EPISODE 310: The Live Free Tour - Poso and Michael Knowles at University of Delaware
On the TPUSA Live Free Tour, Jack Posobiec visited the University of Delaware. Joined by Michael Knowles, they put forth a critical question: what does true freedom actually look like? Is it the shuffling of fentanyl zombies in Phili and the deaths of despair from suicide and rampant homicide? Poso analyzes the ideological divide in the country, why the left is desecrating the symbols of our history, and the new drive for tolerance of intolerance. Knowles explains how Darwinism has evolved th...
- Welcome to Turning Point USA's proudly hosted 2022 event, the Live Free Tour.
Joining us on stage tonight, Jack Posobiec.
Let's get this started.
Now, welcoming to the stage, Jack Posobiec.
What's up?
Thank you.
Good evening, University of Delaware.
It's great to be here.
And you guys may not realize this, but I'm actually from the Philadelphia area myself.
So Delaware is very well known to me, very well known to me.
So I take it that this is where we have to blame for Joe Biden.
Is that how that?
And Jill Biden.
Excuse me, excuse me, Dr. Jill Biden.
Let's get it right, let's get it right.
Now, you guys may have seen the internet at all today, but Candace Owens and her friend Kanye West decided to go and break the internet today because they ended up showing up in Paris wearing a couple of shirts that the media wasn't very a big fan of, but We do have a video from Candice exclusively for all of you here explaining the entire situation.
So without further ado, let's hear it from Candice.
What's up, Delaware?
Candace Owens here, and I'm just here to say that I am so, so, so, so sorry that I missed tonight.
You have no idea how badly I wanted to go and how much I wanted to jump back on the college campuses with Charlie.
Obviously, you've probably figured out by now that the reason that I missed tonight was because I am in Paris right now.
My friend Kanye invited me to partake in what I perceive to be a really, really, really Important cultural moment.
And if I did not think that it was such an important inroad for us to establish as conservatives, there would have been nothing stopping me from being with you guys tonight.
So again, I want to say sorry.
I especially want to say sorry to all the Turning Point USA students who worked so hard to organize this.
And I promise, promise, promise, I'm always gonna promise that I will make it up to you guys.
So whether I have to look to next semester or next fall, I'm coming back to Delaware to do an event with you.
So thank you guys so much for your understanding and hopefully I will see you soon.
Probably at AmFest.
Bye, guys.
We are going to hold Candace to her word on that, by the way.
Don't worry.
Don't worry.
I've got her digits.
I've got all of it.
But when I got the call yesterday, and I'm doing human events, and we're doing War Room with Steve Bannon, and we're doing all this other stuff, and Charlie says, Jack, I need you to go to the University of Delaware.
I said, alright, I'll go, but I want to bring another special guest.
And he said, who do you want to bring?
Who do you want to bring?
And I said, well, What, what, who do we have available?
And he said, well, we got this, this travel arranged already from Nashville.
And he said, who do you know in Nashville?
And I was like, I don't know.
I mean, we know some like, like, like Jason Aldean.
We know some like Brittany Aldean, you know, you know, he said, yeah, but they're not, you know, you know, they're a little bit out of our price range.
At least my praise range, maybe not Charlie's.
And I said, well, hold on a second.
I have an idea about who we could bring out.
So a man who is just as much of a medical doctor as Jill Biden, ladies and gentlemen, a special guest tonight from Daily Wire, Mr. Michael Knowles!
Michael Knowles.
Now joining us on stage, Michael Knowles.
Because we had the plane ticket already, so we just transferred the ticket.
Well, and I can pass for Candace is the other thing.
That's true, that's true.
Because I was very excited to come today.
I mistake the two of you all the time.
I think that my presence here tonight makes me officially the new face of Blexit.
Because I figure if Larry Elder can be the black face of white supremacy, then I, you know the Italians are racially very ambiguous anyway, I think that I can be the white face of Blexit.
Amazing.
Congratulations on your latest, the first transracial speaker I believe that we've had here at a Turning Point event.
Charlie is immediately regretting the decision to ask me to come.
But we're very excited to have everyone here, and I don't know, I did already reveal, though, that is it true, and actually, let me ask you, so we mentioned before that this is the alma mater of the Biden family.
It's true, it's true.
Is it true, though, that Biden's, President Biden's, his records here are still sealed?
Is that accurate?
What's going on with that?
You know, we're supposed to be a Q&A, but I'm asking you guys the Q's.
What's that, what'd you say?
Because he failed.
I was reliably informed it's because he got too many A's.
Is that it?
No.
Because he plagiarized.
I like that one.
That one's probably true to be honest.
Because he probably plagiarized.
And we're not saying that...
Because we were just making specious allegations.
We're saying that because it's literally what he's done for his entire career.
He plagiarized his presidential speeches when he was running for president in the 80s.
He plagiarized so many speeches when he was in the Senate.
And now we're looking at this presidential administration that he tries to plagiarize from the television show The West Wing, but it really ends up being more like a really, really bad episode of Veep.
It is, and you know, the whole topic of the tour and the speech did get me thinking about how to fight back against this insane administration.
Because what's the topic?
The topic is live free.
And I love that topic, and I love that topic in particular, because nobody seems to know what it means.
Everybody thinks that he's for freedom.
So the left thinks that it's for freedom.
You may have noticed, usually it speaks about that freedom with regard to sort of weird sex stuff.
You know, this idea that you can be with whoever you want, you should be able to have the freedom to kill your children through abortion, that you ought to have the freedom to do all sorts of sort of social issue freedoms.
And then the conservatives will come out and they'll say, we need the freedom to, I don't know, Cut taxes, regulation.
Well, I'm looking out and the lights are actually pretty high right now.
But is there a chance that we could get the lights on in the house?
Because I want to fact check something.
Is there a chance we could do that?
I don't know if that can happen quickly or not.
But from what?
All right.
Yeah, we got them on.
All right.
Now, I just want to do a quick look around.
Everyone look to your left.
Look to your right.
I don't see a single mask in this entire room.
That is freedom.
That is freedom.
Ah, there's one.
All the way at the back.
That's okay.
That's your freedom.
Well, you think about it.
The left says that freedom is putting on 10 masks and getting, you know, 15,000 boosters, which are so significant.
You know, the Ayatollah says that as well, that putting on masks is freedom.
Yeah, that's right.
So, you know, you get, you get these different definitions of freedom.
And even Joe, I bet Joe Biden would tell you if he came back to his alma mater, I bet he would tell you, I'm for freedom.
And I think there are all these sorts of debates, you even see it a little bit on the right, and it's a big misunderstanding because true freedom is not just the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want to do it.
If true freedom were the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want to do it, you know who the freest person in the world would be?
Who?
It would be a heroin addict.
Oh, yeah.
Right.
A sort of derelict bum shooting up heroin on the street.
We're only about 30 minutes away from Kensington Avenue.
Right.
You guys want to go up there.
So my brother, we my brother was living in in Fishtown in Philadelphia, only about Two or three blocks away from Kensington and Allegheny.
And if you guys don't know Kensington Avenue in Philadelphia, that has become, I used to call it a local eyesore, but it's gotten to the point where it's regional, national.
I've even seen people in other countries playing these videos.
For folks who aren't familiar with the area, Kensington is, and it's right under the Market Frankfurt L, so the elevated train there, and this is that area underneath where you see these shuffling fentanyl zombies, and that's what they are, they're fentanyl zombies just marching around, and now you may not know this, do you know, have you heard the nickname of this area, that it's the Kensington Beach?
Does anyone know Kensington Beach?
Alright, the reason they call it Kensington Beach in Philly is because there's so many people that have overdosed or just completely knocked out and passed out from fentanyl there that they're lying down on the pavement as if they're all sunning themselves on the beach.
So the joke is that it's called the Kensington Beach.
You go to Instagram, there's Kensington Beach Lifeguard.
You can buy t-shirts.
There's Kensington, you know, the zombies of Kensington Beach.
And you can find these videos.
And it's horrific.
We're the laughingstock of the entire Western world.
In fact, there's parts of The third world that are laughing at us when they look at this.
They say this is the first world.
So when you hear Biden go up there on the world stage and start telling these other countries using these moral epithets saying this is not the way we conduct ourselves, this is the rules-based order, you cannot conduct whatever action it is that he's talking about when he goes to the Ayatollahs, when he goes to Putin, when he goes to Xi, etc.
We'll look at how we conduct ourselves.
There was a book I read a long time ago that said something about the splinter in your eye versus the log in another eye.
I forget, some famous guy wrote it.
From that same book, it makes a very important point about freedom.
Spoiler alert.
For those who haven't read it yet, it's a good ending.
It makes a very important point about freedom, because the Christian view of freedom is that the man who sins is a slave to sin.
And so the freedom that the left is peddling is freedom to shoot up heroin, freedom to do fentanyl, freedom to look at porn.
Freedom to do all sorts of things that are destructive, but as you see when you see the guys on the beach, the druggie beach down there.
Kensington Beach.
Kensington Beach.
They're obviously not free.
They're the biggest slaves of all because they're slaves to their basest passions and their lowest appetites.
They're slaves to sin.
And sin is not freedom, vice is not a freedom.
Having the ability to live a good life, live a healthy life, that's true freedom.
And we as a society, you know, when I look at people like that, and this is where I might get into it with my more libertarian-minded friends, is to say, no, I don't believe they have the freedom to choose that, because when you have an addiction like that, that's become a chemical addiction, you don't have freedom at all.
You don't even have a brain at that point.
And if there's anyone in this room And I don't know if Hunter Biden's nearby, but...
Come on, you were at University of Delaware.
You know the Biden jokes are going to be flying tonight.
But in all seriousness, and I would say this to anyone suffering from the disease of addiction, that we as a society should do better by those people and we should do right by those people.
And it's because of corrupt politicians that have overlooked this for years and years, whether it's Philadelphia, whether it's California, Detroit, take your pick.
They are the ones to blame for letting those people die in the street, and we owe them better.
We owe them better.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You know, you talked about this sort of higher political freedom, so if we don't want the freedom, quote-unquote, that the left is offering, there is a higher freedom.
Edmund Burke, one of the great conservative philosophers, he talked about how there used to be, in the good old days, a generous loyalty of rank and sex, a proud submission, a dignified obedience that finds Even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.
And it's one of the most beautiful passages in that book.
And it made me think, you know, all in the name of freedom, what have we given ourselves?
This culture that is full of drugs, it's full of porn, it's full of disorder, it's full of family breakdown.
The life expectancy in this country is decreasing now, year over year, for several years in a row, for the first time ever.
Obviously things are not working out very well.
Don't drive past that point, by the way.
Don't bury the lead.
For the first time ever in United States history, save wars, right?
Our life expectancy is now going down year on year.
Every single year prior to this, Prior to this period, it's gone up.
Our life expectancy always gets longer.
This has always been one of the shining examples of the success of the U.S.
system.
Now, all of a sudden, it's going down.
And I'll tell you why it's going down.
It's going down because of drugs.
It's going down because of suicides, these deaths of despair in the Midwest, in the cities.
It's going down because of the crazy homicides.
I'm not even going to ask you guys to raise your hands, but is there anyone in this room right now who actually thinks it's safe to walk the streets of Philadelphia at night?
I hope not.
I really hope not.
There you go.
Yeah, Wilmington, precisely.
And look, we used to go down to Wilmington all the time.
I saw Green Day in Wilmington at Big Kahunaville, right?
Such a millennial.
Let's go to see Green Day.
But I also saw Bob Dylan there.
But I also saw Bob Dylan there, Mr. Mr. Mr. Tambourine Man himself.
And so it, you know, coming down Wilmington just to see concerts or even going up, you know, down South Street, Philadelphia, you know, these were rites of passage when I was in high school, when I was in college, a Temple University guy, I know, I know.
But Because of crime right now, I wouldn't even bring my children anywhere near that campus.
I've got a four-year-old and a one-year-old.
I wouldn't even bring them within a 20-block radius of that campus right now because of what's going on.
750 people shot in the city of Philadelphia since Memorial Day.
And now, to your point, aren't those people just exercising their freedom?
Their freedom to shoot other people?
No, you know, referring to that great political philosopher you just quoted, Bob Dylan.
Yes.
You know, that great political philosopher made a great point, which is, he said, everybody's gotta serve somebody.
And so when we think about these battles for freedom, how to live free, it's not just, it isn't even at all a battle between do whatever you want or live like a slave.
The question is, Who and what are we going to serve?
You know, because if freedom were just following your own desires, whatever you want to do, well, yeah, it's true, you do what you want to do, but the weird thing about wanting to do stuff is the more that you do stuff, the more you want to do that stuff.
I sound like Yogi Berra, but that's the way it is, you know?
The vice and virtue are habits, and so the more you do one of them, the more you're going to get at the political level and at the personal level.
So Joe Biden, he has this line, and it's the only thing I think I've ever agreed with Joe Biden on.
He says that we are in a battle for the soul of our nation.
Now, meanwhile, Joe Biden hires people that wear pentagrams on their chest, hires men who think that they're women who want to castrate children, hires other guys who do even weirder stuff than that with sort of puppies and leather.
And it's very, very bizarre.
This is a family show, so we're not going to get into it.
But he does.
So when Joe Biden says we're in a fight for the soul of our nation, I think, you know, I think he's right.
And he never told us what side he's on, so I don't think he's necessarily lying, but I don't think he's on the right side.
And it gets to what Ronald Reagan said.
You know, Reagan, in the time for choosing speech, one of the greatest conservative speeches in American history, he said, ultimately, when you get down to it, there is no left or right.
There is only an up or a down.
And so when you're in the fight for the soul of a nation, at a certain point, You've got to pick a side.
There is no neutrality, and we need to stop pretending that we're going to come to some conciliation, when in fact we're not.
We need to win the battle, and I think we can, but that requires moral clarity and courage.
No, I agree with you, and there was... Yeah, please, please.
There was...
There was an interesting incident since we're going off of the great moral philosophers and musicians lately.
Of course, one of the greatest ones to ever walk, really, into any American stage is the current contemporary singer and flutist, Lizzo.
And you may all have seen this recent Lizzo video that went entirely viral.
The James Madison Flute's first person, we're told, that has ever played his crystal flute in 200 years.
And there were two videos, by the way, and I'm going to be fair about this.
There's one video that shows her playing.
I believe it's in either the National Archive or the Smithsonian.
She's being very respectful.
She's actually fantastic.
Very talented.
Very, very talented.
Clearly 10,000 hour rule in spades, right?
And What's interesting, though, is that's not the one that went viral.
The one that went viral was when she very, to my mind, disrespectfully, was wearing this scantily clad outfit, picked up the flute of one of our founding fathers, and started twerking while while tooting into it.
And what was so interesting about that, and I could sit up here and say, oh, how terrible and awful, etc.
But what was so interesting to me about that was I noticed that there were two responses to that video and I'm sure you saw this online as well and just in out in the in the discourse that It got me to thinking more that has America broken into two societies?
And does this really undermine the discussion that we're having about freedom versus not freedom?
And this idea that if our moral character is defined whether or not by our embrace of our past, our history, our understanding of our history, or by overthrowing that history, And saying that, you know, 1619, America is racist, etc.
America has always had a founding flaw of slavery, etc, etc.
That and therefore they interpreted that view of the Lizzo video through this, this post racial lens where here is a black female singer and performer playing the, you know, playing the instrument, one of the founding fathers of a slave owning era.
I don't know if Madison off the top of my head owned slaves or not.
And it was so interesting to me that they were celebrating this, and they were almost in tears, ecstatic, that the moment happened.
And people were sharing it, people were liking this thing, hundreds of thousands of shares, just as much as people on the other side, and I don't even want to use the word right, because I'm not sure if that's the right label for it, were shocked and dismayed by this video.
And so, I'll ask you that question.
Do you think that Do you agree with my analysis here, this thesis, that it seems as though we've broken, and it's not geographic society, it's not North-South like it was during the time of the Civil War and prior to the Civil War, but it seems as though it's sort of an ideological social split.
Certainly that's the case.
I'm certain that while Lizzo was twerking and playing the Madison flute, James Madison was twerking in his grave.
I'm sure he was not pleased by this at all.
And it could have been something just fine.
It's a little weird that Lizzo is the first person in 200 years to be offered this privilege, but she was offered this honor and privilege to attack, to desecrate Madison in the memory of the Founding Fathers.
I mean, that's openly what the left was talking about.
It's what the New York Times was talking about.
A revolutionary regime always desecrates the symbols and icons of the previous defeated regime.
Of course.
And so that was obviously what's going on there.
And so as an attack, it was a really, really ugly sort of thing.
But to your point, the nation has split into two, not along geographic lines.
So sometimes I'll hear excitable right-wingers call for civil war.
And I say, well, do you want to go shoot your cousins?
Because I don't.
I'm not really eager to do that.
And I've never seen a nation break up peacefully.
And I'm Catholic, so I oppose divorce in all cases, whether it's a national divorce or a private divorce.
And so I just don't think, I don't think that's going to work at all.
I don't think it would be preferable.
But it does create a problem, this very word freedom.
We don't know how to even use this word in the same way as the left does.
And this is true of a whole lot of words.
We can't use the word man in the same way that the left does anymore, or woman, or any of the, equality, or any of these things.
Excuse me, are you a biologist?
Do we have any biologists in the area?
I want to make sure we're using the proper terms.
Where's Dr. Jill while we're here?
Dr. Jill, where is she?
She still teaches here.
I know she's in Virginia.
So, yeah, I mean, this is the problem with political correctness.
This is the problem with wokeism, right, is that the left changes the meaning, tries to change the meaning of all the words.
And so if you don't speak a common language, you don't have a common country.
That's true.
However, this is all very depressing, you know, and to use the young Zoomer speak, you know, I'm pretty hip and live with the jive, you know, and so the way that the hip young Zoomers call it... For real, for real, on God?
For real, for real, yeah, no cap at all, no cap at all.
Awesome.
But what the young hip zoomers call it is getting blackpilled.
You know, they are really, really depressed.
And I think blackpilling is not only stupid, I think it's also sinful.
Actually, I tweeted this the other day.
I said blackpill is cope.
Yeah, total cope.
It's total cope, right?
This idea that, oh, it's nihilistic at the end of the day.
It's just embracing nihilism.
And nihilism is this idea that, you know, and if you are a believer, By the way, this is the 100% Catholic panel up here, so I don't know if Turning Point's ever done one of those before.
A sample of two.
We're in the Northeast, so it's cool.
And don't forget, Joe Biden's a devout Catholic.
Very devout.
Very devout.
Along with Nancy.
So devout.
More devout than the Pope.
Well, that's another discussion.
And this is the part where Noel says, which one?
I didn't want to be the one to say it.
But actually, you know what?
Speaking of the mackerel-snapping papists, there is a great coincidence that we're here this week, which is this week marks the 451st anniversary of one of the most important battles in Western civilization.
That would be the Battle of Lepanto.
Lepanto.
Now, what happened at the Battle of Lepanto?
You had the Christian Western Holy League is fighting a much larger force of Ottoman Turks.
These guys were pretty serious fellas.
This whole thing sort of kicked off when the name, I believe, is Lala Kara Mustafa Pasha.
How's that for a name?
One of the Ottoman generals Flayed alive, the Venetian commander then sewed his skin back together, I'm not making this up, stuffed his body full of stuffing and paraded him through the streets.
Now as bad as things are for American conservatives, I do not think even Joe Biden would do that to us.
I think Corn Pop might do that to us, but I don't think Joe Biden would do it.
And so I think, yes, we're facing the threats of censorship.
We're facing the threats of prosecution and imprisonment in some cases.
I'm thinking of the Midwestern grannies who had the audacity to take selfies in the Capitol Rotunda.
You know, they get thrown in solitary and they throw away the book.
Yeah, we face a lot of problems.
The FBI goes and raids the former president, leading rival to Joe Biden right now.
These are all big problems.
But folks, folks, people have faced tougher enemies in more difficult battles than us.
And I think if we can summon the moral clarity to understand the stakes here, and if we can summon the courage, courage, which is not just a virtue, but the prerequisite for all of the other virtues.
If we can summon that, I think we're absolutely unstoppable.
And I think the libs are going to be run and scared.
Amen.
Now what's so key about what Michael just said there is moral clarity.
The left has that.
The left absolutely has moral clarity.
Well, for them, right, yeah.
For them, yeah, well, I could make comments there.
That they believe in their truth, right, as they like to say, of what they're doing.
They firmly believe That this country is flawed.
That our institutions are flawed.
They believe in this idea that every institution in this country is systemically broken and therefore must be brought down, destroyed, toppled.
In many cases, like the statues themselves, that is of course a symptom of this.
That they want to remake that country, our country, in their new image.
An image of a new America.
Because they have the moral clarity to do that.
And it is only a movement with moral clarity that can ever achieve that critical mass of being able to shift.
And it doesn't take much.
It doesn't take much.
It's like at the time of the revolution.
It doesn't take a firm majority.
It just takes a strong minority to be able to shift everything.
Well, I do, you know, I did actually go back and look up something.
So we saw this ubiquitously in 2020 with the BLM Antifa riots.
I was in Chaz in Seattle.
I was in DC.
I was in Philadelphia.
I was in more riots than I can even imagine at this point.
Do you need a passport to go into Chaz?
Is that the sovereign state?
No, because then you would be considered documented.
And therefore, you know, by whose authority would you be documented?
There actually, believe it or not, there's a lawsuit going on from the people of Seattle, this is happening right now, against the former, God bless, former mayor of Seattle who was basically run out in disgrace, Jenny Durkan.
You remember her, she's the one who said it's going to be a summer of love while we're out there.
The minute I got to Shaz, one of the first things I saw was a homeless guy just completely drugged out of his mind, swinging about a 12-inch Bowie knife, just slashing it about throughout the air like he's Don Quixote fighting dragons.
And we eventually got to the point where we picked up this stick and we told him that it was a bigger knife.
And so he took the stick and he put the knife down and then we took that knife and got rid of it.
I have that on video, actually.
And a few people were sitting and they were having their healing circle and going around the sharing tent and didn't even realize that this guy was almost lopping off parts of their cranium, which they may have already had prior to me being there.
I'm not sure.
A little loss, I think, at that point.
But we realized very quickly how bad it would get.
So anyway, this mayor, she's being sued.
We just found out she deleted manually 200 text messages during the time of Chaz from the moment that she said it would be the summer of love to the moment when the shooting started and people were being shot up in there because the border defenders thought it was the KKK but it turned out it was a couple of black teenagers that were out joyriding, shot up their SUV, killed one, injured the other.
She deleted the text messages.
She's going down.
She's going down hard.
The point I wanted to make, though, actually, wasn't about Chaz.
It was about Christopher Columbus.
Because did you know that of all the statues targeted, In this entire country, there were only two that stayed up during that summer of 2020.
One was the statue of Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C.
when I was there, and Antifa came after us, and they tried to tear that down.
A statue, by the way, that was dedicated literally by Frederick Douglass himself, who was out there.
This was the original Lincoln Memorial before the new one.
New, you know, comparatively.
And the other one was the statue of Christopher Columbus that's standing right in South Philadelphia.
They were not able to get it down.
And why is that?
Because the Italian boys of South Philadelphia had something to say about that.
And they said, no, you're not taking down our statue, Jim Kenny.
And that statue, I'm proud to say, is still up today.
My brother was down.
We added a little Polish support to that as well, so my brother went.
That's good.
You want a little bit of Western unity.
Catholic unity.
And Catholic unity.
It kind of brings up this question, you know, you gallivanting about in the sovereign principality of Chaz and all the rest of it.
I was undocumented in Chaz.
You were.
You were a border crosser.
The question sometimes comes up, and unfortunately I think people have lost sense of this in recent years.
Would you rather be a poor man in a rich country or a rich man in a poor country?
And as we've all become so self-absorbed, certainly on the left, but I think largely on the right, too, in this country, a lot of people have the mentality of, look, who cares what happens to my country?
I just want to be rich.
And if I really ruin the lives of my fellow citizens, it's no big deal, because at least I'll have money and a big house.
But the thing is, if you're rational at all, you would always prefer to be a poor man in a rich country, and really, in a flourishing country, in a good country, in a stable country.
You know, the richest man in Afghanistan had better watch out.
is probably not gonna remain rich very long.
And if you're in a country that's so full of disorder where you can't raise a family, where you can't go out for a walk, where you can't have your valuables, where you can't go to church, where you can't exercise your rights, that's no country to live in at all.
Our personal wealth, our personal individual freedom is tied up in a communal freedom, in a kind of national freedom, in a good flourishing country.
And so if we want to live free, we need to have a good country, and we need to stop the people who are trying to ruin our country, and poison it, and give us all a crappy way of life.
We know what the good life looks like.
We've lived it, probably many of us, and we've at least seen pictures of it, so we have some sense of it.
And it is absolutely our right, it is our political freedom, to demand that from our fellow citizens, and to fight for it tooth and nail.
Amen.
And I do also believe very deeply that when it comes to freedom, we should also have the freedom to question, right?
The freedom to question your professors, as I'm sure many of you do, especially when you get your grades.
No, I did.
No, I'm just kidding.
I was serious.
But this idea that if you're being presented with some orthodoxy, whether it's the orthodoxy of the state, whether it's the orthodoxy of the media, why shouldn't you be able to question that?
And we've got videos now from the World Economic Forum, another group of people that tried to have me arrested.
Um, videos from the WHO saying very, very proudly that they worked hand in glove with Google to say, well, we didn't like the, and this was the latest video that came out, we didn't like the search results that were coming up when you Googled climate change.
And so we went to Google, and this is very nonchalant as they talk about ruling our world and controlling our minds, that we went to Google and we had a conversation with them.
And now that whenever now, whenever you Google climate change, our websites come up and none of these other websites that might call into question some of those interesting, you know, or pesky problems like the hockey stick graph or this idea that, you know, is nuclear energy actually considered green energy?
By the way, it ought to be.
It's the greenest energy there is.
Right.
But of course, they don't want that.
They don't want nuclear energy.
They want nuclear war, it seems like lately.
But what's incredible to me, though, is that we live in such an era of censorship, such an era of political repression, such an era of intolerance.
All done in the name of tolerance and this and if you read Derrida, if you read Marcuse, this is exactly what they talk about that you must be in order to be revolutionary, you must have practice what they call intolerant tolerance, the tolerance of intolerance, and repressive tolerance.
Your ideas that may simply just be asking a question, not even necessarily refuting what they're saying, just simply questioning their reasoning, questioning their minds, whether it be climate change, or even if you acquiesce and say, okay, well, I agree with you on climate change, but, you know, is it anthropocentric?
Is it something that humans are creating?
Is it something that, you know, me really, you know, me destroying all of my, the ability to power my own country?
Is that going to save the world?
Is it going to stop how many degrees Fahrenheit Of the climate going up, you're not allowed to ask any of those questions.
And also, of course, their schemes always seem to fall back on paying the government more money and giving the government more power in order to solve whatever problem it is, whether it's COVID, whether it's climate change, whether it's monkeypox, whether it's any of these things out there, it's always giving the government more power, which is the answer to them.
And I disagree.
I think we should give our communities more power.
I think we should give our families more power and our parents.
I know I'm at a college saying that.
I know I'm at a college saying that.
But I'll say this as, and we're both young fathers up here, and there isn't anybody from any position of government that has a right to tell me how to raise my children.
And you mentioned, when you mentioned the government, and especially in light of the prospective nuclear war that we're all facing that you alluded to, there was a really jarring quotation that came out this week I was reading a piece on the war in Ukraine, a great piece by Christopher Caldwell at Claremont, and he pointed out that Ian Bremmer, the foreign policy writer, a very popular writer,
He said that in this war, it's so strange because certain corporations have become literal belligerents in the war.
He was referring to Elon Musk, who offered the Starlink satellite system, as it was widely considered an act of charity.
He was referring to other companies, though.
Google.
I mean, you think of the power that a company like Google or Amazon or any other corporation can have.
Obviously, they have the power to censor.
They censored the duly elected sitting president of the United States on January 7th, 2021.
No one, as far as I know, among the American people, said, Google, we want you to have this power.
They just sort of took it.
And in a self-government where we're supposed to persuade one another to create our laws, that means that they're controlling the entire political order.
But then if a corporation can become a belligerent during a war, well, then the corporation can be a target during the war.
The corporation is carrying on foreign policy.
All of a sudden, we look up, and there was 10 years ago, we used to say, oh, well, if you don't like Google, build your own Google.
You know, that's the free market at work.
I'm not sure how free that market is, by the way.
But regardless, if my rights are being taken away by the U.S.
federal government, that bugs me.
If my rights are being taken away by Google, and, I don't know, Facebook, and all these corporations that are frankly less accountable to me even than the government is, and that's damning with faint praise, well, I don't like that either, and I refuse to sit idly by in the name of some quote-unquote principled conservatism, which I think is neither conservative nor particularly principled, and allow these corporations to take away our freedom.
You know, the government is not the only threat to our freedom.
I can't see too well with the lights.
Is that might be Teddy Roosevelt over there that I'm seeing?
You know, I'm a bull moose is what I am.
Darn it.
Moose, right.
A little Teddy Roosevelt.
If you go, by the way, to if you go to Milwaukee, you can actually go to the there's a hotel that's been built on the site of the spot where Roosevelt was actually shot with a Derringer I believe it was a 38 while he was giving a speech.
And it hit him in the copy of his speech that he had in his breast pocket.
He continued, he decided to continue doing the speech because he had been so much of a hunter in his life.
He realized that because he wasn't coughing up blood, that meant the bullet had, I kid you not, he realized that the bullet had not gone into his lung and therefore he would probably survive because it was just a flesh wound.
That's a real president, ladies and gentlemen.
And he was right, by the way.
He was 100% right.
No, it is worth reiterating here.
We should not test this theory tonight.
I have no doubt he was right, but I don't want to prove it true.
I only have copies of your speech, so it's much thicker than mine.
Right now so so but there was this idea as well that in in the Roosevelt era and you saw this in the conservative movement for many years, where they would try to write off Teddy Roosevelt as a progressive and lump him in with Woodrow Wilson and lump him in with these ideas of Okay, as an example, if you want to understand how you get a Dr. Fauci, you have to go back to Woodrow Wilson.
Because if you understand Wilson's idea of government, which he got from the Frankfurt School, which he got from Germany, it was this idea that government should be based along the ideals of Darwinism, essentially, of natural selection.
That the government should be not this separation of powers, this biblical framework from Isaiah.
No, no, no, no, no.
Right?
The king, the lawmaker and the judge, which should be split in three.
No, no, no.
The government should be an amorphous entity that is constantly evolving.
So the growth of the theory of evolution and the growth of this new form of government actually coincide.
And in Wilson's mind, the idea was that it was, they should, this should be in parallel because The sense of it was that Congress and the founders and the elected representatives, they didn't understand evolution.
They didn't understand Darwin.
The Founding Fathers didn't have Darwin, so how could they understand the right processes of the world?
And so experts must then evolve to evolve along with material science in the material world, and they should be erected.
What they did through this was the growth of the administrative state, The growth of the bureaucracy, the growth of rule by expert, rule by the eggheads in many senses, and what it did actually was it took our constitutional system, and if any of you are in government or in poli sci, I don't mean to get too poli sci on you here, but, and I am a Temple grad, so I'm not too good at it, that our sovereignty started leaking out.
Our sovereignty started leaking out of the constitutional system, and that opening is where lobbyists, where the academy, We're bureaucrats were so many others were able to come back in because they realized that if the politicians started just following whatever their edicts were and went along with it, and the court started following along with it because of the court system and the judiciary in general is already sort of tied into the legal profession, as it is they're always sort of hand in hand.
Fast forward 100 years, that's how you can get an unelected bureaucrat, this 5'3 doctor, who can say, well, okay, every child in this classroom, I'm not going to do the voice, but every child in the classroom should wear a mask.
Every child in the classroom should wear a mask.
There it is.
Obviously, ask the Italian.
But the school board's voted against it, and the school board is the closest to... But Dr. Fauci, the school board has voted against it, so we're closest, we control the school, so you can't override us, can you?
He can.
He can do whatever he wants.
What about the governor?
What if the governor of Tennessee himself says that he agrees with the school board, files it in court, the court's surely going to side with the Julian- I don't care about no stinking governor.
Why do I need to answer to some governor?
I'm Dr. Fauci.
I do what I want.
No, but Dr. Fauci, I don't understand.
I mean, so you're just doing this out of love of country?
I'm doing it Because it is my birthright to tell all of you little sheep exactly what you should do.
You should wear the mask.
Don't wear the mask.
Wear it again.
Do whatever I say.
Or I am the great Dr. Fauci.
Well, of course, you're just doing this out of the goodness of your heart.
I mean, it's not like you stand to gain any kind of, I don't know, financial profit.
What, a lot of money?
Yeah, never mind.
We don't need to talk about that.
Don't poke around my books, Senator Paul.
And of course, you'll just release your financial documents.
By the way, When Senator Paul, Senator Rand Paul, is in the majority, I interviewed him last week.
He said that he's going to appoint a special counsel specifically for Dr. Fauci.
We're not letting that one go.
We're not letting that one go.
But I want you to understand that.
I want you to understand that if you have to go all the way back to Wilson and this idea of an ever-evolving permanent state, and this is where you get the idea that you're Your rights are countermanded.
The entire electoral system, the system that was written and laid down for us by the founders at Independence Hall, again, right over here in Pennsylvania, same area, same building actually, where the declaration was signed, 5th and Market is where Jefferson wrote it, that You don't have that anymore.
You have the role of these little, unelected freaks who just make decisions on a whim, and one day he says he's for masks, and one day he says he's not, and one day he says natural immunity is amazing, and one day he says, no, of course you don't need natural immunity.
By the way, I'm unvaccinated, my family's unvaccinated, we have natural immunity, we're sticking with that.
Are you really going to admit that?
They're going to come after you.
They're going to kick down your door.
They're going to go after you.
You know, points very, very well taken, Jack, on how people gave away their rights and freedoms and now it's just a bunch of fouches running our lives.
It's been a hundred years.
It's been 100 years that it took them to go from that point to where we are now.
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In the spirit of restoring power to the people, giving people a say, not just in their government, but in this very event tonight, should we take some questions from the audience?
This audience, I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know if they have any good ones.
I'll take good questions.
Wait, actually, no.
Let's take the bad questions first.
You know, this is a rule that my colleagues have had for so long.
They say, if you disagree with us, come to the front of the line.
I think if you disagree with me, you should go to Guantanamo Bay, but my more open-minded colleagues, they insist that you go to the front of the line.
I'm actually serious about that.
If we have any socialists in the room or, you know, full on, if you're from the gender clinic at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, please, please come on down.
We just broke the news a few hours ago, by the way, that the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, working, of course, with the great Dr. Rachel Levine, don't we all love her?
Don't we love her so much?
Our greatest military officer.
That not only are they pushing gender transitions for children, they will, number one, If you're in the foster system, because of course, you know, kids in the foster system, I mean, they don't have any issues to deal with, that they directly target children in the foster system and will put them in for these treatments without any need for parental consent, because there's no parents in the picture or legal guardians.
Number two, we lately found out that the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Gender Clinic, I've just been, I was just speaking in Philadelphia this weekend, that's why I'm hot on it, that They're now recruiting their research subjects.
I wouldn't say suspects, but it's almost similar.
At homeless shelters.
Children at Homeless Covenant House, right in North Philadelphia, they're recruiting children for gender studies up there.
That's what's going on.
And if you... Growing up in the Philadelphia area, if you heard the name Chop, that was sacrosanct.
That was beloved.
That was just... If you had a problem, God forbid, with your child, you would take him to Children's Hospital.
You knew everything was going to be fine.
Now, if you have a problem with Timmy, you send him to Children's Hospital, maybe he comes back as Jenny.
Maybe they don't let him come back at all, right?
This is the insanity.
This is the absolute insanity that's going on in this dark alliance, and I call it a dark alliance, between crooked politicians, Dr. Rachel Levine and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and many other children's hospitals.
For example, your colleague, Mr. Matt Walsh, the great Matt Walsh.
Just exposed Vanderbilt, and they called it a cash cow.
They called it a cash cow.
And you think about, look, when something crazy happens in Boston, I say, okay, that's Boston.
Something crazy happens in Philly, I say, okay, that's Philly.
Something crazy happens in Tennessee.
Tennessee, that's supposed to be the red part of the country.
And so it's everywhere, and they're pushing it everywhere.
And all it takes... Look, the people are on our side on this issue.
The vast majority of Americans don't want to trans the kids.
Very powerful people in very specific offices are pushing this kind of thing.
The people, I think, can push back.
Speaking of the people...
Um, I was just wondering, so you guys are both, I guess, pretty big Catholic, you know, Republican speakers in the area, and I was wondering, besides from, you know, your big Catholic background roots, was there any other influence you've had, whether it be organizations or people that helped shape your opinions, or even now that different organizations that help shape your opinions?
Religious opinions or political opinions?
Political opinions, like, such as Catholic.
Oh, certainly.
Yeah, certainly.
I mean, I...
One thing I will say about going to a left-wing school or being in a left-wing state, I think it can be very helpful.
I am from New York.
I went to one of the most left-wing schools in the United States.
I lived in Los Angeles.
I've been around libs statistically my entire life, you know, just in a dominant liberal culture.
And it did help me to form my views of things.
Because you're confronted constantly with all of the liberal opinions, right?
There is no liberal opinion I have not heard.
The libs have not heard very many of the conservative opinions, unless they have the misfortune of being stuck in an elevator with me, in which case they might have.
But it gives you this opportunity where you say, look, if I'm going to disagree with one of these liberals, I really need to have an answer, because they're going to come at me with bullets, rhetorical bullets at least, maybe physical ones too.
And so that caused me to do some of my own reading.
Some sort of those small groups of conservatives at school really helped me.
Edmund Burke really helped me.
Lewis Chesterton, who also there is overlap there with religion.
Michael Oakeshott I felt was an important philosophical influence.
Good old Uncle Aristotle and Uncle Plato I think are very important.
Ben Shapiro made this point to me once, which is, I said, Ben, I've only read one or two books on Christopher Columbus, and people are calling me up to be an expert on TV about Christopher Columbus.
And he said, well, Michael, the reason for that is, if you read one book on anything, you know more about it than 99% of people.
And so you're not going to learn these things.
It's true.
It's true.
You're not going to learn these things, very likely, in the classroom, but if you go out and you say, well, I heard about this, I'd like an answer to this, and you read a book or two on it, and then you talk to people, you know, and you find sort of affinity groups on that, you will be able to educate yourself very, very quickly, much better than your liberal colleagues.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Hello, Michael.
How are you?
Hello, I'm doing well.
I'm doing better now that I'm talking to you.
Is that mic on?
I don't know.
Anyway, my name is Clinton, and I have a kind of philosophical question.
So obviously the right, pro-choice.
By God, pro-life.
And as well as more in favor of small government than the larger government.
Okay?
So in that respect, As far as your position on the right, being a Catholic and everything, if it came down to abortion... Another way, okay, if the right were to take more power in, you know, Congress and everything, and it came to a point where it was the reverse, where we could now
Make it pro-life, like, across the United States, or we could keep it at the smaller governmental level, where...
What do you think should be done?
I am not for small government.
I'm for limited government, but I'm not for small government.
There is no small government in a country of 330 million people with a global empire.
So I think that government ought to be within its proper limits.
And I think protecting life is, if that is not within the proper limits of government, then there are no proper limits of government.
And so I am absolutely for I think there's a strong argument that the 14th Amendment, as it is written and ratified, outlaws abortion.
I think Robbie George and John Finnis made that point very well in an amicus brief on the Dobbs decision.
If there were a law at the national level to outlaw abortion, even if it in some sense grew the government, I would be totally fine with that in principle.
Now, as a prudential or practical matter, that might not be able to work, and so you try to protect life where you can.
But in principle, I see absolutely no problem with it.
One last thing.
So, I'm constantly thrust into these situations where I'm trying to debate, if you will, people on the left.
Not in an aggressive fashion, just a kind of, you know, hey, this is my thought, what, you know, blah blah blah blah blah.
And I find that if I don't say exactly what they say, what they want me to say, or like, what's your view on this?
And I'm like, well, I kind of think this, but also then all of a sudden I'm a bigot, I'm this, I'm that, and then there's like an army of them.
How do I de-escalate?
How do I continue?
Do I just walk away?
Do I stay there?
I happened to be on stage with a guy who managed to have a hot confrontation with one of the top libs in the country and did de-escalate it.
So I had a little confrontation with Jon Stewart a couple weeks ago, and at this point now, and this guy was just coming at me so hard.
How could you come?
You're just a troll.
You don't care about any of this stuff.
You're just here for clout.
I said, Jon.
Which event was this?
You know, this was this was the burn pits.
This is the burn pits bill was going through and it was the funding for the burn pits.
And Senator Cruz had initially voted for it, but then pulled his vote.
And there was some question about his motives.
Right.
And this was the this was the issue that I had was that and I said, John, I said, John, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.
And I'm going to say, I don't question your motives on this.
Because Jon Stewart has been great when it came to the 9-11 first responders.
He has.
And I wasn't questioning his motives on the burn pit victims, by the way.
And not to get into the issue, that's veterans who have had smoke inhalation because of the burn pits in Afghanistan, Iraq.
I've had friends from when I served in the Navy who had gone through that.
I have friends who You know, a girl I knew in my unit, she was losing her toenails, losing her fingernails, her hair because of this stuff.
I know a guy who, you know, he can't go over a certain altitude because he just can't because of his lungs.
But what Stewart was doing was saying, well, that Cruz had pulled his vote, not because of a fiscal reason to me as well, and I'm no huge fan of Pat Toomey, that because they hated the troops.
And I said, John, what I did was I showed him respect.
And I said, I respect your motives and I respect your ideals.
But if you want to come together, I'll work with you.
But we have to put the veterans first.
We have to put the people first.
And in doing that and showing respect, we actually did a great video afterwards and the bill did pass.
I'm a veteran as well.
So thank you for your service.
Thank you for your service.
One final question.
Why do people even try to argue with you guys?
You got a long line behind you.
Why do people debate?
We'll talk after.
We'll talk.
We'll be around.
We'll be around.
Thank you.
Hi.
So, I guess my question deals with, so like, in general, like you said, you support limited government.
How does this tie into foreign policy?
Because often, I think, there's like a trend with conservatives since Reagan to say they support limited government, while also propping up this huge military.
And in my opinion, like, often, like, an empire that edges on imperialistic.
Like, the U.S.
does things... It's a fair question.
It doesn't just edge.
America is an empire.
It's a global empire.
Yeah.
In many ways, people, there's actually an argument I heard recently that say 500 years from now, there may not be any meaningful distinction between the British Empire and the American Empire, and they may just lump it into a British American era.
So do you, how do you think we should conduct ourselves on the world stage?
Like, keeping in, like, morals in question, like, specifically one thing is, like, America supports things like, supports, like, Israel's, like, expansion to Palestine and all the human rights atrocities that happened there.
Or, like, I mean, yeah, that's one of the big ones.
Or, like, our covert interventions in Latin America, all that stuff.
I mean, like, do you think that, like, as conservatives, you have a duty to stand up and protest these, like, imperial ambitions?
I know, like, paleocons would say, like, oh, yes, but neocons don't.
I mean, I guess I'm wondering where you stand In between that, like, how do you think we should conduct ourselves?
I mean, I won't speak for Michael.
For me, it's America first, right?
For me, it's just America first.
And this idea that if we're going to...
If we're going to be spending money to defend our borders, it ought to be borders that benefit Americans, not benefit the borders of any other country first.
If we're going to be spending money on aid, then I want that aid going to Florida and yes, also to Puerto Rico.
All right, President Biden, he's there right now.
God bless him.
God bless him.
I just forgot that Florida got hit as well.
But this idea that we need to be all things for all people, we just don't have the... like practical matter, we don't have the money in the bank, folks.
Right?
We're printing money like crazy.
And the neocons want to do it for the defense contractors.
The libs want to do it for universities and all of their pet projects.
And at the end of the day, we've been broke for a very, very long time.
And that's why it is that the financial security of the millennials and the zoomers is very, very much in a crisis.
Because the people who came before you We're completely irresponsible financially, completely irresponsible.
That is why our life expectancy is going down.
That's why the economy is in the sorry state that it's in.
That's why the U.S.
dollar is burgeoning on perhaps falling off the face of the global charts in terms of the world reserve currency, right?
That's because of our own financial irresponsibility.
And they're going to sit there and blame you and say it's all your fault.
No, it's not.
It's their fault.
There is.
That's a good point.
There is also this fact of the fallen world, which is that great, strong nations become empires, and that's just sort of what happens, and you can try to stave it off a little bit, and you can try to pull back here or there, but as Jack pointed out, the only way that our economy is staying afloat right now is because The U.S. dollar is the global reserve currency, and the way that the U.S. dollar is the global reserve currency is because we're the global hegemon that governs a worldwide empire.
And so you raise a question about America's relationship with Israel.
America's made a decision to support Israel and to support the existence of Israel in a hostile neighborhood where a lot of neighbors want to destroy Israel.
And so you might say, well, I don't like that.
I think the United States should pull away from Israel.
You know, whatever your view is on that particular relationship, it is simply a fact that nations are going to have alliances and nations, you know, certainly an empire can't govern the world if it doesn't have alliances.
So you bring up covert action in Latin America, and the United States saw that it was in its interest to prevent communist infiltration in Latin America.
And so we went in there and propped up some guys that we thought were more favorable to our interests.
I think nations do that throughout the history of the world.
empires certainly have to do that so that that's that's just a fact and would that we could all return you know to some idyllic time in the past that that never existed by the way where we didn't have to worry about these things but we do and so to me the question is less can we you know I don't know is it is it wise to abandon the American Empire could we even abandon the American Empire but the question is how are we going to play the hand that we are dealt
And how can we do that in a just way, and in a way that's not going to throw our own citizens out the window and destabilize the entire world?
And a lot of that does come down to prudence and judgment and competence.
And one of my issues, by the way, when we talk about, we alluded earlier to the potential nuclear war that we're facing, because the United States has just stumbled into a proxy war with a nuclear former superpower.
But one of the issues here is just sheer competence.
And so again, you bring up really sort of ideological issues, you know, Israel or Latin America or whatever, but there is just a level of competence.
If you're gonna have a global empire, you need competent managers.
And unfortunately, not just the elected officials, not just Joe Biden, but the deep state, you know, the permanent government has bundled it. - I would add that I actually do support COVID, covert operations in Latin America, Specifically, the ones that I would support right now is just south of the border.
These organizations called the Narco-Terrorist Cartels.
And I would absolutely support covert activity to take every single one of them out.
Or overt, whichever.
I'm good.
I always find the foreign policy questions are really frustrating because there's no easy dunk answer to it.
It's just extraordinarily complicated, and to deny America as an empire is just to deny reality, and so what are you going to do?
You're going to try to keep it afloat.
If we're going to nation-build and have a global empire, you'd think we'd at least be nation-building in nations that, I don't know, share a contiguous continent with with us maybe.
They keep sending.
We don't have a narco state that's just operating in.
I mean, you understand there's cartel wars going on in Mexico right now that affect Delaware, right?
That, you know, as far away as we are from the border, that actually affects right where we're sitting, Newark, Delaware.
Well, that's because the Florida governor is about to send a plane load to Rehoboth Beach.
I'm waiting for that.
I'm waiting for it.
Okay.
Well, thank you for your time.
It's a good question.
It's a good question with just a sort of a complicated answer of resignation, you know, is sort of the way that empires are governed.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hey, thank you for coming out here.
I know it's hard for conservatives to come to more liberal-leaning areas like a college, so thank you.
I'd like to begin with, first, I agreed very much with what you said about the overreach of corporations like Google and Amazon, who in many instances control our lives more so than our actual elected government and our elected officials.
With that being said, why do so many conservatives tend to support laissez-faire economic models and deregulation of the market, while deregulation is really what allows these companies to control every aspect of our lives, more so than the government that we vote for?
Do you think it is moral and just that private companies have that ability to control our lives more so than our elected government?
Surely not, and I think it was a mistake that conservatives did it.
I mean, part of the reason the conservatives did it... We're working on it, by the way.
Well, this is something that, you know, gets into this sort of argument, you know, we talked about civil war earlier, but the other civil proxy war within conservatism right now is this sort of rise of the new right versus the, there's the old right, there's the Neoconservatives, there's neoliberals, there's all these different little pockets.
You know, I've heard obscure political monikers are the right-wing version of gender pronouns.
There's like 10,000 of them.
I'm a paleo-neo.
Paleo-neo, yeah, which is a little of both.
So there is a huge movement right now within the right, and I think this is one that's also doing well politically, that is focusing predominantly on two issues.
Those issues being immigration and trade.
And because those issues are getting such a focus, and you saw this with President Trump, you see it a lot with Governor Ron DeSantis, and you're seeing it throughout the country, that conservatives aren't scared anymore of using the tools of government to secure our rights.
You know, you want to do it justly.
You don't want to do it with capriciousness or, you know, in an arbitrary way.
Except for drug dealers.
That's right.
Except for them.
Then you just bomb them.
But you want to do it in a way that is just and prudent.
But yes, you ought to wield the power that the people give you on those happy occasions that they do give it to you.
And so, you know, why did deregulation happen?
In part, it was a sort of triumph of the liberal establishment, because even the right adopted a lot of their views.
But in part, it was also to spur growth.
And economic growth is a good thing.
And much maligned as the neoconservatives are these days, the OG neoconservatives were actually pretty thoughtful people.
And Irving Kristol made this point.
He said, the right in America, conservatism, is nationalism, religion, and economic growth.
And I think most people on the new right would actually agree with neocon Irving Kristol on that.
Economic growth is very important there, too.
And so, unfortunately, the desire for ever-higher GDP growth basically mortgaged away our political rights and allowed a bunch of woke oligarchs and C-suites to run roughshod over our traditional way of life.
So, I agree that's a huge problem and we need to take it back.
Well, I agree with what you just said, but it is freedom to have economic freedom and be required to work some people over 50 hours a week and the freedom to just be a unwavering consumer of products like in laissez-faire capitalism.
Is that really the freedom that you want conservatives to... Well, it's not an end.
It's not an end, but it is a means.
And I think this is where people got a little screwed up with laissez-faire capitalism and the sort of worship of markets.
Markets are a very efficient means toward political flourishing, but they're not an end.
So you don't want to make markets an end unto themselves.
Having material wealth and prosperity is a good thing, but it's not an end.
If you make that the end of your society, you just worship mammoth.
The way I like to put it is, you know, we are a people with an economy, not the other way around.
To sort of paraphrase on of Reagan's idea about the government, that the economy is a tool, right?
It's a tool that can help us.
It's a tool that can make our lives better.
But if our lives get to the point where all we're doing is serving that economy in the name of meanless and Mindless consumption like you're talking about then you're just some you're just some insect at that point in you're a worker drone serving the queen of the colony and you know she has the eggs you eventually die right you never even get to eat the honey you're not having kids of your own she has the kids and so
We should, as conservatives, or the new right, or the new conservative movement, whatever you want to call it, be working towards the kind of society where we can get back to the point where you ought to be able to have a family and survive on a single income.
Where people can raise their kids as they see fit.
Alright, we'll have to chat after, I guess.
They're withholding the microphone.
I've got a clock back here and I see a long line, so.
Hey, what's going on, guys?
Just want to say I appreciate you coming out here to campus, especially at UD.
There was a lot of people that did not want you guys to come, but I'm a firm believer- I didn't want him to come either, just to be- I was like, what, I got to share a stage with him?
And I saw you come out, I was like, oh, I've seen him before?
Yeah.
So, okay.
So my question is, Since the conception of America, right we had the idea that we were being untreated, we're being treated unfairly by Britain right so we said, okay, by any means necessary.
Let's go ahead and rebel against the establishment let's establish our own country our new nation in the way that we see fit.
Why was it different do you think In the 50s or 60s, let me not even presume your opinion already, but what do you think about figures like Malcolm X or the Black Panthers, who basically said the same thing?
We're being untreated unfairly, so by any means necessary, we have the right to fight.
You did just put the words of Malcolm X into the mouth of George Washington, which I don't think he said that exact phrase, and they did not permit any means necessary.
They waged actually a largely civilized war and preserved the political traditions from England, even after Overthrowing that government in the new world.
But that aside, the point is very well taken.
Jack, do you want to take a crack at it?
Well, I do think that you raise an interesting question.
And I think that, you know, for conservatives, it would be easier to just say, oh, those guys were crazy and they were completely insane.
And I, you know, obviously I don't condone any of the violence of of the Black Panthers.
But what I do see, though, is I believe what you're saying is that this was these were groups and in this case, Malcolm X, who was trying to and Malcolm X, by the way, Who left the Nation of Islam at one point in order to be able to, because he thought it was becoming too radical and that he wanted to find a better life for his people.
And they were the ones who later had him killed.
In fact, Elijah Muhammad later on just kind of joked about basically ordering the assassination of Malcolm X. And so, you know, Jack Posobiec goes to University of Delaware and, you know, supports Malcolm X is going to be the headline here.
But when you look at this, though, I think when I when I read that story, It showed me that even maybe even to an extent and this is just my analysis but maybe even he realized that again, it shouldn't just be any means necessary do have to work with to find the practicalities in the system.
Because there's always going to be trade-offs, and that's what Michael was just saying in terms of foreign policy.
There's always going to be trade-offs, but maybe by making some of those trade-offs, rather than being completely iconoclast, you can actually find a better solution and a better result than simply saying, you know, we've got to go full Ted Kaczynski on whatever we think the problem is.
It's a great point.
And there is a strange coincidence here, which is there was a...
Someone joked on Twitter the other day that there was going to be a new biopic of Malcolm X produced by Matt Walsh, starring me as Malcolm X.
And I thought this was sort of funny.
Well, as you said, the Italians are...
The Italians are racially ambiguous.
Little ambiguous.
And so this started to go viral.
Especially with Sicilians.
And it was picked up in entertainment blogs, and a lot of prominent leftists really took this seriously.
So, you know, I don't want to talk myself out of a job here, by disparaging Brother Malcolm.
But, you know, what you're saying is how is the...
Revolutionary action against a regime different in the 1960s than it was in the 1770s.
And I would say it may not be different in principle, though there are some distinctions to be had, but it's not just about procedure, it's about substance as well.
So then the question is, what sort of regime is being overthrown and with what to replace it?
And I think to broaden it out from Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, even to just the broader new left that was, you know, the Weather Underground and all those sorts of characters, I just think that the society that they were trying to affect was overtly communist in many cases.
The society was extremely radical, was grounded in violence and a kind of persistent violence and a continual perpetual revolution that I think is just not preferable to the regime that was already in place where improvements could be made and in some cases have been made.
So I think you have to look at the specifics of it as well.
It's not just, do we want to have revolution now?
The question is, what are we going to do after the revolution?
Some revolutions Can be perfectly fine, like the American Revolution.
Some revolutions turn to the terror, like the French Revolution, and I don't trust the New Left from the 1960s to give us the nice version of that.
I expect the guillotine from them, because they brought bombs out anyway.
Charlie had a question about this recently at an event.
To kind of, you know, reiterate what Charlie would probably say if you were here because he said it recently, he pointed out that the United States did not, the Founding Fathers didn't declare war on Britain.
They declared independence, right?
So they were duly elected representatives of the colonies, they declared themselves states, they declared independence.
It wasn't an act of violence, it wasn't an act of aggression, there weren't Uh, terror strikes on British compounds or anything like this, or military facilities in any way.
It was the British that eventually went to Lexington and Concord, they went to Boston, et cetera, et cetera, that led to all of this.
It wasn't the Americans going around and doing that in the first instance.
It was the Boston Massacre.
We did start throwing the rocks first, but I agree, it was just throwing rocks.
That was a couple rocks.
That was a few rocks.
George Washington didn't throw those rocks.
You don't have fingerprint evidence of that.
Good question.
Great question.
It is a good question, seriously.
I am terribly sorry to provoke more Italian on Italian violence.
I know you and Fauci already had beef.
Oh, yeah, I'm terribly sorry to provoke any more Italian on Italian violence.
I know you and Fauci already had beef.
But briefly, you two touched on the Holy See, and you talked about how Pope Francis doesn't exactly agree with you, let's say, on many issues.
I've heard him described as the socialist pope.
How do you reconcile being a Catholic but having your own Head of faith, essentially being ideologically opposed to you?
How does that work?
Listen, I'm not terribly worried about it.
I think the Lord sometimes sends us Popes who say interesting things to remind us that the Pope is fallible except when he is infallible.
And the Pope, by the way, you know, the way he's covered in the media is not always reflective of the things he actually believes.
I do remember that when he was Cardinal of Buenos Aires, Pope Francis, then Cardinal Bergoglio, said that gay marriage, same-sex marriage, is no mere political lobby, but rather a machination of the father of lies that seeks to deceive and confuse the children of God.
So pretty based as far as I'm concerned.
And you see these things.
He referred, Pope Francis referred to abortion.
He likened it to hiring an assassin to kill somebody.
So, you know, he has said things that raise eyebrows and that raise dubia, and that some have said, Papa Francesco, what are you talking about?
And then often the Vatican will sort of walk back some of those comments.
But I don't stay up too late at night, because there is the Magisterium of the Church.
I fully, 100% accept the Magisterium of the Church.
And if the Pope has a sort of stray opinion that he's musing about it on an airplane, That doesn't really affect my life.
To answer the broader question, though, that, you know, and Charlie and I get into this sometimes, Evangelical Charlie and I, when we're on the show together, that I say, look, you know, you can disagree with this pope, you can disagree with that pope, when they're talking about political matters.
Because when, and to Michael's point about infallible when you're not infallible, right?
Fallible when you're not infallible.
It's this idea that when he's speaking ex cathedra, so ex cathedra in the seat of St.
Peter, on behalf of the entire church, that's a very serious, written out, it's going over with the magisterium at length before any of those papal edicts or papal bulls are issued, those encyclicals.
And so when he's making comments in an interview or something, that might just be his personal opinion on something.
And that might not be that necessarily something that I have to follow as, you know, as the dirty papists that I am.
But that being said, you know, to the broader question of, you know, I hear this, you know, do you support, how can you support this Pope, etc.
And I'll say, well, look, you know, as a Catholic, we've had a lot of Popes.
The same way the United States has had a lot of presidents, but you don't, you know, tear up your passport and tear up your flag because you just have a disagreement with the president.
The question raised in the gospel is, you know, after Christ has the hard sayings, and he describes his flesh being true food and his blood being true drink, and many people go away because this is a hard saying.
He says to his apostles, will you leave me too?
And the apostles say, to whom shall we go?
To whom shall we go?
You're the way and the truth and the life.
And so that's my opinion too.
To whom shall I go?
Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here.
Mr. Knowles, I just want to say I love your podcast.
Thank you so much, I appreciate it.
You're a man of excellent taste, I can tell.
Thank you.
Hopefully we can get a shout-out next episode, wink wink.
What's your name?
Tamon Hamlet, University of Delaware.
Say the name again, I can't.
Tamon Hamlet.
Tamon?
It's a great name.
I'll have to remember that for the show tomorrow.
I just wanted to ask really briefly about the Constitution.
It seems today that being pro-Constitution is synonymous with being conservative.
I mean, you ask young people today, they think it should be changed, rewritten, or most people don't even read the Constitution.
Well, it's easy, right?
It's basically like water following the path of least resistance.
This idea that, because to your point about nobody reading books anymore, I guess it was Ben's point, that how many people actually know what the Constitution says versus whatever the top Google result for the Constitution is, which is always predominant.
Usually when you look this up, it's always some Like, a university professor has written their version of what they believe the Constitution says.
For example, the Second Amendment, right?
Shall not be infringed.
It's pretty explicit, right?
But you'll find professors and lawyers and entire industry will go in and try to interpret those words when it's right there in the text, right?
Shall not be infringed.
What did they mean by this?
And just piles and mountains of cope after that.
But the idea basically is that if they can get away with it, they will.
Because again, this goes back to, I think, what we started at the beginning of saying.
This constitution was written for a society with one moral core.
And if you take away that moral core and attempt to replace it with a new moral core, then they will find ways to apply those words of the very same Constitution, the very same Declaration, the words of Jefferson's, you know, letters, his private letters, like that's where we get separation of church and state, obviously it's from private correspondence, had nothing to do with his public speeches or edicts, etc., and certainly not how he governed the state of Virginia.
But, and the state constitution that he wrote there, but it's basically this idea that if you take away our moral core, the moral core that we had at the conception of our country, right, then you can make the constitution mean whatever you want.
This is why, and Beto O'Rourke recently came out and said he believes in a living constitution.
That is what they believe.
It's a Darwinian belief, it is a belief in natural selection, and it is completely antithetical to how this country was set up.
You know, there's a reason, uh, they say there's a reason that the Gospels don't, um, it doesn't address atheism, right?
You know, Christ never addresses atheism.
You know why?
Because atheists didn't exist back then, right?
You either worshipped... I don't know that they exist now, right?
Yeah, right, right, right.
True.
Atheists and foxholes.
But it's this idea that everyone believed in some god back then, whether it was Yahweh or whether they're worshipping Baal or Moloch.
There's a lot of those worshippers still today.
But by the same token, the Constitution doesn't necessarily address morality because at the time they didn't have to.
Right?
And that's the big difference between then and now.
You see it in the writings of John Adams and of John Jay in particular.
When people say, well, what did the Constitution mean?
We know.
We have the Federalist.
We have a very lengthy explanation of what the Constitution means.
And when you see, especially in the writings of Jay and Adams, they declare that the country is a Christian nation, and it's founded on Christian principles, and it's the only thing that united the people when they built the country, and that's what it's for.
So we can know that.
The left obviously doesn't like that.
They don't like Christianity.
They don't like the country.
They don't like the way the whole thing is set up, and they want to attack it.
And they say it's an evil country from the very beginning, and we need to overthrow it.
And so they obviously have a hostile relationship to the Constitution.
It's helpful to them when they can to just go in and rewrite it, as Jack was pointing out.
It's easier when they can to infiltrate institutions and just wear them like a husk, you know, sort of a rotted out husk, and they animate it like Night of the Living Dead.
But when they can't do that, they'll just assail it.
That guy in Men in Black, you remember the beginning when he was, like, stretching his head back there?
They're skin suits, basically.
That's right.
It's a skin suit.
But when they can't do that, they'll attack it and desecrate it and mock it, which they do regularly in the New York Times.
And they're just going to alternate on that.
But it's an end seeking a justification.
The end is, we hate the country and want to remake it.
And the justification, they'll figure that out along the way.
Which is also why they have to constantly redefine words.
Constantly.
Thank you.
Taemon, by the way.
Taemon Hammer.
Taemon.
Gentlemen, thanks for coming here.
I'm a big history freak.
I read history.
I watch documentaries on the revolution and something was worth fighting for back then and it wasn't pretty.
Given the situation now where we're going, there's obviously some Some threats to our democracy.
Which one would you think is, hopefully this question makes sense, but which one would you think is the biggest threat?
Unelected officials or officials or government that don't represent us.
Namely rhinos that you think will represent you and then they You follow the money, and they're following the money, and they don't represent you.
It's just cowardice.
That's the real fear.
Cowardice and ignorance, I guess, are the two things.
Because, you know, I think the people are broadly with us on a lot of issues.
But unfortunately, we don't have much of a democracy.
We were never intended to have a democracy.
The word democracy does not appear in the Constitution, doesn't appear in the Declaration.
It appears a handful of times in the Federalist.
Only negatively, by the way.
Only with disapproval.
So what we were given was a nation with a mixed sort of regime, with a strong executive and a legislature and an aristocratic sort of representation, and obviously a very strong democratic element as well.
But they warned us, actually.
Publius warned us and the Federalist that there could come a time when it seemed as though we were expanding the democracy.
But by apparently expanding the democracy, you were really just creating a facade that was masking an oligarchy.
And so I think that's what we seem to have done through the 17th Amendment, through the direct election of senators, through the constant piffle about ever more direct democratic participation.
I think really what the libs have done is just create more and more of an oligarchy, and it's an oligarchy that they themselves are running, right?
The destruction of the Electoral College.
Right, they're obviously trying to destroy the Electoral College.
For me though, I think there's two great threats here.
Number one, the greatest threat to democracy as it stands right now, and when I say democracy I mean the representative power of the people to actually have an effect on their government, is censorship.
Because 2016 scared the hell out of the regime.
When they saw what people could do, if they could share true information, if they could connect, if they could meet in rooms like we're meeting tonight, on a college campus, and have discussions like this, and meet in person, the amount of power that that has, and discuss things that they don't want being discussed, and commit thought crime after thought crime while we're together, is terrifying to them.
Is the unelected official scared of that?
Oh yes!
They're all terrified of it.
Every single one of them is terrified of it.
That's why people like Nini Yankovich tried to set up this thing called the Disinformation Governance Board, which I completely discovered, exposed, blew up, and got her fired in disgrace from the Department of Homeland Security.
Thank you.
And by the way, by the way, For, you know, I assume this is being livestreamed.
As a message for Nina or anybody else out there, I'm just going to say this.
Should you try to get any one of these set up anywhere else in the government, I will expose you and I will get you fired just as quickly.
I will find you.
I will expose you.
Thank you for being here.
So you spoke earlier about moral clarity and how people on the right and people on the left have different moral clarities.
How would you convince someone on the left with a different moral clarity that yours is correct?
And if you can't, how would you, quote, agree to disagree, unquote, if you can do that?
Well, so the moral order is not just some preference of mine, you know, I like vanilla and you like chocolate.
The moral order is an objective thing, and the moral order can be perceived and understood, or certainly conceived, through our reason and our moral conscience.
And if you say that to many libs, they will laugh in your face, and they probably won't even admit that there's such a thing They almost certainly won't admit there's such a thing as God, and they probably won't admit that there's such a thing as objective truth.
And so you're going to have to get them there first.
And it's very easy to convince someone that there is objective truth, which is, when they say, there's no such thing as objective truth, you will ask them, well, is that statement objectively true?
And assuming that they, you know, stop sputtering around after a while, they'll have to admit that they do accede to some sort of objective truth.
And so then it is helpful to get them to believe in God, which is that God's existence is self-evident and can be known by the light of reason from the created world.
There are many good arguments for the existence of God, there are no good arguments against God, but you might have to reason them through a little bit there as well.
I think only once you do that Can you point people to the realities of morals that they already perceive?
It's an amazing thing how people know things to be true, and they just won't let themselves admit it.
We know it's wrong to commit murder.
We know it's wrong to eat human beings.
We know cannibalism is wrong.
Why is it wrong?
It just is.
We have a kind of wisdom of repugnance.
I've been watching Jeffrey Dahmer all last week.
He's been sending me these texts, I'm telling you.
But these are things, Leon Kass, the bioethicist, used a great phrase here, the wisdom of repugnance.
I guess I could come up with some argument as to why cannibalism is wrong, but I don't really need to.
We just kind of know that it is.
And this is true on so many moral issues, because we are endowed by our Creator with a moral conscience and with reason.
And so, I think, get people first, you just say, hey, buddy, We're not on a debate stage, okay?
It's just you and me, pal.
Just you and me here over stogies.
You're gonna admit to me, right, um, you know, uh, having sex with 500 women at a time, and then, you know, killing a bunch of orphan children, and then, you know, I don't know, going out and doing a bunch of heroin.
That's probably not good, right?
And they'd say, well, I don't want to admit that there's a moral reality, but I guess if it's just us, okay, I'll admit that that's true.
And once... Which, by the way, we all agree on that.
In the ancient world, in the ancient world, that was accepted morality.
For many, throughout the Bronze Age, throughout the Iron Age, and it's only with the coming of God and through Abraham, right, that we started to have this new moral order.
That came through, because there were societies that practiced child sacrifice.
That happened in the Americas all the way up through the time of Columbus, by the way.
Go look at the Cahokia Mounds out in Illinois, right on the banks of the Mississippi, where the teenagers were murdered because they wanted good crops.
You saw child sacrifice to Moloch for years.
These were real things that actually happened in our world.
And we find in Peru, every day it feels like there's a new article about finding some mass grave of children.
And so there's this idea, by the way, this is the reason that when the Aztecs were overthrown by the Spanish, that many of the other tribes joined with Cortes To go after the Aztecs because they didn't want to have to keep sending their children to be ritualistically slaughtered in these arcane pagan practices.
Made MS-13 look like Boy Scouts.
Oh, easily, easily.
And so this idea, and I've just, you know, just came back actually from Israel about one week ago, went to the Holy Land with my family, and incredible, just absolutely incredible, and I agree with everything you said about the idea of a universal morality and this idea of trying to get them to at least admit that... By the way, this is the reason that simulation theory is such a cope, by the way.
Simulation theory is a cope by the secularists because they have to admit that things just work a little bit too well for it to evolve in random.
And so they couldn't, you know, this whole life was seeded by aliens theory didn't quite go anywhere because they don't have any aliens to point to.
So now the new one is simulation theory and say, well, what if some creator came and constructed this reality?
And we're just programs and sprites living within the reality.
And there's some greater plan, like a program, for example.
And I said, well, yeah, that St.
Paul's been saying that for 2000 years.
So, but, you know, and you can walk through all that.
But for me, you know, I'm probably just going to go up to them and, you know, they start They'll understand the Latin about as well as they'll understand the English.
But it's worth a valiant effort, I think.
It's really worth a good try.
And look, on that point, I was never really a Lib, but I was an atheist for ten years.
I know plenty of people who, at the religious level, are converts.
Yeah, that's true.
They'll understand the Latin about as well as they'll understand the English.
But it's worth a valiant effort, I think.
It's really worth a good try.
And look, I mean, on that point, I was never really a lib, but I was an atheist for 10 years.
I know plenty of people who at the religious level are converts.
Hey, we all have regrets.
That's right.
Yeah, no, I mean, I know people who have converted religiously.
I know people who have changed their mind politically, some in a dramatic way.
And so these little conversations really do matter.
It's why, I'll speak for myself, I assume it's true of you too, Jack, it's why we come out to the college campuses, because every so often you get someone who comes up to you and says, you know, this one random thing you said that you probably forgot, that actually got me thinking, and then I read this guy, and then I looked this up, and then it really, you know, kind of changed my way of viewing things.
And so, I wouldn't give up.
As we said earlier, getting blackpilled is just a total... It's very stupid.
It's very sinful.
You shouldn't do it.
Have hope.
We're called to have hope.
It's a theological fact.
We're gonna win anyway in the end, and we're gonna have a good time fighting in the meantime.
Thank you all so much!
By the way, guys, we are winning, and we're going to win.
And ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being out here tonight.
Thank you for taking part of this, for Turning Point USA.
Make sure to go to TPUSA.com.
I'm trying to think of what, you know, what are the advertisements supposed to be?
AmericaFest is coming up.
Phoenix, Arizona.
So it's going to be the week before Christmas.
I believe it's December 17th.
It kicks off Phoenix, Arizona.
Myself, Candice, Charlie Kirk will be headlining the entire thing.
Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon is going to be speaking.
Fantastic event.
I don't know if it's announced yet, but...
I also will be.
I don't know if we've announced it yet.
It's an exclusive announcement.
Michael will be there.
That was a condition of him coming to speak tonight, but make sure you go.
And of course, the promo code is promo code POSO for 25% off.
And I encourage all of you to also come out and support my organization, Blexit.
