In this episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, host Charlie talks about why the Electoral College should be abolished and why a constitutional republic is better than a direct democracy. Charlie is joined by presidential candidate J.D. Deutch and former Vice President Joe Biden to discuss their views on the matter.
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00:01:42.000Okay, so we talk a lot about like DEI programs and that sort of thing and people being, you know, unjustly put into these like positions.
00:01:50.000I believe that the Electoral College is DEI for the Republican Party where Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the presidency because of the Electoral College because it empowers rural states more by giving them the electoral votes.
00:02:06.000Do you believe that the Senate is unjust?
00:02:23.000First is it means that we are really a union of states.
00:02:26.000We're not just a random assemblage of geographic land masses called states that we call a union.
00:02:31.000That means something where part of it is direct representative democracy.
00:02:35.000But part of it is also making sure that states actually have a relative say in the process.
00:02:40.000That's how you get the Senate versus the House to balance it out.
00:02:43.000Same thing with respect to the history of the Electoral College.
00:02:46.000This is about making sure that we're being thoughtful about the step of who's actually the U.S. president while channeling the Democratic will through the manner enshrined in our Constitution.
00:02:55.000And here's the biggest difference between a republic and a democracy.
00:02:58.000This is relevant to a lot of young people.
00:03:01.000In a constitutional republic, it's not just about what you get.
00:03:05.000You think about what does it mean to be a citizen about what you get.
00:03:08.000In a constitutional republic, it's also about what you give.
00:03:12.000It's about your civic duty to your country.
00:03:14.000And I think that part of what our founding fathers envisioned is we had voters who actually knew something about their country.
00:03:21.000You know, every legal immigrant who comes to this country has to pass a civics test before they can vote.
00:03:27.000Well, frankly, the sad truth is most voters would fail that if they took it today.
00:03:31.000That would make our founding fathers roll over in their graves.
00:03:34.000And so I think that we've got to get beyond this idea that we're some kind of direct democracy.
00:03:38.000We're actually a republic where people have responsibilities and states actually have some level of distributed say to make sure that two cities in New York and California don't govern who actually leads the entire United States of America.
00:04:41.000What it does is it requires candidates, as Vivek aptly put it, to have a preference on states.
00:04:49.000We are not a national project first and foremost.
00:04:51.000We are a collection of sovereign states that come together as a national project.
00:04:56.000And the founders wanted a decentralized way of doing elections.
00:04:59.000And I think it's actually a really good thing that this state, which is incredibly diverse, Very difficult to be able to win will determine the entire election.
00:05:09.000I think Pennsylvania is a great picture of the country, and you guys get a lot of attention because of it.
00:05:15.000Now, you say, in Texas, well, in Texas, it actually might become a battleground state one day.
00:05:21.000The thing about the Electoral College is that certain battleground states rise and certain fall.
00:05:31.000And so what the Electoral College does is it forces candidates to go into places outside of the coastal corridor and win over voters of the people that actually make the country work, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Michigan.
00:05:48.000It doesn't answer the question, though, why somebody's vote in somewhere like Wyoming, which has three votes for 70,000 people versus Texas's- 700,000.
00:05:56.000700,000 versus Texas's 38 for 30 million.
00:06:20.000It's the solution that our founding fathers made, which is that if we don't like that in the United States of America, we got a way to change it.
00:06:29.000I don't agree with you because I wouldn't vote for it.
00:06:31.000But if your view is that this is anti-democratic, there's a way to change it.
00:06:36.000If three quarters of people in this country wanted to change it, that would change in an instant.
00:06:40.000And so there's a mechanism to go through it.
00:06:42.000So just like the gentleman earlier who was founding a movement, there could be a movement that says we want a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college, but they haven't managed to convince enough people in this country that it's worth it.
00:06:52.000And the reason why is there was actually a justification for it.
00:06:55.000It turns out that most people, when they think about it, actually do land where Charlie and I do on a popular vote basis across the country.
00:07:01.000That wouldn't be a weighted vote, by the way.
00:07:03.000So you're talking about actually overturning it through the constitutional amendment.
00:07:06.000Then Wyoming doesn't actually get more votes.
00:07:08.000You're talking about just three quarters of the overall states and three quarters of the vote in Congress, which is proportional representation.
00:07:15.000So there's a way to fix it that our founding fathers...
00:09:10.000I can assure you there would be several blue blots there.
00:09:12.000But I'm saying that in theory, you could have an election where it would just be those two blue blots and the rest of the entire map is red, and you would still have an outcome where you would have a blue president of the United States.
00:10:43.000I'm against the nanny state domestically, but I've got to be consistent.
00:10:46.000I'm against the nanny state internationally, too.
00:10:49.000And I'll give you NATO as one example of that, all right?
00:10:52.000Most of the countries in NATO do not pay for the minimum amount they've already agreed to pay in the Treaty of NATO, 2% of their GDP on military expense for their own national defense.
00:11:43.000It's not even me and Charlie would be long gone before most of you, okay?
00:11:45.000It's your future money and your future national debt, but it's not just that.
00:11:49.000It's more likely to drag you into a war because some other country doesn't have the incentive to bear the cost if the United States is subsidizing it.
00:11:59.000I'm not an isolationist, but I do think that those who we support should pay their fair share, and that's not too much to ask.
00:12:06.000Okay, so I would say it's very interesting that you say that because I am personally an interventionist.
00:12:11.000I believe in the idea that we are the city on the hill, we're the beacon, we're also the world police, and in that role we should maintain a world that has Here's what I'll
00:12:42.000say, a lot of Republicans Might agree with you, Charlie, and I don't.
00:13:42.000You think that our border should matter as much as something happening overseas?
00:13:45.000I think our status as a world power, as the superpower of the world, is not just that we have borders here domestically, but we have borders abroad that are, I guess you could say, more ephemeral or whatever.
00:14:00.000They are still—our border with Russia, for example, with NATO, that is still a border that we should be paying attention— We are.
00:14:09.000I just believe that Germany needs to be paying more.
00:16:58.000And plants tend to grow in warmer atmospheres than in cooler ones.
00:17:02.000So 40 years ago we used to teach kids in the country that deforestation was a main problem.
00:17:06.000The reason that's disappeared is that we're not seeing deforestation as a problem.
00:17:09.000We're seeing a greening effect from the planet.
00:17:12.000And the thing they used to worry about 50 years ago back then was that we were actually going to die of an ice age because more human beings have died of ice ages than they've died from warm temperatures ever.
00:17:23.000Well, the reality is more people are dying as a consequence of that, so why on earth are we worried if global surface temperatures go up one degree over the next century?
00:17:31.000That's really where the climate change agenda ends up being a hoax.
00:17:35.000The very people who are most opposed to fossil fuels in the United States are also among those who are the biggest opponents to nuclear energy, the greatest form of carbon-free energy production known to mankind.
00:17:46.000The very people who, like BlackRock, who have called for emissions caps in the United States at companies like Chevron are perfectly fine supporting greater emissions in places like China at companies like PetroChina.
00:17:58.000When you're talking about actual global warming, it has no net effect if you burn it in the United States versus China.
00:18:05.000China has burned more coal last year than they ever have in their history.
00:18:09.000Well, we burned less coal than we ever did in our history.
00:18:45.000I think this has become a substitute for a modern religion.
00:18:48.000I think at a moment where we stop believing in our country and believing in God, we start believing in this new climate God instead.
00:18:55.000And, you know, every religion has this tradition of wearing a hair shirt or flogging yourself.
00:19:00.000This is the modern secular version of flogging ourselves and apologizing for our success in the West while China's laughing at us every at every step of the way, catching up.
00:19:37.000So across many of the sectors, I've noticed a lot of an increase in cyber attacks from nation states and other groups responsible of transnational crime.
00:19:44.000How can the Trump administration help assist with that?
00:19:52.000So I'd like to know, what do you think the good strategy is in mind for that and your guys personal thoughts on that?
00:19:57.000I'll go quick on this so we can get another question.
00:19:59.000Yeah, so we're really good at offensive cyber.
00:20:02.000We're really bad at defensive cyber protection.
00:20:04.000So the answer is actually we need greater training in the United States of America of people who actually have the talents required to power greater cybersecurity.
00:20:13.000When it relates to AI, so much focus on investing in new algorithms, not enough in actually applying AI. More of that focus in college education.
00:21:00.000So I don't think it's just this, like, left, right, and then there's centrist.
00:21:03.000I also think that centrism can be a fake kind of siren song where I don't want to unite just the people in front of the 30-yard line on each side and bring them in the middle, hold hands, and sing Kumbaya.
00:21:17.000And I think that includes people who we deeply disagree with.
00:21:21.000So I think what we have to embrace more of in the country is not pretending like we all agree on this narrow band of questions and ignore everybody else.
00:21:27.000We disagree like hell, but we're still citizens of the same nation at the end of it.
00:21:31.000What if they're not agreeing on one thing, but it's like you have the same amount of viewpoints that are economically left and economically right, and the same thing with social views.
00:21:39.000You have just the same amount, like 50-50 amount.
00:21:42.000What would you classify yourself then as, like, if you were having those viewpoints?
00:22:08.000I believe in pragmatism at this point in time.
00:22:10.000If you're voting to make a point for yourself, that's one thing.
00:22:13.000If you're voting to actually make for a better country, make the choice between the two candidates on the ballot.
00:22:18.000Pick the one who you think is going to be better at sealing the border, growing the economy, staying out of World War III, and reviving national pride in this country.
00:22:25.000Whoever you think that's going to be, vote for them and have a good sense of who that's going to be.
00:22:42.000So, first of all, I'd like to ask why you're spending your time debating college students instead of people who have similar media training or experience to you.
00:24:00.000For ten years, Alex Jones was saying that there is a child sex trafficking ring being run to an island in the Caribbean with very shady actors and people call them a conspiracy theorist.
00:24:12.000Was Jeffrey Epstein a correct story that Alex Jones broke?
00:25:00.000I just believe, and I just think this is so important in our country right now more than ever.
00:25:03.000If we have a chance of having a country left, we can't be a country that says, okay, here's people who have views that are far outside of what I disagree with, so I'm not going to talk to them.
00:25:12.000It's part of what your first question was also, why is Charlie here?
00:25:14.000We believe in open dialogue and open discourse.
00:25:17.000I think that's how we're going to save the country.
00:25:18.000And back when I was 18, this used to be a country where we could disagree like hell and still get together at the dinner table at the end of it.
00:26:00.000Let's just start with this as a next step.
00:26:02.000Veterans who suffer from PTSD, I believe, do need access to ketamine, psilocybin, and ayahuasca, which should be reclassified in their scheduling for veterans with PTSD. I think that's a great next step to take.
00:26:16.000I think that that is far better than the outcomes that we otherwise allow for veterans to suffer from addiction to fentanyl and worse, and I think that's a good next step in this conversation.
00:26:32.000But do I think that it has demonstrably poor effects in places like you could look at Seattle, you could look at Portland, even look at a city like Portland, thought this was a great idea?
00:26:40.000Well, tried and practiced, didn't turn out to be such a great idea because there's deep structural issues for why actually people are turning to drugs that correlate with, I think, a lot of other behaviors that even cities like Portland have realized haven't gone well for them.
00:28:52.000I look at this from an American perspective.
00:28:54.000And if what happened on October 7th happened in our country, I think we would defend, I would not want any other country telling us in the United States of America what we can or cannot do.
00:29:06.000I think Israel is a sovereign nation that has a right and a responsibility to defend its sovereignty to the fullest.
00:29:13.000One of the beauties of Israel is they actually have diverse debates.
00:29:16.000You look at their own government, they have a lot of divisions just like we do here.
00:29:19.000But it's up to us to allow Israel to self-determine its own right course of action without meddling.
00:29:26.000That's what we're seeing happen there through open debate in a democratic country, and that's what I support.
00:29:30.000I mean, we're responding to both points.
00:29:31.000Like, the Jews have a right to their own country, but when they create Israel, they should not have driven out the Palestinians who were originally living there.
00:29:39.000They should have made a nation living side-by-side with them.
00:29:41.000I'm responding to the point about October 7th.
00:29:44.000Like, it was bad, and Hamas is a terrorist organization, but Israel, what they're doing to the Palestinians is what made Hamas so powerful.
00:30:17.000So my question is, do you really believe, right, like, that the best way to have this open discourse with voters, like you said, in response to one else's question, is in a format like this, you know, where, you know, us college students don't have the time to be prepared or have as much time to prepare on these topics.
00:30:31.000Therefore, we aren't able to have, like, rigorous intellectual discussion with you, especially when, in the end, when you aren't defending your arguments against the best versions of your opposition's arguments, we have no reason to, like, believe that your case is true.
00:30:43.000So I'll tell you, it's all of the above.
00:30:46.000I'm having a debate with John Bolton at another college campus, and he's a Republican but has different views than me on foreign policy.
00:30:53.000We do rallies with—these guys fill up audiences of tens of thousands of people who talk to people who agree with us.
00:30:58.000I went to places like Harvard and Yale, not exactly bastions of conservatism.
00:31:02.000I'll tell you, I got a better education because I was surrounded by people who challenged my own views.
00:31:08.000And I think that's missing on college campuses today.
00:31:10.000And so our hope, I know Charlie's hope, he's doing a great job of it traveling the country, is to make sure college is too expensive already.
00:31:17.000But you might as well at least get your money's worth by having your views challenged.
00:31:44.000So yeah, basically, my stance is that, like, in order to engage with you in a fruitful discussion, which I think is important, right, for our society, that I should at least be given, like, for example, not me personally, but, like, me as in college students, should be given, like, an equal amount of time to prepare and be, like, prepared for this engagement, right?
00:31:59.000Like, your whole job is, like, knowing about these things and researching them.
00:34:10.000Since Alaska's UBI has been so progressive and so able to provide over $1,800 to every Alaskan citizen annually, as well as providing extra funding for roads, for education, for infrastructure around the state, would you be in support of a measure similar to that using the United States' advanced economic resources to would you be in support of a measure similar to that using the United States' advanced economic resources to provide the No, and you know that's a natural resource-based UBI. I do, yeah.
00:35:23.000We're going to stay for one more disagreement, then we've got to go.
00:35:27.000It is an interesting idea, but it increases dependence on the state, and I do think that that dependence is something that has actually been bad for the psychology of countless workers across the country.
00:35:36.000It moves people's tax money back to them.