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March 15, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
32:18
Delingpod 11: Charlie Kirk
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Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPod.
And even though this is going to be a short podcast this week, I don't think you're going to grumble about the guest because he's pretty high profile.
It is none other than Charlie Kirk, the wunderkind behind Turning Point USA. And I think he's going to be quite relieved because I've just read a few of the print interviews he's done.
And they tend to be by complete wankers from the left trying to make out like he's evil or something.
Well, Charlie, you're safe here.
Well, thank you.
Pleasure to be here.
And, you know, we're definitely getting an interesting welcome here in the UK. And just happy to be with like minds.
Except, I mean, this is another thing that pissed me off.
Turning Point USA is now becoming Turning Point UK. And what do I read on social media?
I read nasty little left-wing trolls setting up sundry fake accounts so that you don't know which is actually a real Turning Point UK tweeting out.
That's correct.
We would never do that to the left.
No.
Exactly.
That is what they are like.
It is how they roll.
I want to hear it from you.
I mean, I have a pretty good idea what is wrong with the world and how desperate things are.
But tell me the analysis of the world which led you to set up Turning Point USA. What are the problems we're facing?
I mean, first I'll start in the States.
Yeah.
I believe America is the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world.
Apart from Britain, okay?
Yeah.
Right, yeah, carry on.
Well, I don't say that as an insult to Britain at all.
Britain's a wonderful, great country, but I grew up as an American patriot, and everyone should love their country.
Of course, of course.
I was teasing.
That's a good thing, to love your country.
Yeah, yeah.
And to love the ideas behind your country, if they are rooted in timeless principles and The protection of the individual and decency and civil debate and dialogue and market-based solutions, things of all that.
And so I started Turning Point when I was 18 during the kind of the re-election of Barack Obama, and now we've seen a great triumph in America, really the revitalization and the resuscitation of our country thanks to President Trump, who's been doing just such a magnificent job, truly and totally.
Try to convince that of British media has been a totally different task of mine.
You're not going to.
You will have no traction, even in the conservative press over here.
Well, I will say, they at least allowed me to say my part.
We'll see how the stories end up.
But I did have a journalist ask me, and I thought it was a very interesting question.
Charlie, make the argument of why British people should like Donald Trump.
Well, do they hate ISIS? Because ISIS is nearly obliterated under President Trump.
Unlike Obama, they were thriving.
They have one last bastion left.
They're almost completely destroyed.
Do they want to see NATO have more money?
NATO has $100 billion extra resources thanks to President Trump.
Do they want to see Merkel called out for selling natural gas, buying natural gas from the Russians?
He pays $4 billion a month.
To Vladimir Putin for that natural gas?
Do they want to see Vladimir Putin get put in check?
Because President Trump has done that better than almost any president in recent memory by arming the Ukrainians, by putting on more sanctions, by challenging their proximity to the European state.
And then finally, do you want to see North Korea not have nuclear weapons, nuclear missile tests?
They have not had a missile test in 470 plus days, thanks to President Trump's pursuit of peace.
Do they want to see Iran get hundreds of billions of dollars in sanction relief, the number one funder or terror around the world?
What's the point?
He's been an unbelievable president for the world.
And here's the thing is that when Western societies and Western democracies are strong, peace will come.
If they're weak, like under Neville Chamberlain or Barack Obama, all of a sudden you have chaos happen around the world.
And so look, we're facing a lot of things around the world, and a lot of it is either rooted in Marxism Or authoritarianism.
Or sometimes both.
A mixture of both.
And the defense of decent civil Western society is now under direct threat, both internally and externally.
We see this in America, and we see this in the UK. And so, there's a lot I could talk about with all that, but, you know...
Yeah, the tragic thing is, I'm not even going to challenge you on that, because I agree with every word.
No, I do.
It seems to me a no-brainer.
My question to you is, how come so few people realize this stuff?
Well...
The great Andrew Breitbart said that politics flow downstream from culture, which is so true.
And we've lost our core cultural institutions here in the West.
We've lost the media.
We've lost academia.
We've lost the centers of intellectual gravity that we so much depend upon.
And when you lose them, all of a sudden the bedrock and the fabric of your culture starts to get put in jeopardy.
When did the rot set in?
Are we talking about the Frankfurt School?
Of course, of course.
You know the Frankfurt School.
I said this to a journalist.
He looked at me like I said something bizarre.
You know why?
Because left-wing journalists think it's a conspiracy theory.
They don't believe in the Frankfurt School.
It's not a conspiracy theory.
It's a...
Irrefutable fact that the Frankfurt School existed and infiltrated Western schools around Marxist ideology.
And they've been very good at it.
So they came over from...
They fled Germany in the 1930s, came over to New York to Columbia University?
That's right.
Funny that, isn't it?
I mean, Columbia University is one of the epicenters of...
They're not even liberal values.
How did the liberals steal that word?
How did the left steal that word?
They did because they knew it worked.
And there's a whole premises of what this...
Because conservative meant something different and they wanted to be the opposite of conservative.
I think all of our terms are so screwed up in society that no one knows what anyone's talking about anymore.
They hear conservative means something else.
They hear liberal means something else.
Liberal and its traditional, the classical liberal is much more akin to libertarian today.
But a classical liberal believes in freedom of markets and free speech and Western society.
Frederick Bastiat or F.A. Hayek or Milton Friedman, those are classical liberals.
Who don't get taught generally on economics courses.
They never get taught almost.
It's John Maynard Keynes or Marx and Engels or these collectivists that believed in bigger government programs and larger deficits and higher taxes and you name it.
And so, look, here's...
Here's the way the world is right now.
You have some great threats.
The great threats are China.
China is a huge threat that must be taken very seriously.
I think they are the great evil of our time.
I'm talking about the Chinese government.
There's plenty of good people in China.
That's going to get you into trouble.
I saw the rumor on Twitter today that the reason Alex Jones got effectively deplatformed by Silicon Valley was because they want the Chinese cash.
I mean, look, all I can say is that China is a great evil.
It's an irrefutable fact.
I mean, they're...
They're totally diminishing South and Central America by buying up natural mineral rights and ports of entry.
And Africa.
Yeah, Sub-Saharan Africa, sure.
That's not a good thing what they're doing there.
They're trying to rebuild the Chinese Empire.
They have stolen huge amounts of IP from America, intellectual property, massive.
That's a fact.
They're trying to rebuild the South China Sea.
They are behind a lot of the nefarious behavior of the North Korean government.
They are putting Muslims in jail, like you wouldn't believe, which is interesting to see the silence of the left on that religious freedom issue.
I think that's very interesting.
They're bulldozing churches in western China.
These are evil things.
I mean, that's just the only way I can categorize it.
So, Trump, presumably, with whom you communicate quite regularly...
I wouldn't say regularly, but I have the opportunity to talk to him more than most.
So, I mean, you have...
I call out all the time the hypocrisy of people that have wanted to end wars for a long time and Donald Trump's delivering the end of war and people don't want that.
I think war should be an absolute last result.
It's horrible.
So you wouldn't, for example, have been part of that neocom tendency that was agitating for the second Gulf War?
Well, I was when I was in sixth grade, but I look back and I said this in all my other interviews, the Iraq War was one of the worst mistakes in America in history, if not world history.
First of all, from 9-11.
I remember where I was on 9-11.
I remember what happened to our country.
Over 3,000 people died.
It was horrible.
The world was in shock.
And we never asked the question, who actually did this?
So if you ask an American, who actually were the participants in 9-11?
Some people would say Al-Qaeda, which was true.
But people might say Iraqi or Afghanis.
No, no, they were Saudi.
15 out of 19 of the hijackers were Saudi Arabian.
A lot of the money came from Saudi Arabia.
They were never held accountable for what they did, ever.
Instead, we go to Afghanistan, which there were cells of Al-Qaeda, but if you remember, six months after 9-11, we hit Afghanistan super hard with special forces, and we made a serious dent at Al-Qaeda.
Then some neoconservative got the idea that we should have a war against the Taliban, which was one of the stupidest ideas.
We used to meet with the Taliban in the late 1990s, by the way, as a political party in the United States.
We got into the business and nation building.
We spent trillions of dollars.
What makes me sick to my stomach, seriously sick to my stomach, is that UK soldiers went to die for American bad ideas.
That really makes me sick.
It really does.
That other countries' citizens died because of our foolishness or our corruption, whatever you want to label it.
And then the Iraq war came, which was an unbelievably horrible decision.
And I say this with no reservations, because I'll call balls and strikes, which is an American analogy for good and bad.
As it is, I don't care if a Republican did it or a Democrat did it.
This is a Republican president, George W. Bush.
It was one of the worst mistakes in American history.
It really was an unbelievable mistake.
We spent a trillion dollars.
We lost thousands of American lives and hundreds of UK lives, if I'm not mistaken, hundreds.
PTSD up the wazoo, which is post-traumatic stress disorder we have in America.
What do we have to show for it?
When the original people that did it were Saudi.
And so, and I don't want, I wouldn't have like said, oh, we should declare war on them.
But we never held them accountable, right?
I think it's so sick that in the world today, and by the way, not to mention, what do we have after the Iraq war?
We have ISIS. Yes, exactly.
Because of that.
We attack Iraq.
We withdraw from Iraq.
Then ISIS gets enough.
Trump is fixing that.
Yeah.
And not to mention, Iraq used to fight Iran for us.
Iraq used to fight Iran.
And so it was one of the worst mistakes we ever made.
And I think...
I know Donald Trump is fixing this.
And so look, here's the thing.
The way the world is right now, we have China, which is a big threat.
We have these radical Islamic theocratic dictatorships in the Middle East.
And I'm not a fan of Iran at all.
I think they're a huge evil.
I don't like the Iran deal, but I don't want to be fighting a proxy war for a Sunni-Shia conflict.
I think the big mistake.
Because in some ways, the Saudis hate the Iranians, the Iranians hate the Saudis.
I don't think we should be doing the Saudis bidding against a Saudi-Iranian conflict.
You see what I'm saying?
Because they want the support against Iran, which again, we should be anti-Iranian, but we should be Saudi skeptic, is what I say.
Especially after 9-11 and all that.
That's a big threat, by the way.
You have so much...
That could go wrong in that region, but I don't think the U.S. should be part of that, nor do I think the U.K. should be part of it.
I don't think any more of our soldiers should die for that in any way possible.
And then finally, the third threat we kind of have right now is the threat from within.
This kind of rising collectivist postmodern Marxism here in our own countries.
And I would actually rate that as a higher threat than the other two that I talked about.
And I think it is so sick of, I have to tell you, it is so sick that now one of the greatest threats to our culture and our civilization is within.
Yeah.
Which comes from cultural Marxism.
That's right.
And post-modernism, which is the kind of...
Well, it stems from the French philosophers, or lack thereof, which infected American universities.
Yeah.
So, in a way...
Postmodernism is the weapon used by the cultural Marxists to subvert academia.
Yeah, and to those that don't know, postmodernism, that's where we get identity politics from.
That's where we get oppressor versus oppressed narratives and dialogue.
Go ahead.
So, I've been listening to you, and I'm thinking, this bastard is 25.
You're 25, aren't you?
And you talk incredibly fluently, and I can't...
I haven't yet found a flaw in what you're saying in your argument.
So, how come you know all this stuff?
Or rather, yeah, how come you know all this stuff?
You didn't even go to college, did you?
Yeah, I think that's an advantage.
Yeah, right.
I'm not trying to diminish people that go to college.
But do you spend a lot of time reading?
I read all the time.
I try to read a book a week.
I'm not always successful.
Right.
But I read everything I can get my hands on.
Right.
From the New York Times to The Economist to the Huffington Post to the Atlantic.
I'm a vociferous reader.
And that's so important.
And I try to be aware of everything that's going on.
You know, consumption of information from Drudge Report.
What are people thinking?
And then I'm a huge, avid history person.
Whether it be documentaries or books or biographies, the more information and more knowledge I can ascertain and collect, the better.
And then I love to meet smart people and I ask questions out of them limitlessly.
Jordan Peterson or people like that.
And you must get quite...
You get quite high access in the administration now, so you get briefings, I imagine.
No, I don't.
No, no.
I don't get briefings.
Well, I don't...
I mean, I might be...
Informal ones.
Yeah, I might be subject to talking point phone calls or conference calls, but...
Look, I have a great, and I'm very blessed with a very good relationship with the First Family and with the people in the White House, but I don't want to overemphasize that.
It's just a part of what I do, and I'm really happy.
I'm so supportive of the president, too.
I really am.
Yeah, well, I think he's going to get a second term.
No, I'm convinced of that.
Yeah, it's a given, because the opposition is so...
Well, I don't know if it's a given, but it's very likely.
So, in a way, your longer-term mission, because with Trump doing the Lord's work until 20, when will his second term end?
He'll be done in 2024.
Okay.
So, really, your bigger worry, particularly as a young chap, is how are you going to defang Alexandria occasional cortex and that particular tendency?
I mean, the idea that, as you say, communism is becoming fashionable again among the kids on campus.
Yeah, and I don't even use that word communism because it's so whatever.
I use Marxism or I'll say, you know, socialism.
But look, what happens in campus today will happen in Congress tomorrow.
And so for your UK listeners, Congress is our representative body.
That's our parliament, if you will.
And so what happens on the university campuses will soon be in our political systems.
Well, it already is.
Sure.
No, but I tried to warn people that there would be more radical ideology happening because I see it happening on the campuses.
And I warn people that you'll see leaders like AOC happen very, very quickly.
And we've seen that, is that this radical ideology will be uninterrupted in its influence in the political system.
And so, look, we believe we're in the midst of an American culture war.
And the winner of that culture war will dictate the next hundred years in the direction of the entire world.
It's that serious.
I mean, it's one of the most serious culture wars in world history.
Yeah.
Because you have a perniciously evil ideology up against righteous and timeless ideas.
And we're losing, aren't we, at the moment?
On some fronts, if you look at it as a battle, if you look at it as a war...
We're losing on the environment, for example.
The world has been completely taken over by the enviroloons.
Economic policy, the whole drive for renewable energy, which is fake energy.
Yeah, no, look, I'm a big fossil fuel guy.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I think we're losing on the narrative, of course, on the environmentalist movement.
In the States, we've had a revitalization.
That's why I would kind of pause for a moment.
In the States, we've had a revitalization of our natural gas exploration and our oil assets because of President Trump.
Yeah.
We're actually exporting more oil than we're importing.
Yeah, that's right.
Which is really terrific.
But I will say, we're losing at the universities.
Totally.
We're losing in Hollywood.
Totally.
We're winning, you know, thanks to President Trump in certain political verticals, but boy, I'll tell you what, the winner of this culture war will be able to determine the future of free people.
Seven billion people will live either more free lives or less free lives because of the results of this culture war.
So, cut to the chase.
How are you going to win it?
How are we going to win it?
Well, I'm trying to be relentless in my pursuit of that.
And I think we are winning on some fronts.
We're winning converts.
We're winning hearts and minds.
But look, I can't do this alone and you can't do this alone.
We need thousands and thousands of more people to step up and do something, to run for office, to hold people accountable, to be citizen journalists like Andrew Breitbart told us.
Andrew Breitbart was one of the greatest people To live in American history.
He was such an inspiration.
He changed the way journalism occurred.
And he got no credit.
He gets no credit for it from anyone.
But imagine if every person who loved their country and loved Western civilization held their rulers accountable and had the media elites accountable with a smartphone in their hand.
The world would be a better place.
Oh, sure, sure.
And that's one thing.
But you've got your work cut out.
Sure.
We know that kids, before their frontal lobes are formed, they prefer feelings over facts.
Sure.
Some people never graduate from that.
Yeah.
So how do you get that target audience?
Because you're aiming, what, at college-age kids, aren't you?
What's the way of winning over their minds?
You have to be unapologetic in your defense of your ideals.
You can't try to...
Students would prefer bold colors than bland in the middle.
Right.
And say, this is what I stand for, this is why I stand for it.
And what I find is students are not inherently opposed to our ideas is that they're not exposed to them at all in the first place.
Is that they've never even given the opportunity to hear what we believe.
You and I could recite the leftist pablum word for word.
Yeah.
But if I went up to a student, I went to SOAS today, is that what it's called?
SOAS, yeah.
That's the belly of the beast.
Evidently.
I didn't know where I was going.
Our Turning Point UK leader, Ali, who's a wonderful guy, by the way, Oh yeah, we got a university for you to do a change my mind event where the sign said socialism is evil.
I didn't know where I was.
And I mean, my goodness, I felt like I was at Berkeley.
And they stole my sign.
They committed a criminal act of theft against our property.
And we got some very vile things thrown at us.
Not thrown at us, but said to us.
I can't remember where I was going with this.
I said something before that.
Did you get it?
I mean, was anyone receptive at SOAS? Sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
Oh, yeah, here's my point.
Yeah, there were some people that were a little open-minded, a lot of combativeness, though.
I could tell you what they believe and why they believe it before they ever said it.
They couldn't tell me the same.
If you would have sat them down in a room and offered them a reward, any cash reward, tell me why Charlie Kirk believes what he believes.
They couldn't do it.
Tell me what he believes.
He couldn't do it.
They'd say, oh, he's a white supremacist.
All these false, false, false things, right?
I could tell you exactly what they believe.
They believe that utopia is possible.
They believe environmentalist agenda.
All these sorts of things, right?
That's so important.
Because if they can't tell me why I believe what I believe, they've never heard it.
They've never been exposed to it.
They inherently hate something they don't know.
I don't like something that I know very well.
So do you thrive in that kind of...
Of course.
You do.
You like it.
I enjoy it.
If I could do it every day, I would love it.
The public discourse, the public discussion is so fundamental to a fair and decent in civil society.
Have you developed a certain series, like a sort of catechism, to respond to their arguments?
I mean, how do you talk to them about environmentalism, for example, which is one of their shibboleths?
I ask the question, are your policies going to do good, or are they going to make you feel good?
Good line.
And they've never heard that before.
I ask them, who do you think the biggest polluters in the world are?
They'll say oil companies.
I'll always say, no, they're actually governments.
Governments are the biggest polluters.
For example, in the States, the biggest polluter is the United States government.
The largest oil spill we had was actually practiced by the EPA in the last year.
You might remember the Colorado River was actually polluted by the EPA. No one held accountable.
No one sued.
No one gone to jail.
Nothing.
No recourse whatsoever.
So who holds our bureaucrats accountable when they pollute?
And here's the other question I ask, more talking about the environmentalist movement, is show me an instance or an example where you target fossil fuels that over the next couple decades those people's lives get better.
The industry, the community, the sectors, they can't answer that.
It's impossible because it doesn't exist.
When you ban fracking, when you ban natural gas exploration, when you ban coal, you'll have disenfranchised communities, you have rising utility rates, you have people that have losing jobs, and you see third-world nations that depend on those access to cheap and affordable energy.
They're not able to get access to it whatsoever.
And so they will make broad generalizations about the environment, very, very few specifics.
Yeah, yeah.
Tell me, I would have thought one of the obvious lines of appeal to the youth is libertarian values.
Totally, no, and I engage in that, sure.
I am a conservatarian, that's correct.
So why, but I don't, certainly in our Conservative Party in the UK, I see a kind of...
I see them very rarely making the argument for liberty.
We're very nanny state-ish on things like tobacco, advertising, all this kind of thing.
I make the argument, for example, you should be able to do whatever you want with your body as long as it doesn't harm someone else.
People, oh my goodness.
Oh, they'll say passive smoking there.
Well, I mean, then walk away.
Yeah.
That's what I say.
For example, the speech laws here in the UK, I just can't wrap my head around them.
I mean, that you would lock someone up because you disagree with them, I just...
Well, that's a recent thing.
I know, no, no, I know, I know.
But it's happening.
It is happening, yeah.
It's happening rapidly.
From what I understand, I don't want to speak as an expert here, but speech is fundamental to a fair and decent society.
And the effect, so how I sell it to the youth is, I ask the question, this is the best framework I use.
Do you trust the government?
No, I don't trust the government.
Then why do you want to make that government more powerful, bigger, or have more control over your life?
I don't.
Then you're a libertarian, not a leftist.
That's the framework.
The very government that you hate, the very government that you think is bought by the corrupt, rich, ruling class elites, the very government that you detest, why would you want to give that government more power?
Why would you want to give that government the ability to be able to regulate speech, to be able to regulate commerce?
Because I thought you said you don't like that government.
When in reality, you should be the most important person in a functioning society.
This goes back to John Locke.
The recognition of natural rights.
The understanding that rights are not given by government, but they're given by God.
That government can take those rights away.
It's much different than the French Revolution and Rousseau and all that crap that they teach in our schools.
Collectivism, social construct, all that stuff should be burnt.
It's horrible.
No, I don't believe...
I'm not saying burn books.
I'm talking about the idealist.
Sure.
Because someone will listen to this.
Charlie Kirk supports burning books.
But anyway, this is a sale that can work with young people.
But you have to understand we're dealing from a structural deficit.
Okay?
Because it is harder to sell responsibility.
It's harder.
They sell utopia.
It's very easy to be generous to other people's money.
It's easy to want to say government can solve all your problems.
It's easy to blame someone else for your issues.
It's hard to say, you know what?
Maybe I should work harder.
Maybe I should wake up earlier.
Maybe government is not the answer.
That's hard.
Those are harder things to sell.
So we're always going to be dealing from a structural deficit.
The problem is we're dealing from such a deficit now because we've lost all our cultural institutions and they're programming people to go up against and blame other people for their problems.
Do you find that English university undergraduates are similar to American ones?
Yeah, there's a lot of parallels, no doubt.
I mean, I see a tremendous amount of parallel between...
I mean, I saw it today at SOAS, and I saw what the students were saying and how they were saying it, and I felt like I was on a U.S. campus.
It was almost directly parallel.
It was like exactly the language that I felt on U.S. campuses, the intolerance.
The vapid ideology, the lack of ability to have coherent discussion or dialogue, storming away when I say something that they've never heard before, they disagree with, that triggers them.
The stealing and the theft.
There was a criminal act caught on camera by the BBC that they probably will not air where they steal my sign.
I mean, in what world is that okay where you just come and steal someone's property?
Well, it seems to me that the campuses are out of control.
Of course they are.
Yeah.
That's right.
And the professors.
I mean, you get given stick in your interviews by Business Insider, I think, for your first campaign, which was against...
The Professor Watchlist.
Yeah.
Which we still maintain.
Which sounds great to me.
Well, thank you.
Why don't we have one in the UK? Well, you have to ask our Turning Point UK students if they want to do one.
They have the freedom to do it.
I want to make something very clear for anyone listening to this podcast.
I'm not going to tell the UK citizens how to run your country, and I wouldn't expect the UK to tell the US to be the same.
Do you know what, Charlie?
The weird thing is, I was at a university in the 1980s.
I did English literature.
I know almost for certainty that all my professors, tutors, were left-wing.
But none of them ever imposed their ideology on it.
There has been a change.
Things have changed.
There used to be the Alan Dershowitz model.
I will argue the other side for sake of opinion and dialogue and debate and discord.
Professors now indoctrinate.
They will shove their opinion down students' throat.
intellectually hostage with their grades and with cultural isolation, intimidation, and mockery, if you dare disagree with him.
Yeah.
Well, let's say you've got, again, you've got your work cut out to counter that.
No doubt.
And that's what, I mean, this is why I do what I do.
Because what could be more fundamental to our future than students that aren't sure yet what they believe?
I mean, you have students that aren't sure yet, they're still discovering, and they are told that there is a good and evil paradigm, and anyone on the center right is evil.
Yeah.
I think you could only have come from America I can't think of an English equivalent to you.
It's good and it's bad.
I mean, the good thing is that I look at you and I think, clean-cut American kid, bright Christian.
Midwestern, which I am.
You'd probably have been good in the Marines had you decided to do that.
We don't really have quite that.
We're a bit more sort of messy and sort of post-Empire over here.
You've got the kind of...
Well, I don't want to speak for the UK, but I can say in America, I truly say that we are the greatest country ever to exist, and we have some amazing, amazing people.
I appreciate the compliment, but I'm just...
I would like to say I'm just par for the course in the States.
There's nothing exceptional about me.
What I'm saying is I'm glad you're coming here to help rescue us, because after all, we are your...
Essentially your mother or your father or whatever.
We gave you the founding fathers.
No doubt.
They brought over your values and now you're coming over here to kind of restore the values that they gave to you.
Yes.
And you gave us the Scottish Enlightenment and then Burke and Adam Smith.
All that stuff.
All that good shit we gave you.
And you're bringing it back.
But do you think...
The turning point model, which is a kind of like a sort of boot camp for conservatives and universities.
Yeah, and it's very entrepreneurial and grassroots-y.
Will that translate to the UK, would you say?
I sure hope so.
I hope so.
It seems that it's having success.
There's differences.
I don't see the kind of, I'm going to be honest...
And I was careful the way I said this to the last journalist.
I'm going to be less careful when I say this to you.
There just isn't a small-c conservative infrastructure here.
It's amazing to me.
In the States, we have the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association.
We have Americans for Prosperity.
We have these amazing national organizations that have funding, that have members, that have infrastructure.
I don't know if there's an equivalent of that here in the UK. Well, you know why?
We used to have.
We used to have a fantastic range of institutions, not least our military.
But now, I'm afraid, on the Gramsciite march through the institutions, they've all been captured.
Gramsciite, that's right.
And the BBC was captured.
The BBC never was of our party.
We've got the BBC and the NHS, which are our two national religions, and they're both the left-wing cults.
Those are your words, not mine.
No, no, I can tell you.
Great, so I'll take your word out.
What I will say is what's really amazing about America that I think other people have to realize is we still, in large parts of our country, we don't look to government to solve our problems.
And I think that's something that can deteriorate a spirit of a country.
So you understand the Christian trinity.
There's Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
There is an American Trinity, too.
Which people don't talk about.
The first is e pluribus unum, which is the Latin phrase, out of many, one.
The second is, in God we trust.
That after all this garbage, yes, God is above us all.
And the final is the idea of liberty.
And liberty is being able to live the life that you see fit as long as it doesn't harm someone else.
Yes.
What's really hard about liberty is that there might be people that succeed and others don't.
And that's not to say we should not have compassion for those people.
We should look after them.
We should have...
But it's also a belief in hierarchies, that some people are going to be better at some things than others.
And the left does not believe in those things.
In fact, they would much rather have everyone live equally poor than unequally rich and prosperous.
And so I think that...
I think it's an interesting point you make about the UK. And, you know, I'm just so pleased to be here.
No, I know you've got to get off, so I'm not going to try and...
No, this has been fun.
No, it's been good.
I'm glad.
I didn't think I would like you.
Not because you're not on the side.
Really?
Well, because you're not as kind of messed up as an English person.
But I do like you, Charlie.
Oh, thank you.
I like you too.
I think you're a decent sort, and I'm glad that you've come to save our sorry arses.
Okay.
So, good luck.
Thank you.
Thanks.
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