Do We Really Need to Argue Against Polygamy? (Yes)
Online discourse has exploded into a debate about whether it's actually best for men and women to have only one spouse. Charlie and Inez Stepman talk about why monogamy isn't just Biblical and moral, but also a superior social technology over more primitive setups. Plus, the Treasury Department's Joe Lavorgna talks about the president's big trade deal with Japan and the importance of an exploding level of capital expenditures here in the United States. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio.
What is feminism and why should we be against it?
And as Stetman joins the show to discuss the argument against polygamy, believe it or not, we have to make that argument today.
And then what if I told you there was an economic boom happening in America?
It's called the CapX Boom and we talk about the positive news that's happening here in America.
Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast.
That is the Charlie Kirk Show podcast page.
And as always, you guys can get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.
That is tpusa.com.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of the Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com.
That is noblegoldinvestments.com.
It's where I buy all of my gold.
Go to noblegoldinvestments.com.
There's record amount of money being invested in the country right now.
You didn't hear that in the mainstream media.
You didn't hear that on your local newspaper.
But do you know that capital expenditures or capex, it's a very important data point on how much companies are investing in America?
Joining us now is Joe Lavorgna, counselor to the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Besson.
Joe, great to see you.
Thank you so much for sharing your time.
Tell us about the successes that we are seeing with capital expenditures in this country right now.
Yeah, you led with a nice lead in, and that is if you look at the capital expenditures, essentially what businesses are spending to run their businesses more efficiently, to run it better.
Those capital expenditures in the official government data rose at a 24% annualized rate in the first quarter.
That's obviously a huge number.
And then we have figures from the Federal Reserve that suggest that in the second quarter, those same government numbers, when they become official next week, should show another 11% increase.
That would bring first half capital expenditures, capital outlays, capex, as it's known, to a 17% annualized rate.
That would be the fastest two-quarter gain, excluding the pandemic, since late 1997, which you think about, it's almost 30 years ago.
We had gains of this magnitude.
And that, of course, Charlie, was before the One Big Beautiful Bill was signed.
So it's a really remarkable story that people aren't aware of.
They are not.
Let's play cut 332 here.
I had our team get this.
It's the Palantir CEO, Sankar, praising President Trump's leadership in AI innovation, which is directly tied to capital expenditures.
So if we want to win the AI race, we actually want people to invest capital in this country, not otherwise.
Play cut 332, please.
Well, you could say our adversary, China, they're kind of the best at long-range planning.
They have systematically worked over 40 years to invest against our weaknesses.
But you know, the one thing they could not see coming is the AI revolution, because even we could not see it coming.
The AI revolution is an American phenomenon.
It is something we are leading in, as the president said.
We can't take that for granted.
We have to keep up the pace as the president's doing and as our industry is doing.
But the real opportunity is that AI allows us to give the American workers superpowers.
It allows us to compete in a completely asymmetric way.
We shouldn't forget at the dawn of World War II, we had the 17th largest army.
We were the underdog by a long shot.
And I think American greatness always starts when we're the underdog.
When we were the rebels against the Redcoats, when we were starting to build factories in World War II, we're back there again.
I would agree with the president that we are the leader in AI.
We're not catching up.
We're leading.
So this AI renaissance is very important.
I know you guys are monitoring this at the Treasury Department.
What does that also mean for blue-collar jobs investment?
And can you talk about how capital expenditures actually is a direct investment in the working class?
Because when companies invest, workers then have higher wages and more work, please.
Right.
So, Charlie, if you look so far at the first six months of President Trump's term, blue-collar workers, these are people who are not the professional managerial class.
They're oftentimes, unfortunately, living paycheck to paycheck.
Their real wages, their inflation-adjusted pay, is up 1.2%.
The only time it's been faster to start a new administration was Trump.
1.0 to 1.3%.
They're virtually the same.
Unfortunately, through the bulk of time and data go back to the 1960s, people saw real wage declines, not even increases, but declines.
So already the blue-collar boom has occurred.
To the extent we get more capital investment, in other words, companies being able to invest in tools, machinery, to allow them to produce more, that means higher productivity, higher profits.
By definition, it means higher wages.
And we know from technology and AI certainly now is at the forefront of technological innovation that when we have these technological booms, they're disinflationary.
So that will also tend to lift real wages.
But also, the middle class tends to benefit quite significantly.
We had a little bit of that under Trump 1.0 in his first term when you saw significant increases in median household income and the middle to lower income wage earners did the best.
So essentially what the president's doing is he's taking the policies that worked well in his first administration and he is accelerating and improving upon them in the second term because there's other parts of the bill, not just the full expense of capex, but also, Charlie, the full expensing of structures.
So now you could deduct the building of a plant or a factory.
That is incredibly novel.
It's innovative.
It will help on the AI race.
It'll help on building digital assets because you need data centers.
So all these things are working together and you need people to build it.
That's going to directly benefit the U.S. worker.
Let's play Cut 380.
Again, this is major blue-collar bottom-up investment.
Play Cut 380, please.
The CapEx comeback in full swing.
Business investment is surging at the fastest pace since 1997.
Equipment production jumping 17% year over year, powered by retroactive incentives in the president's newly signed Big Beautiful Bill.
The administration hoping to boost productivity, lift blue-collar wages, and lay the groundwork for longer-term economic growth.
So what other components on the Capital X side makes America have a competitive advantage?
So can you just walk our audience through how some of these companies, they need to pick what country they're going to have capital expenditures in?
And why is it now that America is winning that contest, please?
So number one, Charlie, if we start with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, you've got a significant cut in the corporate tax rate.
Corporate tax rates is one of the lowest in the world.
We'd love to see it lower, but it's one of the lowest in the world.
So you've got that.
That now is permanent.
You've got pro-business regulation, the president trying to shorten the time with which it takes to build something because the permitting process has gotten out of control.
You want to do AI?
You want to be the crypto country of the world, the dominant driver?
Well, you need data centers.
How do you have data centers?
Well, you need data centers.
You got to power them.
You got to power that with energy.
You need cheap and abundant energy.
The U.S. has that.
So you've got a very friendly business environment.
You've got low corporate tax rates.
You've got cheap and abundant energy.
You're getting tax credits to be here if you're building a plant or you're investing in CapEx.
I mean, it's across the board where you want to bring your money here.
And the tariff, in addition, is an added incentive to do it.
So this is why you're seeing the president announce all these countries wanting to invest directly in the U.S., why Secretary Besson's been working so hard to get these trade deals through.
We're now reaping the early stage of these benefits, which should be multi-generational as they take hold.
And so let me just kind of have one final question here, Joe, which is how much of this is current and is also a lagging indicator?
When do you think we'll start to really see the culmination of CapEx?
Because some of this, in my opinion, takes six, nine, 12, 18 months to materialize into macroeconomic data.
When do you think we're going to really start to see all of this take hold where people start to feel the benefits of this capital expenditure bonanza that's happening in a good way?
So the big gain in Q1 that looks like it continued in Q Charlie was due to the fact that we have retroactivity to the tax cut.
So it's already starting.
That's number one.
Number two, because President Trump has been able to get the inflation rate down, we're seeing the real wages increase.
So it's here.
It's in the very, very early innings.
And because AI now is so abundant and we know how to use the technology, so that shortened the time period from which you actually could get the benefit.
So we're not talking like 12, 18 months.
We're going to continue to see the benefits as you get more capex.
We'll see very strong second half numbers.
The economy should be growing at 3%, 3% plus.
And then sometime in the new year, we could talk about how 2025 started this incipient boom.
And with these policies in place, there's a very long runway.
And that runway is going to be higher living standards, higher wages, and Americans are going to feel much richer and healthier because of it.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
According to the Department of Energy, the risk of blackouts could increase by 10,000% over the next few years.
It's because of massive energy demand from AI data centers and an aging, fragile power grid that just can't keep up.
I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of being without power even for a day.
That's why I got the Grid Doctor 3300 from my Patriot Supply.
It's a powerful solar generator that runs refrigerators, AC units, medical devices, power tools, and anything you need to write out a blackout.
And right now for their Christmas in July event, they're including over $1,000 in free survival gear with your generator, including an emergency food supply, water filtration, survival tools, and more.
You heard that right.
Over $1,000 free bucks in gear.
Go to mypatriotsupply.com, promo code Kirk.
That is mypatriotsupply.com promo code Kirk.
Talking about trade deals and investment, there's so much good stuff happening.
It's important that we emphasize that.
It's Joe Lavorgna, counselor to Secretary Scott Besson.
Joe, congratulations on the major trade deals.
Well, the president deserves congratulations, but you also get congratulations because your team has been working very hard on it.
We had a landmark day yesterday.
The Philippines and Japan.
Japan is our number one foreign investor.
They're our fifth largest trading partner.
Take a little victory lap and explain to the audience what happened yesterday.
Well, the president, with the help of Secretary Bessett, Ambassador Greer, and Secretary Lutnik, worked on an historic deal where there's a 15% reciprocal tariff with Japan.
They are going to take our agricultural products, make it less onerous as they import products from us.
They won't have to go through other additional regulatory checks that we're holding back many of the goods that we want to export to them.
And at the same time, Japan has committed to, and this is because of President Trump's leadership, has committed to investing $550 billion into the U.S. with a 90-10 split, 90% of the profits and proceeds taken by the U.S., 10% going back to Japan.
So it is an incredibly good deal.
It follows on the news of other trade deals this week, Indonesia and the Philippines.
And as Secretary Besson had highlighted, And the financial markets clearly now believe this full throttle, the deals are coming through.
So everything is working as President Trump had envisioned, and his leadership has gotten us these deals.
And we're optimistic we're going to continue to make progress.
I want to just put 383 up on screen.
It shows that President Trump upselled Japan from a $400 billion investment to a $500 billion investment.
That's all tied into capital expenditures.
Can you just walk through somebody living right now in Marshallton, Iowa, or someone that's living in Butler, Pennsylvania, or someone that is in a rural area where factories are starting to come back?
What does this mean for forgotten parts of the country that President Donald Trump is a phenomenal salesman for America?
Please, Joe, tell us.
Yep.
So Charlie, what it means is that Japan, it's not just Japan, many other countries have announced their intention to bring capital, bring money into the U.S. That money is going to invest in projects that people want to be in, that these foreigners want to be in.
It could be cryptocurrencies, the creation of digital assets, which you need to mine those assets.
So it's building of data centers.
It could be automobiles, because again, there's tariffs.
Those tariffs are designed to encourage people to not sell into the U.S., rather invest in the U.S. So it's a whole range of potential different industries and products that people want to come into the U.S. because the U.S. is the largest economy in the world.
We're the biggest consumer in the world.
We're the wealthiest consumer in the world.
So there's all these wonderful opportunities to come into the U.S. And President Trump has said, look, we're open for business and we're going to make it so that it is your best reason.
It makes the most sense for you to be here.
So when you have countries like Japan who are committing over half a trillion in capital to build the industries and firms here that they think are going to be additives to the U.S. economy, the U.S. worker is going to be a direct benefit of that.
So again, we'll get more details as things come out, but this is really fantastic news.
It is.
And so, for example, that means that Toyota might build more manufacturing plants here.
That means that Japanese, so talk about that, how foreign companies can avoid the tariff, and that means that they will build and they'll invest in the United States, which is a benefit for everybody.
It's a benefit for welders, electricians, and plumbers and accountants, please.
Right, that's right.
Well, Secretary Best is from South Carolina.
BMW has many plants there.
They've got plants elsewhere.
And those are jobs.
Those are high-paying jobs that Americans are working at.
They're working at these places.
So as more countries consider, like, look, we've got this tariff.
Maybe it makes more sense instead of selling into the U.S. and paying this tariff.
Maybe we should relocate to the U.S. to take advantage of its low corporate tax rates, its investment incentives, its high-quality workforce.
And this is important.
It's cheap and abundant energy because whenever you're going to make something, Charlie, you need an input.
You need energy to power that.
And in many places in the world, energy costs are incredibly high, especially in Europe.
Why would you want to operate there?
Bring your business to the U.S. We're open.
It's the golden age, the golden era, as President Trump says.
And you got to employ people.
Who are you going to employ?
Well, you're going to employ Americans because the president has made sure that illegal immigration has been put to a fault and you're going to pay Americans.
And as Secretary Besson has said, because there's now, there isn't any more below or artificial labor supply anymore, you're going to get normal market-based wage rates.
So your companies are here, they're building.
And at the same time, the Americans who are here, who want to work at a market-based wage, are going to get it.
You're going to see wages rise, as Secretary Besson is highlighting.
Joe Lavorgana, thank you so much for your leadership.
Congratulations.
Deal with the Philippines, Japan, got CapEx going up.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Charlie.
Let's be honest.
Most of what comes out of Hollywood these days makes a mockery of America, our history, our values, and our faith.
But there's still a place telling stories that remind us why this country is worth celebrating.
That place is Angel Studios.
They're creating unapologetically patriotic films and shows, original films and shows that uplifts, educates, and inspires.
Like Sound of Freedom, a powerful true story that exposed the horrors of child trafficking and rallied millions to action.
Something to stand for with Mike Rowe, an incredible tribute to ordinary Americans who risked everything to defend liberty.
And The Last Rodeo, an upcoming heartland drama about a bullriding veteran who comes out of retirement to save his grandson.
It's faith, it's grit, it's the kind of storytelling Hollywood forgot how to do.
Angel is also behind shows like The Tuttle Twins, teaching kids the principles of freedom and personal responsibility.
And Green and Gold, a small-town story about a family standing up for their values and risking it all to save their farm.
These aren't just good films, they're cultural reset buttons.
When you join the Angel Guild, you don't just stream entertainment, you help create it, you vote on what gets made.
You support filmmakers who still believe in America.
As a premium member, you get two free tickets to every theatrical release.
So if you're ready to support entertainment that celebrates faith, family, community, and freedom, go to angel.com slash Charlie and become a premium Angel Guild member today.
Support entertainment that builds something worth passing on.
Joining us now is a very smart woman, Inez Stepman.
She's a fellow Claremont, let's say troublemaker with me, but Independent Women's Forum and an anti-feminist.
Wow, that's quite a statement.
Inez, great to see you.
Thank you for joining us.
Inez, there is a discussion going online, and this is a very important topic.
I don't want to get into any of the names because I think that will only distract us from the essence and the meat of this.
But there are some online that are saying that, young men, you should go be a polygamist.
Have as many sexual partners as you can.
Don't be restrained by monogamy.
I think this is not just unbiblical.
I think it's bad, insane, and a really terrible idea.
Inez, walk our audience through this kind of growing movement and sentiment of young men that seem to be very, very mad at no-fault divorce, which is leading them towards a almost polygamist aim and your response to it.
Inez Stepman.
Well, first, I mean, I've argued against no-fault divorce for a decade.
I do think it's a bad policy.
I think it's bad family policy.
And, you know, actually, a little fun anecdote.
My husband and I went to one of the three states in the union to redo our marriage contract that allows anti-no-fault like divorce where they have a list of possible grounds for divorce.
It really doesn't work that well in law because you can always escape to the next state, but that's part of the issue with the fact that all of our states have moved to a no-fault regime.
But that's neither here nor there.
I don't think that this argument, first of all, it has some truth to it because there is something to the fact that we are by nature not monogamous, that women are hypergamous and that men are hardwired to try to have as many children as possible with as many women as possible.
And this was something that worked relatively well in human societies in the pre-Christian era and before and to some extent after in primitive societies, but it was totally incompatible once societies moved into some kind of civilization.
And the reasons for that are anthropological.
There's obviously there's a religious argument against this, there's a moral argument against it, but there's also a common sense and anthropological argument against it.
And there's a reason that polygamy, widespread polygamy, as opposed to a small minority elite, but widespread polygamy as a system of marriage has basically disappeared.
All the societies that practice that, like the Plains Indians, have been essentially defeated, replaced, overwhelmed by societies that didn't.
Yeah, so let's dive deeper into that.
So we believe monogamy is obviously biblically and morally correct, but it's superior cultural technology.
So if young men right now start to engage in widespread polygamy or what they call this red pill culture, and explain that.
It's not the red pill that we would think of, which is, you know, to believe in conservative or MAGA values, but it's something completely foreign and different.
Inez, can you explain that and talk about how polygamy is actually really bad for a culture at large?
Yeah, I mean, polygamy has a math problem, right?
Even if you don't agree that it has a moral problem, you don't agree with the morality that is taught by Christianity, by Judaism, then you still have a math problem at the end of the day, right?
So then the basic math problem is what to do with all of the unattached men who have no wife and no hope of getting a wife and no hope of reproducing or having sex, right?
And those guys tend to get restless and angry.
We see this like on a small scale in our society today, right?
As people are not finding a partner or not finding a girlfriend, a wife, right?
You see that there's unrest there, some of it mitigated by the SOMA drugs of pornography or just doom scrolling online, but still like it causes social problems.
Now imagine flipping those numbers, right?
You have an 80% incel culture, for example.
What happens is there's a lot of restless young men.
And in times when societies were going to war, where there was a war season, frankly, a lot of the young men were just dying, right?
So a smaller and smaller number of men were making it through that gauntlet of constant warfare and then establishing themselves in, let's say, a Plains Indian tribe in a position where he would be permitted by society and attractive enough to women to take a wife and then another wife and then another wife, right?
But you can see how very quickly, if your entire civilization depends on warfare, which is very much true about the Plains Indians, depended on this constant seasonal warfare, that doesn't leave a lot of room for building things.
That doesn't leave a lot of room for actually applying labor as opposed to defense and war, applying it to butter, right?
The traditional distinction between guns and butter, to applying it to learning to cultivate, to building wealth and being able to defend it against constant attacks, right?
So that's why a lot of those civilizations were very precarious.
They lived very war-filled and precarious lives.
And by the way, it didn't really, contrast some of the other claims, didn't really explode their fertility rate either.
Most of those societies had very low fertility rates to the point where they were constantly having to raid other societies for more women in the hopes of saving their tribes from extinction, from demographic extinction.
So it is a way that to some extent a natural way that people have lived throughout the past, but it is not compatible with actually building wealth, technology, all the things, by the way, that make modern warfare, make you a formidable opponent in modern warfare.
So it's an important point because societies that embrace polygamy actually don't do very well.
So why don't you take a step back here, Inez, and explain what an incel is, the problems with young men and young female dynamic and relationships right now.
Why are so many young men not getting married?
Why is this even worthy of our time to discuss?
And this is even being proposed as a potential alternative.
Explain it to our audience that is not totally in touch with some of the structural issues happening right now.
Yeah, I mean, look, that's a big question.
And I'm sure there are a lot of people with a lot of thoughts about this.
You know, the dating discourse is broad and long, but I do think at least part of it is the fact that we've lost touch with the differences between men and women and what men and women look for in a partner.
And you see the projection going both directions, right?
You see women complaining.
There was a recent viral tweet a couple of weeks ago about a woman saying her friends are just fantastic, amazing catches.
And then in describing how she thinks that they're amazing catches, right?
She's talking about their master's degrees or the fact that they have really great jobs.
And it's not even that those things of themselves are turnoffs.
I think that can go sort of too simplistic on some of the red pill discourse, but it's that they just don't matter that much to men.
And women are just thinking about the things that they would like to see.
Ambition, for example, the ability to provide, the fact that men and women are looking for different things.
So I think there are like two big hits going on in the dating culture, in addition to just everybody retreating from an IRL life is one is like just simply the obesity crisis, right?
And that hits women's attractiveness more than it hits men because women are not as visually choosing their partners, as men are.
So it hits women harder than men, even though both men and women are statistically obese.
And then on the male side, just lest you think I'm only ragging on women, on the male side, the ability to interact charmingly in person, to be funny, right, to crack a joke, to seem comfortable and confident in company.
Again, both men and women are retreating from that.
We spend more time with our phones.
We spend more time interacting in an asynchronous manner where you don't have to come up with anything witty on the fly.
You can take your time and type out a text, right?
That hits all of us, but it hits young men more than women because women just don't really want to be with like a shy, awkward kind of guy.
It really is just not one of the things that women are naturally attracted to.
And I think when you put both of those two things together, you add in long sexual histories and heartbreak, you add in the fact that people are looking to marry much later.
You add all those things together and you get something where the sexual market, if you will, where the average person on both sides of the sex divide is less attractive to the opposite sex than they were, let's say in 1970, where the average woman was younger, hasn't dated around as much, right?
Doesn't have as long a sexual history, is slimmer, right?
And is generally not opposed to behaving in a more feminine way or taking on a more feminine role.
On the flip side, right, in 1970, you had a lot of cultural encouragement for men to develop those kinds of social skills, to develop competencies that would make them feel competent and confident when they were going out and talking to women.
Those were things that were kind of instilled in the culture, not to be too glib about it, but you'd get stuck in a locker more often.
You get bullied.
And that might have been painful, but it really did shape people in a way that made them more attractive on average, the opposite sex.
And then, of course, there was a big pay differential between men and women in 1970 in a way that's not true today on the average sort of dating market.
So I just, look, love is individual.
I'm not trying to be too didactic about this, but it's still, you can look at the overall dating market and see where, you know, your average woman and your average guy who are out there looking for a partner may be less satisfied with what they find than they would have been 30 or 50 years ago.
That is so true.
This is evidenced by the time I spent with a lot of students at our Student Action Summit.
And I said to the men, how many of you are upset with the current dating market?
They're all, all their hands go up.
I said, young ladies, how many of you are upset with the current dating market?
All their hands go up.
And I said, we got a serious problem here.
The young women, they want a six foot five, blue eye, hunky hedge fund manager making $2 million a year that will, you know, never cheat on her.
Yeah, good luck finding that.
And the men, they want something equally as unrealistic.
And so we find ourselves at an impasse that has a fertility collapse, a marriage collapse, a dating collapse.
And of course, social media is harming this.
I think feminism is to blame for a lot of it.
What I want everyone in the audience to know that this is a civilizational emergency that's happening in front of our eyes.
It is a massive and major issue.
Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.
Young ladies don't want to get married to their late 20s and early 30s.
And then they find out that some of them actually are not as, let me put it this way, or even later, that men want to have younger women.
Let's just put it that way without myself getting in too much trouble.
We are seeing a civilizational potential collapse if we don't solve this.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
Brand new year, brand new opportunities to change the world for the better.
It's easier than you might think.
You can save babies by providing ultrasounds with pre-born.
Together with the sanctity of human life month, we're going to save 35,000 babies to show the world that not only do we believe life is precious, but we're going to do something about it.
Your gift of pre-born will give a girl the truth about what's happening in her body so that she can make the right choice.
What better way to start this new year than to join us to save babies?
And $28 a month will save a baby a month all year long.
A $15,000 gift will provide a complete ultrasound machine that will save thousands of babies for years and years to come.
It will also save moms from a lifetime of pain and regret.
I am a donor to this organization, and you should be too.
Start this new year by being a hero for life.
Call 833-850-2229 or click on the pre-born banner at charliekirk.com.
That is charliekirk.com and click on the pre-born banner.
I'm a donor.
You should be too.
CharlieKirk.com, pre-born banner.
Inez, you describe yourself as an anti-feminist.
What is feminism and why are you anti?
Yeah, it's funny because I've been putting that in my bio for, I don't know, 10 years, 15 years.
Now it's gotten sort of mixed in with the Tradwife accounts and some other weird things that I want nothing to do with.
But it's the definition that I use is the political, economic, and cultural equality or social equality of the sexes.
I think that's a pretty fair and broad definition of feminism.
For one, it's the definition in Merriam-Webster dictionary, but it's also the definition that Beyonce used when she put that giant feminist sign behind her.
So it has, I think, some broad appeal.
And the reason I like that definition is it swoops in a lot of people who think of themselves as more on the right, right, or who are conservative.
They're like, what's wrong with that?
Well, I mean, I think there are really two things wrong with it.
One is that it's not possible.
And two is that I wouldn't think that it would be desirable.
So the differences between men and women are incredibly deep.
And the feminist sort of premise from the very beginning, from the first wave of feminism, you can go back and read Wollstonecraft and the American Founding and still see the sort of seed of this idea.
And that is that those differences are primarily socially constructed rather than biological and immutable.
And I think you've seen the final stop on that train with the trans issue, right?
If we say that men and women are interchangeable biologically with regard to everything important in life, if they're interchangeable in our relationships, in our careers, in society, in our role in the world, and in our families, then I don't see why we shouldn't say that those biological exterior differences are also irrelevant and interchangeable.
The differences between men and women above the neck, I guess, Is the short version is the differences above the neck and in our brains, which are confirmed by decades of science before the Academy stepped on doing any of this kind of science, are as significant as the ones that are below the neck that are obvious and external.
These differences are deep, and I simply think that it's better to accept them, to celebrate them, and to use them in a complementary way where men and women can actually feed off of each other's strengths and counter each other's weaknesses and build a more flourishing society together.
In closing here, Inez, so what does this look like then from a conservative movement?
How standpoint?
How should we approach this?
Because there's a lot of young men that are really upset, they're really jaded, and they're joining the conservative movement in record numbers, which is amazing.
How do we handle this as a movement conservatively to be pro-family, but also try to remedy this structural differences between the sexes?
Yeah, I mean, so I think it's important that we take some of these structural concerns and legal concerns seriously.
I'll say that up front before I get to the part that I think young men probably won't like to hear from me, but the part that I think I agree with them on is that it is time for the conservative movement to pick up some of these issues.
It is time for us to pay attention to the bias in family courts.
It is time for us to think about the incentives that we are building into marriage and to counteract those both legally and culturally.
And I think we're finally at a moment where a lot of people are willing to listen to those kinds of concerns more than they might have 10 years, 20 years ago.
Because I mean, the major problem with the conservative movement, since I've been a part of it for, I don't know, 15 years or something, has been that they've always been chasing the left.
You know, conservatism is just progressivism going the speed limit.
Just in this issue, they really have done that.
They've chased the left.
They've chased the label feminists.
They've chased the idea that the right is the real feminist while the left is the crazy feminist.
And I think we really should stop chasing that train and look at some of the ways in which we built female victimhood and frankly power over men into the legal system.
And by the way, at the top of that list is things like ensuring due process when there are sexual misconduct allegations on college campuses, right?
Something that Biden was personally involved in as a VP under the Obama administration and stacking that deck against young men in college and something that the Trump administration reversed not once, but now twice.
So I do think we should pay attention to more of those issues and take them seriously.
That being said, you know, the history of human relations is long and there have been plenty of both material deprivation and cultural, you know, sort of, I guess, like cultural structures that weighed against generations before us, right?
This is not, it's new, but it's not unique.
It's not like we are in a totally powerless position over our own lives.
And sometimes I feel like we really go into this, like you have to be able to look at these structures, say they're unfair, and still take agency for your own life and not make yourself miserable in the process.
Thanks so much for listening.
Everybody, email us as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.
