Jan. 19, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Monday was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. | ||
| Day, and as is the case with almost everything lately, virtually everyone on social media seemed to parse out MLK's words for whatever narrative they're currently pushing in our modern times. | ||
| I saw articles on how MLK was the first environmentalist, how he was an ardent feminist, a communist, a socialist, and much more. | ||
| The one quote I tweeted of his is perhaps his most famous. | ||
| I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. | ||
| I believe this quote to be as relevant now as it was in the early 1960s, but for a whole other set of reasons. | ||
| In the 1960s, MLK was fighting for equality under the law and equality of opportunity, two things we should all absolutely believe in. | ||
| Today, those who judge people by the color of their skin and not the content of their character are fighting not for equality, But for special treatment of some at the exclusion of others. | ||
| This misguided principle, thinking you should treat someone differently because of their skin color, or thinking someone should believe what you think they should believe because of their skin color, or any other immutable characteristic, is the essence of prejudice, which means to prejudge. | ||
| This is the complete reverse of what MLK stood for, and sadly, this way of thinking has infected the modern left almost completely. | ||
| This is why, like myself, so many of you find yourselves on the outside of a political bubble that you were once safely part of. | ||
| For this Direct Message, I don't want to focus on the flaws of identity politics. | ||
| Instead, I want to focus on one of the other topics I just mentioned, socialism. | ||
| And for the purposes of this message, I want to put aside whether MLK was a capitalist or a communist or a socialist or a hybrid of any of them. | ||
| What I want to discuss is some of the reaction around the word socialism itself. | ||
| The amount of people I see talking about socialism positively is actually staggering. | ||
| A tweet I sent out saying socialism isn't cool even got me into a little exchange on Twitter with the official verified socialist party who explained to me that socialism has actually never been tried, which is why we don't know if it'll work yet. | ||
| Perhaps they should tell that to the people of Venezuela right now who are fighting for food and basic services as they watch their socialist system collapse on top of them. | ||
| The ideas of socialism, that the means of production, distribution and labor should be owned, controlled and regulated by the community as a whole, are the worst sort of collectivist ideas which exist. | ||
| The very implication that the group knows what is good for the individual, that we exist to do things for the greater good, is totally antithetical to the purpose of being human It's your job to find value in your work, to strive for more than you have, to bring good to yourself and the people around you, and to live as a free person as you see fit. | ||
| The very idea that you should set aside your individuality for the community as a whole, which virtually always turns into an intolerant hostile mob, is exactly why so many have died in socialist regimes. | ||
| Despite the obvious failures of socialism, socialists have no problem using the freedoms of capitalism against itself. | ||
| This is perhaps the most perverse part of the socialist worldview. | ||
| Much like Islamism, socialism wants to use our freedoms against us until it attains complete power. | ||
| For example, they use the tools of Twitter and Facebook, companies created through the ingenuity of individuals and the freedom of capitalism, to attack the very system that By the way, I'm all for them being able to do this even if I don't like what they're doing. | ||
| That's the tricky part of freedom. | ||
| It even applies to people and ideas you don't like. | ||
| Just think for a moment if we had a socialist government in charge right now. | ||
| How do you think it would be going for free expression and free speech? | ||
| How tolerant would they be of all the people they label Nazis and bigots? | ||
| Whatever you may think of Donald Trump and the evil capitalists, are they the ones coming for anyone's speech right now? | ||
| Are reporters being put in jail? | ||
| Actually, President Obama used the Espionage Act to put a record number of reporters in jail, and as far as I know, Trump, who dislikes the press, to put it mildly, hasn't put anyone in prison for the crime of journalism. | ||
| Fortunately, I see a rising tide in America based on liberty, freedom, and individual choice. | ||
| Note how those words themselves are somehow thought of as evil in the socialist lexicon. | ||
| Liberty, freedom, and individual choice must all be sacrificed for the greater good. | ||
| Though what they're not telling you is that the greater good is usually for the tiny minority in the elite protected class. | ||
| Their ideas have never worked and will never work because a system built on stripping our humanity is in direct conflict with what it means to be human. | ||
| I've said it before and I'll say it again, this perfect system which they wish to create can never be perfect because we humans, as flawed as we are, are part of it. | ||
| Imperfect beings cannot create a perfect system, but what we can create is a system that always does its best to further the advancement of human freedom. | ||
| For all its flaws, this is what capitalism is, which is why if you're watching this from a capitalist society, you should consider yourself one of the lucky ones. | ||
| Of course, in America, politicians don't outright call themselves socialists, they say that they're democratic socialists. | ||
| This is Bernie Sanders' mantra as he calls for a revolution of every kind, be it political, social, or even environmental, whatever that means. | ||
| What Bernie forgets, or intentionally obfuscates, is that the democratic part of this of course will always be tossed away as socialism takes root. | ||
| It's also why there's no doubt in my mind that eventually the social justice movement will turn on Bernie himself and I think there's already plenty of evidence of that. | ||
| Democracy is the enemy of socialism and Bernie's trying to have it both ways. | ||
| There's also a reason that the social justice movement has such a socialist strain within it. | ||
| Both of these movements, based on frowning on achievement and accomplishment, and a resentment of those who break the mold, need people to be oppressed, or at least believe that they're oppressed, to survive. | ||
| Creativity, free thought, and the pursuit of your own happiness is the antidote to both social justice and socialism. | ||
| It's either that or a life of bitterness, resentment and jealousy, which in my view | ||
| is less socialism and more just anti-social. | ||
| Joining me today is the founder and director of Turning Point USA, a student organization | ||
| for young conservatives which advocates for free markets and limited government. | ||
| Charlie Kirk, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Glad to be here. | ||
| Big fan. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| Young conservatives. | ||
| I thought there was no such thing. | ||
| That was like the Yeti or the unicorn or Falcor or something. | ||
| There's more of us than you might imagine. | ||
| It's not all conservatives. | ||
| Some are libertarians, some are free thinkers, independents, people on the center right. | ||
| We just had that amazing conference that you were nice enough to come down and speak at in Florida. | ||
| 2,600, 700 students from all 50 states. | ||
| And it was so funny, I couldn't pay the media outlets to cover this thing, you know. | ||
| I was calling up the New York Times, Washington Post. | ||
| Here we had, you know, thousands of students giving up their winter break to come here from, you know, you and me and the best speakers, you know, that advocate for freedom, and none of the media outlets and the traditional media outlets covered it. | ||
| But it's amazing. | ||
| There is a, there is a revolution happening on these campuses, but it's not, it's not against, you know, conservatives, all this. | ||
| It's a new train of thought That we want freedom, we want smaller government, but it's also fighting the culture war, which is for free speech, for diversity of ideas, and really against what these college campuses have created. | ||
| Yes, so you're in the thick of a lot of the things, obviously, that we talk about here. | ||
| So first, I just want to talk briefly about how we met, because I think it kind of shows how you operate and why Turning Point has taken off. | ||
| So we had met about a month and a half ago at the Horowitz Freedom Center event in Palm Springs. | ||
| Were you a panelist there? | ||
| Yeah, I was a panelist and just kind of helicoptering around. | ||
| I have a lot of friends that, you know, attend that conference. | ||
| Yeah, so you were there and everyone was like, oh, you gotta meet Charlie Kirk, you gotta meet Charlie Kirk. | ||
| We met for two seconds. | ||
| You said a couple nice things about me and you're like, you know, we're doing this, our gig in Palm Springs in a couple weeks. | ||
| Why don't you come down and talk? | ||
| And immediately, we worked it out, and your guys sent me the paperwork the next day, and it was done. | ||
| And I think that does illustrate something, because we're gonna get into some of the issues that we agree on and some of the things we disagree on. | ||
| But basically, you were like, look, you're down for free speech, that's the main thing here, and I want my audience to hear you talk about that. | ||
| Well, you're a rational thinker, which is really rare to find in California. | ||
| I'm kidding. | ||
| But no, I mean, I'm a big fan of the show, and I watch a lot of your interviews, and I know you have a huge following amongst young people, and I mean, I met you, and I was like, yeah, let's get you on board. | ||
| I've always been a gut player, for better or for worse. | ||
| It's gotten me into a little bit of trouble at times. | ||
| Yeah, but I think net it's been positive. | ||
| You just have to you have to go with your gut and make quick decisions and similar That's where I met Candace Owens, too Who is now doing a wonderful job with us and yeah took me about 45 seconds until I offered her a job So literally, I think it happened right in front of me and then you walked up to me That's right. | ||
| Candace was like I just got a job and you were like, let me do something with you And I was just like, all right. | ||
| Look this guy's obviously Open to some different people in totally in the scheme of what's going on You need the diversity of ideas, right? | ||
| If you're in a room where everyone thinks exactly the same, that would be a university. | ||
| So you need the diversity of ideas and you need to be able to challenge your viewpoint around a broader theme of freedom that really is okay to have that sort of discussion. | ||
| Yeah, so to illustrate that point, so then about, I think it was the week before Christmas, you guys do this. | ||
| Was it the largest conservative college group conference ever? | ||
| We're waiting for someone to correct us. | ||
| We've done some research. | ||
| We have never found anything even close. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And to have 2,650 students from all 50 states, no one's really found anything even comparable of size. | ||
| So we call it the largest until someone corrects us. | ||
| Yeah, well, you had some protesters out there. | ||
| They show up all the time to everything. | ||
| But there was true diversity of thought there. | ||
| I mean, it was also sort of a Rubin Report reunion for me because Prager was there and Gutfeld was there. | ||
| All my best friends. | ||
| And Candace was there, obviously, and a whole bunch of other people. | ||
| Trump Jr. | ||
| was there, just a series of people. | ||
| I went up there, and I talked about being gay married, and I talked about being pro-choice, and a bunch of other things that, if you were to poll the average conservative, that perhaps they're not for. | ||
| I think gay marriage, maybe it's a little different at this point. | ||
| But I got a standing ovation, and everywhere that I went. | ||
| Multiple times. | ||
| Yeah, a bunch of times. | ||
| And everywhere that I went, For those two, three days that I was there, and by no means was this just me, I mean, Ben Shapiro came out, it was like... It was like Elvis, it was unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah, I was gonna say, it was like the Rolling Stones appeared. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| It was nuts. | ||
| But that happened to everybody. | ||
| I went for breakfast, I need coffee before I talk to people, yet I'm literally, there's a line of a hundred people waiting. | ||
| They just start popping up, it's like they start swarming. | ||
| Yeah, but that said something to me, beyond the politics, that there's something else going on with young people right now, where they actually, as the young people say, they're really woke to what's happening here. | ||
| Well, and it's that diversity of ideas that I think illustrates what makes our organization so unique. | ||
| So a reporter came up to me, and he was a totally dishonest guy. | ||
| He's like, well, this feels like a Donald Trump rally. | ||
| And I said, how could you possibly say that? | ||
| Sure, we have Trump Jr., we have Gorka, we also have Austin Peterson, who ran for president in the Libertarian Party. | ||
| Yeah, I love Austin. | ||
| We have Rubin, who is not a leftist anymore, but he's somewhere out there, right? | ||
| He believes in freedom, right? | ||
| We have Ben Shapiro, who literally led the Never Trump movement. | ||
| Right? | ||
| We have a huge diversity of ideas, and each speaker was respected, was given standing ovations, was challenged appropriately, and I think that really says something about this new conservatarian movement that we're helping create. | ||
| Which is, we don't have to agree on 100% of conservative dogma. | ||
| Let's just get the big stuff right. | ||
| The big stuff. | ||
| Is America a great country? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Is free enterprise a good thing? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Is freedom something that we should really embrace as a general idea? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Is socialism bad? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's just pretty much the main key points and the rest of the stuff we can argue and disagree with respectfully. | ||
| Yeah, when did you wake up to some of this stuff? | ||
| Just tell me a little bit about growing up and your situation with family politics back then. | ||
| I was a crazy, crazy kid growing up. | ||
| Grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. | ||
| Always was a conservative Republican. | ||
| Growing up around a lot of leftists and liberals in my public high school. | ||
| And how are you young and conservative? | ||
| Because I loved history and I was always contrarian, right? | ||
| So I'd always be challenging my teachers. | ||
| My parents were generally Republican, right? | ||
| They weren't, you know, necessarily political, but they were center, right? | ||
| O'Reilly Factor watching, you know, Republicans that I always used to say. | ||
| And then I would always just challenge teachers that would say that, you know, all conservatives want to do is kill poor people and, you know, pollute the environment. | ||
| The typical talking points, right? | ||
| And being the kind of, you know, rebel, I guess you could say, I'd always challenge the teachers and say, well, no, Ronald Reagan, Lifted more people out of poverty than your crazy social programs at Jimmy Carter. | ||
| It drove them nuts and I found enjoyment in it. | ||
| The further down that rabbit hole you get, the more you read Milton Friedman, the more you understand the foundational principles and ideas. | ||
| At a young age, I just became on fire for politics and for economics. | ||
| Long story short, I started this organization when I was 18 instead of going to college and it ended up being a wonderful decision. | ||
| Helped really place myself in a movement that was waiting to be grown and this is something a lot bigger than just | ||
| Politics this is the fight for the soul of the country and it has to start on college campuses | ||
| And it's really the struggle for our generation, and it's it's really if you divide it | ||
| It's do we want do we believe America's the greatest country in the history of the world and do we believe | ||
| freedoms a good thing? | ||
| Or do we want to go a completely different direction that looks much more like a European socialist democracy that | ||
| does not honor civil liberties That does not honor private property and really deteriorates | ||
| everything that made America a great place That's the decision our generation has to make. | ||
| It's kind of funny, you're sort of like the non-Silicon Valley version of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, the guy that didn't go to college or dropped out of college, but now you're talking to college people. | ||
| When did you realize that that was the place that this battle had to be fought? | ||
| Yeah, the first couple years of starting Turning Point USA, it started as kind of a generic student organization, but just like any good innovator and entrepreneur, I listened, and I learned, and I realized there was such frustration amongst self-identified conservative libertarians on campus that were not being properly channeled and organized. | ||
| They felt as if they were being targeted. | ||
| And that they were being suppressed, and their ideas were not being allowed to be heard. | ||
| And we made a decision at Turning Point after a couple of years is, let's not just fight the political war, let's double down and fight the culture war. | ||
| And that we can be the champions of free speech, and we can be the ambassadors of freedom, where really you see these campuses, I call them islands of totalitarianism. | ||
| You know, their idea of diversity is a group of people that all look different, but they think the same. | ||
| That's not diversity. | ||
| And so Turning Point has benefited tremendously over the last couple years of really being the champions of free speech and also saying, hey, we're not Republicans. | ||
| We're not conservatives. | ||
| We're not libertarians. | ||
| You can call us all that stuff. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| We have members that are across that whole spectrum. | ||
| As long as you believe in freedom, you believe America is a great country. | ||
| Welcome aboard. | ||
| Do you think the idea of having that kind of wide tent is part of the appeal? | ||
| I think people are so sick of the labels and all that that it was cool. | ||
| I spent actually most of the weekend hanging out with Austin, but part of it also hanging out with Tommy and Candace and a whole bunch of other people, and I was like, there really is. | ||
| And then Allison Stuckey was there and a couple other people, and I was like, wow, these people actually really do think different things. | ||
| And my libertarian side usually goes to kind of where Austin's at, but I was like, We were all having dinner after and having drinks. | ||
| But that's a great thing, man. | ||
| And I was like, this is great. | ||
| We're having real discussions about, we're really digging into this stuff. | ||
| And there is that disagreement, but if you put them all in a room, they get the big stuff right. | ||
| Do we believe that free enterprise has been a net positive for humanity? | ||
| Do we believe the Constitution is a great political document that should be preserved, protected, and better understood? | ||
| Do we believe America has been a wonderful, you know, net benefit for humanity, you know, over the last 200 years? | ||
| They probably agree, wholeheartedly and all that. | ||
| It's the other stuff where they start to have little philosophical differences. | ||
| But that disagreement is not being found on the left right now. | ||
| If you disagree with one core tenant of leftist dogma, you're ostracized. | ||
| You're kicked out. | ||
| And that shows they're not a diverse political movement, the new modern American left. | ||
| They're extremely intolerant of differing opinions, and I don't have to talk for you. | ||
| I mean, I'll just let you take the stage now. | ||
| Now you're acting as my agent, but listen, I would gladly, I said this when I had Shapiro on last week, I will gladly give the exact same speech that I gave to you guys a couple weeks ago. | ||
| I would love to give that exact same speech to any progressive or democratic. | ||
| And you got a standing ovation! | ||
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With a MAGA hat wearing students, right? | |
| But you give that speech to the Young Democrat Socialists of America Conference coming up in a couple months. | ||
| You'll get boos and you'll get, WE SHOULDN'T HEAR THINGS WE DISAGREE WITH! | ||
| You know, Bolshevik forever. | ||
| These people have translated into total authoritarianism. | ||
| Do you see a moment where both of the movements, where you would argue the conservatives sort of lost their place, thus lost the culture war, and where the left sort of went bananas? | ||
| Yeah, I think the left has gone bananas just by default of their positions. | ||
| Really, inside of every leftist is a totalitarian waiting to, you know, screaming to get out. | ||
| It's a great quote I always use. | ||
| It's because when you argue for total government power and total government control of health care and schools and private economic decisions, that can easily be translated into the monitorance of personal capacity decisions, right? | ||
| That translation is quite simple, and I always say to a leftist, That says, well, I believe in, you know, civil liberties, but I also believe in government-run schools and healthcare. | ||
| And as I say, if you don't trust the government to help, you know, to monitor your own personal life, why on earth would you trust the government to run all these other institutions? | ||
| Where I think conservatives have gotten it wrong over the last 30 years is where conservatives have become mislabeled, and sometimes some conservatives believe this, to want to do social engineering. | ||
| I think, I'm an evangelical Christian, I'm a pro-life conservative, but I also believe government should have barriers in trying to instill those values upon society. | ||
| I think the best persuasion and the best capacity for good is done through churches and local community movements and individuals persuading individuals and writing books and doing podcasts, not through government doing massive social engineering programs. | ||
| So I think that's where conservatives have lost their way and that's where the left is currently trying to stake their claim. | ||
| Is there anything that you think government does well? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I think government is a necessary evil. | ||
| I think it's necessary for providing for the national defense, because that is something that, whether we like it or not, you have to delegate some of our personal freedom to, you know, have some sort of a civil society. | ||
| But government, by its essence, if you read what Milton Friedman has said, they're incentivized to be inefficient. | ||
| They're incentivized, by definition, to not be able to provide the best possible good or service for the individual. | ||
| So, look, the private sector does everything better, whether it be the inefficiency of the post office, Medicare is bankrupt, Social Security doesn't serve the people, you know, effectively, everything government touches goes to crap. | ||
| And the private sector is, by definition, more efficient, because if you don't do it well, you're not going to exist much longer. | ||
| What do you think is the best way of getting that message across, that government just doesn't do things well? | ||
| Because I think it's just so built into people, partly because our education system screwed up or whatever, that they just feel the government should just do things. | ||
| So I saw Bernie tweeted the other day this video of all these millionaires saying that- And I responded to that. | ||
| Yeah, so I retweeted it, which got like 20,000 retweets, because it was like, it's all these millionaires saying, we should be taxed more, we should be taxed more. | ||
| What intellectual hypocrisy? | ||
| It's such lies. | ||
| It's like, well, A, what's stopping you from paying? | ||
| That's what I said! | ||
| Just send more money to the IRS, numbskull! | ||
| But it's like, okay, so, but yet, Bernie's tweet gets something like 50,000 retweets, and not that it's all about retweets and all that. | ||
| No, but it's true. | ||
| He has high engagement with this nonsense. | ||
| But to me, it's just lazy thinking. | ||
| It is lazy thinking. | ||
| If this is so virtuous, if it's so virtuous to keep giving money to the government, why do you need the government to tell you to do it? | ||
| And really, at its core, if you look at the philosophical difference between the culturally Marxist left, which is what they're becoming, and the free-thinking, individual, libertarian, conservative right, which is the new intellectual position that is growing quicker than even the left, it's We might want good things to happen in society, but don't tell me to do them at gunpoint. | ||
| And the left, on the other hand, I don't think their intentions are very good. | ||
| I think they want permanent political power. | ||
| but bernie sanders for example he's so convicted that he is right he wants to | ||
| use the absolute authority on and unlimited power of the state | ||
| to put a gun to your head and say you have to have a seventy percent tax rate because | ||
| someone is starving on the street | ||
| i would rather live in a society that has the same tax rate for everyone ten | ||
| percent and we dig deeply say are we gonna take care of the person | ||
| on the street through charity | ||
| through private philanthropy and to being better people and if you look at | ||
| when socialism is implemented you see the moral disintegration of society. | ||
| You look at Spain, you look at France, you look at Europe. | ||
| They don't have anything as private philanthropy anymore. | ||
| Private charity has disappeared in Europe, because government takes care of it. | ||
| And I think that is such an important point to make. | ||
| So going back to your question, how do you illustrate this to a young person? | ||
| You ask the fundamental question, do you trust the government? | ||
| That word trust is so important. | ||
| Because in that word trust, it really feels personal, right? | ||
| Do you trust the government? | ||
| 99% of young people will say no. | ||
| Then you ask the next question, then why do you want to make government bigger? | ||
| And they'll say, I don't. | ||
| Well then you're not a socialist, you're not a leftist. | ||
| Then let's talk about how we can really shrink the size of government and put power back into the hands of people. | ||
| And it's important to note also, even though you think government might want to do something, it doesn't mean federal government has to do it. | ||
| Local government is much more accountable to the citizens than some bureaucrat in D.C. | ||
| that you're never going to meet. | ||
| And so those are those are arguments that, you know, we found to be very effective. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| You mentioned intentions, and I always try my best not to impugn intentions of others. | ||
| I think that, especially on the left right now, obviously, I think these people have a lot of bad ideas. | ||
| Now, of course, some of them have bad intentions, but most of them don't. | ||
| Most average people don't wake up thinking, I'm going to do bad today. | ||
| They actually think they're doing good. | ||
| Most of them, yeah. | ||
| Do you think some of their leaders actually have bad intentions? | ||
| Without a doubt, yes, absolutely. | ||
| Not all of them, but some of them. | ||
| And you look back to the original writings and the original thought process behind the Great Society, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who bragged on multiple times that the implementation of the Great Society and all the social programs around it will keep African Americans dependent and keep them voting for generations. | ||
| Documented in the presidential record, Lyndon Baines Johnson said that. | ||
| And so I think the Democratic Party is full of people with great intentions. | ||
| But its leaders have realized and calculated that if they can keep the government programs continuing for just long enough, not getting people out of poverty, but keep people surviving within poverty, they will have a permanent political base. | ||
| So if you ask the question, if African Americans actually rose out of poverty, And saw their wages get higher and their schools get better and their communities, you know, flourish. | ||
| Are they going to keep voting for government welfare programs that are the basis of the Democratic Party? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| They're going to break out of that. | ||
| So I think the intentions of the Democratic Party, the followers, I'm never ever going to impugn them. | ||
| I'm not going to call them deplorables or anything like they call us. | ||
| I think most of the followers of the Democratic Party are actually really good people. | ||
| But the leaders, we must question their motives because if you look at the failures Of the welfare system in this country, it is undoubtable that they're protecting a system that benefits them politically. | ||
| Is this also partly why the media is going so hysterical right now? | ||
| Like, have you noticed just in the last couple weeks, we've shifted a little bit out of Russia hysteria, but now it's about Trump's mental capacity. | ||
| And it's like you can see how they coordinate it. | ||
| I mean you really, if you just look, you can see. | ||
| They got like a group text message chain going. | ||
| I'm telling you, they got like John King, Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow. | ||
| I think they're all just group texting. | ||
| I'm not kidding. | ||
| How far down that conspiracy theory can you go? | ||
| I mean, when you start to have all three television stations open up, CBS This Morning and CNN, you know, with Cuomo and MSNBC with Morning Joe, and they're talking about the exact same thing. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| The segments are literally produced the same. | ||
| I don't think that's a conspiracy. | ||
| There's got to be some sort of talking points memo they send out. | ||
| Early in the morning. | ||
| But does that show you a talking points memo, or just general group think? | ||
| No, I think it's general group think, but also I think they understand that they have to be coordinated to be effective, which, there's nothing, I think, wrong with that, effectively. | ||
| We conservatives do the same thing, without even realizing it. | ||
| You listen to Rush Limbaugh, you listen to Dennis Prager, and you listen to Sean Hannity, the talking points are usually quite similar, because, you know, you watch Fox and Friends in the morning, that kind of sets the agenda, and I'm not attacking the Democrats for being that, but If you look at why the media is going so far off the rails, it's they will never accept the fact that this presidency is actually large in part a wonderful success, is that the president is fulfilling his campaign promises, we're seeing unprecedented economic prosperity, and you're seeing people's lives actually get better. | ||
| And so they have to go down to this tabloid journalism and report on this fake book. | ||
| They have to continue down this Russia hysteria, because if this president succeeds, which he is and he will, What else do they have? | ||
| They have gone so far all in that this guy is a psychopathic nutjob, they will lose all institutional credibility and political relevance. | ||
| You know, it's funny, right when Trump started the campaign, I kept saying that if you keep calling this guy Hitler, You are painting yourself into a really bad corner. | ||
| And it cheapens Hitler, too. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| Hitler was one of the worst mass murderers in human history who killed 15 million people. | ||
| And they have people once a week on those networks equate him to the rise of the Third Reich. | ||
| What does that do? | ||
| It cheapens the evil of Hitler. | ||
| And isn't that one of the worst things you could possibly do when we're trying to educate the next generation? | ||
| Everyone's Hitler, no one's Hitler. | ||
| Then maybe what Hitler did wasn't that bad. | ||
| Maybe Hitler was democratically elected and had a Supreme Court that kept him in balance. | ||
| You see what I'm saying? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| You know, it cheapens the evil of the Nazi empire when they start to make these comparisons to Donald Trump and Hitler. | ||
| It's really... And also the way this stuff just goes downstream. | ||
| I mean, because then you start calling all your intellectual opponents Nazis, then you say it's okay to punch Nazis. | ||
| Well, where does that end? | ||
| Can we punch the Nazis twice? | ||
| Can we blow up their car? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I'm called a Nazi all the time. | ||
| I mean, it's one of the most intellectually dangerous arguments to make. | ||
| When everyone becomes a fascist, even though there is no evidence of that, what really has your political movement become? | ||
| Where'd the words freedom and liberty and the words that I now use a lot, how did they get so mucked up that they started feeling wrong? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| In the cultural relevance of things. | ||
| Well, I think it's starting with the misrepresentation of what freedom and liberty really is. | ||
| I mean, the left tries to be the movement of freedom. | ||
| A lot of young people that follow Bernie Sanders actually think they're on the side of freedom. | ||
| They think that Bernie Sanders is fighting for political freedom and economic freedom and that he's going to fight for the little guy, when in reality, when his ideas are implemented, which he's an open socialist, The power always gets concentrated at the top. | ||
| The rulers are the ones that get rich. | ||
| The people that have the best connections, the best lobbyists, are the ones that benefit tremendously. | ||
| You look no further than Venezuela or Cuba or anywhere where socialism is tried. | ||
| It's the poor people that voted these guys into power that are worst off. | ||
| And so we have to be able to make the argument. | ||
| Freedom is not only a really cool thing. | ||
| Freedom is not only a great idea, but it actually works. | ||
| Like, freedom, when implemented, actually makes people's lives better. | ||
| You know, freedom would be a difficult argument if it was not only, like, really cool to make the argument, like, yeah, you can do whatever you want to do, when you want to do it, how you want to do it. | ||
| That would be great. | ||
| But we actually get to make the argument that in practicality, freedom is the greatest thing to make people's lives better. | ||
| For innovations, for medical advances, for technological prosperity, nothing comes even close to allowing freedom to ensue. | ||
| So what do you say when someone says, I hear this all the time, you know, well if the government doesn't do these things, these social programs, or if the government takes away food stamps, or whatever it is, that we just don't know. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| the private sector or churches and synagogues, whatever it was. | ||
| We just don't know that that'll pick up the slack. | ||
| And then if that doesn't happen, we end up with this permanent class of under, | ||
| economically underserved people that have no way of getting out of it. | ||
| So fundamentally disagree with that. | ||
| And so this is where the worldviews, I think, collide. | ||
| It's where the left, they try to build this... I think a lot of it is trying for guilt, right? | ||
| They actually want to help as many people as possible. | ||
| They feel so bad that people are suffering. | ||
| They want someone else to do it for them. | ||
| So the first thing I do is I challenge them. | ||
| How much money are you giving to charity? | ||
| How much are you doing to actually help the homeless guy in the side corner? | ||
| And then what if 10 million people did what you did? | ||
| Secondly, never underestimate the good that Americans will do when people are in need. | ||
| Hurricanes, natural disasters, famines, fires. | ||
| Americans always step up. | ||
| Americans voluntarily gave $500 billion away to charity last year. | ||
| Imagine if our tax rate was 10%. | ||
| Imagine if there was really a national rallying call to double our charitable efforts. | ||
| We can easily give away trillions of dollars. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Trillions of dollars. | ||
| That's the size of the welfare state. | ||
| And I would make a compelling argument that local churches, charities, and municipalities do a heck of a lot better job of serving the people than the federal government bureaucrat. | ||
| A lot better. | ||
| You know, sending money to Washington, D.C., is that actually going to help the poor single mother in Miami? | ||
| Or is going to the local Catholic Church and giving $5,000, which might be a lot of money to you, actually going to help them a lot more than sending that $5,000 to Washington, D.C.? | ||
| I will argue fiercely against someone who says that a government bureaucrat is going to help an underprivileged individual better than a private charity or individuals helping individuals. | ||
| So you said a couple nice things about Trump. | ||
| So I wanna get into some of the specifics on that. | ||
| Please. | ||
| So one of the things that I've said is that Trump basically was the bull in the China shop and he just went in and just upended everything. | ||
| And I actually think that right now, that's a net good because there were a lot of bad things happening before and there's some fertile ground for good ideas. | ||
| So on that level, I'm for what's happening. | ||
| When I had Eric Weinstein sitting in that chair, he said that he would have preferred it to be a panther in a china shop, meaning it would have just knocked over a few things, maybe not the whole thing. | ||
| I don't think that that exists. | ||
| That was the point of our disagreement. | ||
| I just think it just doesn't exist where you get to selectively choose which things are gonna be knocked off the shelves and all that. | ||
| Seb Gorka was speaking at the Turning Point event. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gorka. | |
| Yeah, Gorka. | ||
| Gutfeld was doing this whole thing about how he sounds like. | ||
| Trust me, he was doing it backstage, and it continued on stage. | ||
| It just didn't stop. | ||
| But Gorka was saying how Trump was the, I think he said the icebreaker going through the glacier, basically. | ||
| And what I noticed, though, is there was a theme with the speakers where everyone basically acknowledged that there are issues with Trump. | ||
| I don't think anyone went up there and said this guy is, Sure. | ||
| the perfect thing or this is exactly how we wanted it. | ||
| But there was a sense of this was the only way it could have happened. | ||
| Is that basically where you fall? | ||
| So I'm one of the few outward and vocal millennial Trump supporters out there. | ||
| Not few, I should say. | ||
| In kind of this world of conservative punditry, if you will, everyone tries to hedge, right? | ||
| And there's some good and some bad, and I've obviously gone all in. | ||
| And I'm glad I have, and I'm happy to walk through the philosophical reasoning for that. | ||
| So look, Donald Trump was never supposed to be President of the United States. | ||
| Just going back a little bit, running in a crowded field of Republican candidates, announcing the day after Jeb Bush announced his candidacy, which I think was no coincidence. | ||
| And I think he saw Jeb Bush announce, like, screw it, if that guy's running, I'm running. | ||
| He took down the Bush dynasty that had $110 million to spend, and then took down the Clinton dynasty, took down the media dynasty in a way that's totally unprecedented. | ||
| And if you look at the values that he represents, in my personal opinion, he is one of the best chances Western civilization has to continue. | ||
| He believes America is the greatest country in the history of the world. | ||
| He's been a fierce critic of socialism. | ||
| His visit to Poland was a 40-minute critique of the fall of the USSR. | ||
| He believes that the Constitution is the greatest political document ever written. | ||
| Look no further than his appointment of Gorsuch and these circuit court judges. | ||
| More than any of that, he believes that America as an idea must be preserved, protected, and advanced. | ||
| and is he an imperfect vessel? Of course we're all imperfect vessels. Does he tweet | ||
| things that I might not always agree with? Yeah, sure. | ||
| But the ideas that he's implementing, I would make a compelling argument, | ||
| he's the most conservative president in a hundred years, even more so than | ||
| Ronald Reagan. | ||
| He is doing more bold reforms and he's fighting to do what he said he was going to do, even in the face of | ||
| unprecedented opposition, whether it be the embassy moving to Jerusalem, | ||
| opening up our natural resources, getting out of TPP, getting out of the Paris Climate Court Agreement. | ||
| This is stuff that is not supposed to happen, right? | ||
| Do you think Jeb Bush would be doing this? | ||
| I mean, give me a break. | ||
| No way. | ||
| So basically, do you think he was the last chance for conservatives? | ||
| I hesitate to say that. | ||
| Because I kind of think that's a compelling argument, that no, that if you look when McCain ran or Romney ran, Romney was against women with his binders of women. | ||
| They said, you know, McCain was racist, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| That to me, the most compelling argument is that none of these guys, you think Marco Rubio would have somehow beat Hillary? | ||
| Or Jeb would have somehow beat Hillary? | ||
| So that putting aside some of my reservations for a moment, This was the only way that any of these ideas were going to get through. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| So we play out the alternative scenario. | ||
| Hillary Clinton is president, and she has control of the Senate and control of the House, and she's just advancing this radically destructive Obama agenda. | ||
| Instead, Donald Trump, for any of the disagreements people might have around him, the results really speak for themselves. | ||
| The economic prosperity that we're seeing right now, the six trillion dollars of new wealth created in this country, but even more than that, I'm telling you, there was a referendum on the ballot. | ||
| And I was there in Wisconsin, I was there in Michigan, I was there in Pennsylvania with Donald Trump Jr. | ||
| for weeks on end. | ||
| The people that showed up to vote that hadn't voted in 30 years, do you know what they were really voting for? | ||
| They were voting that America is the greatest country in the history of the world, | ||
| and here's finally someone who's going to fiercely defend it against the permanent political class. | ||
| That's important. | ||
| Because who else to represent that permanent political class than Hillary Clinton? | ||
| Like, she was the worst person the Democrats could have put up in a change election. | ||
| Here's someone whose husband was impeached, who constantly cheated on her, | ||
| She's the most... | ||
| Uncharismatic, possible person to put up, and here's a guy who, you know what? | ||
| He's going to blow it up. | ||
| Great. | ||
| That's who I'm going to vote for. | ||
| And you look at a lot of what he's doing. | ||
| He has shrunk the size of a lot of these federal bureaucracies, and he's fighting a lot of these entrenched media and political establishments that, honestly, I never thought we would see such a champion against, which brings me great satisfaction. | ||
| What do you think about the intellectual side of Trump? | ||
| I get what you're saying, that the broad ideas of freedom and America and liberty and those things, and I basically agree that he does understand those things. | ||
| In terms of just the intellectual or philosophical side, do you think he really has an understanding of the issues, or do you think that maybe isn't even important? | ||
| I don't think it's that important. | ||
| I've spent considerable time with him and his family, and I can say this. | ||
| His understanding of why America is the greatest country in the history of the world, why free enterprise matters, and actually how to benefit countries as a whole, is just as good, if not better, than some of these politicians that might be able to recite all these intellectual and philosophical quotes. | ||
| Because this is a president that, you know what, he's been through bankruptcy trials. | ||
| He's been through hiring and firing hundreds of people. | ||
| And, you know, you running a business and me running a business, that develops character in someone, you just gotta say. | ||
| making payroll, dealing with regulators, versus some of these senators that have been | ||
| orators and thinkers their whole life, give me a break, right? | ||
| So I have a deep amount of respect. | ||
| It doesn't bother me that CNN says, oh, he talks at a fourth grade level. | ||
| Give me a break, seriously. | ||
| He talks the way that the guy in Northeast Iowa has been waiting for someone to talk to in a while. | ||
| So I completely dismiss that as an argument, and I look at what he's accomplished as a person, | ||
| which is totally amazing, and what he's fighting for every single day, | ||
| he gets the big stuff correct. | ||
| He really does. | ||
| And I challenge some of my critics on the right. | ||
| Who else in that field of 17 Republican candidates would have nominated Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, moved the embassy, advocated for the greatest middle class tax cut in American history, not backed down on some of these core issues? | ||
| It's really, if I would have said, here is XYZ candidate, let's just pretend this is in the Republican primary, and in the first 11 months we'd get this done, most conservative pundits would say, where do I sign? | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| And he has advanced more conservative pro-freedom libertarian ideas than any of these candidates, most of these candidates would have. | ||
| So then what do you make of the conservative class that hates him? | ||
| So I'm talking about like the David Frum crew, that whole French, the rest of these guys that really just hate him, even though I agree he has put forth a lot of the ideas that they've been yammering about for the last 20 years. | ||
| I mean, look, I have a lot of respect for those publications, because of their history. | ||
| I'm just, I'm challenged. | ||
| I'm really wondering, is it a personal vendetta they have against this guy? | ||
| Is it a personality disagreement? | ||
| Because policy-wise, and implementation of the people he's put in place to make decisions of the cabinet positions, I mean, this is a much more conservative president than George W. Bush, and remarkably more effective than H.W., and already in 12 months, much more consequential than Ronald Reagan. | ||
| And so I'm wondering, the ball's in their court, right? | ||
| Because to be so hypercritical just automatically against someone who is fighting for your ideas every single day, I'm really wondering, is it a personality disagreement or is it kind of just, I don't want to be wrong type of thing, like I'm cheering for his demise because I've opposed him for so long. | ||
| I think it's also I just want to be liked by mainstream. | ||
| Which is the other thing, right? | ||
| I've now created a whole new form of enemies I never thought possible, which is like these rabid media elites that are like, oh, he's close to the Trump people, we must try to destroy him. | ||
| I'm like, alright, fine, whatever. | ||
| And the hatred for this man is uncalled for. | ||
| Is there anything that he's doing that you're not happy with? | ||
| So I'll give you something. | ||
| So that's a great question. | ||
| So I'll give you something just in the last 10 days. | ||
| And I think you know what you're gonna say, and I'll probably agree with you on that. | ||
| Okay, so in the last 10 days, so he basically instructed Jeff Sessions. | ||
| We were gonna agree on that. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| So to me, states' rights, if you care about that Constitution that you said he loved so much, and all those things, the states should be able to make laws that they want, and the federal government should not impede on those laws. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| We have something called the 10th Amendment, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| So in a case like this, what's happening there? | ||
| How is there such a disconnect between the ideas of freedom that you have laid out so eloquently and then what Sessions is doing in practice? | ||
| I can't explain it well and I won't defend it because I don't agree with it. | ||
| Look, I'm a big defender of individual freedom and liberty and I get a lot of hate from my socialist conservative friends when I argue for decriminalization of drugs. | ||
| I've never done drugs in my life and I don't plan to, but if someone wants to do it, Cool, right? | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Put whatever you want to put in your body as long as it doesn't harm someone else. | ||
| So this is something that I think they're actually not making the correct decision on. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| I'm happy to say it. | ||
| I've said it publicly. | ||
| If I find someone like Jeff Sessions who gets most of the stuff right, he's been great on guns, he's been great on some of this other stuff, but I don't think he's correct on this marijuana issue. | ||
| And I don't think he's correct politically. | ||
| It's just the majority of Americans don't agree on this issue. | ||
| And to go after people that are peacefully doing business, that's really what they're going after is the financial On the financial transaction side. | ||
| That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. | ||
| That's not on the correct side of economic freedom. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| Disagreement is a healthy thing, right? | ||
| And we need to challenge our cabinet officials and challenge our leaders when we don't see eye to eye with them. | ||
| And I think this is something that I think runs in the face of some of our core beliefs and tenets. | ||
| Yeah, it just seems like so ideologically inconsistent to me. | ||
| It's like you've been fighting for states' rights. | ||
| He's been fighting for states' rights. | ||
| Look, even now you've got people on the left Fighting for state's rights. | ||
| Which is ridiculous. | ||
| Which makes no sense because now they're they're trying to defend sanctuary cities So now they're for states rights and against the federal government, right? | ||
| Doesn't make any sense. | ||
| But I will say this I think a lot of it is stemmed from this kind of old holdover war on drugs that Ronald Reagan declared in the 1980s, which was an abysmal and total failure. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The statistics speak for themselves that, you know, the war on recreational marijuana has not been a net benefit for the taxpayer or for society in general. | ||
| Again, I come from the general worldview that the greatest change does not come through government policy or through government bureaucrats. | ||
| And so to be intellectually consistent, I won't defend penalizing people that are peacefully selling, you know, cannabis to other people, whether it be for medically or recreationally. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| I went to high school in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. | ||
| This is the story I always tell. | ||
| People say, Charlie, you're a conservative. | ||
| How can you possibly hold this position? | ||
| You know, it's always at these Tea Party groups, which I love. | ||
| I love the Tea Party. | ||
| I love these people, right? | ||
| But they're my, you know, I call them, like, the hardcore group, right? | ||
| Like, they're the Alex Jones, you know, flag-carrying people that are really hardcore. | ||
| They're really big in the conspiracy and, you know, they always ask me, Charlie, how can you possibly be on the side of decriminalization of marijuana? | ||
| I say, listen, I went to high school in the north suburbs of Chicago, okay? | ||
| I remember after football games, like, kids had backpacks full of marijuana. | ||
| Now, marijuana is illegal in Illinois, marijuana is illegal in Cook County, | ||
| and there were cops in our halls looking for it all the time. | ||
| It was not working, okay? | ||
| Let's just put it that way. | ||
| The kids who wanted it found it. | ||
| The kids like me who didn't want anything to do with it just walked away. | ||
| What other better illustration of freedom than that? | ||
| You don't want to engage with it. | ||
| Just walk away. | ||
| Find somewhere else to do it. | ||
| We didn't need to pay the DEA or FBI units to go do locker room raids of something that kids were recreationally and peacefully doing. | ||
| I'm not a proponent of it. | ||
| I would support a charity to try to educate students not to do it, because I think it had a net negative. | ||
| But why is it government's role to socially engineer us? | ||
| Especially when it's a non-lethal substance. | ||
| I always think it's so interesting, like, look, now I'm in California where it's now recreationally legal, but I have a medical marijuana card. | ||
| I had to hurt my knee playing basketball a couple years ago. | ||
| The place is right over there. | ||
| I'd like to walk you in there just to see what's going on. | ||
| I've been in there before. | ||
| Look, you're not going to persuade me to do it, but I think it's fine. | ||
| Like, whatever. | ||
| I just think it would be fun to go in there with you and see what was going on in there. | ||
| I'd wear my MAGA hat, too. | ||
| That would not go well in L.A. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Let's not. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Get a hate crime lawyer. | ||
| But I think it's funny because anytime that I ever bought weed illegally, like when I lived in New York City, I'd just get it from whoever the weed guy was. | ||
| I don't even know who the weed guy was. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But I never once in 15 years or whatever, I never had the guy selling weed say, | ||
| hey, you wanna buy crack, you wanna buy coke, you wanna buy meth, and yet we can go to prescription, | ||
| you can go to a psychiatrist who will push every drug into manna. - And it's 100 times worse | ||
| and it's chemically addictive. | ||
| So look, I know plenty of people that have had stories that tell me, | ||
| Charlie, if it wasn't for medicinal marijuana, I would have gone to narco substances | ||
| and I would have been in a really, a worse place. | ||
| And so, fine. | ||
| But that's the core tenet of freedom. | ||
| And I think what you're seeing here is most of our Turning Point followers would find sympathy with my argument. | ||
| And this is okay. | ||
| This is a natural change in a political movement as time goes on. | ||
| And the fact that Jeff Sessions holds that position, maybe he has an experience that I haven't experienced, right? | ||
| That is really personal to him. | ||
| Maybe he's seen marijuana do something horrible to a family member or people in a local community in Alabama. | ||
| I'll disagree with that. | ||
| Yeah, probably not. | ||
| Whatever, I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt because I think he's generally a good person. | ||
| I always try to give the benefit of the doubt when people hold these positions. | ||
| I just think it's not the right policy. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| In 20 years, you're going to see the conservative libertarian majority, similar to Rand Paul, advocate for this. | ||
| And then we'll be able to point out the hypocrisy of the left and say, okay, hold on a second. | ||
| We're cool with people being able to sell what they want to sell as long as it doesn't harm someone else. | ||
| Why are you trying to tell me I can't frack this oil field in the Permian Basin? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you want to have like an intellectual... If you want to be intellectually consistent, right. | |
| Alright, I want to do one other thing on the social stuff and then we'll move over to some other things. | ||
| I'm cool with, you know... No, I know, I said... Listen, I never tell my guests questions, but you immediately sat down, you're like, anything, let's go, alright. | ||
| Seriously, challenge me. | ||
| Here we are. | ||
| Well, I don't think this one will be too much of a challenge, but I think it's an interesting, it just shows how things have shifted. | ||
| So at the Republican Convention, Peter Thiel, an openly gay man, spoke before Trump. | ||
| He said, I'm a proud gay man, got a standing ovation. | ||
| Then Trump gets up there, talks about- And points him out. | ||
| Yeah, right, points him out. | ||
| And he said, it makes me very happy, was the exact quote he said. | ||
| Makes me very happy. | ||
| A little gay, that thing with the hand, but okay. | ||
| But that, the fact that there's been such a wholesale shift in that, that even right now, Ted Cruz or the guys that you might consider a little more of the Christian conservatives. | ||
| Which I'm one of them, right? | ||
| Mike Huckabee, right. | ||
| Okay, so where you come from. | ||
| Basically, as far as I can tell, don't really see this as an issue anymore. | ||
| Is that a fair premise? | ||
| I think that's correct. | ||
| And so let me dive deeper and also pose a hypothetical to some of the leftists watching this. | ||
| Peter Thiel, openly gay man, gets a standing ovation at the Republican National Convention and then pointed out by the candidate. | ||
| Do you think that an evangelical pastor that was pro-Israel, that might be a Democrat, would have even been allowed to speak at the Democratic National Convention or given a standing ovation? | ||
| They booed God when it was mentioned, okay? | ||
| They literally did. | ||
| What is the shift here? | ||
| The shift is the Republican Party is beginning to realize, hey, with the Party of Freedom. | ||
| Like, it's cool if you want to do that. | ||
| I think it's a real sea change because even if you see Rand Paul beginning to endorse | ||
| more of those favorable drug policy positions on the side of freedom or gay marriage, you're | ||
| starting to see a sea change where it's becoming the soul-searching the Republican Party has | ||
| been doing over the last 30 years is, what's the one thing that ties our party together? | ||
| Freedom. | ||
| And I think that's why you're starting to see that. | ||
| And the left, they can't reconcile. | ||
| What ties them together? | ||
| Oppression. | ||
| You know, like it's the oppression Olympics. | ||
| It's like, who suffers more? | ||
| You know? | ||
| And I think that's a really good thing. | ||
| segue to one one final point is What I think is the position that needs to be articulated better is I have no problem if you know gay marriage Whatever like I believe marriage one man one woman. | ||
| That's my own personal position right, but I'm never gonna tell government to have someone live a life I think it's cool. | ||
| You're married. | ||
| I think it's great, and you should have all the same tax benefits adopt children It's great right, but I feel the same way about you. | ||
| Well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's fine. | |
| It's like whatever Sure, but that's more of a generational perspective. | ||
| Here's where I think conservatives need to really fight hard, and I think you agree, is the religious liberty stuff. | ||
| Are you going to force a Christian baker to make a cake for a gay couple? | ||
| That is not the same thing as being cool with gay marriage. | ||
| And the left is trying to make a moral equivalency argument of the civil rights of the 1960s and someone having to violate their religious conscience. | ||
| to make a cake for a gay couple because they wanna have fascism | ||
| where you can go into a private company and say you have to produce a product or service | ||
| because we have a certain lifestyle. | ||
| That's dangerous and wrong, and I think that's where the fight needs to happen. | ||
| And that's where I think we can actually win converts over. | ||
| Do you think also that technology is the answer to some of those problems? | ||
| Oh, totally. - Where it kinda sucks. | ||
| I did in my PragerU video from last year-- | ||
| Which was excellent, by the way. | ||
| Thanks, I mean, that was the line that really caught on because I don't wanna force | ||
| No. - That baker to do something. | ||
| Just as if there was a... | ||
| We could use any example here, but if there was a Jewish artist who had a website that they take commissions for paintings, I wouldn't want the government forcing them to paint neo-Nazi paintings. | ||
| It's exactly the same thing. | ||
| And would you want to force a Muslim wedding hall to have to host You know, someone that is a great critic of Islam, right? | ||
| That would violate one of the tenets, one of the pillars of Islam, right? | ||
| But for whatever reason, the left is way overstepping their bounds, and the Circuit Court of California | ||
| has lost their freaking mind, seriously, where they don't realize the slippery slope that | ||
| they're engaging in here. | ||
| Where if you have a private business with their own private conscience, they should | ||
| be allowed to accept and deny business as they see fit, especially if it's business | ||
| that takes pre-planning, such as a wedding cake or photography. | ||
| The only argument they might make is if you're running a fast food restaurant, but you know | ||
| what? | ||
| If someone wants to be a racist or a bigot, they have that right, no one's going to go | ||
| buy products from them anymore. | ||
| That's how you win arguments without having to use the government gun on people's heads. | ||
| Which again, I think that's the argument that we have to make, but look, if a gay couple | ||
| wants to get married, that's cool. | ||
| Like, whatever. | ||
| That's the law of the land. | ||
| Move on to bigger battles like religious liberty and freedom. | ||
| Alright, let's shift a little bit to some religions. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You are a Christian conservative. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Just that phrase triggers a certain amount of people. | ||
| So first off, what is a Christian conservative? | ||
| Yeah, which always, which always stuns me. | ||
| So I do a lot of campus tour, I'll tell you a quick story, a lot of campus tours, and I go through my litany of what I call hard truths told by Charlie Kirk, and I'll say, you know, socialism is the greatest killer of humanity in the last 100 years, and I'll say free enterprise is the greatest economic system ever, and then I'll say three words, and it drives them so crazy. | ||
| I say, God is real. | ||
| And it's like, they just start shaking. | ||
| The left. | ||
| They don't know how to handle it. | ||
| And half the place loves it, half the place hates it. | ||
| I don't know why that's so triggering. | ||
| So, I'm a Christian, first and foremost. | ||
| I believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God and He came down and He died for all our sins and we have a good documentation of that and we could debate and discuss that, whatever. | ||
| As a Christian, I believe that we are called to try to advance the kingdom of God and the ministry of Jesus Christ to as many people as possible, and as peacefully as possible, obviously, right? | ||
| So that's how I try to live my own personal life and make my own personal decisions. | ||
| As a conservative, I'd say... Let me pause you there for a second. | ||
| So I don't see you proselytizing religion, though, in the public way. | ||
| I've heard you speak before, and I've never heard you push that. | ||
| I say it every so often when asked, but I look at my speaking no different than sometimes doing a job, right? | ||
| So a plumber or electrician is not going to tell every person he turns around the corner, like, hey, have you heard the great news of Jesus Christ? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So you don't want to be too offsetting and off-putting, but I also try to, you know, through some of my platforms, You know, talk about my personal beliefs, no matter how triggering it might be to other people. | ||
| And on my campus tours, I try to, you know, advance. | ||
| But of course, I could probably do a better job of it. | ||
| But with that being said, I would consider myself more as a conservatarian, which I find to be a new breed of, you know, ideology, which you and I talked about, and some people have already been labeling themselves as such. | ||
| And I find no contradiction between my Christian worldview And my political philosophy. | ||
| In fact, I find a great amount of synchrony, actually, between what I find, what I believe theologically and what I believe spiritually and religiously, to also what I advocate for politically, which is essentially the non-aggression principle and, you know, believing in productive people and free societies should be able to make your choices as you see fit as long as you're not harming someone else. | ||
| How did Christians end up as so much of the butt of what the left hates? | ||
| Because you can open up every day another BuzzFeed article mocking white Christians and Mike and HuffPo. | ||
| They all love me, by the way. | ||
| Oh yeah, they must love you. | ||
| But how did that happen? | ||
| Well, so I think what happened is that Christian conservatives fell for a trap that they really | ||
| should have rejected, which is we might hold these truths very near and dear to our heart, | ||
| theologically and biblically and spiritually and religiously. | ||
| But I think where the line was crossed is in the 60s and 70s and 80s, where we tried | ||
| to impose those beliefs through government policy, where people then inherently have | ||
| a rejection to it. | ||
| And similarly, how people are rejecting the left and posing their crazy worldview upon | ||
| us. | ||
| I think that was a big mistake because it created this kind of counter-revolution, which | ||
| is I don't want to have to live the way some Christian in Alabama wants me to live. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| So it's the imposition of those values through legislation and government, which is something | ||
| I don't necessarily support. | ||
| So I try to always advocate for everyone in my political positions through a secular worldview | ||
| because that is the vast majority of people. | ||
| And that's actually the government system that we have all decided to create. | ||
| We do have a separation of church and state, and we should support that. | ||
| With that being said, I can still have my own personal opinions and my own personal | ||
| ways to go about changing public policy. | ||
| But when we start to say, "We're going to have to change the way we think about | ||
| We should support this law because it's the Christian thing to do. | ||
| That is, I think, beginning, that has turned people off for the last 30 years. | ||
| What does it say also about Christians that, you know, we talked about gay marriage before, that there was a shift? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There actually has been a shift. | ||
| Now, you're basically arguing it's a political shift or a utilitarian shift. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| You're just, you're sort of giving me just the realist argument. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there something else going on there, too, where there is something related to tolerance, to tolerance in the truest sense? | ||
| Yeah, and this is the other problem with Christians, and me being a card-carrying member of this community, and I try my hardest and I fail, is, and I'm around a lot of these Christians, and I sometimes fall into it, is this legalism, right? | ||
| Is that I'm somehow better than you because I'm a Christian, and I really think that's done such a disservice to the Christian community, especially the Christian conservative community. | ||
| It's this sanctimonious approach to lifestyle that I find to be really off-putting to a lot of non-believers. | ||
| And people say, well, I don't want to be a Christian because they're always going to talk down to me, or they're going to make me live by this set of beliefs, or they think they're better than I am. | ||
| It's the number one critique I get. | ||
| It's not that, oh, I don't believe Jesus Christ is actually the Son of God, or I don't believe the Bible. | ||
| You know, those are actually things I think that could be ironed out. | ||
| It's more so like, I've always been talked down to, or when I was a young kid I was in Catholic school and they gave me these 15 things I couldn't do, and because of that I rebelled and rejected. | ||
| So I think this idea that actually Jesus Christ advocated for, which is, hey, I dined with the tax collectors, I was best friends with the prostitutes, right? | ||
| Like, I never thought that they were any better than my disciples, right? | ||
| And of course, I don't live this out the best I should, but where Christians have gotten it wrong is this fierce, fire-and-brimstone legalism. | ||
| Thou shall all homosexual! | ||
| You know, like, that's wrong, man! | ||
| That's not... | ||
| It's not what the teachings and the evidence we have of Jesus Christ's life ever taught us. | ||
| He was welcoming. | ||
| He was tolerant. | ||
| He was accepting. | ||
| He had standards. | ||
| He was fierce when it came to eternity and the standards of God. | ||
| But he wasn't afraid to go chill with tax collectors, which were considered like the lowest form of individual possible in the Middle East during that time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And so I think we as Christians can learn a lot of that in modern society. | ||
| Listen, when we wrap this thing up, you want to go have lunch with some prostitutes? | ||
| I mean, if they want to hear about the good news of Jesus Christ. | ||
| But even so, right, sometimes some people are like, but the point being is, we as Christians have to do a better job of not being the sanctimonious, moral conjecturers, which we get labeled that so much. | ||
| So when you see a guy like Shapiro or a guy like Prager, Prager's more- They're my heroes, I love them. | ||
| Prager basically is secular Jew at this point, but grew up Orthodox. | ||
| Shapiro obviously- He's an observant religious Jew. | ||
| He's an observant Orthodox Jew. | ||
| You guys basically, from what I can tell, agree on pretty much everything politically. | ||
| You're obviously more Trump than Shapiro is. | ||
| And Prager's pretty Trump. | ||
| On any given day, Prager definitely is more pro-Trump. | ||
| But does any of your religious differences, I know that doesn't matter to you in terms of policy, | ||
| that's very obvious, but just in terms of like, your humanity or the way your worldview, | ||
| does any of that matter to you? | ||
| You know, I've had wonderful discussions with Dennis Prager about what he believes theologically. | ||
| And I mean, look, first of all, I think Dennis Prager is like the Yoda | ||
| of the conservative movement. | ||
| He's like unbelievably brilliant. | ||
| That one tall Jew. | ||
| Isn't that, I know, exactly. | ||
| He's fantastic and same with Ben. | ||
| I mean, I listen to their stuff every single day and Prager University does a heroic job. | ||
| But it doesn't bother me at all, but I always challenge, right? | ||
| So I challenge, you know, religious and observant Jews with some pretty good. | ||
| You know, questions, I think, because I'm very big into apologetics of the New Testament and the Christian, you know, the evidence for, you know, Christianity. | ||
| I ask questions. | ||
| I'll say, do you believe Paul existed in, you know, do you think Paul of Saris existed? | ||
| And they'll say yes. | ||
| I'll say, don't you think it's kind of like weird that a Roman Jew dropped his whole amazing lifestyle And like, went all in for this Jesus Christ thing, and then got persecuted, put in jail six times, and then reverse crucified? | ||
| Like, would someone do that if they actually didn't believe this? | ||
| That's a provocative question, obviously, right? | ||
| But I love that. | ||
| And I love that kind of, you know, discussion. | ||
| And look, Paul said very clearly in the New Testament, bless the Jews. | ||
| You know, these are your brothers. | ||
| There is no New Testament without the Old Testament. | ||
| So we agree, you know, with the Jewish people and all that. | ||
| And look, I think we need more Jews to actually become more observant and to understand the roots of the Torah and the roots of what God commanded through Moses and through David and the major and minor prophets. | ||
| And I have such great respect for them because they've done a great job of, I think, awakening people that there are, you know, Jewish conservatives out there and it's okay to believe these things. | ||
| Well, it's interesting because as someone that doesn't come from this from a religious perspective, I agree with the wider principle that you're pushing here, which is that some of these minority communities, so in this case, you're talking about Jews, but you referenced black people earlier, which I want to talk a little bit about why you're working with Candace, but now I see it with the Asian community. | ||
| I don't know if you just saw in the last couple of days, there's this email that got leaked from Google Where they basically were saying, we're gonna hire people but not white men, or Asian women will be treated like white women, or something to that effect, like this lunacy. | ||
| It's horribly racist, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's racist. | |
| It's the real racism. | ||
| It's the real racism, though. | ||
| It's this kind of like, it's this ranking of oppression Olympics, like somehow your skin color makes you somewhat more, you know, worthy of a position in a company or in a university because you've been through more just because you look different. | ||
| Or the scary part, especially for the Asian community, is that your skin color and the way you look makes you less worthy because you're gonna work real hard and you're gonna have- You make the right decisions. | ||
| You make all the right decisions. | ||
| I mean, make no mistake, it's like an anti-Asian American worldview that the left has now essentially embraced. | ||
| It's like, oh, they've been successful enough, now we must discriminate against them so we can help the other. | ||
| It's like, it's lunacy. | ||
| But going back to your point of the Christian conservative kind of worldview, I think that there's a lot There's a lot of us that hold these beliefs very personal, but also that's kind of where we draw the line. | ||
| We have these personal beliefs and they're going to dictate how we want to live individually, but how do we advocate for a society that allows the most amount of people to advocate for their own personal beliefs, whatever they might be, as long as it doesn't harm someone else? | ||
| So your basic argument, and I think you hit on this a little bit earlier, would be that part of the reason that Europe is crumbling, which it is crumbling... The West is crumbling except for America. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so we're taping this. | ||
| It's going to go up next week, but we're taping this. | ||
| Today is the three-year anniversary of Well, Charlie Hebdo was a couple of years ago, three years, but today was the day that they finally caught the guy and then there was the shooting at the kosher supermarket in the Paris suburbs and all that. | ||
| Today, a different supermarket was burned down. | ||
| I mean, this is still happening in Paris right now. | ||
| And this is happening all across Europe. | ||
| We know what's going on in Sweden. | ||
| Your basic premise would be that if they had held on to some of their Judeo-Christian values instead of trading them in for... | ||
| Secularism, essentially statism. | ||
| But yet you're also a secularist, which is an interesting... I don't think it's contradictory, because I would make an argument that actually the separation of church and state found in America has helped the church. | ||
| We still have the highest church going rates in the West. | ||
| We still have the highest levels of private philanthropy. | ||
| We have more churches opening than ever before. | ||
| The evangelical community is growing in most states. | ||
| As Alan Dershowitz would say, the separation of church and state has been the best thing for the church, because it's not imposed upon people. | ||
| It's not mandatory. | ||
| As you and I both agree, when as soon as you start to tell someone to do something, it becomes a lot less sexy and appealing. | ||
| And actually you want to rebel against it, you want to reject it. | ||
| I would argue Europe, through their social welfare programs, have deteriorated the church. | ||
| As soon as they start to say government is going to take care of people, government is | ||
| going to be the most important thing in your life, government is going to fix these vastly | ||
| complex social problems, then all of a sudden the church and the individual becomes far | ||
| less significant. | ||
| As Dennis Prager says, the larger the government, the smaller the citizen. | ||
| You're seeing that play out in France and Spain and Portugal and Italy, where you have | ||
| individual philanthropy disappear, where you have business startups totally evaporate. | ||
| The final point is what it really lends itself to is more dangerous ideologies to take form, | ||
| such as radical Islam, which is I think one of the most dangerous widespread ideological | ||
| movements happening in the West that no one is talking about. | ||
| I mean you're a gay guy I mean, I would probably be worried if I start to see you know radical Islam start to take root in Europe, right? | ||
| You're a Christian, I'd be worried too. | ||
| No, I mean, trust me, I'm on that program, okay? | ||
| They want us both dead, my friend, right? | ||
| And that's something I find to be horribly inconsistent with the left, is they try to be the champions of all these minority groups and all these supposed oppressed groups, yet here they are kind of joining forces with countries and movements and, you know, theocratic fascists in the Middle East that give homosexuals flying lessons on the top of buildings. | ||
| All right, so then how do we, I spent, I think, a good chunk, especially the first year of this show, trying to talk about radical Islam, making a distinction between radical Islam and the nominal Muslim person who practices their faith privately, however they do, just like most people. | ||
| I try to separate Islam as a set of ideas worthy of criticism, as Christianity is, and Judaism is, and republicanism, and all of that, okay, versus people, versus criticizing people and treating people differently. | ||
| I think a lot of people in our space have tried to do that, and you don't get a lot of credit for it, but okay, fine, I don't need bonus credit. | ||
| But how do we talk about radical Islam in an honest way? | ||
| There is a differentiation that needs to be drawn, but we also do need to talk about the broader implementation of an Islamic government worldview. | ||
| So Islam, at its core, Has always been and will always be tied into the state. | ||
| And as soon as they can demonstrate that they can be a majority in a country and not be a theocratic government, then I'll start to cede some territory against that. | ||
| So for example, Saudi Arabia, right? | ||
| So if you are a Christian in Saudi Arabia, you lose your head. | ||
| If you're a Jew, they'll find your family and kill all of you. | ||
| There's something wrong about that, right? | ||
| So I think we need to draw a great critique of that. | ||
| Same in Iran, which is Shia and Saudi, which is Sunni. | ||
| And there's something really, I think, not correct about in modern society that you have obviously | ||
| a Muslim majority country and you know There's no Christians and no Jews and no churches and no | ||
| synagogues. There's something very intolerant about that However people that want to reform Islam. I'm your biggest | ||
| advocates, right people that want to go through a reformation of you know | ||
| Islam and try to differentiate that no Islam does not have to be tied to the state and yes | ||
| Islam can be tolerant of Christians and Jews and gays and the modern feminist movement and they should be allowed to | ||
| vote and drive and You know be able to make decisions they see fit and not | ||
| have to wear a full hijab. I want those Muslims to succeed Yeah, I'm frightened that the more radical voices which are | ||
| in the tens of millions If not hundreds of millions are actually getting more | ||
| More of an audience. | ||
| They're creating, you know, sectors of Europe that are quite troubling, that are advocating for the advancement of these more dangerous ideologies that support honor killings and don't think women should have the right to drive or to vote or to be able to have representation in any sort of form of government. | ||
| And so I think a broader critique of Islam Needs to be put forth because they've been doing it against | ||
| Christianity for the last 100 years I walk into a lecture hall and I hear about how horribly | ||
| intolerant Christians are and how they're terrible people fine hard stop | ||
| You go to the Vatican a woman is allowed to wear shorts and you know a cutoff t-shirt | ||
| You go to Mecca and you're a Christian you get your head cut off. I mean you literally can't go | ||
| No, you literally are not allowed. | ||
| No, they're literally not allowed. | ||
| So there's a discussion that needs to happen where a broader reformation is necessary, but the more radical voices of Islam are actually succeeding right now. | ||
| You look at the most viral members of the YouTube community in the Sunni, you know, Saudi region. | ||
| They're the ones that are advocating for a holy war and the extermination of Christians. | ||
| They're the ones that are really taking root. | ||
| We have to support, we have to reinforce, and we have to really encourage the reformist Muslims to get a broader platform, but I'm just not seeing it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I've tried to do a little bit of it here. | ||
| No, you've done a great job. | ||
| I've helped some reformers and some ex-Muslims and things like that, but the problem is that they're constantly undercut by supposedly their own people. | ||
| The left, every time one of them talks about this, they say you're a sellout or you're evil or whatever. | ||
| But it does beg the question that the center of their faith is the most intolerant city in the world. | ||
| Someone's got to take a broad stand against that, and maybe we'll see it in the next hundred years, but Hamad bin Salman, the new Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, is trying to do some more modern changes, but you're also seeing Extraordinary radical voices in Saudi Arabia continually rise up. | ||
| You're seeing protests in Iran, which is great. | ||
| But then you're seeing a lot of the Western world not stand with these protests. | ||
| You see President Trump has done a great job of it. | ||
| Obama, who is totally silent. | ||
| So look, Islam in general, there's wonderful Muslim friends that I have and productive members of the American community that embrace this idea that you can hold your beliefs without having to have them pushed through a state, which is great. | ||
| But you're also seeing the exact opposite with the Muslim Brotherhood taking further root in Egypt and in Turkey. | ||
| You're seeing Saudi Arabia want to continue its influence throughout the Arabian Peninsula. | ||
| It's going to be a conflict of ideas and it's the largest religion, I believe, in the world. | ||
| Correct me if I'm wrong, 1.2 billion people. | ||
| Christianity is right up against it. | ||
| But I would argue that Islam has a lot more power in countries than Christianity does. | ||
| It's a reformation that needs to happen. | ||
|
unidentified
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So is the demographic time bomb in Europe, is it already too late? | |
| It's troubling, it's very troubling. | ||
| So as a byproduct of supporting social welfare programs in the 60s and 70s that deteriorated | ||
| the influence of the Catholic Church and in Protestantism throughout Europe and really | ||
| just kind of making people so apathetic towards private philanthropy, apathetic towards value | ||
| creation, entrepreneurship rates disappeared and you really created a lazy European society. | ||
| I hate to say it, but they are not highly productive people. | ||
| They take the month of August off, they have very little ambition, they're okay being average. | ||
| That's not the society I want to live in. | ||
| America has always been aspirational. | ||
| We've been the most productive, we've been the risk takers, we've been the entrepreneurs. | ||
| So because of that, they've laid themselves to be remarkably vulnerable to a takeover | ||
| culturally and demographically. | ||
| And you're starting to see that with the millions of relocations from the Middle East of people | ||
| that don't hold these views that the Europeans hold. | ||
| And honestly, they come from a background, whether it be Syria or Jordan or Yemen or | ||
| Oman. | ||
| Yemen, there's a huge humanitarian crisis happening. | ||
| They've known nothing but government being Islamic. | ||
| And so they inherently support that. | ||
| But if they wanna go through a reformation and they can demonstrate they can do that, great. | ||
| I'm not seeing that though. | ||
| I'm seeing vast demographic clashes happening all throughout Europe. | ||
| There's also an interesting generational piece to this, which is that you find that a lot of the older people | ||
| that came from those countries 30 years ago, they actually are more Westernized. | ||
| And their children are now, they're sort of making up that there was something imaginarily great about Saddam. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's correct. | |
| Or about where their parents came from. | ||
| Or we need to reform the Caliphate, rebuild the Caliphate. | ||
| Very dangerous, right? | ||
| And so you look at the Reformation that Christianity rightfully went through in the 1500s and 1600s and 1700s, It's as soon as you embrace the idea of personal freedom and individual liberty, and you try to restrict the state. | ||
| So put yourself in the seat of the Founding Fathers. | ||
| They intentionally removed any sort of mention of Christendom in the Constitution, which ended up being the best thing for Christianity, which created the most Christian nation in the world, which is America. | ||
| Think about how ironic that is, right? | ||
| Whereas Europe didn't always do that. | ||
| They actually created these theocratic governments that led way to, you know, horrible conflict and, you know, ethno-nationalism, and eventually in the 60s and 70s, like I mentioned, the huge proliferation of the welfare state, which was the worst decision Europe ever made. | ||
| They turned a highly productive people into a mediocre, lazy society that rejected all sorts of religion and any sort of connection to higher being and has now led themselves to a demographic takeover that I think is for the worse. | ||
| Some people think it's for the better. | ||
| I just don't see any evidence of that. | ||
| But again, there's nothing... I get criticized as being a racist and all this. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| I'm talking about a set of ideas that, when implemented through the state, have proven to be extremely dangerous to human rights, and to economic productivity, and private property rights, and really, human dignity. | ||
| So when you've mentioned the phrase, the Prussian Olympics, a couple times, which obviously I totally buy in on... Which is from your video. | ||
| I stole it from you, by the way. | ||
| Well, I think I stole it from Faisal Syed Al Mutar, and he probably stole it from somebody, so that's how these ideas get around. | ||
| But this idea of this intersectional nonsense... Which is all nonsense. | ||
| Do you think that the average left person in America that says they're a feminist and they're for all, do you think that they don't recognize any of the stuff that you just said about Islam? | ||
| They obviously don't talk about it. | ||
| They might recognize it, they might know about it, they might be able to answer it in a Trivial Pursuit game, but the question is here, so there's the International Feminist Society, which is growing huge on campus, and I always challenge them. | ||
| They advocate for women's rights across the world, and they're right next to Like the Muslim Student Association, which is fine. | ||
| They should be friends. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| But why are they not demonstrating widespread protests against how women are treated in Saudi Arabia? | ||
| But the International Feminist Society is protesting against Israel. | ||
| It's weird, right? | ||
| Because intersectionality, it's like they have this weird construct that we must advocate against Israel because Israel is a friend of America and America hates women. | ||
| It's like this weird web. | ||
| Yes, yes, America hates women. | ||
| Where's the Oprah Winfrey's? | ||
| Like where they kind of try it doesn't make any sense, but where is the outrage? They say there's outrage when I | ||
| challenge him Oh, yeah, we're really outraged about it. Yeah, okay sure | ||
| but no where is the where's the where's the Oprah Winfrey's right? | ||
| Where's the Hillary Clinton's who spoke multiple times in Saudi Arabia and took? | ||
| millions of dollars from that right Where women can't drive, where now they can drive, and that's going to be a real disaster. | ||
| No, it is, because all of a sudden, just wait for the imams to get their hands up there. | ||
| Wait, what do you mean? | ||
| Oh, because they're going to have a total religious clash about this, because Hammad bin Salman said by decree that women can drive, and there's going to be all these religious fundamentalists that are not going to allow it to happen, and it's going to be a Total conflict. | ||
| They were bragging that women are allowed to go to movies now. | ||
| To show you how medieval Saudi Arabia is, right? | ||
| But anyway, Hillary Clinton made this, like, her pinnacle, you know, point of her campaign is like, I'm gonna really have good relations with Saudi Arabia. | ||
| Her foundation took tens of millions of dollars. | ||
| Here was a woman that ran on the idea of, like, feminist representation. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And she can't critique Saudi Arabia once, right? | ||
| But she critiques Israel for the settlements, right? | ||
| So I think there's unbelievable hypocrisy there. | ||
| But it's not just Saudi Arabia, which I'm focusing on. | ||
| It's Egypt. | ||
| It's Iran. | ||
| It's Iraq, which is changing. | ||
| It's Syria. | ||
| It's Jordan. | ||
| It's Oman. | ||
| It's Yemen. | ||
| The only countries that get it right are Qatar, right? | ||
| And maybe the UAE. | ||
| But you have a geographic disposition of Hundreds of millions of square miles where women cannot vote, women cannot own property, women cannot start businesses, women cannot serve in government, men have total and absolute control over society, gays... They asked Akhadeem Ajaan, they said, how do you treat... We don't have it! | ||
| How do you treat gays in your society? | ||
| We do not have homosexuals in our country. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Where's the LGBT international society protesting against that, right? | ||
| It's like they have this kind of like handshake, like, we're not going to mention this, it's all good. | ||
| That can't stand anymore. | ||
| Right, and then what country do they hate the most? | ||
| Of course, it's Israel, where they treat gays equally. | ||
| Where gays are openly productive members of society. | ||
| I think they can marry in Israel, I'm not sure. | ||
| The West has been the best to women and to gays, and yet they want to destroy the West, which doesn't make any sense to me. | ||
| By the way, you mentioned settlements a minute ago. | ||
| I think that Jesus guy you referenced before lived in a town called Bethlehem, and where is that? | ||
| He was born in Bethlehem. | ||
| That's in the West Bank. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Jesus of Nazareth. | ||
| Minor details here, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But history, though, is just lost on people, right? | ||
| To me, that's one of the most depressing things. | ||
| Oh, it's horrible. | ||
| That people don't know basics about history. | ||
| It's the basics, but it's just like the ignorance of understanding the blessings we have to live in Western civilization and how unique what we really have here as a country. | ||
| And it's being taught in our universities how America's a racist, xenophobic, imperialist, horrible country. | ||
| And you really have to try. | ||
| It takes effort to try to make that argument because America has been One of the greatest, if not one of the greatest, ideas ever implemented in human history and civil society. | ||
| It's had more respect for human rights. | ||
| It's had more economic productivity. | ||
| We have freed more people from serfdom and from bondage than any other country. | ||
| We voluntarily sent our citizens and our civilians and our soldiers to die for the freedoms of others without asking for anything in return. | ||
| You look at the Korean War. | ||
| We send, you know, our boys from Iowa, Kansas, South Carolina, and Florida to go die in the Korean Peninsula, 50,000 of them, So that South Korea can exist, we ask for nothing in return. | ||
| If we were imperialists, we're the worst imperialists ever, right? | ||
| And so, yet, it takes the effort to really look at history and say that we're a horrible place. | ||
| And this is what the modern American left is trying to do is, like remember when I said in the beginning of the video, we have a choice. | ||
| We can either go the way of Europe and totally, fundamentally transform this country and embrace a set of ideas we've never had, or we can defend, respect, and advance American ideas here and really try to make the 21st century the greatest we've ever had. | ||
| Is there an inherent risk in some of that though? | ||
| That yes, there are things like South Korea that work out. | ||
| There's also a lot of foreign policy. | ||
| Yeah, I mean there's a lot of instances. | ||
| Sure, we've had tons of blunders. | ||
| I mean Iraq war was a total mistake. | ||
| It was a disaster. | ||
| So that's just the inherent risk in this basically? | ||
| Even though that was sanctioned, by the way, by Congress and the Senate and the United Nations. | ||
| It wasn't actually an effective war of authorization. | ||
| It was a conflict. | ||
| So what I meant there was a broader point that throughout the 20th century, America has stepped up and fought for the freedom and liberty of others, not ever asking for something in return. | ||
| I would argue that Iraq was a horrible response to 9-11. | ||
| It had nothing to do with the actual existential threats against the homeland that was George W. Bush trying to rectify a mistake that his father didn't actually make, which was take over Saddam Hussein's empire. | ||
| We got next to nothing. | ||
| We lost 30,000 American troops. | ||
| We spent $2 trillion we didn't have, and we helped create ISIS to boot. | ||
| Imposing American ideas worldwide is not something that I would ever advocate for, but when the chips are down, for example, in World War II, and the Nazi Empire is on the march, and they're 16 miles away from Moscow, and Winston Churchill is on his hands and knees begging FDR to send troops, Then we send, you know, half a million ground troops to go through Normandy. | ||
| We stepped up, right? | ||
| And we helped push back European fascism. | ||
| So look, there's been a lot of mistakes. | ||
| Some of our incursions in Central America were total disasters. | ||
| But net positive, America's, you know, decisions throughout the 20th century have helped, you know, advance human freedom and release people from bondage. | ||
| So to that end, you must love what Trump's doing with the UN, right? | ||
| Oh, it's fantastic. | ||
| Nikki Haley is a freaking all-star. | ||
| Here's what I love about Nikki Haley, and to my leftist people watching this, how can you not recognize she's everything you pretend to advocate for? | ||
| No, no, seriously. | ||
| She's a daughter of an immigrant. | ||
| She's a minority, you know, and she's Indian, I mean, like from actual India, right? | ||
| Which is one of their, I think, oppression Olympics groups. | ||
| Right, well you saw this thing like a couple of weeks ago where they were trying to mock her for using the name Nikki, and it's like, that's what her parents called her, you idiot. | ||
| I know, imagine if a Republican said that, there'd be March on this record. | ||
| She's totally self-made. | ||
| Her father literally owned convenience stores, started as a state senator, ran as an insurgent for governor, twice elected, eradicated the Confederate flag from her state capitol, balanced the budget, created South Carolina into this unbelievably prosperous state, in a very complicated political state, by the way. | ||
| By the way, they always say, you know, the South is so racist. | ||
| Well, they twice elected, you know, a woman minority governor of a state that you call, you know, the new, you know, Confederacy, anyway. | ||
| What about that Tim Scott guy? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| There's only two African-American senators and one of them is from what they call one of the most racist states in the country. | ||
| That's beside the point. | ||
| Then she gets selected by President Trump, who supposedly hates women but he doesn't represent us in the UN, to go fiercely fight against all these globalist forces at the UN, cuts, aid to Pakistan. | ||
|
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She is what the left is supposed to love, right? | |
| She is this absolute embodiment of modern-day feminism. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Yet they hate her. | ||
| Did you see this tweet the other day by the at-Democrats, you know, the official... Oh yeah, all the check marks? | ||
| Yeah, women... How about qualified women? | ||
| Well, that of course, that's like the blanket response, but the best was, so it was like, you know, do minority women, brown women, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| The amount of people who just wrote, all right, you're endorsing Nikki Haley. | ||
| And it's like, man, you guys, this is what you idiots have created. | ||
|
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That's right. | |
| And I can't tell you, it's really interesting, because so many of our Turning Point members and our Turning Point students, I say, why are you conservative? | ||
| I'm a student, I'm not conservative because of the left. | ||
| I left the left because of the left. | ||
| Because they have lost their freaking mind. | ||
| Like, if they were just, like, normal Democrats and didn't say the stupid stuff, and an intersectionality politics, and, like, they argued, like, well, we can run government better, but free enterprise is a good thing, but flawed, and we need to perfect it. | ||
| And, you know, if they actually had some humility for it, instead of just, like, embracing cultural Marxism and doing the oppression Olympics, I think you might still be on the left! | ||
| Instead, they've created the greatest gift. | ||
| Thank you liberals for doing this, leftists, because now we have like former Bernie Sanders supporters running our chapters because they are now cultural Marxists that look at people by the color of their skin by how much value they have in the world or how great you can understand someone's, you know, that, you know, degree of suffering, which is everything that Martin Luther King argued against, which is everything that has fundamentally created this country. | ||
| And so thank you leftists for helping create this movement for us. | ||
| Are there any good Democrats left? | ||
| Oh, sure there are. | ||
| Look, I have my issues with plenty of Republicans, and I'd be more of a Rand Paul Republican and a Libertarian. | ||
| Good, welcome aboard. | ||
| Join the, you know, I call them the Sith evil empire. | ||
| You could join the real resistance. | ||
| The real resistance. | ||
| I mean, look, the stuff that I like about Rand Paul, obviously, is all the Libertarians, of course. | ||
| Sadly, in that collection of 18 people that were running against Trump, he was seemingly on the wrong stage. | ||
| It just, the party had nothing to do with Yeah. | ||
| At that time, what he wanted, even if, as you've said before, Trump may be doing a lot of those things right now, which show you how complex this whole thing is. | ||
| Sure, very complex. | ||
| But the question I think you had was about the new generation, like any good Democrats? | ||
| Yeah, is there anyone now that you think is? | ||
| Sure, I'm still looking for that kind of like blue dog Democrat to rise up and be like, You know, I'm a Democrat, that is pro-choice, which I disagree with, whatever, that is, you know, all these things, but I still think America's a great country, and we need to, like, rid our country of Antifa. | ||
| Alan Dershowitz is probably the only one I can think of right now, who's, by the way, he's getting kicked out of the Democrat Party. | ||
| I mean, the abuse he's taking. | ||
| I'm saying this every week on the show right now. | ||
| Since when has it been a bad thing to be Alan Dershowitz? | ||
| I mean, the guy is freaking brilliant. | ||
| Like, you might disagree with him, but he's, like, the smartest You know, lawyer and human rights attorney that you could possibly find. | ||
|
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And now the Democrats are being like, he's being paid by the Trump campaign. | |
| Like, are you kidding me? | ||
| I mean, he's brilliant. | ||
| And they're kicking him out. | ||
| I love that man. | ||
| So yeah, there are some good Democrats out there. | ||
| Charlie, I suspect we could do this for a couple more hours, but I'm only going to ask you one more, because I want this on the record on this show, because when it happens, it should be that I ask it first. | ||
| You're going to run for something. | ||
| No, I'm not. | ||
|
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No. | |
| Not for political office. | ||
| I want to be a commentator and a movement driver. | ||
| Does that have anything to do with the clown show that running is? | ||
| That a guy like you, who you obviously have a great understanding of the issues, you have a consistent line of thought, whether I agree with you on everything or not. | ||
| Far too principled. | ||
| No, but there's something to be said for that, right? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I mean, that goes to what Gorka said about he's the icebreaker. | ||
| In all reality, I love what I get to do. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| Every day I get to help facilitate a movement and say what I want to say and be able to have conversations with you on all this stuff. | ||
| I've met very few Congress people or Senators or Governors that actually enjoy what they do. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| And it's always about meeting with lobbyists or kowtowing to leadership and fundraising. | ||
| It just makes me sick to my stomach thinking about that. | ||
| Let's pretend it was a great gig, which some of them seem to like it. | ||
| I don't know why they like the corruption or something. | ||
| Is that really a place where I can do the most amount of good for my world view? | ||
| And I would say probably not. | ||
| No, I'd say, look, Turning Point's doing a great service for the country, I think, right now. | ||
| I love what I get to do. | ||
| I have some influence in helping shape this policy and this agenda. | ||
| And that doesn't seem like fun to me. | ||
| It doesn't seem like that would maximize my amount of happiness. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's on the record now. | ||
| It's on the record. | ||
|
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I still suspect there could be a little movement there. | |
| I hope I don't talk like a politician. | ||
| I think we're doing a gig together in New Hampshire. | ||
| Yeah, that'll be fun. | ||
| Not too long from now. | ||
| And Candace will be there too. | ||
| And Candace Owens will be there. | ||
| Let's just finish talking about Candace for a moment. | ||
| When I met you that day, I referenced that literally a minute before you had. | ||
| I saw it from a distance. | ||
| You and Candace talked for about two minutes and then she walked over to me and she's like, I just got a job with Turning Point. | ||
| Charlie wants me to help talk to the black community and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| She's quickly becoming an all-star in this space. | ||
| I think she escaped some of the YouTube madness, which I'm somewhat aware of, and you may have seen my insane debate with her and Blaire White and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But she's quickly becoming a real powerhouse voice because the black community has needed The Thomas Sowles and Larry Elders and David Webbs and Allen West, whoever else there, it's a different generation. | ||
| She's coming at it from that young place. | ||
| It's kind of beautiful. | ||
| She's unbelievably talented. | ||
| I've spent a considerable amount of time with her now, minus the five minutes I hired her. | ||
| But she's a passionate, driven person. | ||
| Look, broader than that, she, like all of us on our team, believe and understand there is a movement happening in this country. | ||
| And it's something the media will not report. | ||
| It's something palpable when you experience it. | ||
| You saw it in Florida. | ||
| There's something happening in this country. | ||
| There was something crazy. | ||
| It's almost quasi-spiritual political. | ||
| There's something happening because the left has tried for far too long to suppress the movement of ideas and free speech and dialogue and discussion. | ||
| But what Candace believes, which I'm in full support of and I want to help her in every | ||
| way possible, is that the African-American community has been totally disserved, for | ||
| lack of a better term, by the modern Democratic Party, and that they are disproportionately | ||
| more poor, they're disproportionately in worse circumstances than people of every other ethnic | ||
| racial group. | ||
| But why is that? | ||
| It's not because America is a more racist country than we were in the 1960s. | ||
| In fact, no one with a straight face could possibly say that. | ||
| Yet African Americans are poorer today than they were in the 1960s. | ||
| So, what happened? | ||
| To use a Hillary Clinton term. | ||
| America did not get more racist. | ||
| America got significantly less racist. | ||
| There's still racism in this country, but a lot of it has been eradicated, if not reversed. | ||
| What happened is that we, as Americans, supported one of the most, I would say, contentious political and social programs, which was the Great Society, where we de-incentivized the black community from making good choices. | ||
| We incentivized women to stay single and have babies. | ||
| We destroyed public sector education by reinforcing the public sector teacher unions and disallowing school choice and rewarding bad teachers and keeping communities perpetually poor. | ||
| We, I think, really did a disservice by starting this war on police in the last couple years, which most police officers are there for the betterment of the communities that they police. | ||
| and we have started this narrative that america somehow inherently racist | ||
| country and african-americans are poor because we're racist country the data | ||
| does not reflect that it's because we have created a s a set of government | ||
| policies and ideas that have not incentivize african-americans to | ||
| continually make good choices that break out of poverty and as ben shapiro says | ||
| you make these three choices you get married before you have kids graduate high school | ||
| you get a job you can break out of poverty in this country | ||
| And you can look to all three of those things. | ||
| We have government programs that either discourage or de-incentivize every one of those choices, especially for African American community. | ||
| And Candace, growing up from a poor family, growing up as a, you know, African American woman in this culture, in this society, can talk about it a lot better than I can. | ||
| I can only talk about it from an outsider. | ||
| She's an insider, which in today's time, unfortunately, buys you a lot more institutional credibility. | ||
| Which it really shouldn't. | ||
| Right, I mean that's the irony. | ||
| It's sort of using identity politics against itself, which you almost have to do. | ||
| Which you almost have to do because, I always say this, if I say free enterprise is the greatest way to solve poverty, and Candace says it, it doesn't make it any more lesser true just because she's a black woman, right? | ||
| Truth is truth no matter who says it, but the left somehow has a value, you know. | ||
| A lot higher of certain people saying it, but you know what? | ||
| If identity politics is what we have to play, then so be it. | ||
| And Candace understands that, especially on college campuses. | ||
| Black students will listen to her a lot more likely than they'll listen to me. | ||
| And I believe that she can continually build a movement around these core set of ideas and values and principles. | ||
| And she gets it, because she used to be one of them. | ||
| She used to be a leftist. | ||
| She understands who these people are, and she understands how to fight them and how to persuade. | ||
| And we're lucky to have her as our Director of Urban Engagement at Turning Point USA. | ||
| I know you don't like drug references, but when I had her on, I said, you know, for me it was like the red pill was like, I was like slowly drinking it like tea. | ||
| She said she snorted it. | ||
| All the power to her. | ||
| As long as it doesn't harm someone else, do whatever you want to do with your life. | ||
| I wanted to end with you in a slightly awkward position. | ||
| Oh, here we go. | ||
| With one of your employees. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| That seemed like a thing. | ||
| It's very good. | ||
| Well, listen, you're doing great stuff. | ||
| I'm looking forward to getting out on the road with you. | ||
| Well, you're doing awesome stuff. | ||
| You know, my mouth hurt at the end of that week. | ||
| Because you were smiling so much. | ||
| I literally, at one point, I could not smile anymore. | ||
| But weren't our students just great? | ||
| I mean, they were just... And by the way, speaking of standing ovations, I mean, Candace got a massive Massive ovation. | ||
| Everyone got a stand. | ||
| I mean, but here's the thing. | ||
| That's the diversity of ideas is we will give a standing ovation of people even if we don't agree with what they have to say completely, right? | ||
| And that's, the left won't do that. | ||
| It's like, get out of my room, get out of my, get out of our, you know, lecture hall. | ||
| And it's a movement around true tolerance and true discussion of ideas. | ||
| And we're going to win. | ||
| All right. |
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