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Sept. 21, 2024 - The Charlie Kirk Show
48:53
Are Humans Good or Bad? — Part 2 with Tucker Carlson

Enjoy the rest of Charlie's exclusive interview with Tucker Carlson, where they discuss Winston Churchill, free will, parenting, culture, world history, and one of the most enduring questions in all of human history: Are human beings naturally good, or naturally evil?Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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So you mentioned the Iraq War, and you famously came out, you actually went to Iraq and saw it for yourself.
Yes.
And I might be misremembering this, but there was like some general that told you a story of a mom who died or something, is that correct?
Yeah, it was all so disgusting.
It was awful.
And then that was the beginning of kind of your eyes opening.
Yeah, I mean, like, look, I'm not an intellectual or particularly Wise person but I try to operate on the level of animal instinct to the extent that I can because I think it's probably a clearer guide to right and wrong than most and I remember just having a gut level revulsion as this
He may have been a full colonel, actually.
But anyway, he was an officer and I think the commanding officer at the time, where I was.
But I remember feeling this revulsion as he told me about this woman, this mother, who'd
had her legs blown off and then died that day in outside Baghdad.
And he was saying that this was just such a beautiful sacrifice for freedom or for America
or something.
And I just couldn't get...
And her husband was with her.
And her husband was there.
He was in country as well.
And I remember thinking, wait a second, are we allowed to send...
First of all, what's a woman doing getting her legs blown off?
Second, are we allowed to send a husband and a wife?
And where are the kids?
100%.
And I had three kids at the time.
It shouldn't be a loud period.
You can't put a whole family into a theater of war.
It's totally immoral.
And then I thought, wait a second, I thought we had a military and a police force, for that matter, in order to protect our women and children.
That was the whole point of it.
I mean, that's why we have a military, is to keep foreigners from hurting our women and children.
That's why we send men to die for their women, our women whom we revere and respect, to the extent we're willing to die for them.
And so if we're sending women to go fight our wars, First of all, that's not a liberation movement.
That's a kind of slavery, and it's totally wrong.
And so I said something like that to him, and he looked at me like I was a freak.
This was at a dinner, so I didn't really have time to think it through.
I still haven't fully thought it through, but I just remember thinking, that's disgusting.
It's like walking by a pile of human feces on the sidewalk.
You can explain it away.
There are no restrooms here.
It's like, no, that's on the sidewalk.
Like, I'm against that.
It's just disgusting.
I don't need to explain it, actually.
That's how I felt about that.
And I remember just feeling sick to my stomach.
And this guy's reaction to me was like, oh, I thought you were on our side.
Like, I hate you.
And I felt like looking at him, I was like, I don't know.
I know you have this, you know, this whole uniform on and all these insignia that I was raised to respect.
And I do respect.
I respect your service.
But I think you're disgusting.
And I think what you just said is evil.
And wow, it set off this chain reaction inside of me.
I didn't expect any of this at all.
And I've never kind of gotten over it, but it's informed how I feel about a lot of things.
Before the Iraq War, did you have any other moments where you started to think that the ruling class, the regime, the people that run the country are not up to the task?
Or was the Iraq War really the beginning of your questioning of the management of our country?
You know, it's so hard to know.
I mean, when the Iraq War broke out, I was 33.
I had three small kids, and I was working really hard to pay for everything.
So, you know, you're very distracted.
I know you know the feeling.
Yes, yeah.
We have two, and... It's really hard, you know?
And we're very blessed financially, and it's hard.
I mean, it's just... Yeah!
It's hard no matter what.
Yeah!
And I had grown up in affluent circumstances, but I didn't have any money.
So, you know, that's difficult right there.
Anyway, whatever, I had a lot on my mind, and I'd also grown up, like, right in the middle of all of this stuff.
And so, you know, you don't question the things that you grew up around quite as quickly as you question things you've never seen before.
And my dad worked for the government and was involved in all kinds of stuff, and I just never really thought about it.
I'll tell you this, just having lived in Washington and Georgetown as a kid and just being there really my whole life, I was never that impressed.
I mean, I thought there were smart, interesting people who'd lived in various countries and had a sophisticated view of the world, but I didn't think anyone was like a super genius.
It never occurred to me to be impressed by a college degree.
Part of the problem with Washington is you get a lot of people moving in from the provinces who are like head of...
elected a boy's state to something or did, you know, model UN and they're all sort of,
you know, the hyper first row in the classroom achievers and they get there and they're all
very impressed by credentials. Very impressed. And they show up and there's, you know, David
Ignatius at the Washington Post and like he knows how the Intel, the IC really operates.
He's the CIA spokesperson.
Of course he is. But the point, I mean, it's absurd. It's absurd. But they all fall for it.
I guess that's the point.
Or the Speaker of the House, who's like some probably sort of well-meaning, not very smart guy from Louisiana, all of a sudden becomes Speaker, and they pull him into the Sit Room, and he's texting, I'm in the Sit Room!
Like, he's so impressed by all this stuff.
And because he's impressed, he's so easily led and manipulated.
And so really the only advantage that I had was, I've just been around it, so it's like I'm not that impressed, you know, at all.
But it definitely was the Iraq War that got me thinking, A, this is not the kind of left-right divide that I thought it was, because I grew up during the Cold War, so it really was just left-right.
Yes.
And these categories had been much muddied in the 11 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and I didn't know that, and I learned that.
So it was Republicans collaborating or working with Democrats to do this thing.
That's the first thing.
I began to question, like, what is the point of this project, actually?
It doesn't seem to be helping the United States at all.
We don't seem like we're very good at this, at being an imperial power.
I'm not surprised.
I don't think most Americans want to be an imperial power.
They just want to be... And what are we sending out into the world?
Well, that's the other thing.
And that's, you know... It's not like Christianity or something.
We're sending out the LGBT agenda and abortion clinics in Ghana.
Right.
So, of course, it's an attack on Christianity.
Yes.
That's what it really is.
It's like we're spreading secular...
Thought into a hyper-religious country.
Like, that's not gonna work.
Well, sure.
I mean, our proxy state, the sort of clearest proxy state of the United States is Ukraine right now.
Yes.
And they've just declared war on Christianity in Ukraine.
They're putting priests and nuns in jail.
And so, actually, they just banned the Christian denomination, and we're paying for that.
So, I mean, that's kind of the clearest example of it.
But, you know, once you see it, you see it everywhere.
And I grieve for what I see because, you know, I grew up in such a different country with such different assumptions, and it's still not clear how many of my assumptions were just stupid—probably a lot of them.
And, you know, how much things have actually changed, I don't know, but I'm aware of it.
And, yeah, we're exporting attacks on Christianity.
And that's, of course, why, you know, the U.S.
government is so opposed to Hungary and Russia.
I mean, that's the main... You know, probably lots of things... You think, and I agree, the Ukraine-Russian war is deeper than just what they say it is.
It's actually... Well, it has nothing to do with what... I mean, they claim it's a war of liberation designed to help the Ukrainians... Or stop the new Hitler.
Well, of course, it's absurd.
And sure, if you wanted to help Ukraine, you probably wouldn't kill 600,000 Ukrainian men, would you?
You wouldn't change the law in Ukraine to allow foreign companies to buy their farmland, which Zelensky has done with the help of the US government.
And so no, Ukraine as it existed three years ago is gone.
In 10 years, Ukraine will not be owned by Ukrainians, and there won't be Ukrainians living there.
It'll be populated by people from outside Ukraine.
So historic Ukraine is over, destroyed by the United States.
That's a fact.
It's not by Russia.
That's a tragedy.
Well, it's unbelievable.
So the two things that comprise a country, of course, are the people and the land.
And if both of them get taken away, one way or another, then you don't have that country anymore.
And that's exactly what's happening in Ukraine.
And I had a very interesting... I've been trying for the past two years to get a Zelensky interview.
And really, really trying hard, much harder than... Good faith trying, yes.
Oh yeah, I want to interview Zelensky.
By the way, I kind of feel sorry for Zelensky.
I don't think he's the root of all problems in Ukraine.
It's much more complicated than that.
I'm not for Zelensky, but I also don't think that it's all him.
I don't think he's really in charge of a lot of things.
He's just a surrogate.
For sure.
But anyway, during the course of these sort of endless negotiations, which are still ongoing to get this interview, I had dinner maybe six weeks ago with a Zelensky ally who came to an American city.
I flew there and met him.
He was a totally reasonable guy.
You know, a lot of Ukrainians, when you meet them, are great people, actually.
And this guy was Christian, a patriot, mad at—he doesn't want foreign troops on his soil.
I get it, you know, completely.
And he was mad because I had called Zelensky some... A bitty foreigner in a t-shirt?
Yeah, dwarf in a tracksuit.
I've been, you know, characteristically nasty, which I shouldn't have been, but I was because I can't control myself.
I think it's hilarious.
Yeah, well, Zelensky didn't like it and he's like, Zelensky's mad that you called him a dwarf in a tracksuit or something.
And I said, okay, sorry.
I shouldn't have said that.
I agree.
However...
Here's my view of what he's allowing to happen to your country.
Your population is being killed, it won't be replaced by Ukrainians, and your actual land, physical Ukraine, is about to be sold off.
To Blackrock.
100%.
You're not going to own the farmland, the mineral resources, the energy, and it won't be populated by Ukrainians.
You think they're not going to move the third world into Ukraine?
Oh, they can't wait to do that.
Yes.
And he looks me right in the face and goes, I know.
And it was one of those moments where you really just felt the tragedy of the situation.
I mean, here's a guy, you know, whatever, I have a lot of views on the war in Ukraine,
but I certainly felt for this man.
You know, I think his motives were pure.
He's from Ukraine and he knows that he has lost his country.
So the U.S. State Department, the Biden administration, the U.S. Congress, morons like Speaker Mike
Johnson made that possible.
So you can lecture me for hours about your motives or your intent, but at a certain point I get to judge the effects of what you've done.
You can say you're a great dad, but if all your kids are in prison or rehab, I'm saying you're not a great dad, actually, because I judge the tree by its fruits.
It's really simple.
And so Mike Johnson and the rest of them, all the completely corrupted Republican committee chairs, the entire Democratic Party, and the American business community have destroyed Ukraine.
They've destroyed Ukraine.
And by the way, they triggered this war on purpose.
Kamala Harris played a big role in that.
Kamala Harris was the pivot point.
That's exactly right.
You send the biggest moron we can to read a teleprompter saying Ukraine's going to join NATO.
You're basically— On camera!
On camera, when Russia has said— And she doesn't know what she's talking about.
I mean, of course not.
Look, Russia is a separate country.
It's not the United States.
It acts in its own interests.
Not all of which align with our interests.
I get it.
I mean, that's the nature of countries.
They're separate countries.
They're sovereign, or they're supposed to be anyway.
And so, yeah, Russia didn't want American missiles on its western border.
I get it.
And we knew that.
Any reasonable person acknowledges that.
And there's no reason to have Ukraine in NATO.
There's no reason to have NATO in the first place.
NATO is very bad for the United States, it's very bad for the rest of the world, it's not a force for good at all, and we all have to pretend that it is.
Why do you say that?
Why is it not a force for good?
Well, because NATO is much more than a military alliance, actually.
So the idea behind NATO, of course, was that Western Europe faces the threat of invasion by the Soviets.
You know, probably true.
And so you want a collective security agreement to prevent that from happening.
Article 4, right?
Article 5?
Yep, exactly.
Get it.
And so the whole structure was designed to keep the West in America's sphere of influence, and I supported that unthinkingly really up until 2016 when I was forced to think about it, when Trump started talking about it, and I'd never thought about it ever.
I'm like, Dad, work with NATO.
I was like, yeah, NATO, great.
And then you have to ask questions like, well, okay, so the Soviet Union hasn't existed since the summer of 1991, so what is the point of NATO now?
And no one can answer that question.
And so the point is to contain Russia, I guess, but Russia is not expansionist, actually.
It's the largest country in the world.
It's very hard to run Russia.
Very complicated country.
12 time zones or something, right, yeah.
20% Muslim, multi-ethnic.
Yeah, it's really hard to run Russia.
They don't want Poland.
What would they do with Poland, right?
So it's also silly, but we're told these lies because the people who benefit from the existence of NATO want to keep NATO going, which is very expensive.
And it's also kind of productive to our, I would say, to our prosperity and our freedom here in the United States.
But what NATO actually is, is a way to project American cultural values across Eastern Europe.
And Eastern Europe is a huge problem because it's Christian and it's anti-communist.
Having spent 40 years under the Soviet jackboot, they're like against a lot of the priorities of Washington's permanent class, you know?
And they're very Christian in a way that the rest of Europe is not.
And so if that's a threat to you for whatever reason, if you hate Christianity, which they do above all, then you're gonna use NATO as a way to influence the domestic policies of those Eastern European countries, particularly Romania.
Belarus.
Yeah, but... Hungary, yeah.
Well, I mean, Hungary and Romania are part of NATO, right?
Right.
You know, Belarus is very much in the Russian sphere.
But anyway, but the point is, NATO is not... there's no collective security necessary.
Like, what?
Against what?
I mean, is there evidence that Putin is planning to invade Germany?
And if there is, tell me what it is.
That's like absurd, and how stupid do you think I am?
If you distill it down, you go to Brookings, Hudson, any one of these neoconservative think tanks, and you get them, they've been in this space for 50 years, PhDs, they will all eventually, if you distill them down, well, what are you going to do if Putin rolls tanks through Paris?
Yeah, okay.
And that's where it goes, like immediately.
But you're like a child if you're saying that, or more to the point, you think I'm a child if you think I would believe something like that, because it's absurd.
And by the way, the rest of the world laughs, actually.
So the main problem of the Soviet Union, from my perspective, you know, it was anti-markets, it was anti-Christian.
That's enough for me right there.
It was also anti-human in so many ways.
It was anti-human.
It really was.
And the way that you knew that it was anti-human is because it was a purveyor of chaos.
And chaos is the marker for evil.
God brings what out of chaos?
Order.
Exactly.
And so anybody who is spreading chaos in any sphere, including within the home, it doesn't matter.
Like if I'm spreading chaos in my house, wherever, I am acting on behalf of evil.
So that's just like the clearest sign of it.
And the Soviets, boy, they specialized in exporting chaos from the earliest days post-revolution with the Comintern, whose whole sort of mission was to spread revolution First in Germany and then throughout the world were not
successful, but they certainly destabilized a ton of countries.
The poorer the country, the longer it remained destabilized.
Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, like they, you know, there are many, many, many countries
the Soviets worked to destabilize.
But that was the main problem with the Soviets.
They exported chaos.
And so if you're on...
And this was the sort of turning point for me from seeing the Iraq War firsthand was
that we had taken control of Iraq in March of 2003, but not brought order.
There had been a kind of order in Iraq, not for Saddam.
It's a very difficult country to govern, by the way.
One hundred percent.
Right.
There was no appreciation of that, because when you think you're God, you know that your will is going to be done.
It's not exactly easy to—yeah.
You're exactly right.
The thing that turned my view, really, was seeing the fact that the United States had defeated the Iraqi army, but there was no order there.
I got there in December of 2003, the day Saddam was captured.
It got worse.
Oh, it was completely chaotic.
Like, actually chaotic.
At the neighborhood, block by block level.
Rapes went up, arsons, kidnappings.
It was terrible.
People would fire automatic weapons.
I mean, I saw it, including at the house I was staying in.
Fire automatic weapons, like thousands of rounds of 7.62x39.
You know, kind of a big...
Fairly big round for a residential neighborhood.
And then sort of like no one would follow up, there was no police, there was no U.S.
military or State Department presence to be like, what was that?
Who's firing all this?
Is anyone hurt?
It was pure chaos.
And I remember thinking, wow, we brought chaos.
I brought chaos.
I'm an American.
I advocated this.
When the British Empire used to come in, they brought order.
Yes.
The places they came in contact with.
If you want to know, am I doing a good job?
Because it's a binary.
Am I serving evil or am I serving good?
And all of us serve both at various times, obviously.
But if you want to know about the success of a project, ask yourself one simple question.
Are things more orderly or are they more chaotic?
Chaos is totally intolerable.
People cannot deal with chaos.
They will choose tyranny any day over chaos.
The human brain can't deal with it.
It's totally intolerant of chaos.
So we brought chaos, and I think the same is true now.
And I am so sad about that.
You know, there are some people who love to beat up on the United States or the Biden administration.
I don't.
I feel sad about it.
I am not a boomer, but I am boomer adjacent.
I was born five years after the end of the baby boom.
But you know, some of their attitudes I sort of grew up with, and one of them is the United States is a force for good in the world, and we're a better place than other places.
We are a special country.
And to see our government acting in a way that's the opposite of that, it bums me out.
It does not bring me joy to point that out at all.
It makes me very down.
But I see it everywhere, and I travel a lot internationally.
I have in the West.
Since I got fired, I've been on the road out of the country a lot, months and months and months out of the country.
So interesting.
I've really learned so much.
But that's one thing I've learned, is the rest of the world sees the United States in its current form as a force for chaos, a destabilizing force.
And there's nothing more unpopular than that.
There's nothing more resented than that, and there's nothing more destructive than that.
So I hope we can change course.
And the other thing I would, in one sentence, say, the thing that Americans don't understand is that our foreign policy does not exist in a separate sphere from our domestic policy.
Our foreign policy drives our domestic policy.
No one in charge in Washington, and I am an expert on this because I know them, they're not interested in domestic policy.
There's no effort to cure homelessness or fix the fentanyl crisis.
No, they don't care.
Immigration.
They don't care.
They don't care.
They're just not interested at all.
What they're interested in is the projection of American power, their power, abroad.
But why is that?
Because— Read me into the psyche of who these people—because it's
so foreign to our audience.
They don't understand.
They just aren't interested in it.
And the psychology is really simple.
I mean, you have a lot of well-meaning, kind of limited people showing up in Washington
every election cycle to the Congress.
And they've been elected from some district, and I think most of them kind of want to do the right thing, and they sort of know why they were elected.
And they get there, and they realize, I can't do any of this.
I can't do any of this.
I can't achieve any of this.
How do you fix these problems?
How do you fix the debt?
It's really complicated.
How do you fix immigration?
I mean, there are a few, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's just like monomaniacally focused on the task.
She's hated and resented for that.
But most of them are just like, oh, I can't deal with this.
So what can I do?
Well, I can't, you know, I can't fix Union Station in DC directly across the street from my office.
That, you know, I can't clean up the men's rooms there or keep the people dying of drug ODs out of the hallways.
But, you know, I probably could overthrow Putin if I tried hard enough.
And that's something I can do.
I can feel useful, competent, powerful.
These are the things, of course, that every man wants to feel above all.
Useful, competent, powerful.
And I can achieve that abroad.
And I don't need to trouble myself with the details.
I don't speak Russian.
I don't speak Ukrainian.
I don't speak Chinese.
I don't really know.
It's almost like some natural disaster in Bangladesh.
Like, I don't know.
Just tell me the death toll.
That's all I need.
I don't know the town it happened in.
I don't know.
I don't need to bother myself with all the details because they don't matter.
All I need to do is convince myself that I'm working on behalf of freedom and goodness, and I can feel like a hero.
I mean, I had dinner the other night—not the other night—at the Republican convention with this Republican senator who I've known.
He's a perfectly nice man.
Probably 105 IQ or something.
You know, sort of like above average, but barely.
And, you know, kind of, you know, thin and fit in his early 60s.
He was a perfectly nice person.
And, well, that's what he was when he was elected.
I knew him then.
And I was amazed by what a pompous sort of bore he'd become.
And he literally looked at me at dinner with his wife sitting right there and goes, you know, my national security team.
My national security team?
Really?
Like, you're a senator, like you're an idiot.
No, he's not an idiot.
But I mean, you're not, like, you don't speak any of the languages in these countries you're
trying to control.
You don't know anything about the countries at all.
You don't read the books, you don't know the music.
You don't know anything, and yet you imagine that.
What was he saying?
Like, my national security team says that.
He was just dropping it.
Like, I was in Paris recently with my national security team.
I was in Paris, he said.
That's almost exactly what he said.
He said, I was in Paris.
And his wife's like, we're in Paris.
In Paris, you know, working with the IC over there.
And my national security team called me, and I was like, is this real?
Like, are you being serious?
You're a United States senator, you know?
Like, actually, you don't have any power at all.
You're not in—really, do you have an army?
I don't think you do.
Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
No.
And he just loved the trappings of it, and it made him feel like a significant figure in history.
And here I'm judging and being mean.
But that is sort of what everyone... No, but none of these people... That's what everyone wants, though.
You want to feel like your life matters, you know?
They're part of a small group of people that will determine the future of the civilization.
Yeah.
So what you're getting back is their incentive is, I want to feel important?
Oh, 100%.
Well, that's... So this is student council running the country.
Yeah, but it's also human nature.
Like, we're all sort of like that, you know?
At some point you realize, I mean, it is...
You're the Bible scholar, but is it Ecclesiastes?
I think it is.
By Solomon?
By what?
Ecclesiastes, the book.
Yes, correct.
One of the two books written by Solomon.
What is all this?
The first line was, this is all meaningless, it's a meaningless God, it's all meaningless.
What a depressing book.
No, it literally opens up like it's a suicidal 17-year-old goth.
No, it totally is!
Like, meaningless, meaningless, all that is meaningless.
It's Ecclesiastes 1, and you're like, what is this?
You've probably read it like 10 times and understand its deeper meaning.
It actually gets better because he says, with God, there actually is meaning.
No, that's right, and I've read it precisely one time sitting at home.
And in the context, Solomon had all the women he wanted, all the trappings, all the splendor, and he's like, it's all meaningless.
But that is kind of, that is exactly, that is the one thing that I, not that I have all the women and all the money or whatever, but like you do reach an age in life where you're like, okay, you know, I've achieved all my dumb little goals that I set out for myself.
And they're all very small bore, because they always are.
And okay, was that worth it?
Was the prize worth winning?
Did that bring me joy and fulfillment and knowledge of eternal life?
No.
And so I do think that is very common.
That's almost universal.
among middle-aged men who run by and large the US government.
And so it's a very natural temptation to be like, you know, what can I achieve?
Like you saw this with John McCain.
Oh my goodness.
Everyone hates John McCain.
And I think John McCain was one of the most destructive people like in American political history.
But I'll just be totally honest, having spent a lot of time with John McCain,
He was totally charming.
Very, very charming.
So charming in person, on the road I traveled with him for a year.
Yeah, you did his campaign, right?
Yeah, yeah!
And I just, I really enjoyed McCain.
He had this, like, he had wonderful manners, for example.
Sort of old-school, Episcopalian manners.
And he was hilarious.
But then, in retrospect, I look back and I'm like, John McCain really hurt the United States in a really serious way.
And other countries, too.
And I don't mean to upset his hysterical daughter by saying this, or her bizarro husband, but it's just true.
And he did, and why did he do that?
I don't think he was an evil person, not that I ever noticed, but because he wanted to feel
like his life had meaning and like what he couldn't achieve in the United States, he
achieved nothing in the United States.
He didn't improve the standard of living in the United States at all, he didn't even try,
but he could tell himself, well, you know, I freed people in some faraway land and that
was really important to him.
That was so – I mean that was the driving – Lindsey Graham, same thing.
You see in him the gleam of the zealot in his eye, and you're like, what is that?
And obviously, he's got a very barren, sad personal life, which everyone makes fun of, including me, and I shouldn't.
But the truth is, it's a human desire to feel like my life had consequence.
I did something.
I made things a little bit better.
And they've shifted all of that energy overseas, and because they have, their foreign policy aims absolutely dictate their domestic policy.
That's the most profound point of the whole thing.
That the IC, the intelligence community, all that, that determines what happens domestically.
DC is far more focused about the abstractions abroad than the immediate concerns.
But we should have seen it coming!
And I should have seen it coming because, I mean, boy, it was way up in my face as a child, as the son of someone who worked for the U.S.
government during the Cold War, doing Cold War stuff.
You know, the U.S.
government used anti-democratic means to protect democracy abroad again and again and again and again.
Every two years.
And I never thought about that one time.
I never thought, hmm.
Because it seemed justified, because the Soviet Union was so evil, and I still believe that.
It was.
And I was disgusted by how liberals in the United States defended them relentlessly for 70 years.
But leaving that aside, I was so caught up in that that I never paused to ask myself,
well, wait a second, is there a kind of very obvious moral rot involved here?
If we're overthrowing people, democratically elected leaders, to make the world safe for democracy... Like in Iran.
It is like shooting people to save them.
Is it not?
I mean, it is.
That's exactly what it is.
It's murdering people in order to save their lives.
Like, it's insane.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
And in the long run, it corrupts the person who does it completely.
And it has corrupted our leadership class.
The things they've done abroad have changed the way they feel about the United States, its citizens, and have changed the rules for what they can do to us.
I think you're pinpointing, you've said this before but it's worth repeating, they hate Trump because of his foreign policy far more than his domestic policy.
Of course.
Bill Kristol was saying publicly at the time, and I don't mean to even bring up Bill Kristol because he's not...
He's not a player anymore.
No, of course he's not.
But it's just, because I worked for him for so long and I knew him so well, I do think he's sort of a gauge of how permanent Washington feels about things.
And Christo was saying in public, right up until that famous debate in South Carolina about Trump, you know, he's kind of a buffoon, but he could be our buffoon, and maybe we can ride this to power again in Washington over Hillary.
This was in 2016.
This has been much noted by people smarter than I, but the second Trump went after the Iraq war, on a core level, like that was not a good idea from day one.
When he said that, that was it.
And yeah, foreign policy is what they really care about.
And it's just a tragedy, but it is the end result of really kind of 80 years of corruption that all of us, very much including me, should have noticed at the time and called out at the time.
And we didn't, I didn't.
And again, this is like something to remember about life.
It's like you can get so focused on what you're fighting against that you fail to honestly assess what you're fighting for and the way that you're fighting for it.
And I think it's very important to be honest about our own behavior and to take, you know, relentlessly clear-eyed stock of ourselves.
All the time.
All the time.
Like, I can say, you know, it's easy to be against bad things.
You see this in diesel all the time.
But Putin, he's bad!
Hitler's bad!
Great!
Okay?
But let's talk about you for a minute.
Are you good?
Are you bad?
What exactly are you doing?
What are your aims?
Putin, bad!
Great!
Got it.
Putin, bad.
Got it.
Message received.
But let's talk about you, my leader, for a moment.
Shut up!
Putin bad!
And I think all of us are like that to some extent.
I know that I was.
Saddam Hussein bad?
Yeah, okay.
That's an easy call, I guess.
I guess?
I don't even care actually, but whatever at the time, I was like, he's bad, okay.
He gassed the Kurds, okay.
But how are we responding to it?
What I can control is me, to some extent my country, what's done in my name with my money.
And we all, I, fell down on the job and did not do that because we were so focused.
And I just think this is a recurring problem in human affairs.
Are you encouraged at least some of the American right is waking up from this neoconservative spell?
That we've made some progress?
Well, yeah, and I've been... With J.D.
Vance being the VP with... Yes, and I've been reminded of that in the last 24 hours.
I did this interview with the guy who seemed totally reasonable and moderate to me and wasn't saying anything crazy.
Daryl Cooper?
Daryl Cooper, yeah.
Really nice man and a very moderate man.
I had dinner with him the night before for like five hours and just talked about history and all.
Not that much about the Second World War, actually, but other things.
My read on him was he's not a hater, that's for sure, and he's like a reasonable guy, and maybe you disagree with him, but... okay, you know?
Um, that's okay.
We're each allowed to have our own... That's kind of where I'm... I don't know if I, like, I don't think I agree with a lot of it.
It's fine!
I mean, I agree with... Well, I'll just say for the record, what I agree with is...
The UK is a disaster.
Truly... Your analysis of how the UK has become a husk of its former self.
Yes, and a disappearing country, and disappearing people, and they're done.
And I'm not just saying this because I'm half-English, which I'm not proud of, but I am, and it has nothing to do with that, actually.
It just has to do with, this was an amazing country, and now it's a disgusting country, and how did that happen?
And if Churchill was such a great leader, how, 80 years later, is his country basically gone?
And I think it's important to understand how that happened.
And someone should have to answer for that.
I totally agree.
So, but whatever conclusions you reach... I was amazed in the last 24 hours, you know, you platform... I had Seth Dillon from the Babylon Bee, who's like some anti-woke guy, I guess, text me, I can't believe you platformed him!
Platformed?
You mean talk to him?
I thought you were the anti-woke guy.
But anyway, people are very upset.
And look, it's okay to be upset about a difference of opinion.
I totally get it.
I'm frequently upset about differences of opinion.
But I can't help but detect in the hysteria over all of this, trying to turn Daryl Cooper, maybe he's got eccentric views or not, but into some sort of a Nazi?
And me into a platformer of Nazis?
I detect in that something much bigger, which is a kind of Desperate, hysterical attempt to hold on to certain ideas or founding myths, some of which may be worth holding on to or not or whatever, I'm agnostic.
And mythologies can be important, as astutely pointed.
I totally agree.
Blake Neff made that point, whom I love.
Blake's amazing.
I totally agree.
He made that point to me last night.
All societies are founded on myths.
And it's important to have a founding method.
Maybe this isn't the worst one.
I think that's a great point, and he may be absolutely right.
But a confident society, a confident ruling class, would be able to explain that in the way that he did, non-hysterically, rationally.
And that's not what we're seeing at all.
We're seeing people, like, losing control.
And I think that is sort of the point of it.
They are losing control.
For those that didn't listen to the episode quickly, what was the synthesis, would you say?
Synthesis was, well, we talked about all kinds of different things.
Yes, Jonestown cult, which was something else.
Completely.
The sadness of modern Britain, the destruction of Ireland, which is really a fixation for me, because it's just so bizarre.
Hungary, right.
Why would you want to destroy Ireland?
What did they do wrong?
You know, replace what people want from Ireland?
Have they not suffered enough?
I mean... Well, kind of.
They were never an imperial power.
It's all very weird.
But anyway, and it's worth talking about.
But, no, Darryl Cooper said, I think the villain of the Second World War period was Churchill.
Which is a provocative thing to say for sure, but I don't know.
Tell me more.
Why do you think that?
And his point was, look, there was this regional conflict underway.
Germany was pissed about the concessions that it was forced to make under the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War, and they wanted their land back and their population, German-speaking, ethnic German population in all these different countries.
And so it was a regional conflict, and you can take either side of that, or no side, or whatever, but it was effectively a regional conflict, and Churchill forced it into what it became, which was a global war in which tens of millions of people died.
That's his position.
Okay.
I mean, I think that's a defensible position.
It may be a wrong position.
I don't think that's, like, crazy.
It certainly doesn't justify the hysteria that it provoked, in my opinion.
And so the question is, well, why did it provoke that hysteria?
That was going to be my question.
Because, again, I don't get that much emotion about it.
I don't think I agree with that.
I agree.
But I'm not an expert.
I'm not a historian.
But it's okay!
But also, it doesn't get me screaming, right?
So I guess I would ask, which is more dangerous, living in a society where people have all kinds of views, heterodox views about a historical event, or living in a society in which you're not allowed to have?
Heterodox views on an event, an 80-year-old event.
I mean, you know, it's not a close call for me.
You want to live in a free society where inquiry, free inquiry is encouraged.
It's certainly allowed.
But anyway, but the point is, why the hysteria?
And I think if you take three steps back, I think this is right.
What you're looking at is like, is a huge, is it the end of an 80-year cycle?
And the end of a certain way of thinking about the world, the end of a certain way of administering the world, institutions which have run the West, and to some extent the East, since 1945.
That's all kind of going away very fast, actually.
Economic power, political power, cultural powers, all moving East.
And that's tough for me as an American to accept.
It's very upsetting to me, actually.
I want America to be preeminent.
Of course, I'm American.
I think the world's a better place when we are, yeah.
I've always thought that.
You know, we're 4% of the world's population, and so, you know, it's a lot to ask for that to continue forever.
Correct.
But at the bottom, whatever we want may be immaterial, because it's not continuing.
It's ending, and it's ending very fast.
And again, that's upsetting.
I'm certainly not...
You know, poor Seth Dillon from the Babylon Bee.
Like, I kind of get why people are upset.
He couldn't quite articulate it, but I get it.
You know, they don't want...
The reason they're upset is because if people start questioning the myth, then it's like, well, but wait, then what's the justification for all of this?
And then we need to accept that we are at the end of a stage of history.
And that's a scary thing.
It's scary for me, by the way.
I'm certainly not celebrating any of this at all.
I feel anxiety.
I can feel it.
I feel it in the air, too.
Yeah.
So I do think that a year from now, the debates that we're having now about Churchill or whatever, they will all seem Silly and antique.
Like, I do think things are changing faster than— Do you mean that we're gonna have real problems?
Well, I just think assumptions are changing really fast, and, um, about a lot of different things.
I don't think all of it's good, by the way.
I'm not for radical change, you know, at all.
I'm conservative.
Be careful what statutes you take on, right?
I totally agree.
Completely agree.
This is not up to me.
I'm just observing.
No, no, I mean, just— And there are a million factors!
Usually it doesn't go well, right?
I agree with that.
I agree with that.
And certainly, big changes cause a lot of suffering, inevitably.
But we're clearly on the cusp of one, or in the middle of one.
There's just no way around that.
Again, I just want to say, I don't want this to happen.
I wouldn't choose any of this.
I wish it was 1985 again.
I don't want to think about any of this stuff.
What a great country that was.
It was!
It was great.
I'd kind of like to go just bird hunting with my dogs and not worry about stuff.
But I'm not in charge, none of us is in charge individually of history and we're sort of captives of it and this really is a historical pivot point.
I don't think that's grandiose or overstating the case at all.
I think it's absolutely true and everyone can feel it and it makes them jumpy and to some extent hysterical.
People are coming at me last night by text message And I was sort of confused about it at first because I was maybe being like too autistic about it or too literal or like, no, Daryl Cooper is, you know, a really good and moderate and non-hating person, which is all true, by the way.
Absolutely true.
I think he's a great historian, whether you agree or disagree, but he's like rigorous.
Let's debate what you think he got wrong.
Like, I'm coming at it from that perspective.
Like, oh, you're mad at him.
I want to see him debate Dr. Arnn on Churchill.
Who's like THE Churchill guy.
100%!
Larry Arnn's amazing on Churchill.
He's like THE Churchill guy.
And I texted him, like, you should talk to him.
Completely different perspective.
That would be wonderful.
I totally agree with that.
So that's the, again, kind of probably too literal position that I'm coming at this from.
And so I was amazed by just the vituperative nature of this and people really getting upset.
And then I thought, you know, rather than just push back and be like, you know, up yours too!
Like, what are we watching here?
What are we pivoting towards?
You say we're pivoting.
I don't, you know, that's opaque to me.
I don't know.
Is the election of a bearing on that?
Oh, of course it does.
But I don't think it's the sum total of it at all.
Sure, I think it's a piece, right?
I really don't.
But more of the point, I guess the only point I'm making is, like, if people are behaving in a way that you disagree with or despise, you know, or think is disgusting, I do think before pushing back, or maybe in the midst of pushing back, it's worth asking, like, what is this?
Like, why are they doing this?
These aren't all stupid people.
They're not all bad people.
A lot of good people, actually.
I've always liked Seth Dillon.
I'm not, you know what I mean?
Like, I don't, so why?
What is this about?
And I do think it's about the sense that all of us have all of us have That things are now really changing really changing fast and people are afraid of what's next me included absolutely And if you start to question
the myths that underpin the current order, that you are really playing with fire and
we could get something much worse.
And I don't think that's crazy.
I don't think it's crazy at all.
I get it.
But I don't think that these changes are coming because someone questioned whether
Churchill was a good leader for Britain.
I don't think that.
I think it's much deeper than that.
But anyway, that's it.
People are jumpy right now.
Very jumpy.
And they have every reason to be.
And the last thing I would say about the election... Yeah, because I do want to get your thoughts on that.
Yeah, I mean... Because you called 16 correctly.
You saw the trends.
You wrote that amazing Politico piece.
I remember it.
You said Trump was vulgar, but he was right.
And you talk about how you insulted his hair, and he called you, and he's like, you're right, you have better hair than I do, but I get more... Ladies than you do.
I'm using the nice... Using... He used a cloak wheel term I will not repeat, but... But it was a great piece, and basically I have the quote here.
It says, he exists because you failed.
Well, that is totally true.
And so, but now here we are eight years later, where are we?
It's hard to know.
I mean, Trump has not done a lot of things that I wish he had done, but the main thing that he has done is revealed, you know, the depth of the corruption at the heart of the enterprise, but it hasn't been corrected.
At all.
And no one he's implicated has repented of what they've done, admitted it.
Repentance means humility, which means higher power, and so it's against the rules in DC.
Exactly right.
So that puts us in a pretty troubling position.
So the people who've benefited from the current system are, they know they're exposed, so they're afraid.
They're desperate and they're totally without limits.
They'll do anything.
So that makes them very, very dangerous.
But this is also playing out against the backdrop of a world that is changing really, really fast.
It's absolutely beyond our control.
The economic structure of the world is changing.
With rapidity.
Yeah.
So that's really the story, is that the money is going east, big time.
And it's manufacturing and resources, things that it's always been.
You take natural resources and you make things with them.
That's your economy.
And we went through this period of decades.
You mean it's not shorts on the market?
It's not.
It's not.
It's not hedge funds and it's not...
No.
Loaning money at interest is part of an economy, but if it becomes the basis of your economy,
then it's not really a real economy.
And no, an economy is based on taking natural resources, things that God made, and making
them into something useful for people.
And converting them into things that human beings to flourish and survive.
Exactly.
That's what your economy is based on.
And ours no longer is.
And China's is.
And anyway, you know the story.
But the point is, this is all changing super, super fast, and I do think that the one thing that we should keep in mind is that we don't know what happens next.
And there's this really interesting phenomenon that I've just noticed as I've gotten older, that Almost always.
The things that you think are victories turn out to be disappointing at best and very often failures.
And the things that you think are failures are actually victories.
It's a biblical principle.
Of course it is.
Which I didn't realize.
The first will be last and the last will be first.
That's exactly right.
The meek shall inherit the old.
The meek?
Really?
How did the meek win in the end?
You could spend your whole year reading that.
You're like, I don't understand it.
So it's, you know, of course it's a theological truth as revealed by Jesus in the New Testament, but it's also a kind of unerring commentary on the way life really is.
And that's true in our lives, and very often—not very often—in my life, a hundred percent of the time, the things that I think are true tragedies are actually, you know, the beginning of rebirth and growth and of joy, the root of my joy.
are the bad things that have happened to me.
It's just a fact.
I didn't make these rules.
I just noticed this.
In the scriptures it says, count it all a blessing.
Count it all a blessing.
That has just been true for me.
And that your trials are actually a blessing.
It's James 1.5.
It's exactly right.
It is true.
I haven't had many bad things happen to me.
I've had an incredibly easy and happy life.
But, you know, like the little dramas that have happened in my life, which didn't seem little to me when they were happening, have turned out to be like, you know, the foundation of my joy.
That's something to remember in the context of American politics.
Like, you think, well, we elect this person and all of our problems will be solved, and it might actually turn out the opposite from what you think or expect.
Or if we elect this person, we're going down this path, we're going to be Soviet America, which is clearly where we're moving very quickly right now.
I don't know if that's actually true.
But what I do know for a fact is that we're not God and we can't know, and so you should always be alive to the possibility that you're completely wrong.
That the inverse, that there'll be a sort of paradox baked in, as there is almost invariably in life.
Wow, I thought that was a win.
How many people do I know personally who, working toward, you know, getting really rich, got really rich... And become miserable.
Oh my gosh.
Oh, that's a cliche for a reason.
How many people do I know who had something really bad happen to them and they realized, wow, you know, that was like the greatest blessing they could have had.
Anyway... With limitations.
There's some tragedy that's so... For sure.
I don't wish tragedy on anyone.
I seek to avoid tragedy every day of my life.
I'm not embracing tragedy.
I'm just saying...
It's important to know the limitations of your ability to see the future.
Everything you're saying is inherently spiritual.
You think there's a spiritual dynamic to all of this.
And can you talk just briefly, I know we're running out of time, how your spiritual journey has deepened in the last couple of years.
I know you've been reading the Bible even more as an Episcopalian, that seems to be quite an accomplishment.
Reading the Bible even more!
I didn't read the Bible at all before!
I'm being generous.
Yeah, I mean, I haven't had much of a spiritual journey.
I'm such a flawed person that I don't even want to be associated with Christianity because I don't want to discredit it, but I mean that.
That means you're a true Christian.
I don't know!
I don't want to be called that!
I'm very superstitious on that point.
No, I'm a really flawed person, obviously.
But yeah, I think I will say this.
There is a Christian revival underway in the United States, a low-key Christian revival.
I see it all around me.
It's not the kind of tent revival that you imagine from You know, 1923, it's something else, it's a different manifestation of the same thing.
I totally agree, yes.
And I see it everywhere, and by everywhere I mean in the conversations that I have with people I'm talking to, where people who've lived totally secular lives, as I have, I've lived a very secular life, are all of a sudden referring to God or some power beyond themselves in a way that would have been really striking five years ago.
No one I knew, I mean you're from a different world, a world that's much more in touch with the spiritual, with the transcendent, but I'm not.
I'm from a world that's in touch with like what is happening today.
That's it.
I've never heard people talk like that, ever.
And now practically everyone I know is talking like that.
What is that?
And that's a sign to me that, yes, the spiritual realm is obvious to people who had never thought about it before.
What I'm seeing is that people are asking the question, why are they doing this?
And the spiritual is the only explanation.
Of course.
Because it defies reason.
That's exactly the conclusion that I have come to.
And it didn't make any sense to me because I was looking at politics through the lens of you know, what I thought was accurate 20 years ago.
We're having a debate over how to improve people's lives, and now, of course, there's no reference to improving people's lives.
In fact, the explicit intent is to crush people's lives.
Like, what is that?
Well, it's evil.
That's what it is.
Tucker, last question.
We had you on before.
Advice for young people right now in America that are listening.
We have a lot of younger viewers.
Oh, gather your people to you.
You know, if you know that, you know, winter's coming, you want to stack up on, you know, cordwood and High-carb snacks.
It's like an instinct, you know?
Put your acorns away.
Yeah, there's a lot of volatility coming.
There's no question about it.
And so, the only way to protect yourself is with your relationships with the people that you love.
And keep them close to you.
Stay in touch with them.
Marry one of them, if you can.
Yes.
You know what I mean?
Keep your people close.
Create more people.
I mean, I do think that's the ultimate gesture of defiance in the face of chaos, is to reproduce.
I wish I could do more of it, but I'm too old.
You would have more kids.
Are you joking?
Yes!
My wife and I always say, I can't believe we only had four kids, but that's what we did.
Tucker, thanks so much.
Charlie Kirk, great to see you.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us as always freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.
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