The Charlie Kirk Show - A Brave Liberal Deconstructs Critical Race Theory

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, on this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, we have a special, unique, and exclusive conversation with a brave liberal named James Lindsay.

00:00:09.000 He's been on the program before.

00:00:11.000 You are going to love his takedown of BLM Incorporated, critical race theory, and so much more.

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00:00:44.000 That's charliekirk.com/slash support.

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00:00:52.000 A brave liberal named James Lindsay is here.

00:00:54.000 Buckle up.

00:00:55.000 Here we go.

00:00:56.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:58.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:01:00.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:04.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:07.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:08.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:09.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:01:11.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

00:01:16.000 Turning point USA.

00:01:17.000 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.

00:01:26.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:30.000 James Lindsay, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:31.000 Hey, Charlie.

00:01:33.000 We have communicated digitally at first, and now in person.

00:01:37.000 And you were at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit.

00:01:40.000 How much hate did you get for being here today?

00:01:43.000 A bit already.

00:01:44.000 It's going to come in a flood.

00:01:45.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:01:46.000 Every time I talk to you, I get a mountain of hate for it, which is ridiculous. 0.99

00:01:51.000 It's ridiculous.

00:01:52.000 Just for exchanging ideas and exchanging ideas, but it's really association.

00:01:57.000 This is the curse of our times is guilt by association.

00:02:00.000 You're not allowed to hang out with the wrong people.

00:02:02.000 You're not allowed to be friends with the wrong people.

00:02:04.000 And somebody else is setting up who the wrong people are.

00:02:07.000 This is such an interesting point.

00:02:09.000 I want to start here, which is who's actually the one that gets to decide who is the untouchable?

00:02:15.000 Can you ever redeem yourself from that if you say something incorrect when you're young or if you happen to take a picture with someone that you know you shouldn't have?

00:02:24.000 This entire idea of kind of being the moral referee of society has now impacted every single portion of our life, culturally, economically, politically.

00:02:35.000 And they've come for you.

00:02:36.000 Yeah, they have.

00:02:37.000 So the people who get to decide are, I like to refer to them by a few different names, depending on who they are.

00:02:42.000 Some of them are our betters, our betters in politics, our betters in the media.

00:02:47.000 They know they have all the better opinions.

00:02:49.000 Our betters are going to tell us.

00:02:51.000 You know, we could call them the petite bourgeois if we were French, I guess.

00:02:55.000 But they're these people who think that they have the right opinions when they're more academic or public intellectual.

00:02:59.000 I call them very smart people.

00:03:01.000 Those are capital letters.

00:03:02.000 They have the proper opinions and they are the ones who have the access, especially to media so that they can call down dog piles on you.

00:03:13.000 They can put out a bad article about you, a hit piece about you.

00:03:18.000 I had a book come out this summer.

00:03:19.000 I made a bestseller list on every one of them but the New York Times.

00:03:22.000 Sold three times as many as other on the on the list, but didn't make it.

00:03:26.000 And the people who make those kinds of decisions, largely in media, but some kind of a revolving door there with politics as we're starting to find out more and more, those people, kind of that intellectual class, very, very fed by academia, which has been captured for 20, 40 years maybe, those people are making the decisions, the community guidelines, if you will, for who can talk and how they can talk, who can be friends and who they can be friends with.

00:03:54.000 And they punish you with kind of social means because they can't use legal means.

00:04:00.000 Yet.

00:04:01.000 And they will use social media censorship.

00:04:03.000 And what we're talking about here is so incredibly significant because it actually makes conversations like ours so incredibly rare.

00:04:14.000 And so this shouldn't be a rarity.

00:04:15.000 Right.

00:04:16.000 This should be normal.

00:04:17.000 This should be regular.

00:04:18.000 Right.

00:04:19.000 Where a conservative and a liberal, and you say you call yourself socially liberal and almost everything and moderate on the rest.

00:04:27.000 Is that pretty much?

00:04:28.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:04:29.000 But also, we agree on so many things, really, really big picture things.

00:04:34.000 Right.

00:04:34.000 And we agreed on voting for Trump, for example.

00:04:37.000 Yes.

00:04:37.000 Oh, you voted for Trump.

00:04:38.000 I very, yeah.

00:04:39.000 Because when we talked in August, you were coming.

00:04:41.000 I wasn't going to.

00:04:42.000 No, I changed my mind watching the way that certain things are being handled.

00:04:46.000 They started talking about packing the courts when all of a sudden, I mean, it was a little bit before that that I already decided.

00:04:51.000 But once the whole laptop scandal just vanished and the New York Post got banned from Twitter for breaking it, I was like, oh, no, no.

00:04:59.000 The job of the media is to hold power to account.

00:05:02.000 And it's blatant that there's a candidate that they hold to account for things he didn't even do.

00:05:06.000 They're just made up.

00:05:07.000 And then there's a candidate that they won't hold to account for something that he did do.

00:05:11.000 And I was like, that's it.

00:05:12.000 You know, when you have that level of brokenness and dysfunction, but I had already decided, it was very specifically when they were talking about packing the courts and when they were talking about, well, there was an article that came out that said, abolish the Constitution. 0.82

00:05:24.000 And I was like, they're crazy. 0.77

00:05:27.000 They cannot be empowered. 0.99

00:05:28.000 And people were like, oh, well, Biden's moderate.

00:05:30.000 Blah, blah, blah.

00:05:30.000 It doesn't matter.

00:05:31.000 He gets to appoint all this administrative stuff.

00:05:34.000 The administrative state is not going to be accountable to voters.

00:05:36.000 And it's huge.

00:05:37.000 It's like 5,000 appointments.

00:05:39.000 So you can cram a bunch of that stuff in there in low-level appointments that nobody's paying attention to.

00:05:43.000 So it's just absolutely, it was a no-brainer by that point.

00:05:47.000 So I said it, and then I had to go on TV in like three countries to explain myself.

00:05:51.000 And so what ends up happening is this kind of academic to media pipeline that exists.

00:05:56.000 Where there's a credentialing kind of wall, where if you do not have the proper credentials from the right schools, all of a sudden you're considered to be completely incapable of even discussing these topics.

00:05:56.000 That's right.

00:06:07.000 That's right.

00:06:08.000 That's how the long march works.

00:06:10.000 The long march to the institutions.

00:06:11.000 Capture the education is really the most important first one.

00:06:14.000 Then you can create that pipeline to the credentialed class.

00:06:16.000 Credentialed class are who are going to be in the media.

00:06:19.000 People with those proper opinions.

00:06:22.000 They're going to go into politics.

00:06:24.000 Once you get into that, you're in a trap.

00:06:27.000 Okay?

00:06:27.000 Because if you say one wrong word, that's when they seize on you.

00:06:31.000 You become the point of focus for maybe it's a day, maybe it's three days, maybe it's a week, maybe it's two weeks.

00:06:36.000 And they do everything they can to make sure that your opinion is no longer going to be valid.

00:06:42.000 But there's this pipeline through the institutions.

00:06:44.000 It starts even now in kindergarten, all the way through our schooling, all the way through the, but the big one is in the credentialing one.

00:06:52.000 And I'll tell you the biggest one.

00:06:53.000 Here is the biggest thing.

00:06:55.000 Nobody's talking about this.

00:06:56.000 Nobody knows it.

00:06:57.000 You cannot become a teacher in this country without going through a leftist indoctrination, a woke indoctrination.

00:07:04.000 They captured the critical pedagogists, that's the technical name, captured our teaching colleges by the early 1980s.

00:07:11.000 It is not possible, therefore, to get a public sector job teaching in this country without going through a political indoctrination to get credentialed.

00:07:21.000 So you have these pipelines of credentialing.

00:07:23.000 And they do, the activists that are into this, they're cultural activists.

00:07:27.000 They have a heavy-duty preference, a very strong preference to want to take over places where they get to train people, where they get to set community guidelines for people, where they get to busybody manage people.

00:07:37.000 So they want to be middle managers and the hiring managers and things like that to control the flow of people and information where nobody else really wants those jobs.

00:07:47.000 And they create pipelines that feed their own thing in, right?

00:07:51.000 So that's what diversity is about.

00:07:53.000 You hear diversity training.

00:07:54.000 Well, it's to train people to only hire the right kinds of people. 0.87

00:07:57.000 That's politically right kind.

00:07:59.000 We think it's about identity.

00:08:00.000 It's about politics.

00:08:01.000 So how did this happen?

00:08:02.000 This question asked me all the time.

00:08:04.000 How is it that all of a sudden you cannot become a teacher, a fourth-grade teacher, without going through a leftist indoctrination camp?

00:08:09.000 How did neoliberalism die in the education of our teachers?

00:08:13.000 Well, I mean, there were a lot of activists starting in the early 70s that started to push it in education.

00:08:18.000 The critical pedagogy story is absolutely crucial to understanding this.

00:08:22.000 Marcus, yeah.

00:08:23.000 That's right, Marcusa.

00:08:23.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:08:24.000 And so that's the long march taking place.

00:08:30.000 They targeted education very vigorously.

00:08:32.000 The universities made for a very soft target because they wanted to look progressive.

00:08:36.000 This ideology, the woke ideology, which is just a new manifestation of kind of the underlying communist ideology, it plays upon certain things that academics are very susceptible to.

00:08:50.000 One is open-mindedness.

00:08:52.000 You have to consider our idea.

00:08:54.000 If you don't consider our idea, you're a bigot.

00:08:55.000 You have to consider it.

00:08:57.000 So you have to open up.

00:08:58.000 Liberalism, you can think of the woke ideology like a virus, and it attaches to the liberal body.

00:09:04.000 And I mean that in the Thomas Jefferson.

00:09:06.000 Yeah, small L liberal context.

00:09:08.000 It attaches to that in our willingness to hear the argument, John Stuart Mill to hear all sides of the argument from its best proponents and to articulate that back and forth and to give as much charity as possible.

00:09:21.000 That's the vector that the virus gets in.

00:09:23.000 That's how it infects the cell.

00:09:24.000 And the universities, you have people who wanted to hear, they want to hear that.

00:09:28.000 They want to take it up.

00:09:29.000 They want to think about it. 1.00

00:09:31.000 They have an overwhelming fear of looking like they're the stupid person in the room. 1.00

00:09:36.000 So the second somebody says, well, you don't even know the definition of systemic racism, all of a sudden you've got an academic on his heels. 1.00

00:09:43.000 So they just, you know, you're doing that kind of thing.

00:09:47.000 I've got to learn this.

00:09:49.000 I know.

00:09:50.000 And then they're going to go get willing to be indoctrinated.

00:09:53.000 You need to teach me.

00:09:54.000 I need to learn from you.

00:09:55.000 And then it's also, most importantly, people who are afraid to not be liked.

00:09:58.000 And academics tend to be actually surprisingly sensitive to that somebody else might not like them.

00:10:05.000 Yeah, social pressure of their peers of that kind of storied academic class, almost like a priesthood now.

00:10:12.000 The idea of a professor used to be the exact opposite.

00:10:17.000 I mean, the point of tenure is the exact.

00:10:19.000 That's the point I was about to say.

00:10:20.000 The exact point of tenure is that you can say whatever you want once you achieve enough to be qualified.

00:10:27.000 The point of tenure was to preserve academic freedom, not to create a culture of conformity.

00:10:32.000 And that's the answer to your question.

00:10:34.000 That got hijacked.

00:10:35.000 So you had these activists filling the universities and kind of especially humanities departments at first and some social science departments.

00:10:45.000 And what they started doing was creating the ability to credential themselves and people like them to give themselves tenure to start building out of the English departments were born women's studies first, then gender studies, then all the different ethnic studies departments.

00:10:57.000 That was in the 60s. 0.89

00:10:58.000 And then that has blossomed now into this whole kind of monstrosity.

00:11:02.000 And since they're all activists, they all want to change the culture in the academy.

00:11:06.000 They understand what I talked about at the summit.

00:11:10.000 They understand that politics is downstream from culture and that culture is downstream from education in the broadest possible sense, what you learn.

00:11:18.000 So they started getting into the schools and they started credentialing themselves, making up their own fake academic disciplines and journals.

00:11:25.000 I know all about their journals.

00:11:27.000 I got right into that.

00:11:29.000 I got into their academic journals, published papers about dog sex, got an award in academic excellence for publishing papers about dog sex in their journal.

00:11:39.000 You did?

00:11:39.000 Yeah, that was me.

00:11:41.000 It's called the Grievance Studies Affair.

00:11:43.000 Look it up.

00:11:44.000 And was this the prank that was 19? 0.98

00:11:49.000 I thought that was Bogoshian. 0.57

00:11:50.000 He was with me.

00:11:50.000 Oh, you've got to be kidding.

00:11:51.000 Me, Bogosian, and Plaque.

00:11:53.000 You have to explain to our audience exactly what this is.

00:11:54.000 Yeah, I thought it was just Bogosian.

00:11:56.000 No, no.

00:11:57.000 This is one of the greatest things that's ever happened in the history of Western civilization.

00:12:00.000 It was technically mostly his idea, but I was actually the one who was in charge of making it happen.

00:12:06.000 So we decided that the academic literature in these disciplines needed to be exposed for what it was, which is fraudulent.

00:12:16.000 We needed to be able to show that these people are starting with their dumb conclusions, including in the dog sex paper, for example, including that it's acceptable to train men the way that you train dogs in order to combat rape, this rape culture that they talk about. 0.57

00:12:33.000 You can start with the conclusion and get yourself there. 0.98

00:12:35.000 That's not academia.

00:12:37.000 That is not scholarship.

00:12:39.000 That's called sophistry.

00:12:40.000 Okay?

00:12:41.000 And so we wanted to prove it.

00:12:42.000 So we started writing these fake academic papers, sometimes under fake names.

00:12:46.000 We had one guy, professional bodybuilder, actually.

00:12:48.000 He's this huge, stacked 70-year-old, like just ripped 70-year-old Richard Baldwin, who let us use his identity to write.

00:12:55.000 So we wrote a fat bodybuilding paper where you get up on stage and present how fat you are instead, but it's not a competition because they're against competition.

00:13:03.000 So we wrote 20 papers in the span of 10 months.

00:13:07.000 We submitted them, and seven of them had been accepted.

00:13:10.000 One about the dog sex won an award for excellence in scholarship.

00:13:14.000 One of them was a rewrite of a chapter of Mein Kampf using intersectional feminism.

00:13:19.000 That one got accepted, right? 0.97

00:13:20.000 That one got accepted by a feminist social work journal. 0.99

00:13:23.000 Which school?

00:13:25.000 Well, the journal's called Ophelia.

00:13:26.000 Oh, okay.

00:13:27.000 So it's kind of like an overarching journal.

00:13:28.000 Yeah, they're separate from the schools. 0.74

00:13:30.000 But yeah, the academic journal accepted Mein Kampf rewritten as intersectional feminism.

00:13:37.000 I mean, we kept a lot of Hitler's pathos, if you will, and some of his language exactly.

00:13:43.000 It was pretty intense.

00:13:45.000 So seven of those things got accepted, and then we still had seven more that were under consideration by the time the Wall Street Journal caught us.

00:13:52.000 The dog sex paper was just too over the top.

00:13:54.000 And so journalists started asking questions.

00:13:56.000 And eventually, you know, the Wall Street Journal called.

00:13:58.000 Why didn't they ask questions out of the people that were accepting the papers?

00:14:01.000 Well, they did, kind of, but they were trying to dig into the story and find out what was going on.

00:14:07.000 So as the putative author of the paper, I had the email address for this Helen Wilson PhD who doesn't exist.

00:14:14.000 They emailed me and I got this email from the Wall Street Journal.

00:14:17.000 And the journalist, I was like, oh, no, that's big.

00:14:20.000 You know, I can deal with campus reform.

00:14:23.000 I can kind of like, you know, get rid of them.

00:14:26.000 I can't deal with the Wall Street Journal digging into it.

00:14:28.000 They're going to do their due diligence properly.

00:14:30.000 And they had.

00:14:31.000 They had actually contacted the journal and started asking really hard questions like, did you vet the identity of this person?

00:14:37.000 So I also that morning woke up to an email that said from the academic journal, you need to provide, you know, proof of identity that you are who you are.

00:14:45.000 And I was like, I'm not sure.

00:14:46.000 That's racist.

00:14:47.000 I don't do that.

00:14:47.000 Yeah, I should have right now, but I wasn't going to go all the way into forgery for the project.

00:14:52.000 So the Wall Street Journal busted us.

00:14:54.000 But we still had seven more that were out there.

00:14:56.000 And I could do this all day now.

00:14:57.000 I mean, so many of our papers have actually come true.

00:15:01.000 Tell me one.

00:15:02.000 Well, it's, you know, we want to avoid that mature rating on your thing.

00:15:06.000 So we had one of our papers was that straight men would be less transphobic if they practiced, say, by getting as the term of art is pegged.

00:15:17.000 And that was an article that just came out the other day.

00:15:21.000 A real one.

00:15:22.000 The peer reviewer called that an important contribution to knowledge.

00:15:27.000 That's the exact quote.

00:15:30.000 And it was all just fake made-up interviews.

00:15:33.000 I just wrote these absolutely ridiculous things that, you know, we allegedly interviewed people.

00:15:38.000 I just wrote all of it. 0.97

00:15:39.000 And I just wrote these absolutely ridiculous. 0.83

00:15:43.000 I had these characters. 0.91

00:15:43.000 I made up the characters separately like I was writing a comedy skit or whatever. 0.91

00:15:47.000 And I just, what would they say?

00:15:49.000 You know, it's like one guy's like, oh, I can't do that.

00:15:51.000 There's poop up there.

00:15:52.000 You know, it's like, and I put that in the academic paper.

00:15:54.000 That's the key. 0.90

00:15:55.000 It's like I put that sentence in the paper to put these ridiculous things.

00:15:58.000 Important contribution to knowledge, Charlie, to knowledge.

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00:17:38.000 And these are the people that are teaching our children.

00:17:41.000 These are the people who are teaching our children.

00:17:43.000 These are the people who are.

00:17:44.000 This is not the onion.

00:17:45.000 This is not the onion.

00:17:46.000 These are the people who are arranging.

00:17:48.000 They are the ones that have the sway over the administrative decisions that the university is making.

00:17:53.000 So this is even bigger than some third-grade teacher.

00:17:57.000 This is like the credentialing body.

00:17:59.000 That's right.

00:18:00.000 That's right.

00:18:01.000 This is the NCAA of college basketball.

00:18:03.000 This is the governing, one of the governing bodies.

00:18:07.000 This is the absolute gold standard of what we consider to be knowledge production and knowledge dissemination in our society.

00:18:14.000 So when you have somebody who says something like, oh, well, one in five women is going to be raped in her lifetime and blah, blah, blah.

00:18:23.000 They go up this whole statistic.

00:18:24.000 That was done in a paper that's been heavily challenged at this point that was published by these people.

00:18:29.000 And so you even had President Obama stand up and repeat that as justification for the Dear Colleague Project, the expansion of Title IX.

00:18:37.000 And it turns out to be a very bogus statistic.

00:18:42.000 They were very expansive in their definition of rape.

00:18:45.000 It included many things that nobody would consider rape, like just being, you know, having somebody like try to kiss somebody or grab them or even accidental stuff or even, you know, after the fact regret, relationship regret or whatever, all could fall into it.

00:19:01.000 There were actual participants in the study who later found out that they were included in the one in four, one in five that it reported.

00:19:08.000 And they're like, wait, I've, no, no, that never happened.

00:19:11.000 That's not what I meant.

00:19:12.000 And so this is when you hear somebody say, well, there's a study that says papers, there's academic papers that say our scholars have said this is who we're talking about.

00:19:24.000 Not all of them.

00:19:25.000 I mean, the physics journals are just only barely starting to do this.

00:19:28.000 With like, I saw one recently, White Empiricism, that apparently they give white physicists a break that they don't give other races. 0.97

00:19:36.000 Our medical journals now, though, are completely trash. 0.95

00:19:39.000 They're completely doing this. 0.97

00:19:40.000 The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, to some degree, New England Journal of Medicine is the worst.

00:19:46.000 They're publishing at least some critical race theory article almost, several of them.

00:19:52.000 I see one almost once a week now that's coming out in the New England Journal of Medicine, which used to outrank the Lancet.

00:19:59.000 Sorry, Lancet, but I think they did.

00:20:03.000 That's our top medical journal.

00:20:04.000 We're technically in the middle of a pandemic, and our medical journal is publishing crazy stuff that is based in critical race theory, which has no scientific basis whatsoever.

00:20:15.000 It is a borderline, you know, religious, if you will, worldview in a very kind of twisted sense of religion, cult worldview.

00:20:24.000 But there's no basis in science at all.

00:20:26.000 In fact, it calls science a white supremacist construct to justify white power.

00:20:31.000 So it's not scientific.

00:20:32.000 And our medical journals are publishing this.

00:20:34.000 I could write papers for medical journals just like we did before.

00:20:37.000 Now, no problem.

00:20:38.000 Can you give an example of one of those New England Journal of Medicine, critical race theory, without specifics?

00:20:45.000 I mean, the general thrust of all of them would be something like that racism is the real public health threat or something like this.

00:20:52.000 Or that racism is deeply infecting medicine, who's really white, something like that.

00:20:57.000 So you'll see that, for example, South Asian and East Asian doctors are doing extraordinarily well. 0.68

00:21:02.000 So now they're white.

00:21:04.000 And so that way they can keep the race narrative going, that there must be racial discrimination somehow. 0.69

00:21:09.000 So now the ones that are doing well who aren't white are now white. 0.51

00:21:12.000 Which is funny, by the way, because that's what they say is the problem, is that white is a political identification, that white people had the power to expand to include who they wanted. 0.54

00:21:22.000 And now that's exactly what they're doing, is expanding it so that they can use...

00:21:28.000 Everything they do is projection, Charlie.

00:21:29.000 It's iron law of woke projection.

00:21:32.000 I tell you.

00:21:32.000 So you wrote an incredible book.

00:21:35.000 I thank you.

00:21:36.000 Yeah, I think it's good.

00:21:37.000 And the New York Times decided to think it didn't even exist.

00:21:40.000 The title is...

00:21:41.000 Cynical Theories.

00:21:43.000 Walk us through what critical race theory is and why people should care about it.

00:21:46.000 Okay, so the book chronicles the postmodern, I know that's a fancy philosophical term.

00:21:51.000 We don't have to dive into it.

00:21:52.000 Jacquel Derrida.

00:21:53.000 Yeah, Jacques Derrida, Michelle Foucault.

00:21:55.000 We've danced around this on our podcast.

00:21:57.000 So our audience is a little bit more prepped for this.

00:22:00.000 Someone wants to listen to it.

00:22:01.000 I got to make it a little more complicated for you, but you got two things that happened.

00:22:04.000 One's older than the other.

00:22:06.000 You have neo-Marxism or critical theory, which started in the 1920s.

00:22:11.000 And then you have a different tradition that arose in France.

00:22:15.000 It's called postmodernism that arose in the 1960s.

00:22:18.000 And what happened is in the 1980s and going into the 1990s, they combined and became one thing.

00:22:23.000 Jordan Peterson referred to it as postmodern neo-Marxism for a while, which is a mouthful, violating Carlin's laws of syllables and hyphens.

00:22:34.000 But George Carlin, I mean.

00:22:36.000 And so critical race theory is one of these that has adopted the postmodern ideas about truth into its otherwise neo-Marxist or critical theory ideology.

00:22:51.000 So critical race theory is a, just to keep it kind of simple, it is a view about race and racism that begins with the assumption that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society.

00:23:04.000 It explicitly says it is not an aberration.

00:23:06.000 Racism is ordinary.

00:23:08.000 And the people who are qualified, they have a critical race consciousness to be able to find the racism that's ordinary in everything that happens are called critical race theorists.

00:23:19.000 And they use critical race theory to do it.

00:23:21.000 And so a simple articulation of that that came from Robin D'Angelo, I think first in 2012, is the question under critical race theory is no longer, did racism take place, but how did racism manifest in the situation?

00:23:36.000 So here's a good example of how it thinks about the world.

00:23:40.000 Imagine that we own a store.

00:23:42.000 I'm at lunch.

00:23:43.000 You're alone working there. 0.52

00:23:45.000 Two people come in at the same time, one white, one black, and you have to approach them to help.

00:23:50.000 And it's one of those deals where you got to talk to them for a few minutes. 0.65

00:23:53.000 You have to leave one person alone. 0.86

00:23:55.000 And so you have to choose white or black. 0.86

00:23:57.000 You have this binary choice.

00:23:59.000 And so critical race theory says racism is present in your decision regardless of what it is.

00:24:03.000 It's up to a critical race theorist to find it. 0.77

00:24:05.000 So if you choose the black person, they'll say, well, that's because you don't trust black people to be left alone in your store. 0.97

00:24:14.000 So that was racist. 0.90

00:24:15.000 Or you realized that if you chose, you really wanted to choose the white person, but you knew if you did, you'd be thought of as racist. 0.96

00:24:21.000 So you signaled by choosing the black person who you didn't really want to choose, racist.

00:24:25.000 Or on the other hand, if you had chosen the white person instead, they'd say, oh, it's obvious. 0.96

00:24:29.000 You think that black people are second-class citizens and have to wait, which was racist.

00:24:32.000 So you can see it's a choose your own adventure kind of structure that always gets to the same place.

00:24:37.000 Whatever you did was racist on the back end.

00:24:39.000 This sets up a total grift where you can just accuse people of racism, get them to feel that guilt, get them, no matter what they did, all you have to do is have a little bit of creativity to figure out how it's racist, then twist the knife on them and then use that, whether it's for politics, whether that's for straight-up grift.

00:24:57.000 I saw one, somebody texted me today.

00:24:59.000 Some guy is like selling some furniture and he's moving.

00:25:02.000 And somebody had texted him, is this still for sale?

00:25:04.000 And the guy said yes.

00:25:05.000 And he said, well, have you considered donating it to a queer person of color for free, like $700 couch or something?

00:25:11.000 And the guy was like, no.

00:25:13.000 And it was racist, was the immediate reply.

00:25:15.000 That's critical race theory.

00:25:17.000 That's the mentality.

00:25:19.000 So that's in a nutshell kind of how it operates, but it is an attempt to use this Marx's idea of conflict, that same structure we're going to pit the proletariat, the oppressed proletariat against the bourgeoisie, yeah, the capitalists who are elites.

00:25:37.000 You're going to pit them against each other in societal conflict, except you take it out of producers and the workers and you shift it over to racially dominant and racially oppressed.

00:25:49.000 It's the exact same architecture there.

00:25:53.000 And I think it's really helpful if you help unpack how this is not a fringe ideology.

00:25:59.000 Oh, yeah, no.

00:26:00.000 So when I talk about this, the number one piece of response I receive is: okay, your summary is correct, but very few people are learning this.

00:26:11.000 Very few people are teaching this.

00:26:15.000 Okay, let me give you something.

00:26:17.000 So as many of your viewers will know, the president, President Trump, issued an executive order in September removing certain tenets of critical race theory from being able to be taught in federal agencies and federal contractors as a part of their workplace training.

00:26:34.000 And it cannot be taught as a matter of uncontested fact in anything that receives federal dollars in the education system.

00:26:40.000 It can still be taught as an academic subject.

00:26:42.000 You can still have diversity training.

00:26:43.000 We've been lied to about that.

00:26:44.000 You can still have racial sensitivity training.

00:26:47.000 It just pretends it's the only way to do that.

00:26:49.000 Well, there was an article that came out just the other day in one of these major newspapers that said, one of the results of Trump's ban is that almost all diversity training has been canceled, which means basically everything has diversity training.

00:27:04.000 Nearly all of it got canceled, which means nearly all of it must have contained critical race theory.

00:27:10.000 It is not just on campus anymore.

00:27:13.000 It is in HR, it's coming out of HR departments.

00:27:15.000 It's in our military.

00:27:16.000 It's in our military.

00:27:17.000 You talk about a national security threat.

00:27:19.000 It is absolutely turning over the orders of protocol that you'd have in the military.

00:27:23.000 It's creating racial division in the place where a split seconds racial division is life and death or failure or success of the mission.

00:27:32.000 It's in our police departments.

00:27:33.000 They're forcing police now to take all kinds of unconscious bias training, which is bogus.

00:27:38.000 All these kinds of race and diversity trainings rooted in critical race theory.

00:27:41.000 Had a police officer send me a message very stressed out, and he said, we make split-second decisions that are life and death for us and for the people that we're serving and protecting.

00:27:50.000 And you add a few microseconds to that, and somebody's dead.

00:27:54.000 And now we have to, oh, well, is pulling the trigger in this emergency going to be a racist incident?

00:28:01.000 What am I going to do?

00:28:01.000 You slow the whole process down.

00:28:03.000 It's a catastrophe.

00:28:04.000 It's in everything almost now.

00:28:08.000 Protecting my family is my number one priority, but I want to do it safely.

00:28:12.000 The people at Taser believe that safer self-defense is better self-defense.

00:28:17.000 Taser's line of non-lethal self-protection devices are small and lightweight enough to carry with you or in your glove compartment or purse, yet they're powerful enough to incapacitate an attacker.

00:28:28.000 Guns carry unnecessary risks for you and those around you.

00:28:31.000 And even pepper spray can harm you as much as an attacker.

00:28:35.000 And it's often ineffective.

00:28:36.000 Taser products are safer and easy to use.

00:28:39.000 They use an electrical charge to immobilize attackers for up to 30 seconds, allowing you time to escape and send emergency dispatch to your GPS location.

00:28:47.000 Taser devices come loaded with features like laser-assisted targeting and emergency dispatch, which will send response teams to your GPS location upon firing.

00:28:56.000 More than 237,000 lives have been saved with the Taser network of devices, apps, and personnel.

00:29:02.000 Now you can have your own Taser device, the number one choice of law enforcement agencies.

00:29:06.000 Taser is available without a permit in most U.S. states.

00:29:10.000 Give the Taser Pulse Plus or Taser strike light at taser.com with the promo code Charlie, spelled T-A-S-E-R.com, promo code Charlie.

00:29:20.000 Restrictions apply.

00:29:21.000 See the site for details.

00:29:25.000 A question I commonly get is what do these people want?

00:29:29.000 Power. 0.91

00:29:31.000 They want power.

00:29:32.000 And it's not even about race. 1.00

00:29:33.000 It's not like black power.

00:29:34.000 They want power for the people who are part of this party that has these correct woke ideas. 0.56

00:29:40.000 So if you are a minority, a racial minority as they define it, who uses these ideas, you have lots of power.

00:29:49.000 If you're a white person who uses these ideas, you're tolerated and accepted as kind of in the club.

00:29:56.000 And then if you are, for example, Kanye West is a great example.

00:29:59.000 You know, Kanye is an interesting character.

00:30:01.000 So he slaps on very famously not so long ago, a year ago or whatever, he slaps on Make America Great Again hat.

00:30:07.000 What's he say?

00:30:08.000 He's like, I think for myself, you know, and what happened next? 0.93

00:30:10.000 Tana Hissy Coates, who's a fraud, very famous writer that's taken up this critical race theory stuff.

00:30:17.000 I think he writes primarily for the Atlantic.

00:30:17.000 Very famous.

00:30:19.000 He also wrote Black Panther, too.

00:30:21.000 He was part of it.

00:30:21.000 Did he?

00:30:23.000 He came out and said Kanye is no longer black.

00:30:27.000 And then over the summer, we got our explanation.

00:30:29.000 Nicole Hannah Jones of the 1619 Project, the New York Times, explains that there's a difference between being racially black and politically black.

00:30:37.000 And then mysteriously enough, she deleted that tweet, you know, with an screenshots everywhere, but she deleted that tweet within, you know, an hour or something very quickly because, whoops, you're not supposed to say that part.

00:30:47.000 So it's not about race.

00:30:49.000 It's about having the correct woke politics.

00:30:52.000 So.

00:30:53.000 And they're after power, by the way, for themselves, and to tear down Western society so that they can have the power.

00:30:58.000 I think that's a good segue to really where I want the positive part of this, which I know it sounds like, what's the positive part of this?

00:31:05.000 Which is exactly kind of what on earth brought a liberal and a conservative, you know, a couple days before Christmas in Palm Beach, Florida, to talk about this is because this is such a, and I use this term intentionally, existential threat.

00:31:17.000 That's right.

00:31:18.000 We are in the jaws of a trap.

00:31:21.000 And that trap's going to snap shut and we're going to lose Western civilization.

00:31:26.000 But I think there's a way to save it.

00:31:28.000 That's right.

00:31:28.000 And you said something so fascinating in my podcast.

00:31:31.000 We have different religious views.

00:31:33.000 I'm an evangelical Christian.

00:31:35.000 I'll let you know describe your own views.

00:31:38.000 No, I'm an atheist.

00:31:40.000 Yeah.

00:31:40.000 And that's a deeper, we could totally have that conversation at a different time.

00:31:44.000 But more pressingly is you have this really interesting theory that it's Protestant Christianity and people who are really, you know, from the Enlightenment that all of a sudden find themselves natural allies.

00:31:56.000 How is that possible?

00:31:57.000 Okay, there's two pieces to this.

00:31:58.000 One is that the Protestant thing breaking off from the Catholic thing, the Reformation, was a process of saying, no, we're not going to go through this gated institutional narrative, as Eric Weinstein would call it.

00:32:10.000 We're not going to go through.

00:32:11.000 The Catholic Church doesn't have to mediate the Bible to us.

00:32:14.000 Let's print it in German.

00:32:16.000 Let's print it in French.

00:32:17.000 Let's print it in English.

00:32:19.000 Let's learn this thing.

00:32:20.000 Let's print it in the vernacular.

00:32:21.000 That was a death sentence, by the way, at the time, to print the Bible in a vernacular language of Europe.

00:32:26.000 And let's study the word and try to understand it. 0.88

00:32:31.000 Let's study the objective truth as Christians hold it and try to understand it and get to the bottom of it. 0.63

00:32:36.000 Exegesis is the primary tool, but there's history gets added in.

00:32:39.000 Other subjects can contribute.

00:32:41.000 But the point is, you believe in objective truth and you locate it in God.

00:32:46.000 As an atheist, I would say that if I had to say I bow to a God, it's Spinoza's God.

00:32:50.000 But Spinoza's God is the universe, not in some kind of hippie way, in a way that there is something all around me bigger than me that I can't understand.

00:33:00.000 And I'm subject to that, whether I like it or not.

00:33:04.000 And so there is an objective truth that is in that. 1.00

00:33:07.000 And I have to set myself aside, just like Christians know, they have to set themselves.

00:33:11.000 They have no standing against God. 1.00

00:33:13.000 They have to set themselves aside.

00:33:14.000 And because you believe in objective truth, and I believe in objective truth, we have the ability to communicate.

00:33:22.000 Our gods may be different if you accept the Spinoza's God construction.

00:33:26.000 I don't mean to step on any religious toes, just as a metaphor for the moment.

00:33:30.000 Never offend me.

00:33:32.000 So as long as you understand me, they may be a different perspective on things, but nevertheless, we agree that objective truth exists and that the best ways to get at it are through things like Enlightenment rationalism, whether that's applied to exegesis, whether that's applied to the scientific method, neutral principles of law, constitutional law, equality theory under law.

00:33:54.000 Newtonian physics, minority.

00:33:55.000 Newtonian physics, you know, even Einsteinian physics.

00:33:58.000 We know that we agree those too.

00:33:59.000 Yeah, well, of course.

00:34:01.000 It's a bit dated, but Sandra Harding, a feminist theorist in the 80s, wrote, I think in the trying to remember the title of the book, it's something like the feminist problem with science or something like that.

00:34:14.000 She wrote that Newton's Principia Mathematica was a rape manual.

00:34:18.000 Yeah, so they're against the idea of objective truth entirely.

00:34:21.000 That's why all summer I fought 2 plus 2 equals 4.

00:34:24.000 I fought for that.

00:34:25.000 2 plus 2 equals 4.

00:34:26.000 I had to get that against people who were saying, you know, it can equal other things.

00:34:30.000 And in particular, they doubled down into 2 plus 2 equals 5.

00:34:32.000 The reason was somebody who's high up in the Department of Education in the state of Washington, one of these activists, got accused for her ethno-mathematics program.

00:34:41.000 She's forcing into the schools all the way down to kindergarten again in the state of Washington that's being copied down the West Coast.

00:34:48.000 She keeps getting accused of teaching 2 plus 2 equals 5.

00:34:52.000 And her reaction to that wasn't to say, no, that's not what we're doing.

00:34:56.000 Her reaction was, how can we turn this into a true statement?

00:35:00.000 And the postmodern activists, the relativists, the subjectivists came to her defense, including Fields Medalist-winning mathematicians debasing themselves, saying that 2 plus 2 doesn't equal 4.

00:35:12.000 Now, my PhDs in math, but I don't need a PhD in math to know 2 plus 2 equals 4, right?

00:35:17.000 Every kindergartner knows this.

00:35:20.000 So that's the difference.

00:35:23.000 So now you see this alliance coming to go fight against wokeism for freedom of speech and quite honestly to save the West.

00:35:31.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:35:31.000 Right.

00:35:33.000 Do you think that there's your truth and my truth and that those things?

00:35:37.000 Of course not.

00:35:37.000 No, there's the truth.

00:35:39.000 I agree.

00:35:39.000 And we have to and the truth will set you free.

00:35:42.000 That's what they say.

00:35:44.000 That's right.

00:35:44.000 So that's why you and I come together.

00:35:47.000 That's why you and I can talk.

00:35:49.000 That's why this works is because you believe in the truth.

00:35:52.000 I believe in the truth.

00:35:53.000 I'm interested to hear your experiences in life, your lived experience, but that's not lived experience.

00:35:59.000 I'm interested to hear your experiences in life.

00:36:02.000 And I'm interested to take that as indicative of something to do with the truth.

00:36:06.000 And I'm ready to have the real investigation to find out what that real truth is.

00:36:09.000 And so are you.

00:36:10.000 So that's why we have this alliance between people who have different faiths in our case, who have different politics, I'm sure, in some regards in our case.

00:36:19.000 Certainly the person I was a year ago, very different politics.

00:36:24.000 And there is this repolarization to people who believe in truth versus subjectivism.

00:36:29.000 There's this repolarization between people who believe in freedom versus control.

00:36:34.000 And there's a recalibration of putting together, putting aside any labels to say maybe we should confront big tech, woke ideology, and preserve the West.

00:36:45.000 Minor details.

00:36:46.000 You can have minor things.

00:36:48.000 Maybe we really do need to realize that there's so much at stake right here.

00:36:53.000 So in closing, people ask me all the time, what can I do?

00:36:56.000 You wrote a bestseller on this.

00:36:59.000 Parents listening to this podcast, tens of thousands are having their kids be taught critical race theory right now.

00:37:04.000 What can they do?

00:37:05.000 Stop sending money to the schools.

00:37:07.000 What if it's their local public school?

00:37:09.000 You have to start getting involved.

00:37:11.000 You have to start learning enough about this to understand the basics.

00:37:16.000 You have to start organizing with other parents.

00:37:18.000 You have to start showing up.

00:37:20.000 Why does your school district superintendent not know your name?

00:37:25.000 Why are you not at the school board meeting?

00:37:27.000 Why are you not at your city council meeting?

00:37:29.000 You have to start getting involved if you're that everyday person at the local level.

00:37:35.000 Now, if you're an alumnus of a big university, don't give them money if they teach this stuff.

00:37:41.000 This is a fundamental threat to everything.

00:37:44.000 Don't, it's not the somebody tweeted, I retweeted, I can't take credit for it.

00:37:48.000 They said, you know, you have to stop giving them money.

00:37:50.000 I loved my college experience too.

00:37:52.000 It's not the same place.

00:37:54.000 Tell them you'll give them money when they quit doing this and put that financial pressure on them.

00:37:59.000 Well said.

00:38:00.000 Cynical theories.

00:38:01.000 James, we're going to have to leave it here.

00:38:03.000 Right on.

00:38:03.000 Thanks for joining.

00:38:04.000 Appreciate it.

00:38:08.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:38:09.000 Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:38:12.000 If you want to get involved with TurningPointUSA, go to tpusa.com.

00:38:16.000 And if you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:38:21.000 Thank you guys so much for listening.

00:38:22.000 God bless.

00:38:23.000 Speak to you, soon.

The Charlie Kirk Show - December 31, 2020

A Brave Liberal Deconstructs Critical Race Theory

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