Michael Knowles and Charlie Kirk discuss 2020 and beyond, President Trump, defeating the left and next steps for the conservative movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Hey guys, so my pal Charlie Kirk was coming through LA and I said you cannot leave LA before you come into my studio and hang out for at least half an hour. | |
| So we covered everything from 2020 politics to Students for Trump to religion and everything in between. | |
| Charlie is the founder of TPUSA. He's the head of Students for Trump. | |
| He is the host of the Charlie Kirk Show. | |
| The guy does everything and I think he lives on an airplane. | |
| If you guys want to keep seeing more of this content, let me know and I'll invite more of my friends over when they come through town. | |
| Enjoy. | |
| What's going on, man? | |
| Hey, Michael. | |
| Thanks for having me. | |
| I see you in any city that I'm in. | |
| That's where you are. | |
| That's correct. | |
| You are in four cities a day, I think, and you are living on an airplane for the rest of that time. | |
| Yes, I've figured out the metaphysical impossibility of being in more than one place at once. | |
| That's incredible. | |
| You've got to let me know your secret at some point. | |
| Yes. | |
| Anyway, thanks for having me. | |
| Huge fan. | |
| I love listening to your podcast. | |
| There's very few things I listen to. | |
| I listen to Rush. | |
| I listen to Prager. | |
| I listen to you. | |
| I listen to Ben. | |
| It's Daily Wire, Rush, Prager. | |
| I appreciate that. | |
| I actually, not to flatter you, but I both want to flatter you and admonish you. | |
| Because usually, you give me a lot of hope. | |
| You're flying all over the country. | |
| You're spreading this great message of love of country and liberty and freedom. | |
| I've gone to a number of TPUSA events. | |
| I always have a great time. | |
| And then you come out with this op-ed in Newsweek. | |
| That has me very worried because you say that there are these sleeper cells of socialists who could destroy our country and nobody is paying sufficient attention to it. | |
| That's correct. | |
| So, I'm a contrarian by nature. | |
| That's just who I am. | |
| I suspected that. | |
| I got that impression. | |
| And so, I couldn't be a more firm supporter of the president and what he's doing. | |
| I mean, he's saving Western civilization. | |
| There's no doubt about it. | |
| I mean, his policies, his worldview, he's doing unbelievably well. | |
| I have the hat. | |
| I don't have the hat. | |
| Unfortunately not, it's not on me today. | |
| We should have both had the hats on today. | |
| Terrific. | |
| He deserves to be convincingly re-elected in a 1972 or 1984 landslide. | |
| Yeah, I agree. | |
| However, he probably won't win in a landslide like that. | |
| I think if the election were held today, he would win 57 states. | |
| But you think there's more of a threat? | |
| I've been all through the seven states, right? | |
| Exactly. | |
| Look, so everywhere I go, people are telling me that Trump's going to win. | |
| So when I mean everybody, from reporters to the New York Times to GOP donors, and especially the donors, and the equation works like this is... | |
| I like Trump. | |
| What he's doing, I don't like his style. | |
| I don't like the tweets. | |
| Okay, fine. | |
| Sure. | |
| They put that in the box. | |
| But I really hate the Democrats. | |
| Democrats are so radical, therefore Trump will win re-election. | |
| This is the A plus B. You hear this non-stop everywhere you go, right? | |
| And so then I say to myself... | |
| Do I believe that? | |
| I'm not just going to digest that pablum. | |
| It might be true. | |
| There's pablum that's true sometimes. | |
| And so then I say, is this correct? | |
| And I say to myself, first of all, I think he should win, but he's up against a massive media machine. | |
| He's up against a social media conglomeration that will do everything they can to manipulate... | |
| Shut them out. | |
| The election. | |
| And then finally, from base one I see anecdotally and what I see in the data, I think there are far more people that will embrace radical left-wing ideology than we would ever believe. | |
| And so, let's take the college kids. | |
| You speak at a lot of college campuses. | |
| You do it really well. | |
| This is what we do at Turning Point USA every single day. | |
| The most of the college activists that protest you or protest me, you think they're going to go and support Joe Biden? | |
| I mean, some might, but they would be out in droves to support Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. | |
| So I think it's fair to say that if Elizabeth Warren or Sanders gets nominated, someone There would be boosted turnout amongst younger voters. | |
| Well, boosted turnout on campus throws off all the voter models. | |
| One of the main reasons why Hillary Clinton won in 2016 is lower than usual voter turnout. | |
| Youth voter turnout. | |
| Right. | |
| She had a lot of good dead voter turnout, but she didn't have a ton of youth voter turnout. | |
| So she spiked the deceased. | |
| She did quite well in the deceased community. | |
| I think Epstein's going to vote for her this year, actually. | |
| I take the fifth. | |
| So, look, I believe that there are people, like there are hidden Trump voters, I believe there's hidden socialist voters out there. | |
| I think this country's way further to the left than we ever realize. | |
| And we want to admit, just take how many people vote for the Green Party. | |
| If you add the Green Party plus Hillary Clinton's deficit in Wisconsin, she's president. | |
| You know, there's this thing that Hemingway described. | |
| He was describing... | |
| Ernest Hemingway or Molly Hemingway? | |
| I wish it were Molly, but this is Ernest. | |
| I like Ernest Hemingway. | |
| What Ernest said is, he was describing someone going bankrupt, and he said, it happened gradually, then suddenly. | |
| And I think that's what's happening with radicalism. | |
| That sounds like such a Hemingway... | |
| So yeah, very pithy. | |
| It has climax, it has prose, and then boom. | |
| And then it hits you. | |
| Exactly. | |
| This, I think, is what's happening with radicalism. | |
| You know, you see these same polls. | |
| More than half of young Americans identify as socialist, even though only about 30% can define what socialism is. | |
| Five years ago, if you had told me that a man can really be a woman, And that most Americans would think a man can really be... | |
| I'd laugh in your face. | |
| Nobody would believe that. | |
| And yet, because of the results of a cultural revolution that's going on and on and on, these days, if you say that a man cannot be a woman... | |
| You could be kicked off of social media. | |
| You could lose your job. | |
| You could be kicked out of school. | |
| Things happen gradually, then suddenly. | |
| So what does this mean for 2020? | |
| Are we at the suddenly precipice? | |
| Well, I think it's an inflection point. | |
| I still think Trump is going to win, and I'm going to do everything I can to make sure he wins. | |
| But I don't like all of a sudden taking victory laps 14 months ahead of an election, which I figure is if that's the tone of the movement right now. | |
| I can't go to one place without someone saying that Trump is going to win. | |
| I can't find that gathering. | |
| And I was like, this is not... | |
| First of all, there's no way to win, first of all. | |
| I mean, just ask Buster Douglas, okay? | |
| Buster Douglas, Mike Tyson, 42-1 odds, okay? | |
| You think you're going to win and all of a sudden you lose in Tokyo, okay? | |
| And if that's above your head, good. | |
| Okay. | |
| I love sports. | |
| I think sports are a great metaphor. | |
| I know. | |
| The only one we don't allow on this show is soccer, but I guess that's a conversation for another time. | |
| Correct. | |
| Yeah, it's let the Europeans figure out how to tie. | |
| How could you tie in a sport? | |
| I don't understand. | |
| As soon as the NFL brought into tying, they also brought in kneeling. | |
| I know. | |
| Direct correlation. | |
| Coincidence? | |
| I think not. | |
| No, conspiracy. | |
| Collusion. | |
| That's right. | |
| Collusion against the anti-meritocracy culture that the left is trying to create. | |
| So look, here's the thing. | |
| I'm trying to offer some sobriety to our movement. | |
| First of all, I think the left is going to be more determined than ever to defeat Donald Trump. | |
| I think there's more socialists on the fringe that are going to show up out of pure hatred to destroy this guy. | |
| And I think we have to win... | |
| The Democrats don't have to lose. | |
| That's a big difference. | |
| If we're counting on winning because of how bad they are, we're going to lose. | |
| We have to go for the jugular. | |
| We have to, and metaphorical jugular, okay, Antifa, Media Matters people, whatever. | |
| I know, they're writing the Media Matters hit piece on you. | |
| I'm qualifying it, okay? | |
| Right. | |
| Metaphor, go for the jugular, okay? | |
| When Antifa literally goes for the judgment, that we have to say so boldly and definitively who we are as a country. | |
| What does this country stand for? | |
| The whole Trump doctrine, the MAGA doctrine, if you will. | |
| What is it? | |
| What is the MAGA doctrine? | |
| I have the book coming out in February, actually. | |
| I can't wait to read that for us. | |
| Yeah, that was really good. | |
| Right there, right in the strike zone. | |
| The MAGA doctrine is this. | |
| Number one, you have to admit one thing. | |
| America is the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world. | |
| That's number one. | |
| You don't admit that, you've got some other doctrine. | |
| Some Iranian doctrine or something, right? | |
| You're either with us or against us. | |
| Exactly. | |
| If you believe that, you believe in something else. | |
| But I don't know what it is, but you have to first believe that. | |
| Number two, you have to believe America's been heading in the wrong direction generally in the last 30 years. | |
| Post Ronald Reagan. | |
| So both parties. | |
| Both parties have been equally contributing to this. | |
| Those are the two things. | |
| You believe those two things welcome to the MAGA doctrine. | |
| Because then you have to believe that if we've been heading in the wrong direction and we are the greatest country, then revitalization is necessary. | |
| Now, understanding that a revitalization is historically improbable, because we're taught in history class that usually there's the arc of civilizations, right? | |
| So there's this general upward trajectory, and then you have a little dip, and then you have a small resurgence and then total decline. | |
| Well, then historians would say the 80s was our resurgence, right? | |
| Like Reagan was the great again moment. | |
| But to have two great again moments? | |
| Has that ever happened? | |
| So Trump is going up against the historical impossibility to try to fight the endless wars, the corrupt politicians, especially the Essentially, Cicero's Rome is really what he is. | |
| Cultural decay. | |
| Cultural malaise. | |
| And so what is the MAGA doctrine? | |
| It is what set of policies can I implement that have proven to be timeless in the history of civilization to fight back the decay of civilization? | |
| Number one, strong borders and recognition of sovereignty. | |
| Number two, a vibrant American working class. | |
| Number three, ending the endless wars. | |
| Declaring war in a country that looks at us silly is the dumbest thing. | |
| And Trump is doing this spectacularly well overseas. | |
| What he's doing, ending the Afghanistan war. | |
| But even he's had trouble getting out of Afghanistan, out of Syria. | |
| Because the permanent military class wants us to be in these endless wars. | |
| If you can't define victory, why are you engaged in the conflict? | |
| If you can't define a goal, you're right. | |
| You ask these five-star generals, what does success look like? | |
| Well, we have to fight them there so we don't fight them here. | |
| Well, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. | |
| I mean, no way could you create a foreign policy around fighting every enemy around the world on their own terrain. | |
| So anyway, the final thing is this, and this is the most important thing, is an unapologetic defense of our cultural icons, symbols, values, and traditions. | |
| That's how you revitalize a country. | |
| So the MAGA doctrine is a revitalization, almost a resuscitation of a country that was so going in the wrong direction, cultural decline, economic decline. | |
| And so he's turned around the economy. | |
| He's defended our core objects and symbols, our flag, our tradition, our symbols. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| That's probably my favorite thing that he's done is he's actually spoken at a fundamental and cultural level about the things that we hold dear as a country. | |
| The things that we hold sacred together. | |
| The flag, our national history, our founding fathers against a whole leftist culture that tries to tear it down. | |
| Let me tell you another thing that he holds near and dear is that we are the best, and we should own it on our sleeve. | |
| There is a hierarchy of nations, and we are the greatest country out there. | |
| We're the strongest. | |
| We're the mightiest. | |
| We have the biggest army, but guess what? | |
| We're also the most generous, the most benevolent, the most creative, most likely to send people when there's a hurricane, a tsunami, an earthquake, or a flood. | |
| We step up. | |
| It's not the Belgians that step up. | |
| We're the most charitable country in the history of the world. | |
| No doubt. | |
| So that's what the MAGA doctrine is. | |
| And I think we have to talk... | |
| In terms of, you know, you and I that really get into the nuts and bolts of the philosophy and the economics of all this, I think he doesn't get enough credit for what he's actually done philosophically and on the policy side. | |
| And going into 2020, it's going to be a referendum on the idea of America. | |
| So a referendum on the idea of America in a sense, are we a nation of victims or a nation of victors? | |
| Are we thankful that we live in America or are we angry that we live in America? | |
| Do we love our country? | |
| Do we hate our country? | |
| That That's basically it. | |
| And so if Trump frames the debate like this, he will win. | |
| He will win, I think, decisively and assertively. | |
| But recognizing that the country we live today is not the country of 1984. | |
| Not the Orwellian 1984, but the Reagan versus Mondale 1984. | |
| But so the question is, what kind of election are we headed for? | |
| The conventional wisdom in Republican circles is, boy, this feels like 1972. | |
| We're a much different country than we were in 1972. | |
| We have more kids going to indoctrination factories. | |
| Demographically, we've changed tremendously. | |
| The welfare state is much bigger. | |
| The public schools have more of an increase. | |
| So the idea that we're going to win a 49-state landslide and we're running against George McGovern, who is whatever, or Walter Mondale in '84, I don't accept the premise. | |
| Of course. | |
| I mean, you can even look at the Supreme Court confirmations, right? | |
| When you have Supreme Court nominees of either party being confirmed by virtually unanimous support, right, until Robert Bork. | |
| And then even after Robert Bork, you get a certain, you know, Antonin Scalia enjoyed. | |
| Such a great point. | |
| Such a great point. | |
| Now what about now? | |
| The left is the only one that demagogues Supreme Court nominees. | |
| When was the last time... | |
| I mean, Merrick Garland was the only time that a Republican stood up. | |
| Thank goodness Mitch McConnell did what he did. | |
| Now he's up there with Harambe. | |
| But Mitch McConnell did the correct thing with Merrick Garland. | |
| That's the only exception. | |
| But Bork and Kavanaugh, I mean, boy, do they cause trouble. | |
| And Clarence Thomas. | |
| Oh, my goodness. | |
| They try to publicly destroy him. | |
| And in Clarence Thomas' own words, you know, I mean, this was a modern-day lynching. | |
| High-tech lynching. | |
| That's correct. | |
| Right. | |
| And they do it. | |
| President Trump, just the other day, he took aim at what we all suspected he was taking aim at. | |
| Was Sean Hannity, who's a friend of his. | |
| But Hannity was covering for Chris Cuomo on CNN. Because Cuomo was accosted in public and Hannity said, oh, you know, come on. | |
| He was called Nero or something. | |
| What was that word? | |
| I know, it's a joke. | |
| Oh, Fredo. | |
| I call them Nero as a joke. | |
| Because, I mean, I would say that for an Italian, it'd be worse to be called Nero than Fredo. | |
| I mean, I would be upset if someone called me Nero. | |
| And that is literally the Italian N-word. | |
| You just made a great point. | |
| You're right. | |
| That is the Italian N-word. | |
| Literally. | |
| I mean, it's actually the Italian N-word. | |
| You can't say that word, Nero. | |
| That's our word, Charlie. | |
| That's our word. | |
| What, you Catholics or you Italians? | |
| Yes. | |
| Okay, yes, sure. | |
| We own all history. | |
| We are the Catholic Church. | |
| Okay, great. | |
| I love your Martin Luther thing here, by the way. | |
| We could have a whole theological debate here. | |
| I love a good rebellion against a corrupt institution. | |
| You know, I always try to be ecumenical. | |
| I invite even Martin Luther to my set. | |
| I'm a living embodiment of this. | |
| You are a living embodiment of this. | |
| Are we going to do communion after? | |
| It pains me to do it. | |
| I want to pay a compliment at the expense of the Catholic Church to the Protestants. | |
| In this country, the only religious group that reliably votes the right way are the evangelicals. | |
| It's not the Catholics. | |
| Do you know why? | |
| Why is that? | |
| Because they read the Bible. | |
| Why? | |
| They do read the Bible more. | |
| That's true. | |
| But you know what I actually think? | |
| I'm kidding. | |
| Half my family's Catholic. | |
| I have great respect for the Catholic Church and the Catholic tradition. | |
| I really do. | |
| You make a great point because this is my issue with the Catholics in America. | |
| Half the Catholics in America, they say they're Catholic. | |
| And yet they support abortion. | |
| And now these days it's abortion up until the moment of birth. | |
| The guy in New York, the governor, Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, who allowed for abortion up until the moment of birth, nominally is a Catholic. | |
| Now, that's because they say we're culturally Catholic. | |
| Whereas, you don't see a whole lot of people who are culturally evangelical. | |
| I call these people chinos, Catholics in name only. | |
| Yes, Catholics in name only. | |
| You're worried about the socialist sleeper cells. | |
| I'm worried about, even beyond the cultural level, at the religious level. | |
| Sure, we could talk at length about this. | |
| You've got a whole generation of young Americans who are... | |
| They're not even atheists. | |
| They're none. | |
| They're religiously unaffiliated. | |
| And they've been raised in a nihilistic culture. | |
| That's correct. | |
| Is there any hope for America if we don't turn around that religious decline? | |
| The answer is more complicated than yes or no. | |
| It's hard to see without a strong religious backbone how this country will continue to succeed. | |
| Right. | |
| Look, this country is so unique. | |
| We take it so for granted, but we are the most diverse country ever to exist in the history of the world. | |
| And not just racial diversity, but religious diversity. | |
| I mean, and this is so critically important because when... | |
| The amount of, whether it be Protestantism, or Catholicism, or Judaism, or Islam, or whatever, that you could practice in this country. | |
| Or Marian Williamsonism, I don't know quite what that is. | |
| I think it's witchcraft. | |
| Do you have crystals? | |
| Do I know? | |
| I've got my chakras all over. | |
| Do we have a sitar music? | |
| Or a shaman? | |
| I think she was a shaman in her previous life. | |
| If you don't know what a shaman is, look it up. | |
| Look... | |
| And look, I will pay a huge amount of compliment to the Catholic tradition because if it wasn't for the Catholics, we obviously wouldn't have the Bible. | |
| And two of my favorite writers, Aquinas and Augustine, obviously were in the Catholic tradition. | |
| And I think that we could learn a lot of our foreign policy doctrine from Aquinas to the just war theory. | |
| And I think that we've strayed away from that and that we've gotten to an offensive war theory. | |
| And I think that's a really big devolution. | |
| But of course, the binary choice of the city of God and the city of man Which, I can't if it was Augustine or Aquinas, I can't remember which one. | |
| City of God is Augustine. | |
| Was it Augustine? | |
| Okay, yeah, I got him confused. | |
| They both start with A's. | |
| But they were also a big fan. | |
| One was a fan of the other because one came 800 years before the other. | |
| But anyway, the point being is that, to answer your question about America, the role of the church and the role of religious institutions is so uniquely American. | |
| Because Europe has turned their back on... | |
| On voluntary social construct institutions. | |
| So instead, they go to compulsory social construct institutions, government, bureaucracy. | |
| And so just from a charitable standpoint, as the church decreases in its role and stature in America, it contributes to a moral decline. | |
| and where the church is at its best is being able to distill really hard cultural issues and take definitive stances on them. | |
| And look no further in the 1980s. | |
| I mean, people like to say the alliance of Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but people forget. | |
| Hold on a second. | |
| There was John Paul II, who was also a huge anti-communist. | |
| And when he went to Poland, I mean, he helped sow the seeds of the end of the Soviet Empire. | |
| Open air mass, million people, and they chant, we want God. | |
| That's right. | |
| That was the chant. | |
| Imagine if you had that. | |
| He was a freedom-fighting pope, and he gets no credit for it. | |
| And importantly, too, he wrote about the evils of socialism. | |
| Yes! | |
| In his catechism, he wrote about it. | |
| And he wrote in a famous encyclical, Centesimus Annus, he wrote about free markets, open markets. | |
| Leo XIII, another great pope, called socialism a wicked confederacy, called them pests, said it was inhuman, said that it must be utterly resisted. | |
| And yet, these days, from some Catholic leaders and some other Protestant leaders... | |
| You've seen embrace an idea that Jesus was some kind of hippie socialist. | |
| Well, I'm so glad you brought this up. | |
| And this is something that I'm going to take on more and more personally in a couple projects. | |
| You and I have talked about this. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Which is, look, I meet more when I go to... | |
| And I'm an evangelical, so we have church service more than an hour. | |
| So when I go to... | |
| Yeah, when I go to the Latin ones, those go on. | |
| Yeah, it goes... | |
| Right on an hour, right? | |
| It's like the Amelie, seven minutes. | |
| If it goes more than seven minutes, there's an uprise. | |
| It depends on the priest. | |
| Some, you want it to go for two hours. | |
| Some, like about four minutes. | |
| It's like too much, actually. | |
| So maybe they bring it down to three. | |
| It's great. | |
| I have great respect for the Catholic tradition. | |
| But anyway, I travel a lot, and I'll go to a lot of different Protestant churches. | |
| But I love, for me, I'm actually contrarian by... | |
| In my church selection, go figure, I find more intimacy in megachurches. | |
| So I like really, really big churches. | |
| I actually find more of a connection. | |
| It's kind of that old Gatsby thing. | |
| The best place to feel, you know, the most lonely place in the world, the most connected place in the world can be in a big party. | |
| Of course, yeah, yeah. | |
| And so I love the lights and I love the praise. | |
| I love it. | |
| What about the music? | |
| I'm such a big fan of it. | |
| The Hillsong music, the Bethel music, all for it. | |
| Isn't that Hillsong guy like an atheist now or something? | |
| That was one of the praise leaders. | |
| We'll pray for him. | |
| We'll pray for him. | |
| Fair enough. | |
| That's the right answer. | |
| But look, so I'll go and I'll mingle afterwards and I'll tell you, Michael, The young churchgoers, there's a lot of left-wingers and a lot of socialists that are amongst this evangelical Protestant community. | |
| And this is really, really, really concerning because it is the corruption of theology for political means. | |
| And so I like to say I go to... | |
| I grew up in the Presbyterian Church and I grew up in the more leftist part. | |
| The Presbyterian Church is divided into two. | |
| It's the FPCA and FPCUSA. I get them confused. | |
| But one of them is super liberal and one of them is pretty good. | |
| I grew up in one that was super liberal. | |
| And so I went five years ago and I felt like I was watching Rachel Maddow with organ music. | |
| It was like watching MSNBC in between scripture readings where they would say all political stuff, basically. | |
| We have to pray for our country and this horrible president and all this sort of stuff. | |
| And then they would use theology and scripture to justify that. | |
| It was really bizarre. | |
| You know, I do have a little bit of hope on this, though, because I agree. | |
| I was raised in the Catholic Church, which became very left-wing, openly left-wing, especially after Vatican II. And you had a watering down of the liturgy and you had a lot of kind of feel-good stuff. | |
| The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr described it as a God without wrath leading a people without sin into a kingdom without judgment. | |
| You love your German theologians, I guess, so there you go. | |
| Through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross. | |
| And this kind of soapy religion, I think, chased a lot of people away. | |
| Sure. | |
| Now, when I go to church, because a lot of Catholic masses are like 45 minutes, 15 minutes. | |
| That's what I'm saying. | |
| It's the drive-by. | |
| But you know, you go to those. | |
| And when I go into those, I find it's the blue hairs. | |
| It's the older people. | |
| There aren't a lot of people in there anyway. | |
| A lot of people aren't going to the sacraments. | |
| The priest is telling jokes like a ham actor. | |
| Right. | |
| Then I go to the Latin Mass. | |
| Latin Mass, in a language that nobody reads anymore. | |
| It's an hour and a half long. | |
| It's got smells and bells. | |
| It's actually, you have to go to confession. | |
| There's a real encouragement of the sacraments. | |
| It's all the young people. | |
| The average age is probably 25 and somehow they've all got 10 kids already. | |
| Mathematically, I don't even know how that works. | |
| This seems to me that there is, at least at a small level, this longing among young people for reality. | |
| For order. | |
| For order, for orthodoxy, for truth. | |
| You go to these college campuses, I go to college campuses. | |
| We'll just say basic truths. | |
| I gave a talk at University of Missouri, Kansas City. | |
| It was called Men Are Not Women. | |
| It's about as basic as it gets. | |
| People filled the room. | |
| Why did they do it? | |
| Because in a culture that's gone mad with fantasy, with delusion, with saccharine sentiment... | |
| People long for the simple statement of reality. | |
| You know, I think Trump does this very well, too. | |
| That's exactly right. | |
| And so, the other point about, kind of, this is something that we have to encounter head-on, is within our own Christian ranks, and the Catholic Church has already gone through this, and I think it's actually coming back, but the evangelical ranks, we have not lived through this yet. | |
| And we're starting to see it through some fights in the Southern Baptist Convention, we're seeing it through others, where it's becoming very leftist. | |
| And there's open conversations, like, well, Jesus was a socialist. | |
| Hold on a second. | |
| Jesus was not a Marxist. | |
| Okay? | |
| And you and I could talk at length about this parable of the talents. | |
| He detested politics. | |
| He was savior of the world. | |
| Not running for Roman council. | |
| Minor details. | |
| Minor theological differences in details. | |
| But, I mean, even the scene when he chastises his followers for criticizing his having expensive perfume put on them. | |
| That scene alone should dismiss this silly, modern, Marxist view of hippie socialist Jesus. | |
| Well, he was also speaking individuals helping individuals, and the individual's pathway to the salvation. | |
| So what gets misconstrued, not misconstrued, I think it's actually because they intentionally misinterpret the theology because you actually go back... | |
| If you read John, for example, go back to the original Greek, there's no way you could possibly interpret it as such, where the left will try to say, well, Jesus was talking in terms of collective and all this. | |
| He really wasn't. | |
| I mean, you talk about a lot of his parables. | |
| He was talking as, you as the individual, so the Good Samaritan, you have to go outside of your comfort zone to help somebody that you might not want to help. | |
| Like, that's, it's not... | |
| Go call DHS and some bureaucrat is going to go do good for you. | |
| I must have missed the parable or I must have missed the part in the gospel where Jesus said, go form a government bureaucracy and have a committee that meets from 9 to 5 every day. | |
| Pool your resources in a widely inefficient way. | |
| I must have missed that whole thing. | |
| It occurs to me, you're speaking obviously in religious terms and this is traditional for conservatives. | |
| Especially in that post-war conservative movement. | |
| You had the libertarians, the traditionalists, the religious right. | |
| You had the communism hawks. | |
| They were all against this common enemy, which was the Soviet Union. | |
| The Cold War ends... | |
| Then what? | |
| What does the conservative movement look like now? | |
| Such a great question. | |
| So, the Soviet Union kept them all together. | |
| That's why Reagan was able to build this coalition in 1980 and take over the party that he wasn't supposed to ever be the nominee of. | |
| I mean, in 76, Reagan tried to overthrow sitting president Gerald Ford in 1976, and he got to the convention floor and sort of half endorsed him, didn't really endorse him. | |
| But Reagan was a rebel. | |
| And the reason why people thought Reagan was going to lose in a landslide to Jimmy Carter, and he won surprisingly. | |
| Sound familiar? | |
| And then all of a sudden, he was the one that crushed the Soviet Union. | |
| So what is our Soviet Union today? | |
| Well, it's the left in our country. | |
| The Soviet Union's no longer headquartered in Moscow. | |
| They're in Montana, Michigan, Mississippi, and Missouri. | |
| They're everywhere. | |
| And only on the university campuses. | |
| Right. | |
| It's the epicenter of them. | |
| And in Hollywood and all this other. | |
| So look, the coalition that we have to build, though, that Reagan got correct and Trump gets correct, and I feel that our movement gets wrong so often, is we have to break, and you understand this, we have to break our shackles away from these coastal elitist universities and these think tanks that we have to break our shackles away from these coastal elitist universities and these think tanks that think that if you're a carpenter, a pipe fitter, or you didn't go to four-year college, are somehow less than worthy to That's where Reagan was successful. | |
| That's where Trump is successful. | |
| And I feel as if there's this elitism that permeates our movement where all of a sudden that if you didn't go to the correct university in the upper northeast corridor, any opinion you have is what? | |
| Well, it's deplorable. | |
| It's all this. | |
| And the left says it. | |
| Our people don't. | |
| You know what it is? | |
| It's also an emperor has no clothes situation because... | |
| Having gone to one of those correct universities in the Northeast corridor. | |
| And I didn't go to one of them. | |
| And you didn't go to one of them. | |
| I didn't go to any of them. | |
| You didn't go to any of them, but you do have an honorary degree. | |
| Yes, from Liberty University. | |
| From Liberty. | |
| Everybody should go to Liberty University. | |
| Yes. | |
| But, you know, having gone there... | |
| I can kind of see what's happened to it, what the left has done to these universities, which is to hollow them out from within. | |
| So it's not to say that there's nothing to be gained at any of these places, but what it is to say is the institution that's hobbling around, and it looks like Harvard or Yale, and it talks like Harvard or Yale, it isn't what it used to be. | |
| The left has gone on a long march through the institutions, and so what you are getting in the end Is something that's simply not as academically serious, scholarlyly rigorous. | |
| You're not getting that same quality of education. | |
| So you have whole generations who are uneducated, uncultured, and they're so damn convinced that they're the smartest people in the world. | |
| Yeah, but they're hyper-credentialed. | |
| Hyper-credentialed. | |
| So they have all the degrees, but they know nothing. | |
| Right, and they often have a lot of student debt. | |
| Right. | |
| So they're in debt, they're vulnerable, and they have degrees up the wazoo, and there's no wisdom, there's no knowledge, there's no history, no perspective. | |
| No humility. | |
| No, definitely not. | |
| They're constantly wrong, but they're never in doubt. | |
| That's exactly right. | |
| And so you mix all this together. | |
| So look, here's what the movement moving forward is. | |
| Number one, we have to dominate in the libertarians. | |
| I know you and I might not see eye to eye on all this, but that's okay. | |
| I'm a little less libertarian. | |
| That's okay. | |
| But I do see the point. | |
| I mean, this is my question to you. | |
| Sure. | |
| Do we need to hold together the exact same coalition? | |
| No, we have to rebuild a new one. | |
| Okay. | |
| And so my coalition is, number one, I think we have to, libertarians, I think those are ours to get. | |
| These guys hate government, personal freedom, and there's robust conversations we can have about all that sort of stuff. | |
| There's stuff that we should not compromise on. | |
| So, like, a pro-choice libertarian, sorry, not going to happen, right? | |
| Yeah, not welcome. | |
| But, like, if you want to go put some substance in your body that I've never done and I don't even know where to find, go ahead. | |
| Like, I don't care, right? | |
| As long as you have something to share. | |
| You know what I'm saying? | |
| So that's one. | |
| So libertarians, those are our people. | |
| Okay? | |
| We shouldn't lose that. | |
| Number two is any sort of person that has religion as a core part of their day or their life. | |
| Their identity. | |
| These are our people. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay? | |
| And it should be actually four or five. | |
| Number three, the other part of the coalition, is people that wake up before 7 a.m. | |
| No, I'm not kidding. | |
| Every human being in America that wakes up before 7 a.m. | |
| should be a Republican. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, that's good. | |
| And then we should limit the vote to be over at about 8 a.m., and then we win. | |
| No, I'm not kidding. | |
| And I say that somewhat jokingly, but if you're getting up early and you've got to really muster some strength to go to work, you're one of us. | |
| I don't care if you're a carpenter, a teacher, a pipe fitter. | |
| You're not a leftist. | |
| Even a hedge fund manager. | |
| No, but, okay, of course. | |
| But, again, there's 50 of them. | |
| Okay, that's fine. | |
| But I'm talking about the 50,000 teachers in Missouri that we've never talked to. | |
| And they're working their tail off, right? | |
| Mm-hmm. | |
| And again, this comes to this hyper-elitism. | |
| So if you're waking up early and you've got to really fight, you're our people. | |
| I want our party to be the hard-work nation party. | |
| That's us. | |
| The final thing is the doctrinaire conservatives. | |
| And there's about 8 or 10 million of these people, and they're the ones that listen to Ben, they listen to Rush, and they're the Tea Party folks. | |
| They buy all the books. | |
| Those are our folks. | |
| I love those people, right? | |
| And that's our coalition. | |
| If you combine libertarians, which our generation is becoming increasingly libertarian, religious... | |
| Hard-working conservatives, that's 65 million people. | |
| You'll win any election you can with that. | |
| Let them go after all the people that sleep until 10 and do whatever the hell they want. | |
| I don't care about those people. | |
| I do care about them. | |
| I don't care about their votes. | |
| Let me make myself go. | |
| I care about them as people. | |
| I don't want to build a political party around people that sleep all day and do nothing. | |
| Of course, yeah. | |
| I mean, they're not really reliable when you need to go out and knock on doors. | |
| But you know what I'm saying. | |
| That's a movement, I think, that can have robust debate and can be one that can win the future and make our country a better place. | |
| Looking at 2020. | |
| It looks to me there are three big vulnerabilities. | |
| One is that Hillary Clinton is a uniquely detestable candidate. | |
| And so if even someone like Joe Biden, who I think is a total doofus, even he is like, I don't know, he's Elvis Presley compared to Hillary Clinton. | |
| I mean, even he is a pretty cool guy. | |
| You got that. | |
| You have the prospect of economic difficulty. | |
| I mean, we've had an incredibly long bull run. | |
| Obviously, we're engaged in a tough trade war with China right now. | |
| There is the prospect that the economy falters. | |
| And three, the wall. | |
| We were promised a big beautiful wall. | |
| We want the big beautiful wall. | |
| I want the wall. | |
| We all want the wall. | |
| And yet, there is not yet... | |
| New border wall. | |
| Though there may be because of that Supreme Court decision that allowed for 100 miles that might get some of it built before 2020. | |
| But more likely not. | |
| Are those vulnerabilities insurmountable? | |
| No, they're not insurmountable. | |
| You don't think any? | |
| If the economy tanks? | |
| Well, I'm not if. | |
| I don't think it will. | |
| But if the economy tanks, I still think Trump can win. | |
| But I don't think the economy will. | |
| I mean, the fundamentals are too good. | |
| And so, look, we have a community of economic hypochondriacs. | |
| Good way to put it. | |
| Where these people are trying to convince themselves that there's a recession. | |
| And so you know what the problem with hypochondriacs are? | |
| Eventually you're going to get sick because you're trying to get sick. | |
| You're right. | |
| And at least eventually you're going to be right. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Mommy, I'm sick. | |
| No, you're not. | |
| Go to school. | |
| Mommy, I'm sick. | |
| No, you're not. | |
| Go to school. | |
| Okay, finally, the 95th time you actually might have the flu. | |
| But here's the thing. | |
| The funny thing about recessions is you can talk yourself into a recession. | |
| I mean, remember, if you read von Mises' Human Action, I mean, that's all the economy is. | |
| It's multi-trillions inputs of human action put into one thing that we call the economy, right? | |
| There's no such thing. | |
| You can't touch the economy. | |
| Every little piece is the economy, right? | |
| But all of a sudden, you have 10 million people that changed their behavior. | |
| Then all of a sudden you can create a recession. | |
| And that's what they're trying to do. | |
| They're trying to propagandize the American public to create a recession ahead of this. | |
| I mean, Bill Maher said it would be worth a recession. | |
| That's correct. | |
| To kick Trump out of office. | |
| So you know what that means? | |
| That he wants to see people suffer. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Because that's how much he hates Donald Trump. | |
| Yeah. | |
| He wants to see people that wake up over 7 a.m. | |
| in Idaho and in Illinois. | |
| He wants to see them have a horrible Christmas. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So that he can make sure that he can be right at a cocktail party. | |
| And guess what? | |
| For Bill Maher out there? | |
| He would be fine in a recession. | |
| Of course. | |
| People will keep coming to his stupid comedy routine. | |
| People will still be watching his show. | |
| He'll be just fine. | |
| I mean, but guess who won't be fine? | |
| The people that Donald Trump, who has made their lives better. | |
| No, of course. | |
| And so, look, I don't think... | |
| There might be an economic slowdown. | |
| I think that's possible. | |
| Look, I think that the bigger... | |
| I think there's, of course... | |
| I think the left is going to try to throw some surprises. | |
| And I think China is going to heavily try to interfere with this election. | |
| So, look, I think China, through their proxies, through North Korea... | |
| Through any sort of way that they can jab at Trump and make him look, not in reality, but make him look wrong, they're going to do it. | |
| You think that Russia interfered in our election through a couple troll farms? | |
| Just wait until you see what China is going to try to do. | |
| And you know, historically speaking, this is something the left doesn't understand. | |
| Throughout the Cold War, we would play China off Russia and Russia off of China. | |
| And so when Russia was the big threat, we would maybe open up China, go play some ping pong with them, play them off of Russia. | |
| Now it would seem that China is the bigger threat. | |
| We might play Russia off of China. | |
| These people have been Russian dubs for a hundred years. | |
| That's right. | |
| And they've never apologized for their support of the Soviet Union. | |
| I mean, but ever since the Russian Revolution, a hundred years ago, they've been telling us Russia's no big deal, Soviet Union. | |
| I've seen the future and it works. | |
| And now the one time that Russia is actually a de-emphasized role. | |
| Now Russia, I mean, if you actually look at the Russian model right now, they have an aging population. | |
| Yeah. | |
| They have one third our population. | |
| They have huge social problems. | |
| I mean, just real big social problems. | |
| They produce next to nothing. | |
| I mean, They just produce those dolls inside the little dolls inside the little dolls, I think. | |
| And they're less of a threat than they ever have been. | |
| Now, do I think we should be dovish on China? | |
| No. | |
| Russia? | |
| I'm like, no. | |
| But now all of a sudden, they're the Russia hawks? | |
| Right. | |
| Now they're worried about Russia? | |
| Like, Adam Schiff, are you serious? | |
| Right. | |
| Meanwhile, you have China, who is cheating on our trade deals, who's illegally subsidizing, stealing the loom. | |
| They're about to mow down Hong Kong protesters. | |
| Yeah, who's on the verge of mow down Hong Kong. | |
| They have Muslims in concentration camps. | |
| You notice how quiet the left is when China locks up Muslims in actual concentration camps? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Not holding detention camps. | |
| Well, because they're not in Arizona. | |
| Well, that's right. | |
| But those aren't real concentration camps. | |
| But the other thing that's really interesting about... | |
| So you kind of go through what I call... | |
| First, they tried to say... | |
| They tried to say, well, it's the Russian collusion. | |
| That didn't work. | |
| And they tried the racism stuff, and that didn't work. | |
| Now they're trying the recession thing. | |
| You know, after all the R's, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| It's going to... | |
| The thing that is so improbable at the Trump presidency is his ability to withstand adversity. | |
| I mean, if you and I were doing this show eight months ago, all we'd be talking about is Bob Mueller. | |
| That's right. | |
| Mueller. | |
| It's Mueller time. | |
| But, like, we just forget about it. | |
| It's Mueller time. | |
| I mean, all we talked about is Bob Mueller for two freaking years. | |
| Right. | |
| More than that. | |
| And now I can't turn on the cable news! | |
| Rachel Maddow, what happened? | |
| Like, all she talked about was Bob Mueller for two years! | |
| Because they couldn't remember his own name at that congressional testimony, so now it's over. | |
| We are so bad at this as conservatives, because we're filled with the Holy Spirit, and we believe in mercy, forgiveness, atonement, and all these great things. | |
| We just move on. | |
| We should seek revenge for them for what they've done to us. | |
| Are you kidding me? | |
| This is the book of Charlie. | |
| No, but like, I'm a Christian. | |
| I feel you, man. | |
| I'm a Christian. | |
| I am, and I'm struggling. | |
| I'm having a very serious, you know, human and divine struggle here because I should forgive the left, but part of it is like, no! | |
| Well, you know what it is. | |
| Are you kidding me? | |
| I'll give you a little Sicilian advice. | |
| Revenge is a dish best served cold. | |
| That's right. | |
| We've got to serve it in November 2020. | |
| Speaking of that, before I let you go. | |
| There's going to be a horse head and somebody's... | |
| I need to know your, speaking of horses, your horse race bets on the 2020 Democrats. | |
| Who gets it? | |
| Who's rising? | |
| Biden will not be the nominee. | |
| You don't think so? | |
| I think Warren will be the nominee. | |
| Warren is raising a ton of money. | |
| A ton of wampum. | |
| A heap ton of wampum. | |
| So you have the hierarchy of what the left wants. | |
| The number thing they want, they want to beat Donald Trump. | |
| That's the only reason why Biden was up in the polls. | |
| We're in a surgeon because she's starting to make the argument that she can beat Donald Trump. | |
| She's angry all the time. | |
| But she's good. | |
| She's like thoughtful angry. | |
| Right? | |
| She's not like Marianne Williamson angry where she's off on some sort of extraterrestrial. | |
| Another plane of existence. | |
| You don't really understand what I'm saying, but if you understood it, then go to MarianneWilliamson.com and put in your horoscope. | |
| Harness love. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Harness crystal. | |
| Yes. | |
| You should have her on the show. | |
| That would be great. | |
| I would love it. | |
| But the other thing is that she's more populist and has more grassroots energy than most of the other Democrats. | |
| And I think that will prove to be very valuable. | |
| It's amazing that a Harvard law professor, the whitest woman to ever live who pretends to be an Indian for 30 years, She, and I agree with you, she genuinely does have a more populist cred. | |
| No, she has a following. | |
| And I think Bernie will fade away, and I think Bernie will name her as the heir apparent of his revolution. | |
| She already stole all his plans. | |
| Right, exactly. | |
| Well, she has a plan for that too. | |
| But I think, I don't think it'll be Biden. | |
| He has no spirit, he has no charisma, he has no stamina. | |
| He's a total gaffe machine. | |
| Does Warren pose a threat to Trump? | |
| I mean, instinctively I say no, but yet... | |
| We have to take everybody seriously. | |
| If they nominated Pete Boot Edge Edge, if they nominated Robert Francis O'Rourke, every one of them pose a threat. | |
| What about Eric Swalwell, though? | |
| He's all of us. | |
| So he's the biggest threat of all. | |
| Yeah, he dropped out. | |
| He's really spectacular. | |
| But look, you have to take all of them seriously is what I'm saying. | |
| And I say this as probably one of the most loyal living human beings to Donald Trump. | |
| Yeah, you're pretty out there. | |
| I mean, you're pretty strong for Trump. | |
| And I'm as loyal as it gets. | |
| But I'm also trying to be honest with the followers and the audiences. | |
| All of them we have to take seriously. | |
| Elizabeth Warren will play for keeps. | |
| She'll do whatever it takes. | |
| The left will do whatever it takes. | |
| And if we begin for a micron to underestimate the left, oh my goodness, forget about it. | |
| For instance, if we think that Elizabeth Warren gave us something, she would take it back. | |
| I don't remember what the term is for that, but she would do it. | |
| She absolutely would do it. | |
| Now, you're out there fighting hard every single day. | |
| I always love going to TPUSA events. | |
| Thank you. | |
| We've got a lot of warriors. | |
| You've got a lot of warriors. | |
| You've got a big one coming up in December. | |
| It's going to be the next big one? | |
| A couple things that I'll shamelessly plug. | |
| Please. | |
| That's what you do on shows like this. | |
| First of all, everyone should buy a Leftist Tears mug, so I'll plug your thing. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Number one, you can go to Charlie Kirk Show on Apple Podcasts. | |
| Please press subscribe if you like what you have to hear. | |
| If you've heard, please do that. | |
| Number two, we have our Turning Point USA event in December. | |
| It's our Student Action Summit. | |
| We'll have thousands and thousands of students. | |
| It's an amazing event. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I had such a good time last year. | |
| It's a blast. | |
| Thank you. | |
| tpusa.com slash SAS. And look, we're on the front lines of the culture war, and I'm also running Students for Trump, which is a non-Turning Point USA thing. | |
| It's a Turning Point Action thing, 501c4 organization, so I'm going to be running that. | |
| That was a disclaimer for all the lawyers out there. | |
| That's what I'm saying. | |
| For all the people, all the Media Matters trolls, I try to say that I'm not careful with this stuff. | |
| That was just for you. | |
| But look, we've got to get this president re-elected. | |
| It's the most important... | |
| In our lifetime, there's going to be moments where, like, this is where we either saved or we lost the country. | |
| And that's what one of these things are. | |
| And remember, you hear, well, this is the most important election of our lifetime. | |
| Do you know why you're able to say that each time? | |
| Because we get further and further away from our founding vision. | |
| Right. | |
| And that's why it's so important we win this election and you're playing a huge role in it. | |
| Thank you for your compliments towards our president because it doesn't go unnoticed and we need more of it and this president is saving Western society and just together we're going to help him every way we can. | |
| I know. | |
| I've worn my hat all the way out so I need to go buy a new hat. | |
| Charlie, you are the man. | |
| Go check out The Charlie Kirk Show. | |
| And I look forward, I think I'm going to be on that soon too. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So I can't wait. | |
| We'll do this, but I'll be sitting in the chair. | |
| I'll be interviewing you. | |
| But yeah, you'll be sitting, I don't know, you'll be on an airplane somewhere saving America. |