George Janko is the President of Turning Point USA, an organization dedicated to fighting for freedom and freedom on college campuses across the country. He is also the Co-Founder and President of the Christian Youth Campaign, a group dedicated to ending homophobia and sexual assault on American college campuses.
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today we have more college conversations for you from Arizona State University with George Janko.
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00:00:33.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:06:06.000If you do not have an objective standard...
00:06:11.000That is written and agreed upon, then who is to say that murder, theft, adultery, these things are wrong?
00:06:17.000It's not naturally built into us, is it?
00:06:19.000Look, you could be totally atheist and know they are wrong.
00:06:21.000It's just instinctive human nature because, hold on, the supreme being is in all of us right now.
00:06:28.000God, or the supreme being, or the intelligent designer, whatever you want to call it, is vibrating through every single human being here and on planet Earth.
00:06:36.000And we just know that murder is wrong, plus it's illegal, and You don't want to be murdered.
00:07:39.000You just said it's a baby in the womb, therefore terminating it would be murder?
00:07:44.000Look, I agree with the premise that it is a human life in the form of development, and if you let nature take its force, it will come out as a baby and be a human being.
00:07:56.000But that doesn't make the state—if you want to promote don't have abortions, then you go out, you use your voice, you make speeches, you build coalitions, and you do it.
00:08:06.000But the government has to stay neutral.
00:08:09.000But shouldn't— The government cannot invade their privacy.
00:08:11.000And you know what the worst thing about it is?
00:08:12.000Is the red states that do it, they torture people, they torture women by not letting them get medical care.
00:08:19.000Should the government remain neutral on a mother being allowed to murder her two-year-old?
00:10:22.000The point is that here's the issue with abortion.
00:10:25.000It's the only issue where we have a different moral framework that doesn't apply to every other part of life.
00:10:30.000So you say everyone knows murder is wrong, yet we can't agree that we should not murder the unborn through government laws.
00:10:36.000So if our government laws prohibit the ability to go into a school and shoot a kid, shouldn't the government laws prohibit the ability to kill the kid when it's still in utero?
00:10:46.000Not when it comes to reproductive rights.
00:12:15.000We have moral agreement on that, then, because that's currently also legal in America.
00:12:19.000The debate over reproductive rights, we can have it, and we can have a federal law that we can all agree on, whether it's a 15-week or a 20-week.
00:12:31.000So as soon as the baby is conceived, when it's just an egg?
00:12:35.000By the way, you keep on calling it a baby, which I appreciate, because since you keep calling it a baby, it means that you are murdering the baby.
00:12:43.000And again, I know George wants to get in here, which is that we call it a baby shower for a reason, not a fetus shower.
00:12:51.000When a pregnant woman is unfortunately killed in a homicide, it's a double homicide because we recognize that as a life.
00:13:00.000And yet with an abortion, it's just a clump of cells.
00:13:03.000We are morally confused on this topic, and we should make abortion illegal in every circumstance.
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00:17:56.000And the only difference from what I see is the Great Society Act that was passed, where they're giving welfare to single moms.
00:18:03.000So to me, that is a, the only point that I've been thinking about it last night, the only point is the government stepped in and now we have 13% committing to 50. We have a whole entire thing that happened because the government stepped in and did a system program to cause that.
00:18:19.000Have you ever seen a mother in need to feed her children?
00:18:56.000So the other thing that has changed is black culture over the last 50, 60 years has changed a lot from what it elevates and what it platforms to the musicians to the cultural figures where, and this is not my word, just check out Thomas Sowell who wrote an entire book on this.
00:19:54.000But I don't care what religion, what race, what position you place yourself in, if you see a family in need and you do not extend your hand, you're evil to me.
00:20:03.000And so, like, as long as that family's being fed, there's no reason why we should be debating if this child should be fed if we're giving billions of dollars to someone else.
00:20:33.000Help anybody in need regardless of where they come from, what they look as God, and have the church go show them who Christ is so they can live a godly life.
00:22:11.000But at the same time, I see you condemn our, especially Kamala Harris's, that's one of your big talking points, you condemn her spending on Ukraine, and yet we've spent like $100 billion more on Israel than any other Egyptian country there.
00:22:24.000I mean, not Egyptian, in the Middle East.
00:22:26.000And I think the only reason why we truly, or at least our politicians, truly give money there is not for the reasons that they say.
00:23:38.000So when I went to Israel, and I encourage you to go, it's not a perfect country, I'm not a defender of their government, but to be able to go to Capernaum, the Sea of Galilee, to be able to go see where Christ our Lord rose from the dead, to see the Pool of Siloam, it changed my life.
00:23:52.000And access to these holy sites and access to these archaeological points is profoundly important for the survival of the West.
00:24:01.000Because without them, you and I are not allowed to go visit, for example, a lot of Christian holy sites in Muslim countries.
00:24:08.000So the one city that I'm sure you would want to visit and I would want to visit is Bethlehem, right?
00:24:56.000But also, like, pro-life of everyone, right?
00:24:58.000And so, I think I've seen, like, a stat recently where it's, like, more children have died in Palestine than anywhere else in the last five years.
00:25:08.000Do more research into it, but just from what I've seen, just on a surface level, it's the visceral reaction.
00:25:13.000I can't get behind funding Netanyahu's war machine, basically, and giving him weapons on weapons.
00:25:19.000I also think it's just a little bit contradictory that you never speak on Kamala Harris's funding of Israel, but you condemn her funding of Ukraine.
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00:28:09.000Which is that if you overly worship markets and you do not prioritize what is good, true, and beautiful, which I think you and I both agree we want strong families, which is not a Marxist belief, but that's okay.
00:28:28.000But I'm not ascribing you to everything you ever wrote, okay?
00:28:30.000But you can have a Marxist critique of systems, and there are two things that we as market believers have to reconcile that are the most difficult.
00:28:38.000Number one, which is if you are trying to maximize output, why would you not put moms in the workplace?
00:28:44.000Which is not a great thing for kids and not a great thing for culture.
00:28:47.000Number two, if profit is always good, what happens if a pharmaceutical company wants to keep you sick for the rest of your life and not heal you?
00:28:55.000Those are two of the most difficult questions we as free market people have to reconcile with.
00:29:04.000So then I would say the fundamental issues with capitalism, like the fact that worker productivity since 1980 has gone up 65%, but worker compensation has only gone up about 20%.
00:29:14.000That 40% difference, in my opinion, is we become, the less you are compensated for your labor, if you're not compensated anything, you're a slave.
00:29:22.000And if you're compensated 100% for your labor, you're an owner.
00:29:25.000So I think that 40% discrepancy is the extent to which we have become more slave-like, right?
00:29:31.000And I think There isn't really anyone on the Democratic side or the Republican side who are really addressing these inherent issues with capitalism.
00:29:40.000I know you might not be a fan of his, but J.D. Vance has done a good job of this.
00:29:44.000He won't word it the same way that you would.
00:29:46.000And believe it or not, Elizabeth Warren wrote an amazing book 20 years ago called The Two-Income Trap, which is what you're talking about, which is in 1985. In order for a family of four to be able to survive, it required 36 weeks of labor a year.
00:30:01.000So that means anything over 36 weeks, you could save money, go on vacations or whatever.
00:30:16.000Now, I would argue, though, it's less about quote-unquote capitalism.
00:30:20.000It might be a little bit of that because there's always externalities.
00:30:23.000And it's more about how we've flooded the zone with cheap money and excess government spending and inflated asset prices over the last 10 years.
00:30:29.000Things are so expensive that it demands and warrants more and more people to go into the workforce.
00:30:34.000And then I would ask alternatively, as a Marxist, what system would you then propose?
00:30:43.000So one of the things that I've kind of struggled with is Marx only wrote about 50 pages of what it looks like the day after the revolution, right?
00:30:49.000Which is, I think, one of the biggest, like, real criticisms you can have of Marx, right?
00:31:33.000I guess the question I have is this, and then is, do you think that free markets have done a good job or a bad job of increasing the standard of living for humanity the last hundred years?
00:31:44.000I think it's complicated because you look at certain things like FDR, the New Deal.
00:31:49.000What do you think was the highest tax bracket for the top earners in the United States?
00:31:54.000Yeah, it was like 80% to 90%, actually.
00:31:55.000And then that even continued into the 50s.
00:31:57.000So I think capitalism, when there's great wealth, that can be created.
00:32:00.000Because I do think capitalism is the most efficient system for creating stuff.
00:32:04.000Now, I don't know if that stuff is necessarily good.
00:32:06.000I don't really agree with how the supply chain works.
00:32:09.000It's great at creating stuff, and we can distribute it in a more equitable way.
00:32:12.000I find very little to disagree with you, but what I will is that Marxism is a really bad idea.
00:32:18.000Meaning you're critiquing systems very well, but the solution of saying, which again, I'm not going to try to put words in your mouth, but saying we want to mass redistribution of wealth, restrict private property, those are really, really bad ideas.
00:32:33.000Well, I would say people who have tried to have ideas of hyper-privatization of property, like I read Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital, right?
00:32:41.000And he talks about how liberalized property rights are what makes countries work, right?
00:32:45.000He tried those policies in Peru and they didn't work, right?
00:32:50.000Whereas I would say when you have the government give military members loans for houses, right?
00:32:56.000And you try to increase people owning things and create an ownership class.
00:33:02.000Marxism does not believe in private property at its core, and that's okay.
00:33:05.000So then I don't think you've read your Marx, because Marx says private property, so there's a difference between private property and personal property, right?
00:33:11.000He said anything you find in a peasant's village is their own personal property they can keep it.
00:35:39.000But when you have a child, and he's looking at you, and he doesn't know and understand the realms of the world, and he sees this bright light, but it's fire.
00:35:48.000And he wants to run up to it and touch it.
00:35:50.000Now the dad steps in and goes, no, the baby can't understand.
00:35:53.000But if it obeys its father, it would lead itself away from danger.
00:35:57.000And this is how we see it as Christians.
00:36:10.000So there's a lot of things we don't understand.
00:36:12.000That's why he says he'll give you peace above your understanding.
00:36:15.000Because we don't even know how to comprehend it.
00:36:19.000I think there's value in a life lived that way, but when you have a God who has said, kill these infants, kill these unarmed women, kill these unarmed children, and you say, our job is to obey this God, again, you can't rationally prove he exists.
00:36:31.000It's a personal, spiritual experience for you to say that God exists.
00:36:45.000Your belief, if everybody believed what you believed, would the world be a better place?
00:36:49.000Or if everyone believed that there was a God who judged them and believed the Ten Commandments, which of those would create a better world?
00:36:55.000Yeah, so I personally believe in post-structuralism.
00:37:01.000Personally, I think most people would be incredibly unhappy.
00:37:30.000So, like, in my opinion— Well, we actually have evidence of it, but yeah.
00:37:32.000I would say it's a little absurd, in my opinion, from a rational perspective to say that the Gila monster, which lives only in southern Arizona, only lives in 100-plus temperatures, somehow crossed the land bridge from Turkey.
00:37:45.000So it went from Turkey through China, crossed the land bridge in the Ice Age, and came all the way down to Arizona to the only place where its fossils exist.
00:37:53.000I think you're overthinking it a little bit.
00:38:05.000And I hope one day that I could plant a seed that, this is what I'll say, is that the devil, which you may or may not believe in, exists to try to get you to question and deconstruct everything in a place of constant confusion and chaos.
00:38:18.000And my hope for you is that you can get back into a place of order.