trillions of dollars of value worth $250 billion and literally has done quote-unquote the impossible, right?
[00:37:09]  You love him or hate him.
[00:37:10]  And isn't that the question that is in front of us as a society, which is who gets power, who's in charge, and who's going to lead us out of this mess?
[00:37:17]  And I guess the options in front of us is, well, we keep on doing what we're doing.
[00:37:22]  Are you suggesting an Elon Musk-ish character as president?
[00:37:26]  I think there's no, I think there's sort of two ways.
[00:37:31]  Yes, definitely.
[00:37:32]  But I think there's two ways that that can roll.
[00:37:35]  I think, you know, we're, of course, in the situation that we're in, and we're not looking at anything but Trump versus Biden in 2025.
[00:37:45]  And I'm very conflicted, actually, about this election because having Biden in the White House, you know, this sort of shambling husk of a man, really, like, and my God, think about how much he's going to degenerate over the next four years.
[00:37:59]  Like, it's painful.
[00:38:00]  Like, you know, like, I mean, in 2020, I was talking to someone who had worked for Biden, and his feeling was that Biden in 2020 was too old.
[00:38:10]  And now he can't even walk off stage.
[00:38:12]  Jill has to lead him off stage.
[00:38:13]  It's incredible.
[00:38:14]  And so, like, seeing that is actually great for America and Americans because they should see what their government really is.
[00:38:22]  They should see.
[00:38:23]  And the reality is Washington doesn't need the White House.
[00:38:27]  You could have no White House at all, no president at all.
[00:38:30]  The executive branch would work even better.
[00:38:33]  Sometimes it's true it sort of sends like decisions up and they land on the president's desk and they give him three boxes to check and he's supposed to check the middle one and he checks the middle one, right?
[00:38:43]  That's not what Elon Musk does.
[00:38:45]  Elon Musk is proactive.
[00:38:46]  No, no, no, no.
[00:38:47]  This whole system is reactive.
[00:38:48]  He's going to stick on the floor of a gigafactory to make sure the battery is two millimeters lower on a car and suspend production.
[00:38:56]  And he'll go right down into all of those details, right?
[00:39:00]  That's what a real manager does.
[00:39:02]  What I would recommend, honestly, for Donald Trump, who is, is he 80 yet?
[00:39:06]  Is he almost 80?
[00:39:07]  Yes, but to be clear, his health, he's got gusto.
[00:39:10]  He's got gusto.
[00:39:11]  And the thing is, what I would recommend for Donald Trump is I don't think Donald Trump really, you know, like when he was a CEO in the private sector, the Trump organization was never bigger than like 20 or 30 people.
[00:39:23]  It was a brand license.
[00:39:24]  It was a family office.
[00:39:25]  It was a family office and it was a license, a brand licensing organization, and they licensed that brand.
[00:39:31]  Trump has so many sort of attributes of kingliness.
[00:39:35]  He's like, has he has this quality in Arabic that's called Baraka, like the quality of a king, right?
[00:39:41]  What Trump is not good at is drilling down detailed management, like going, staying on top of things, having a long attention span, being Elon Musk.
[00:39:53]  He's not Elon Musk.
[00:39:55]  The right job for Donald Trump is not CEO of the government, it's chairman of the board.
[00:40:00]  Yes.
[00:40:01]  And if he was able to see himself as chairman of the board and to basically go out and say, hey, I'm going to go wherever you find these Elon Musks of today, I'm going to go and basically say, you know what?
[00:40:16]  Hey, you know, someone, I'm not going to mention any names, but I'm sure there's 100 people in Silicon Valley that could do this job and basically say, you're going to basically shut down this fake executive branch that we have and create a new government.
[00:40:30]  That's the level of.
[00:40:32]  And I will take credit for it.
[00:40:33]  And I will take credit for it because I'm Donald Trump.
[00:40:35]  No, that's okay.
[00:40:35]  Yeah, that's totally okay.
[00:40:36]  Right.
[00:40:37]  Actually, like, the best managers, like, you know, they don't, they don't want to be on TV.
[00:40:41]  You know, there's an easy way to know that, you know, the White House is fake and lame.
[00:40:49]  The easiest way to know that the White House is fake and lame.
[00:40:52]  I'm sorry, I'm from Berkeley.
[00:40:53]  I have to say fake and lame.
[00:40:54]  No, there was another word we could use.
[00:40:55]  Yeah, yeah, it's fake and fae.
[00:40:57]  I like the word fae.
[00:40:58]  And, you know, is that the president spends like half of his time doing photo ops.
[00:41:05]  That's correct.
[00:41:05]  Do you think Elon Musk spends half of his time doing photo ops?
[00:41:08]  Right.
[00:41:09]  And, you know, and so, you know, the thing is, and like you have all of these patriotic Americans out there, and they're voting sort of based on this emotional belief.
[00:41:19]  They really think they're electing the CEO of America.
[00:41:22]  They talk as if they're electing the CEO of America.
[00:41:24]  So I want to add something.
[00:41:26]  If there is an opportunity to get this done, it's the only vector to get it done is through Trump.
[00:41:31]  When you look at the current plans that are being made for the next Trump administration, they're sort of, you know, I know some of these people.
[00:41:40]  They're really good people.
[00:41:42]  It's just, it's simply, it's not radical enough and it can't be radical enough.
[00:41:46]  And let's get some ideas then, okay?
[00:41:48]  It's going to run.
[00:41:49]  It's a different idea factory.
[00:41:50]  So let's say at a chief of staff or VP level, we get that Elon Musk guy that doesn't want to be on the headlines, okay?
[00:41:56]  But he is a vicious 20-hour a day operator.
[00:42:00]  And let's say that role gets filled, okay?
[00:42:03]  Just for argument's sake.
[00:42:04]  What else?
[00:42:05]  Because you have a whole laundry list of creative ideas.
[00:42:08]  So basically, you know, when you're filling that role, you have to, you know, understand and you have to tell the American people very straightforwardly and honestly, ideally before the election, although FDR didn't do it before the election.
[00:42:21]  FDR did it after the election, but it was a different world.
[00:42:25]  You have to tell the American people before the election, hey, look, if you're going to vote for me, you got to understand that as president, I'm just going to run the country for the next four years.
[00:42:37]  And I'm going to treat the other two branches of government as advisory because this is the only way to restore the executive branch from its present Babylonian captivity.
[00:42:49]  So basically.
[00:42:51]  I will be King Cyrus.
[00:42:52]  I will be King Cyrus and we'll have another election in four years.
[00:42:55]  I'm still going to be accountable.
[00:42:57]  And that election is going to be held in a totally different country.
[00:43:01]  Because when you see real regime change in this world, think about East Germany turning into modern Germany.
[00:43:08]  You know, if you're in East Germany in like 1988 versus East Germany in 1992, your life changed.
[00:43:16]  Everything's different.
[00:43:17]  Everything's different.
[00:43:17]  Everything changes.
[00:43:18]  And, you know, I have a funny story, which is when Trump was originally elected, I was like, oh my God, this is happening, but it's just way too soon.
[00:43:24]  We're not ready.
[00:43:25]  And you were kind of right.
[00:43:27]  I was kind of right, but it was just way too soon.
[00:43:29]  And, you know, at the time, my kids were six and eight, and they're going to this progressive Mandarin immersion school in San Francisco.
[00:43:37]  And I tried not to talk about politics with my kids at all.
[00:43:41]  Absolutely the best thing to do, especially if you're raising your kids there.
[00:43:44]  But they, of course, were coming to me with all these questions.
[00:43:47]  You're like, Trump is going to kill all the Muslims.
[00:43:49]  You know, he's going to, whatever, whatever.
[00:43:50]  You know how kids like, amplify whatever they hear from their parents and take it to an.
[00:43:54]  And my son comes to me and he has a very specific question about the, the Trump world.
[00:44:00]  He's like, how are we going to be able to go to the beach?
[00:44:03]  What, how are we going to?
[00:44:05]  I'm like Henry.
[00:44:06]  I heard you the first time.
[00:44:08]  You're not making any sense.
[00:44:09]  He's like Pop.
[00:44:10]  When Trump builds a wall around the country, how are we going to be able to go to the beach?
[00:44:14]  And I, you know, I'm just like Henry.
[00:44:16]  If you see anything besides political science change as a result of this election, I'll be very, very surprised.
[00:44:23]  In a crisis that's a little different.
[00:44:25]  I think a lot of the COVID calls mattered.
[00:44:27]  I think who was president mattered a lot, but in a normal like thing, it actually doesn't matter at all.
[00:44:36]  Traditional media is crumbling.
[00:44:38]  Why?
[00:44:38]  Because they're hiding something, something big.
[00:44:41]  People are realizing they're being lied to left and right, even by institutions they thought they could trust.
[00:44:46]  But you, you've known the truth all along.
[00:44:48]  You also know that the time to prepare for what's coming is right now.
[00:44:51]  Get started by going to mypatriotsupply.com.
[00:44:54]  There you'll save 200 on essential three-month emergency food kit from my Patriot supply.
[00:45:00]  Over the years, MY Patriot Supply has helped millions of American families prepare for emergencies and yours should be next.
[00:45:07]  Sealed inside ultra durable packaging, their delicious meals last up to 25 years in storage and provide over 2000 calories daily.
[00:45:15]  Eat right when things go wrong.
[00:45:17]  With these three month emergency food kits from MY Patriot Supply, with 200 in savings, you can get enough for each family member.
[00:45:24]  They deserve your protection.
[00:45:25]  Go to Mypatriotsupply.com.
[00:45:27]  Order by 3 p.m.
[00:45:28]  For free day shipping.
[00:45:30]  That is, free same-day shipping.
[00:45:31]  Go to mypatriotsupply.com.
[00:45:35]  You said that we need to pitch to the American people.
[00:45:39]  Regime change.
[00:45:41]  Yes, they need to.
[00:45:41]  Basically, and the only way that, as as Machiavelli says in his great work you know discourses.
[00:45:47]  I studied it with Anton this summer.
[00:45:49]  Oh, amazing as me.
[00:45:50]  Amazing as as Machiavelli says in his discourses on Livy and you know it was a long time ago.
[00:45:54]  But really tell me, you know more about political science than Machiavelli.
[00:45:57]  By the way, no one has surpassed Machiavelli's wisdom.

=== Trusting One Person Over Systems (15:35) ===

[00:46:01]  Yes, I don't close.
[00:46:02]  No, he's amazing, and he was not just, and you're understanding the classics, but he was a political animal.
[00:46:06]  He was an animal and, like he actually, he did that job, he worked in that space and he was trying to get a better one.
[00:46:12]  That's what he had.
[00:46:13]  Yeah, he had a job application.
[00:46:14]  It was a job application to Zara Borgia, you know and like hey, here's all the stuff I know, here's all the stuff I know right, you know and and, and.
[00:46:21]  So the thing is that basically, here's the key, in a way, is that when people vote in a presidential election, they're sort of thinking themselves in this kind of Norman Rockwell sense, like I care about this issue, I care about that issue and i'm like hiring this guy and he's gonna work for me in this office, and to realize that basically no, you have to do something much more daring than that.
[00:46:46]  You have to basically, for your vote to be powerful, you have to give away all of that power and you have to say, when I vote for president in this 2024 election, basically i'm voting for whoever wins, for my guy to have all the power.
[00:47:04]  I don't want to be like, you know, i'm voting for you to do this and voting for you to do that, i'm voting for you to close the border.
[00:47:10]  Are we ready for that as a country?
[00:47:11]  And should we be?
[00:47:12]  I mean because I mean part of me, i'll be honest is like, but don't we have separation of power.
[00:47:16]  I know, I know, I know you want to basically like To cling to sort of all of these things, but the thing is, all of these things are basically, these are things, frankly, Charlie, the Democrats don't believe in any of these things at all.
[00:47:28]  They don't believe in the rule of law.
[00:47:30]  Are we held prisoner by our ideals?
[00:47:32]  We're held prisoner by our ideals.
[00:47:34]  And the thing is, basically, the problem has come, the point has come where we have to choose between these old and very beautiful ideas and our country.
[00:47:45]  And if we choose the ideals over our country, our country is going to cease to exist.
[00:47:49]  Because here's what's going to happen.
[00:47:51]  Can I describe what's going to happen, where we're going to be if we go continue on this course in 2050?
[00:47:57]  We now have about 5 million people a year pouring over the border.
[00:48:01]  We have everyone who is part of America's governing class, you know, believing, you'll see it written all over the place in San Francisco, nun gunda persones eligal.
[00:48:11]  No human being is illegal.
[00:48:13]  You know, and like it's really hard, if you think about it, to defend the idea that your human rights as a human being should depend on the GPS coordinates where your mother squeezed you out.
[00:48:24]  That's a pretty tough position to defend at Harvard or Yale or whatever.
[00:48:29]  It's only a matter of time before we see basically an American, we already have seen it de facto, essentially an American Edict of Caracalla, where it's basically decided that everyone in the world is an American.
[00:48:41]  And once everyone is in the world is an American.
[00:48:44]  Nobody is.
[00:48:45]  Nobody is.
[00:48:46]  And you're not going to see 5 million people coming over the border every year.
[00:48:49]  You're going to see 50 million people.
[00:48:52]  You're going to see basically, you know, I mean, if you did a census in Africa and you said how many Africans would like to come to the U.S., you're looking at a numbers that are more like 500 million.
[00:49:04]  And basically, once that happens, the country you know no longer exists.
[00:49:08]  And the country that you live in is a country that looks a lot like South Africa today.
[00:49:12]  Been to South Africa lately?
[00:49:14]  Never will.
[00:49:14]  Wouldn't recommend it.
[00:49:17]  And so, you know, the thing is that basically, if you're choosing between that and your separation of powers and your, you know, all of these things that were basically long ago captured by these progressives and have been worn as basically a skin suit by them for many, many years.
[00:49:38]  Y'all are familiar with the skin suit technique.
[00:49:39]  I do, but tell us what it reminds us.
[00:49:41]  So basically, it's a beautiful analogy.
[00:49:44]  You take over, you capture this institution and then wear the skin, and you're just like, you know, basically a wolf in sheep's clothing.
[00:49:52]  And, you know, you sound like you're making these ba noises, but all you're saying is come here and get eaten.
[00:49:58]  And so the thing is to recognize that that happened, and it didn't happen recently.
[00:50:02]  That's the whole 20th century is this happening.
[00:50:06]  It's really the whole 20th century is this movement of basically elites recapturing the state from politicians.
[00:50:14]  That is the story of 20th century America.
[00:50:18]  And so when you try to roll that back and say, okay, we're going to give the power back to the people, you basically have to recognize the truth of what John Adams said when he said, our Constitution For a moral and religious is made only for a morally inadequate person.
[00:50:35]  It's wholly inadequate for any other, and power will go through it like a whale through a net.
[00:50:40]  And so the problem, the whale analogy, basically, if you go back to your sort of triangle of democracy, oligarchy, monarchy.
[00:50:47]  If those are the three trials.
[00:50:48]  If those are the three trials.
[00:50:49]  Aristotle was right.
[00:50:50]  If Aristotle was right.
[00:50:51]  He probably was.
[00:50:51]  Which he probably was.
[00:50:52]  What you basically see is that patriotic Americans are a little bit stuck because they're basically trying to put the whale back in the net.
[00:50:59]  The problem is the net has grown a lot weaker.
[00:51:03]  And so the stock of popular energy, of popular virtue, civic virtue, you know, we sort of saw on January 6th this like, I'm not saying January 6th was this great act of evil or anything, but it was also, I mean, I think it was kind of a joke in a way because we saw basically that was what happens when you try to do 18th century politics with the 21st century population.
[00:51:26]  And, you know, they got to the Senate floor and then did they organize, reorganize the Senate and start issuing decrees and taking over the military.
[00:51:35]  And no, he had a guy with quarantines in his helmet, right?
[00:51:38]  You know, but like when you picture what people in like the 17th century and like 1689 in Boston that would do, it would be over right there.
[00:51:45]  Right.
[00:51:46]  And so the thing is when you're trying to organize that popular energy into sort of the people acting over the government, you've got to realize that the strength just isn't there.
[00:51:57]  And that's why essentially all of these attempts to sort of use democracy to fight oligarchy without going the other direction on the clock and saying, no, what you essentially need to do is you need to use all of the power that you have left in democracy in one moment, at one time, in one direction, to kick the thing back over into monarchy.
[00:52:21]  And, you know, you basically say, and you just, this whole idea on the American right of like, we're going to start by restoring the virtue of the American people.
[00:52:32]  And first we're going to make a virtuous people, and then the virtuous people are going to be, you know, strike back.
[00:52:37]  Meanwhile, you're basically being outnumbered by the entire population of Nigeria while you're trying to create these virtues, right?
[00:52:43]  You know, and it's just, it's just impossible.
[00:52:46]  It's never going to work.
[00:52:47]  And so the thing is, basically, that's the terrible choice facing Americans.
[00:52:52]  You have to basically lay down all of these ideals that have been stolen and been corrupted and say, no, actually, it was an amazing experiment.
[00:53:01]  We tried it.
[00:53:02]  It kind of worked for a while.
[00:53:03]  Now we're going to go back to some version of the form of government that 99% of human beings have been governed by for 99% of history.
[00:53:13]  Does that frighten you at all?
[00:53:15]  Of course.
[00:53:16]  Of course.
[00:53:16]  You know, it's like, but it frightens me in a way.
[00:53:19]  If someone told me that I needed cancer surgery, God forbid, that would frighten me too.
[00:53:24]  But it wouldn't frighten me out of having the surgery.
[00:53:26]  Yeah, chemotherapy sounds terrible.
[00:53:27]  Chemotherapy sounds terrible.
[00:53:29]  And the thing is, the problem is basically, you know, what the political scene is right now is like there's a patient going to the doctor.
[00:53:35]  He goes to the, you know, the Democratic doctor.
[00:53:38]  He's like, I keep getting thinner.
[00:53:39]  Why am I so thin?
[00:53:40]  The doctor is like, great, I've never seen you look better.
[00:53:43]  You're so thin.
[00:53:44]  You're in such good shape.
[00:53:45]  Keep it up.
[00:53:46]  And then he goes to the Republican doctor.
[00:53:47]  And the Republican doctor is like, yeah, you know, you have cancer and you're losing weight because of sarcopenia and you're going to die.
[00:53:56]  Fortunately, I have this pill right here that will cure you.
[00:53:59]  It's called aspirin.
[00:54:00]  There's no side effects.
[00:54:01]  Just take it and you'll feel better.
[00:54:03]  And that'll be $100,000.
[00:54:05]  And it's hard to decide which of these things is worse.
[00:54:10]  Because basically, sort of the Republicans are telling you the truth, but they're also telling you that this thing that is not going to come within three or four orders of magnitude of working is going to work.
[00:54:23]  And so in a way, they're still kind of lulling you to sleep about how bad the situation is and what has to be done.
[00:54:31]  Here's the other thing, is that when people think about dramatic changes in power, they think about violence.
[00:54:38]  Because in the 20th century, you saw a lot of political violence.
[00:54:41]  The Russian Revolution.
[00:54:42]  This is not a violent nation.
[00:54:44]  This is a nation of men who have never been in a fist fight.
[00:54:47]  That's very historically unusual.
[00:54:50]  And so when you think about liquidating the executive branch, you're not watching people march to pits being shot in the back of the neck.
[00:54:58]  No, it's just like a company going out of business.
[00:55:00]  It's like FTX going out of business.
[00:55:02]  Maybe it's like Elon reorganizing Twitter.
[00:55:04]  He doesn't have to shoot anyone.
[00:55:05]  He just has to carry the kitchen sink in the front door, right?
[00:55:08]  And so it's actually just this like, it's, you know, all of this, you'll see these Democratic caricatures of what, you know, the Democrats are always telling, you know, basically they're saying you're going to do the things you're not going to do.
[00:55:25]  And they basically get you to promise to do the things you're not going to do, but you should do.
[00:55:30]  And so there's sort of all of these fantasies about Trump becoming a dictator or whatever.
[00:55:36]  And they're just cartoonish and sort of completely off base.
[00:55:39]  And I'll tell you one other thing that you may not really like either.
[00:55:43]  If someone does this, he can't do it on behalf of only one side of the American people.
[00:55:49]  He has to say to the blue state people too, hey, I'm going to govern you in a way that suits you.
[00:55:55]  You're actually going to like this.
[00:55:56]  Like your life is actually going to become more progressive out there just at the same time as all those red state people, you know, don't have to worry about the schools turning their kids trans.
[00:56:08]  Yeah, go have your kids go trans.
[00:56:10]  Have them do blue hair.
[00:56:11]  That's what you want.
[00:56:13]  But, you know, we can't basically fight for these institutions at all.
[00:56:18]  There has to be a sort of, you know, at a cultural level, there has to be a kind of institutional divorce.
[00:56:23]  And that divorce can be a peaceful, friendly kind of divorce within the same nation.
[00:56:29]  So to use first principles, and then I want to just challenge a couple of the other things you said, is you say, if we don't embrace this, right, go towards some form of a monarchy, then we're going to have 50 million people coming in.
[00:56:45]  Can you strengthen how certain you are?
[00:56:48]  Build out why you're so certain about that.
[00:56:50]  Because that is a prediction.
[00:56:52]  And I get what you're saying, right?
[00:56:53]  Total collapse, civilization over.
[00:56:55]  And by the way, I find it hard to disagree.
[00:56:57]  I just want to make sure, because that's what some people would say.
[00:56:59]  Come on, stop with the dooming, stop with the blackpilling.
[00:57:02]  Sure.
[00:57:03]  That's a big statement.
[00:57:03]  If you went back to Americans of 1950 and you showed them the America of today, they'd be like, oh my God, how did we get here?
[00:57:11]  And the reality is that you don't have these decisions already the decision to basically sort of tolerate this massive illegality.
[00:57:23]  I mean, Charlie, for example, when you're going around passing laws, did you know that RICO explicitly applies to facilitating illegal immigration?
[00:57:33]  You could have RICO prosecutions like the size of God.
[00:57:37]  Like, you know, you could prosecute all of these like Volags, all the people that are, you know, certainly all the people, you know, at ICE that are, you know, basically breaking the law, you know, but you don't have the infrastructure to do that.
[00:57:50]  Who's going to run those prosecutions?
[00:57:51]  What judges are you going to put that in front of?
[00:57:54]  And so the thing is that it's actually really straightforward for people to make these decisions.
[00:57:59]  Right now, you know, as you know, the state of Texas is asking the Supreme Court to basically force Texas to not protect its state border.
[00:58:07]  Like, again, like, this is really just getting started.
[00:58:10]  So I guess I'm totally on board with the energetic executive, someone who runs the country like Tesla or SpaceX.
[00:58:20]  Are we really?
[00:58:21]  And I just, I'm not there.
[00:58:23]  We're just going to go Mohammed bin Salman.
[00:58:26]  Well, you know, it's a different country.
[00:58:28]  It runs in a different way.
[00:58:30]  I don't think anyone needs to be hung up by their heels in the Ritz.
[00:58:34]  You know, I would say actually the leader, you know, I did a funny thing about a year ago is that I went on the Young Turks, if you know the Young Turks, with Jenk Uger, and had a very friendly conversation in a way because we talked about Ataturk, who is the basically, you know, the man who created modern Turkey.
[00:58:53]  And Ataturk, you know, who is not, didn't have any death camps or anything like that, not a violent guy.
[00:58:59]  Ataturk had so much power, he changed the alphabet that Turks used.
[00:59:05]  He changed the clothes that they wore.
[00:59:07]  He basically dragged the modern empire, the Ottoman Empire, into the modern world.
[00:59:13]  And by the way, Cenk, who's a huge progressive, obviously is all about Ataturk.
[00:59:18]  FDR didn't quite have the level of power that we're talking about, but close.
[00:59:24]  American progressives are all about FDR.
[00:59:27]  You say to them, we're going to have another FDR.
[00:59:29]  We're going to have another New Deal.
[00:59:30]  How do they say no to that?
[00:59:32]  So I guess the fear I would have, and I just love the Elon analogy, I want to acknowledge that.
[00:59:38]  Is if we cast aside all principles.
[00:59:44]  Does that concern?
[00:59:46]  I think that, you know, when you're ultimately looking at systems that are sort of monarchical, you really have to rest, you have to put your sort of moral confidence in one person.
[00:59:58]  And if you think about it, you know, think about like the Fortune 500.
[01:00:01]  That's a huge ask for a country that our myth, our story, is rebelling against.
[01:00:06]  It's a huge, it's a huge ask, and yet, you know, we live in the most ironic America in history.
[01:00:12]  We live in an America that is actually sort of ready to like break frames and rebel against old ideas.
[01:00:19]  And the thing is, you know, there's, you know, Charlie, there's 500 companies in the Fortune 500.
[01:00:24]  They're all run by a CEO.
[01:00:25]  Well, some, yes.
[01:00:27]  Yeah, some, less, not.
[01:00:28]  Some are more like the CDC at times.
[01:00:30]  I mean, some are, some are Coca-Cola's like.
[01:00:32]  Yeah, Coca-Cola is a little more like Coca-Cola's.
[01:00:35]  That's machine politics.
[01:00:36]  Coca-Cola is still a lot closer to Elon Musk than it is to the CDC, but it's definitely a specialist.
[01:00:41]  Just give me a little bit, right?
[01:00:42]  I'll give you a little bit.
[01:00:43]  There's definitely a spectrum there.
[01:00:44]  But the thing is, you know, the idea, you know, of like, we're going to basically put our trust in this one person instead of this horrific machine that is doing these just obviously insane things.
[01:00:57]  It's really, it's a scary call, a little bit, but it's not as scary as keeping with what we're doing.
[01:01:03]  So that, just to kind of make sure I understand the argument, the binary that you've put forward is current trajectory is more of the same, even worse.
[01:01:12]  You know, hell on earth.
[01:01:14]  Yes.
[01:01:15]  Even if you elect Republicans to the White House and try to have them take control of it.
[01:01:19]  And then you say, therefore, we need to embrace the greatest of all ironies and become the thing we originally rebelled against.
[01:01:27]  I'm not saying that sarcastically.
[01:01:28]  I'm not even trying to say that.
[01:01:29]  Yeah, and let me make this, let me sort of ground this in American history a little bit because, you know, there are really two American revolutions.

=== Conservative Judgments and Virtue (13:54) ===

[01:01:36]  There's one in 1775 and 1776, and there's another one in 1789.
[01:01:43]  There's actually the Constitution is a reactionary coup against the Articles of Confederation.
[01:01:50]  And if you ask anyone, even educated people about the Articles of Confederation period, the only thing they know is that it existed.
[01:01:57]  They don't know anything about the personalities, the events, whatever.
[01:02:01]  It's been almost entirely airbrushed out of history.
[01:02:04]  It's been airbrushed out of history because it was, if I can use this word on your show, a shit show.
[01:02:09]  And basically, it was a shit show.
[01:02:11]  And then people are like, why don't we take the commanding general of the army and make him king?
[01:02:16]  And Washington was offered that.
[01:02:19]  That was what after basically seeing like, you know, 12 years of like turbulent Massachusetts style like Tea Party 1.0, tarring and feathering mob politics without even the British to be opposed to.
[01:02:33]  They're like, we need a king.
[01:02:35]  And Washington did something amazing.
[01:02:37]  The founding, you know, the sort of, you know, the true like founding of this republic was like, we're going to create something that's really, I think, the ideal form of government, which is an accountable monarchy.
[01:02:49]  Which is also the way these companies work.
[01:02:52]  Elon has a board.
[01:02:53]  Steve Jobs had a board.
[01:02:55]  Ideally, the board does absolutely nothing.
[01:02:57]  The board does nothing to govern SpaceX.
[01:03:00]  But if Elon's drug problem gets too bad, if he starts doing really crazy stuff, like, yeah, that board is going to step in.
[01:03:07]  And so you have that kind of safety backup level.
[01:03:10]  And in the constitutional system as it was originally designed, the Electoral College was supposed to be that board.
[01:03:18]  And it just didn't work.
[01:03:20]  So I guess I'm sure this is an objection you receive a lot.
[01:03:23]  And it's one I share.
[01:03:24]  I want to be honest.
[01:03:24]  Please.
[01:03:25]  So you get a Lincoln or you get a Washington, a great man.
[01:03:30]  And then Marcus Aurelius has commodus.
[01:03:32]  Yeah, and so what you need is basically a system that will really actually preserve that accountable monarchy for the long term.
[01:03:41]  You know, Marcus Aurelius has commodus, and before then, there's this period of the five good emperors.
[01:03:46]  Five monarchs.
[01:03:47]  Five good emperors, and they're all selected through adoption.
[01:03:50]  I have a little pet theory about that.
[01:03:52]  I think it was actually a long-running homosexual insider ring.
[01:03:56]  Could be.
[01:03:57]  I don't know.
[01:03:58]  But in any case, Marcus Aurelius breaks the mold and he picks his son.
[01:04:02]  He breaks the mold and he picks his son and we've all seen that movie.
[01:04:05]  Right.
[01:04:06]  Commodus is a good thing.
[01:04:07]  Joaquin Phoenix.
[01:04:08]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:04:09]  Joaquin Phoenix.
[01:04:11]  And so you have to establish something that basically I think you can learn a lot from the corporate model, which sort of works so well as a model of the accountable king.
[01:04:22]  Board of directors.
[01:04:23]  You need some kind of board-like thing.
[01:04:25]  It's a little harder to do at the sovereign level.
[01:04:28]  I have some designs for that, but I don't want to dive way, way too deep into utter nerdery here.
[01:04:34]  Yeah, so is it the system that the found, so is one of your hypotheses being, since Adams and others would say you need the raw material of moral and religious people, therefore the Constitution, since we do not have a moral and religious people and we kind of have this mishmash of different everything, therefore it's very hard to keep the Constitutional.
[01:04:57]  I would say even more than that.
[01:04:59]  I would say that, you know, there's a great line.
[01:05:03]  I urge everyone to go and read the last 10 paragraphs of FDR's first inaugural because to say that it is based, it's not even based.
[01:05:11]  It's metal.
[01:05:12]  It's pure metal.
[01:05:13]  And one of the things that FDR says is he says, our Constitution is such a good document that basically we can change the way it's interpreted and we can get anywhere with that.
[01:05:24]  And so when you look at the Constitution and you note that it says the president is the chief executive of the executive branch, it doesn't say the legislative branch should be running the executive branch.
[01:05:35]  It doesn't say the judiciary branch should be running the executive branch.
[01:05:39]  It kind of leaves all of that hanging.
[01:05:41]  And because it leaves all of that hanging, you can look at this document, the Constitution, and you can say, we're just applying this in a slightly different way.
[01:05:49]  And we're taking this branch that has become effectively subordinate.
[01:05:53]  And we're applying, I forget which is the Federalist paper where Alexander Hamilton talks about...
[01:05:58]  All Men Are Angels?
[01:06:00]  Well, but no, where he talks about executive power.
[01:06:02]  Is it 89?
[01:06:03]  I have no idea.
[01:06:04]  All men are angels is 51 or something.
[01:06:05]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:06:07]  And like, you know, and so you just sort of need to kind of rotate the Constitution a little bit, and you're still interpreting it sort of very, very clearly, but you're putting the president back in charge of the federal government.
[01:06:20]  I want to be on the record.
[01:06:21]  I hope you're wrong.
[01:06:22]  I hope, I hope you're wrong.
[01:06:23]  I would love to be wrong.
[01:06:24]  No, and so talk about that.
[01:06:25]  Do you hope that the Constitution has staying power and that Americans aren't as depraved as they seem?
[01:06:31]  Meaning that the structure can be a little bit revived and that we don't have, because you know, once you go in this direction, it's not going back.
[01:06:40]  It's just there's so many other you're going to a different place.
[01:06:44]  Because, for example, you know, in the book Good to Great, which is all about corporate turning around, you know, five million copies sold, they talk about, look, as soon as an energetic, charismatic, visionary genius CEO leaves, there was this Florida-based competitor to Walgreens that were pharmacies.
[01:07:00]  He ran for the governor.
[01:07:01]  What's his name?
[01:07:01]  I can't remember.
[01:07:02]  And it was Walgreen versus this.
[01:07:04]  And he was amazing when he was CEO.
[01:07:05]  He leaves and the company collapses in 15 years.
[01:07:08]  And so it's just, it's really.
[01:07:09]  You've got to solve that succession problem.
[01:07:12]  That's the most innocent thing.
[01:07:13]  And that's like that.
[01:07:13]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:07:15]  You absolutely have to solve that succession problem.
[01:07:17]  I believe.
[01:07:18]  Or that he just becomes a madman.
[01:07:19]  I mean, that's.
[01:07:20]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:07:21]  And that's another people get brain tumors.
[01:07:24]  It happens, right?
[01:07:25]  And so the thing is, you need the accountability part of that accountable monarchy.
[01:07:29]  But the thing is, when you're in the process of performing that transition, it's so delicate that you basically say, I have to trust this one person and I have to trust this one person to establish that accountability system and to make that work.
[01:07:44]  However, is basically, I mean, a presidential election is a form of that kind of accountability.
[01:07:51]  And so you need something that, you know, the idea that basically, you know, the founders were sort of building a machine of government that would last for the ages and govern this incredible continent for the ages.
[01:08:04]  I don't believe that dream is dead at all.
[01:08:07]  So let me ask you, you alluded to this, and you said every 80 years, we kind of have this super president.
[01:08:12]  It's like the San Andreas fault breaking.
[01:08:15]  So then is it a question, is basically what you're saying is that it's either the right or the left that's going to claim that.
[01:08:21]  I think that it's very hard for the left because the thing is the left has a sort of crabs in a bucket thing where it sort of pulls apart like, you know, to be a leftist, you know, means you're friends with all the little Fauci or whatever.
[01:08:35]  So to kind of stab them in the, I mean, it would take a really, really amazing crisis for that to happen.
[01:08:40]  Whereas, you know, like a Gavin Newsom.
[01:08:42]  Yeah, I don't think, I don't think he could do it.
[01:08:45]  I think that Barack Obama even, there were little places where Barack Obama like differed from, you know, the blob, as his guys called it, in the State Department.
[01:08:55]  Barack Obama, who, you know, has no ideological conflicts with these people, you know, couldn't really direct them to do his will.
[01:09:03]  So the traditional pushback that you'll receive is, hey, we need the courts to disassemble the deep state.
[01:09:08]  What is flawed with that argument?
[01:09:10]  What is flawed with that argument is that the courts are, you can't, first of all, you can't create a vacuum of power.
[01:09:15]  And so to say the courts will disassemble the deep state.
[01:09:19]  Let Marshall send his army to the state.
[01:09:20]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:09:21]  You know, okay, are you going to have the Supreme Court having an army to do this?
[01:09:26]  No, you're not.
[01:09:27]  And so you basically see these sort of little conservative judgments.
[01:09:31]  You just saw one on affirmative action in colleges, right?
[01:09:34]  The court is like, no, actually, you shouldn't do this.
[01:09:37]  Well, how is that going to be followed up?
[01:09:39]  Is that going to be followed up by a giant army of lawsuits ensuring that basically Harvard doesn't have its thumb on the scale for one race or its thumb against another?
[01:09:49]  They'll keep doing it with minor adjustments, and they'll say, oops, sorry.
[01:09:52]  Or they'll say, oops, sorry.
[01:09:53]  They get caught.
[01:09:53]  They'll say, oops, sorry if they get caught.
[01:09:55]  Right.
[01:09:55]  You know, and we've already seen this in California.
[01:09:58]  We went through the whole thing.
[01:09:59]  They just don't follow the law.
[01:10:00]  They just don't follow the law.
[01:10:01]  And so the thing is, basically, when the law is a dead letter, you have to realize that, okay, rule of law is great.
[01:10:08]  We don't have it.
[01:10:09]  So the question of how we get back to having it, like pretending that we have it, that's not a good way to get something you don't have, is to pretend that you have it.
[01:10:18]  And so, you know, when you look at especially like all of this lawfare, I mean, I was just reading this amazing Twitter thread where, you know, the Democrats, if they sort of lost the count, I don't want to say lost the election because it's a count.
[01:10:31]  If they lost the count in 2020, they were going to do all of the things times 10 that Trump tried to do a little bit and now everyone is getting prosecuted for.
[01:10:44]  They were going to do all those things with the masses in the streets, lawfare, alternate electors.
[01:10:49]  They were going to do it all.
[01:10:51]  And so when you have a court system that is fundamentally that deeply politicized, again, I love these black robes.
[01:10:59]  I love, you know, you have great picture, you know, Clarence Thomas up there, beautiful robe.
[01:11:03]  Love the guy, amazing American.
[01:11:05]  They're like, America is actually not short of virtue or talent.
[01:11:10]  Or talent.
[01:11:11]  We just don't have it in large numbers.
[01:11:14]  Or in the right places.
[01:11:15]  Or the right places.
[01:11:16]  We don't even have enough of it to make an oligarchy.
[01:11:19]  But do we have enough of it to make a monarchy?
[01:11:21]  Are there a thousand people that could do the job that we just talked about?
[01:11:25]  Hell yes.
[01:11:27]  So then the other part of institutional pushback that I'm sure that you'll receive is you're being over-reactionary, neo-reactionary.
[01:11:36]  Neo-reactionary.
[01:11:36]  What is your response to that?
[01:11:38]  You know, well, you know, if you take reactionary as a political slur, which I sort of used it like gay people use queer, I'm like, I'm going to come out and say I'm a reactionary.
[01:11:47]  And I'm a neoreactionary really because I don't actually have a heritage of like, I'm not a traditional American.
[01:11:54]  I'm basically an American Jewish communist, essentially.
[01:11:57]  And so I don't have any cultural ties at all to the American right.
[01:12:03]  And so I'm just, I'm a traitor to my class, right?
[01:12:06]  I'm just like, I'm like, I'm defecting against these, like, this horrible thing that like rule by people like me has become.
[01:12:12]  You know, it's worse than you think.
[01:12:14]  Like, you know, and so the thing is that basically I would say something, you know, that a great political leader from about 100 years ago once said that, you know, the task of the statesman is to take what is good about the past and learn from it and help to use and help to use build the future with it.
[01:12:36]  We can't go back to the past.
[01:12:37]  We can't return to the past.
[01:12:38]  That's completely impossible.
[01:12:40]  We can't turn back the clock and be Massachusetts in 1689.
[01:12:43]  Those people don't exist.
[01:12:45]  You know, we can be like our best selves.
[01:12:48]  And the thing is, I'm really confident that with a government that isn't trying to destroy the country, like it's an embarrassment, frankly, that we have trouble competing with China.
[01:12:58]  The West has never had trouble competing with the East before, except when the West is really deeply sick.
[01:13:05]  You know, this country with a government that works is going to blow China out of the water.
[01:13:10]  What gives you hope?
[01:13:12]  The number of amazing Americans that still exist in this country.
[01:13:15]  You know, when you basically, they just need the right structure.
[01:13:19]  And what gives me hope also is that basically, you know, Americans have been getting much less violent and virtuous over time.
[01:13:27]  And so, you know, political systems that rely on them to be like virtuous and violent at the same time, that's a concept that people can't even really parse today.
[01:13:36]  But Americans have also been getting more sophisticated, more ironic.
[01:13:41]  You know, every movie you see, every like Super Bowl commercial is a joke, whatever.
[01:13:46]  And so they're very, very good at breaking out of mental frames.
[01:13:51]  They're very, very good at like breaking their assumptions, at breaking out of Plato's cave, at saying, wow, what if this system was all a joke?
[01:13:59]  What if these ideals don't mean anything?
[01:14:01]  What if all these institutions I was taught to respect and love are just like basically really bad people wearing a skin suit?
[01:14:08]  That's more accessible to Americans than it ever has been.
[01:14:12]  And that's what we need.
[01:14:13]  Is that uniquely?
[01:14:13]  Are you seeing that in other countries?
[01:14:15]  Yeah, it's modern.
[01:14:16]  It's moderny.
[01:14:17]  Are they saying, you know, our tradition of altering human biology needs to start?
[01:14:22]  Well, you know, Germany, Germany's traditions got pretty thoroughly rewritten in 1945.
[01:14:28]  They're like a caricature of Berkeley.
[01:14:30]  They worship chemists.
[01:14:31]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:14:33]  There's national culture still there.
[01:14:35]  But the no, I think that, you know, this is definitely, it's an effect of technology.
[01:14:41]  It's an effect of affluence.
[01:14:43]  It's an effect of many, many things.
[01:14:45]  But like the tool that Americans need to basically sort of, you know, see the world as it actually is is irony.
[01:14:55]  It is.
[01:14:56]  Do you think irony is our superpower?
[01:14:57]  Irony is our superpower.
[01:14:59]  Finding the things that don't fit.
[01:15:00]  Irony is in finding the things that don't fit and being okay with it.
[01:15:03]  And being okay with that.
[01:15:04]  And there's, I mean, how ironic is Donald Trump?
[01:15:07]  He's tremendously, his powers of irony are immense.
[01:15:10]  And that's the thing that he has that Ron DeSanctimonious doesn't have, you know, and like he has, you know, and that feeling of like he's simultaneously incredibly ironic and incredibly sincere.
[01:15:23]  And that's the kind of flavor that it takes to sort of get P to get people to realize that they can do what needs to be done.

=== Irony as America's Superpower (01:42) ===

[01:15:31]  Final thought.
[01:15:32]  What books would you recommend for the audience?
[01:15:34]  One or two where they could just, as jumping off points?
[01:15:37]  Good question.
[01:15:38]  I really like the Chris Caldwell Age of Entitlement book.
[01:15:40]  That's sort of fairly solid.
[01:15:42]  It's a favorite.
[01:15:42]  For deeper political theory, but still very, very readable.
[01:15:46]  I love, there's a book by James Burnham called The Machiavelli.
[01:15:51]  Not Suicide of the West, not the Managerial Revolution.
[01:15:54]  Those are both fine books, but his masterpiece is called The Machiavellians, and it was written in 1940.
[01:16:00]  And it's amazing because what the Machiavellians is all about is basically casting aside these illusions and sort of doing what Confucius said, which is to call everything by its true name.
[01:16:13]  And if you can call everything by its true name, you can realize that we don't have an executive branch.
[01:16:18]  We have a legislative branch.
[01:16:20]  And from there, the problem actually starts to look really straightforward and obvious.
[01:16:24]  So any final thoughts, the way people can follow your work, your writings?
[01:16:29]  Subscribe to my substack at graymirror.substack.com.
[01:16:32]  That's gray with an A, the American way.
[01:16:34]  You certainly have a talent for pushing the Overton window.
[01:16:38]  Thank you, Charlie.
[01:16:39]  And you've been doing this for a couple of years?
[01:16:41]  I have.
[01:16:42]  I agree with some of it.
[01:16:44]  I disagree with some of it.
[01:16:45]  What I really love is this idea, first and foremost, of challenging our presumptions, but this idea of an energetic executive, I really love.
[01:16:54]  I'm still going to be the stickler for the U.S. Constitution.
[01:16:56]  Call me an idealist.
[01:16:57]  So I hope you're wrong.
[01:16:59]  We'll see.
[01:16:59]  We'll see.
[01:17:00]  Curtis, thanks so much.
[01:17:00]  Charlie, thanks so much.
[01:17:01]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[01:17:02]  Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[01:17:05]  Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.
[01:17:09]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.