The Charlie Kirk Show - A Catholic, a Jew, and an Evangelical on Saving the West with Sohrab Ahmari and Josh Hammer (Part 1)

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, my conversation with Sorab Amari and Josh Hammer about tradition.

00:00:05.000 A Jew, a Catholic, and an evangelical talk about the future of America.

00:00:09.000 I think you'll enjoy this conversation.

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00:00:25.000 A Jew, a Catholic, and an evangelical talk about the future of America. 0.75

00:00:28.000 Buckle up. 0.98

00:00:29.000 Here we go.

00:00:30.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:32.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:34.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:38.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:41.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:42.000 He's an incredible guy.

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00:00:51.000 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.

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00:02:02.000 Good morning, everybody.

00:02:06.000 We have an amazing day planned.

00:02:07.000 I've been so excited about this conversation that we have today.

00:02:11.000 With us is Sorab from the New York Post, who we just had an amazing conversation on the Charlie Kirk show, and Josh Hammer from Newsweek.

00:02:20.000 And we wanted to have this discussion around different religious views, all agreeing that we need to save Western civilization.

00:02:29.000 And I want to kind of start this conversation first by asking what is Western civilization.

00:02:35.000 So we're going to talk about this from an evangelical Protestant standpoint, from a Jewish standpoint, and then a Catholic standpoint, which I think is going to be really fun and exciting.

00:02:43.000 So Josh, welcome.

00:02:45.000 And walk us through, first of all, what is Western civilization?

00:02:49.000 All right.

00:02:49.000 Yeah, so thank you, Charlie.

00:02:51.000 Thanks to Turning Point for having me.

00:02:52.000 I'd be remiss if I didn't also thank Charlie for being a Newsweek columnist.

00:02:56.000 So, you know, thank you for that.

00:02:57.000 And yeah, great to be here.

00:02:59.000 You know, Saurabh and I got dinner last night.

00:03:00.000 We were joking about how we can possibly talk about how to save the West in 30 minutes.

00:03:04.000 So let's kind of dive right in and get right to the point here.

00:03:07.000 So, you know, I mean, Leo Strauss famously defines Western civilization as kind of the ever-existing tension between Jerusalem and Athens, between the Bible and between kind of Greco-Roman reason, if you will.

00:03:22.000 I think that's a good place to start.

00:03:24.000 You know, I'm a research fellow at the Edmund Burke Foundation, which is Yoram Hazoni's think tank.

00:03:29.000 It's a home for kind of national conservatism.

00:03:31.000 And we think of the nation-state, the nation-state as being directly derived from the Hebrew Bible, actually, the tribes of Israel themselves, kind of being the original, the OG nation-state, if you will.

00:03:43.000 So I think just recovering a sense of biblical identity and the importance of the nation-state in contrast to globalism, in contrast to all sorts of kind of utopian global ideals, is a good place to start.

00:03:58.000 So it starts with the Bible, truth, Jerusalem, Athens, and then obviously Rome as well, which is more my good friend's territory, of course.

00:04:07.000 There's a lot there.

00:04:08.000 And so, Saurab, you have an interesting perspective on this.

00:04:10.000 So, can you tell us what makes the West different?

00:04:13.000 Why is this worth preserving?

00:04:15.000 And dare we say, is the West better than other civilization projects currently or previously?

00:04:23.000 So, I would define the West not too dissimilar from what Josh shared, as the combination of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Judeo-Christian religion.

00:04:34.000 And what's special about that combination is this view that man and woman are at home in the world, that using reason we can understand the world.

00:04:49.000 And because we are part of a whole, that is a legible whole that can be discovered using reason, we can also understand what it means to be happy as a human being.

00:05:02.000 And then the Christian dimension comes in, the dimension of revelation, and that points out that although we have some natural ends that are good for us, we flourish in families, we flourish in political communities, there's the health of a body that you can discover and learn about, but that there's also a supernatural good that ultimately points us to a transcendent horizon beyond this world.

00:05:27.000 So, we're of this world.

00:05:29.000 We are in this world, but not of it.

00:05:31.000 But nevertheless, we love it because it's God's creation.

00:05:35.000 And we can ultimately then help people reach that flourishing using law, which is where the Roman aspect comes in.

00:05:43.000 So, that tension between those three, that synthesis between those three is the West, and it's made for a truly glorious, beautiful civilization.

00:05:53.000 So, I hear from both of you that it's this balance between reason and revelation.

00:05:58.000 So, Saurabh I want to ask you, do you think that there's been an overemphasis on reason, almost overemphasizing the Enlightenment and almost putting away the tradition of what is a transcendent order?

00:06:10.000 Who are we and how are we supposed to live?

00:06:12.000 How are we supposed to strike that balance?

00:06:14.000 Because you're saying that we shouldn't forsake reason.

00:06:17.000 It sounds like an argument that Thomas Aquinas would make about how reason being a gift from God.

00:06:23.000 At the same point, you say if we govern solely by reason, then all of a sudden we start to have a massive issue on our hands.

00:06:31.000 Can you help us navigate that?

00:06:32.000 Well, I would reformulate the question.

00:06:34.000 I would say that the Enlightenment modern view is an unfortunate narrowing of reason compared to what the pre-moderns, the ancients and the medievals thought reason could accomplish.

00:06:47.000 The modern view is generally that reason is only that which can be known with our senses, what we can measure with our scientific instruments, and that's reason.

00:06:57.000 And everything else becomes revelation or opinion or superstition.

00:07:01.000 Whereas the tradition that stretches from Aristotle to St. Thomas Aquinas says, no, actually, we can also know by reason.

00:07:08.000 We can know of God's existence.

00:07:10.000 We can know that there is an objective human good, that human beings flourish in one way and not in other ways, and we can make these judgments about them.

00:07:18.000 So, what we live in is not only the fact that God has been banished, unfortunately, from the modern West, but we've actually gotten a narrow, too narrow account of what reason can do.

00:07:27.000 I think that's really well said.

00:07:29.000 So, Josh, Saurabh mentioned something, and so did you.

00:07:32.000 There is this idea of objective truth.

00:07:35.000 It's something that we don't like to talk about very much in the last 20 years.

00:07:39.000 In fact, we play into this idea of my truth.

00:07:42.000 I'm sure a lot of you have heard that on your college campus or your high school campus.

00:07:45.000 How many of you have heard that recently?

00:07:47.000 It's my truth.

00:07:48.000 Is there such a thing as my truth?

00:07:50.000 And what happens when we decide to organize society around everyone's independent view of how they think society should be organized?

00:07:58.000 So, I mean, the short answer is that, no, of course not.

00:08:01.000 There's no such thing as quote-unquote my truth.

00:08:03.000 So, you know, I would be remiss if, you know, as the Jew on a panel with one evangelical, a Catholic, and a Jew, if I didn't talk about Judaism here a little bit, I think it's important.

00:08:11.000 So today is actually Tishaba on the Jewish calendar, which is actually the saddest day on the entire Jewish calendar.

00:08:18.000 It's a fasting day.

00:08:19.000 You won't see me eating today or anything.

00:08:21.000 Both the first and second temples were destroyed on this day.

00:08:24.000 Lots of other tragedies happened to the Jewish people on this day.

00:08:28.000 The edict of expulsion from the kicking the Jews out of England happened on this day in the year 1290.

00:08:33.000 The Nazis began the rounding up of the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka in 1942 on this day.

00:08:40.000 So I was actually in the Warsaw Ghetto in Treblinka less than two months ago.

00:08:44.000 I was over there in Poland.

00:08:46.000 And it's kind of a very roundabout way of answering your question, Charlie.

00:08:50.000 But it was my first time seeing the ghetto, seeing the death camps for myself.

00:08:54.000 And when you see that level of human depravity, when you see that level of evil, but you also learn the good stories.

00:09:02.000 You learn about the heroes, the people on the outside of the walls of the ghetto who helped the Jews, the heroes in the camps themselves.

00:09:10.000 You see that there's also such good, that human beings are capable of such good.

00:09:16.000 And it was very difficult for me to kind of walk away from that with such a kind of moral relativism of like my truth, your truth, his truth, her truth.

00:09:23.000 There is such thing as good.

00:09:25.000 There is such thing as bad.

00:09:27.000 And from my perspective, it obviously starts in the Bible.

00:09:30.000 And, you know, I think the three of us probably have slightly different definitions, I'm sure, of like what the Bible is and what that contains and what to make of that.

00:09:36.000 But that is where truth begins, obviously, is in the Bible.

00:09:40.000 And so, Josh, let me just follow up.

00:09:42.000 You know, so in the Jewish belief of the Old Testament, it's this belief in the law that was given by God.

00:09:50.000 And so if you were to even say that on a college campus, you will be ridiculed and mocked that the divine would give you a way to live your life.

00:09:59.000 Using the best reason-based argument you can, can you help equip the audience here of how do they tell their friends on a secular type college campus, no, there actually is a law, and if you follow it, it will actually make you more free.

00:10:15.000 Can you help us walk through that?

00:10:17.000 Yeah, no, this is a fabulous question.

00:10:20.000 I think Saurabh and I both have a lot of thoughts on this exact topic, actually.

00:10:23.000 So there is this paradox.

00:10:26.000 There is this mentality that has really kind of creeped in in the United States and a lot of Western civilization for the past half century, really more than that, the past century, century and a half at least.

00:10:36.000 A lot of it is kind of is intellectually downstream of the Enlightenment, of particularly bad strands of Enlightenment thought, I would add.

00:10:42.000 The Enlightenment is obviously complicated.

00:10:43.000 The Scottish Enlightenment is a heck of a lot better, for example, than other strands.

00:10:47.000 But let's simplify it and say that a lot of this kind of this intuition that we are free when we have maximum consumer choice, that we are free when we can use whatever social media platform we want to realize self-realization, self-potential.

00:11:02.000 You know, I'm a lawyer by training.

00:11:04.000 In one of the more infamous Supreme Court cases of the past 30, 40 years, the Planned Parenthood versus Casey case, which effectively reaffirmed Roe versus Wade in 1992, Anthony Kennedy has this utterly ridiculous passage.

00:11:18.000 Lawyers call it the mystery passage, where he talks about how like the great achievement in human life, it's the eternal mystery.

00:11:24.000 It's everyone's duty to define his or her own existence.

00:11:27.000 That's kind of this mentality to its climax, right?

00:11:31.000 All of this is nonsense.

00:11:32.000 And it explains a lot as to why Western civilization has just gone totally off the rails.

00:11:37.000 Saurabh has been adamant about this, probably more eloquent about it than basically anyone in this space.

00:11:42.000 I don't want to take up too much of his time.

00:11:44.000 But there is a different conception of freedom.

00:11:47.000 There's a different conception of freedom that is not just libertarian live and let live.

00:11:52.000 There's a different conception of freedom, that true freedom, that true liberty can only be attained and fulfilled through living a virtuous lifestyle with certain constrictions and parameters and barriers in place.

00:12:05.000 When the founders, you know, we speak of the founders in broad terms, the founders disagreed about this among themselves.

00:12:10.000 Perhaps Jefferson, when he spoke of self-evident truths, he had this more enlightenment-motivated, kind of strong form of Lockeanism.

00:12:19.000 But there were other founders too, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, who definitely adhered to this more traditional view of freedom.

00:12:26.000 And, you know, we see current politicians today.

00:12:29.000 A lot of what sender Josh Holly is doing, for instance, is really trying to, I think, kind of recover this definition of freedom.

00:12:34.000 So that is what Sorb and I and a lot of our work are trying to do for sure.

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00:13:23.000 So, Sorob, I first became aware of you during a debate where I thought I knew where I stood on the issue because I was trained in the conservative movement in 2012, 13, and 14 to believe that freedom meant that a person should be able to do whatever they saw fit as long as it doesn't harm another person.

00:13:42.000 And this really interesting debate kind of became front-center in the conservative movement, which kind of started on the outer, like more wonky areas, and it kind of moved into kind of the mainstream, which was that, should we as conservatives use political power to prevent drag queen story hour from happening at public libraries?

00:14:04.000 And I thought I knew.

00:14:07.000 I was like, oh, yeah, freedom.

00:14:08.000 How what, you know, like, I don't like it, but who am I?

00:14:10.000 And then I heard very articulate argument.

00:14:13.000 So, Rob, and I won't dare steal the argument from you, but you won me over.

00:14:18.000 And I think with millions of others, where all of a sudden, if we are not protecting and conserving tradition, if we're not even protecting our children, then what good are we actually doing?

00:14:30.000 Just walk us through that argument a little bit and then the impact that it had.

00:14:35.000 Yeah, so the argument was, and it's not just Drag Queen Story Hour, which at the time I was a recent father, and it did outrage me the fact that drag queens, I live in Manhattan.

00:14:47.000 I actually happen to live literally above a drag bar.

00:14:52.000 And Josh has seen it because my place.

00:14:55.000 You know, that's one thing because it's known as, okay, that's where you go.

00:14:59.000 You have your, like, if you're about to get married, you know, you have your bridal party at the drag, fine.

00:15:04.000 But to then to say that this needs to be brought forth in front of children and to say, well, you know, this kind of kind of frankly, transvestic fetishism should be normalized for kids outraged me as a father.

00:15:18.000 Maybe it's because I'm from the Middle East, but I think a lot of Americans who aren't from the Middle East have the same intuition that there's something gone really wrong civilizationally when that happens and someone dressed in like latex boots up to here is reading books to toddlers is bizarre.

00:15:35.000 And so I argue that some of this has to do with precisely what Josh said, is this account that freedom just means having maximal choice and having as much autonomy as you want.

00:15:47.000 And what that paradoxically does, because it gets rid of various traditional limits, it makes us less free.

00:15:56.000 We see this in gender ideology so much more, right?

00:16:00.000 Gender ideology initially began as this claim about, look, I subjectively believe that I'm a woman, but I'm born into the body of the man.

00:16:08.000 Why don't you recognize it and let me do what I want?

00:16:11.000 It doesn't stop there because my demand for full autonomy begins to become, you have to recognize me as such.

00:16:20.000 Therefore, you have to alter your language.

00:16:22.000 Therefore, we have to create a new pronoun system.

00:16:24.000 Therefore, you may be banned from social media if you use the wrong pronoun and so on and so forth.

00:16:29.000 So I know she's speaking here when Tomi Lauren said, well, why are people picking on Caitlin Jenner?

00:16:36.000 Of course, or formerly known as Bruce Jenner, of course we have to object to any kind of bullying or viciousness to anyone because everyone is born in the image of God.

00:16:45.000 But why is it important?

00:16:47.000 It's important because reality itself is at stake.

00:16:50.000 Those traditional constraints preserved our ability to have access to reality and not to be forced to say something that is not true, such as the idea that a man can ultimately become a woman.

00:17:02.000 No, gender differences are fundamental.

00:17:04.000 You don't need to go to Genesis to know this.

00:17:07.000 It's in genetics.

00:17:09.000 And so can I follow up on this?

00:17:11.000 And I totally agree.

00:17:13.000 And we're an educational organization, not commenting on politics.

00:17:17.000 I said this on television, that a man who thinks that he's a woman has no place running in the Republican Party in any position whatsoever.

00:17:25.000 And so I want you to kind of help our audience here, though, because if they said what you and I just said, you know, you run like the oldest newspaper in the country.

00:17:38.000 You know, I run Turning Point.

00:17:40.000 In some ways, I'm not going to have to get some sort of crazy activist coming up to me in some North African lesbian poetry class at their school, right? 1.00

00:17:48.000 So how are they supposed to defend their peers who will call them transphobic, who will call them hateful and bigoted, that traditional gender roles, not just, let's forget traditional gender roles.

00:18:01.000 How about like just a man is a man and a woman is a woman?

00:18:04.000 Help equip our audience to be able to be prepared for that. 0.95

00:18:08.000 Yeah, I mean, the language to use is the language of equal indignity, but also different. 0.85

00:18:15.000 Men and women have equal dignity, but they are different.

00:18:19.000 And when you attempt to cross that boundary, it ends up in far worse coercion than what we had before.

00:18:26.000 Again, it's the coercion that you face on campus.

00:18:29.000 But I will say this.

00:18:30.000 You and I and Josh can withstand cancel pressure, right?

00:18:34.000 When I work at the New York Post, when the Hunter Biden story, which we did, I was not involved because I help run the opinion pages.

00:18:43.000 When we did that, as you remember, Facebook banned our, reduced circulation on our story.

00:18:50.000 Twitter banned our account.

00:18:51.000 You couldn't even use direct private messages to share our story, which remains to this day to be true.

00:18:57.000 Hunter Biden has not said, those were not emails.

00:19:00.000 That was not my laptop.

00:19:02.000 He could have done that 24 hours, two hours after the story dropped.

00:19:05.000 They didn't.

00:19:06.000 It was a true story that was censored.

00:19:08.000 But look, we can fight back.

00:19:09.000 I can go on Fox.

00:19:10.000 My colleagues can go on Fox.

00:19:12.000 We can make our case.

00:19:13.000 And ultimately, we prevailed as much as you can.

00:19:16.000 At least we got our account back and now you can share that story.

00:19:19.000 But the ordinary person can't, which is why those of you who are concerned about tradition, as much as you have to show personal courage on campus or in your workplaces, we also have to seek political solutions.

00:19:33.000 Because you're individually, we are too alone.

00:19:36.000 We have to, the pressure of big tech is a matter of fundamental danger to what matters, political speech, right?

00:19:47.000 Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in 1996 was enacted in order to keep prurient content out of these bulletin boards like Facebook, like Twitter, which would come a few years later, but not to suppress political speech.

00:20:05.000 Perversely now, they use Section 230 to repress conservative political speech, but all sorts of prurient content can be found on these platforms.

00:20:16.000 And that, when you have especially the collusion of government, when you have the Biden administration telling these firms that you have to censor X, Y, and Z, you're dealing with something else.

00:20:27.000 It's this blob of corporate government power and political action of the time that would have been recognizable to an Andrew Jackson is what we need.

00:20:36.000 So Josh, I want to kind of get into this because we have been told as conservatives, the only way to save the West is through cultural transformation and being able to make better arguments.

00:20:48.000 I agree with all of that.

00:20:50.000 And as an evangelical, I think that we need to realize we're in a spiritual battle, not just in a material battle.

00:20:56.000 And I think that, you know, in the specific religious view that I have, that just, you know, talking about things that we can see is a mistake.

00:21:05.000 However, so often conservatives say, well, I agree that Drag Queen Story Hour is wrong. 0.98

00:21:13.000 I agree that I don't want to see men go into a restroom that's a woman's restroom. 0.99

00:21:18.000 But who am I to legislate morality? 1.00

00:21:21.000 Who am I to use political power?

00:21:24.000 Josh, is it time to start using political power?

00:21:27.000 The time for that has long since passed, I think, is the short answer.

00:21:31.000 Look, anyone who is answering no to that question does not understand what time it is in America.

00:21:37.000 If you are looking at what is happening out there, we are obviously over 100 years into the Woodrow Wilson kind of progressive transformation, but this transformation happened quite a bit before then.

00:21:48.000 But, you know, you can go back again to the writings of the American founders, a very kind of intellectually and politically diverse group.

00:21:55.000 But they spoke all the time about the duty, the obligation of legislators, of lawmakers to pursue a politics oriented towards human flourishing justice and the common good of the whole.

00:22:06.000 The preamble of the United States Constitution enumerates seven substantive ends for governance.

00:22:12.000 I don't have them all memorized or bad, but a more perfect union, promote the general welfare, domestic tranquility, secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, which by the way, that latter phrase is often, from my perspective, misinterpreted.

00:22:25.000 A lot of people, this became kind of like a running joke, like hashtag blessings of liberty in this Drag Queen Story Hour context is kind of like a Twitter meme at this point.

00:22:32.000 But that's totally, totally wrong.

00:22:35.000 If you actually look at what the phrase secure the blessings of liberty is saying, it's the blessings that they're trying to secure.

00:22:43.000 The liberty is an instrumental means to achieve those substantive blessings, which of course are downstream of biblical principles.

00:22:50.000 But more generally speaking here, look, the late Andrew Breitbart, may his memory be a blessing, famously said over and over and over again that politics is downstream of culture.

00:23:01.000 I guess my reaction to that is always, it's a two-way arrow.

00:23:04.000 The two very clearly do relate to one another.

00:23:08.000 I think legislators, I think political statesmen, even judicial statesmen, frankly, that our best judges, Chief Justice John Marshall in the early 19th century, the greatest even justices have understood this, that there is a powerful role for the state to also use the levers, whether it's the political levers or the judicial opinion levers, to influence culture as well.

00:23:30.000 And look, we have to know what time it is in America.

00:23:32.000 I realize I've said that already, but like that, you guys are the future.

00:23:36.000 I mean, you have to look out there and see what the left has done.

00:23:39.000 And I guess here's kind of the other thing I'll say about this.

00:23:41.000 Look, Saurabh's already talked about this a little bit.

00:23:44.000 You know, Ronald Reagan famously said that the most terrifying words in the English language were, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. 0.95

00:23:50.000 That probably was true at the time he said that.

00:23:53.000 I don't think that's true anymore.

00:23:54.000 I think the most terrifying words in the English language in the year 2021 are, I'm from the ruling class and I'm here to subjugate you.

00:24:01.000 That is what we see with this new Biden administration, you know, countering domestic extremism document.

00:24:07.000 That is what we see with this grotesque partnering with the federal government and big tech most recently, this Facebook COVID misinformation stuff.

00:24:15.000 We have to get in there.

00:24:17.000 It is way past time for us to get comfortable, use the levers of power to get in there and try to steer this ship back in a direction that is healthy, sustainable, again, towards those overarching substantive ends, justice, human flourishing, and the common good, before it's too late.

00:24:32.000 Just very quickly, to Republican legislators that say, legislators, but also intellectuals of a kind of establishment, older generation who say, well, my purpose in being in government is just to not use government power, then why are you in government?

00:24:48.000 I'm sorry, but in any civilization across all of human history, people go into government to use power.

00:24:56.000 It's only this bizarre class of the GOP establishment, I think, which relative recently has convinced itself its role is to not use power.

00:25:07.000 Of course, and anyone who labors still under the idea that, you know what, the public square can be neutral.

00:25:13.000 So-and-so can believe that there are 157 genders. 0.93

00:25:17.000 I think there is only two sexes, but we can go.

00:25:20.000 It doesn't work that way. 1.00

00:25:22.000 And that's an obvious example.

00:25:23.000 There are many others of this kind where we see that one way or another, some orthodoxy or other will be enshrined in the public square.

00:25:31.000 So it might as well be a true orthodoxy, one that says that God is logos itself, reason itself, one that says that man and woman are made in the image of God and therefore they have an inherent dignity.

00:25:42.000 That's the orthodoxy that the West has, broadly speaking, enshrined and should be enshrined again.

00:25:47.000 And the great irony of it is that each side did the opposite of what the other side was afraid of.

00:25:55.000 And so, for example, it's now the left that is mandating vaccines and trying to control your body, which is what we're always accused of when it comes to the life argument.

00:26:05.000 And we're the ones that are totally indifferent when you want to do something that is probably, you know, not good for society, which is always what we accuse the other side of doing, of kind of just being indifferent.

00:26:16.000 It's just kind of, it's all the kind of accusations have now been kind of absorbed as kind of behavioral, you know, traits in each side, which has been a really bizarre thing to see.

00:26:27.000 Saurabh, I want to ask you this as a follow-up, though.

00:26:29.000 Someone like David French would say, who you know very well from your debates, you're nothing more than a central planner.

00:26:36.000 You want to use political power because you don't trust people to have their own ability to self-govern.

00:26:42.000 There's two statist movements, and one calls themselves conservatives, one call themselves liberals.

00:26:48.000 Is that true?

00:26:49.000 Are we just central planners now?

00:26:51.000 Is the era of big government here?

00:26:53.000 I'm going to appeal to authority.

00:26:54.000 I'm going to appeal to authority because someone like David French or other of my and Josh's kind of interlocutors or our critics in the conservative movements make this point.

00:27:06.000 They say that we just, what we want to do is exhort people to virtue and just evangelize the culture, and that will do its job.

00:27:15.000 And I totally believe in evangelizing the culture.

00:27:19.000 Of course, it's the great commission.

00:27:21.000 In the Bible, our Lord says, go baptize nations in my name.

00:27:25.000 That's fine.

00:27:27.000 But the ancients never thought that mere evangelization or mere exhortation was enough.

00:27:33.000 It had to have the force of law because most people, because of their fallen nature, need the guidance of law.

00:27:39.000 The law is a teacher.

00:27:41.000 St. Thomas says exhortations to virtue are good, but they're not enough.

00:27:45.000 You also need some coercive dimension.

00:27:48.000 And if you say, well, coercion is bad, well, guess what?

00:27:52.000 You coerced one way or another.

00:27:55.000 If you're afraid of government coercion, as Josh said, how much more should be afraid of a coercion of a few Silicon Valley dweebs in Birkenstocks who wield enormous power to make unperson you, disappear you from the internet, and therefore so much of your identity is erased, and you don't have a Supreme Court to go to.

00:28:16.000 You don't have a legislator to go to.

00:28:18.000 It's a private company.

00:28:20.000 So coercion is inevitable.

00:28:22.000 Again, the only question is, what are you coercing for?

00:28:25.000 What means are you using?

00:28:26.000 Are you using them for reasonable ends or unreasonable ends?

00:28:29.000 But the idea that you can have a society without coercion is fantasy.

00:28:36.000 If you choose to believe Google, then all you need to do is surf the internet privately in incognito mode in your browser.

00:28:41.000 And we're supposed to think that we trust big tech?

00:28:43.000 Well, wrong.

00:28:44.000 It doesn't matter what the browser mode you have or your clear browsing history, your internet service provider can see every single website you've ever visited.

00:28:52.000 And they can even sell your data to advertisers.

00:28:55.000 That's why I use ExpressVPN to keep my online data secure and private.

00:28:59.000 ExpressVPN makes sure your ISP internet service provider and third-party trackers can't see your online activity and location.

00:29:06.000 It does that by rerouting your connection through a secure encrypted server.

00:29:10.000 ExpressVPN is also the fastest and most trusted VPN on the market.

00:29:14.000 That's why they've rated number one VPN by CNET.

00:29:17.000 So protect your online activity today with the VPN that I trust to keep me private.

00:29:21.000 Visit expressvpn.com slash Charlie.

00:29:24.000 I use ExpressVPN, and you guys should as well.

00:29:26.000 It's on my phone and my laptop right now.

00:29:29.000 You can get an extra three months free on a one-year package.

00:29:32.000 That's expressvpn.com slash Charlie right now to learn more.

00:29:39.000 So Josh, what does this look like?

00:29:40.000 So you say it's time to use political power.

00:29:42.000 It's time for us to use the institutions and the instruments that were given to us.

00:29:51.000 And by the way, I want to be very clear.

00:29:54.000 When a conservative has political power, they did not stage a coup to get it.

00:29:58.000 It was given to them by the consent of the governed.

00:30:00.000 But what does that look like?

00:30:02.000 Because the fear, just so we're all clear, is some conservatives, and I hear you with this fear, they start, their alarm bells start to go off.

00:30:11.000 It's a five-alarm fire.

00:30:12.000 They're like, road to serfdom F.A. Hayek tanks in the streets, surveillance state, 1984.

00:30:17.000 We can't do that.

00:30:17.000 We might as well do nothing.

00:30:19.000 What do we do?

00:30:20.000 Right.

00:30:21.000 So, I mean, part of this depends on which sphere of government we're talking about.

00:30:24.000 So, you know, on the state level, a lot of the action nowadays is obviously at the state level.

00:30:29.000 Look, there's a debate right now on the right as to whether we should actually ban the indoctrination of critical race theory, which is effectively anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish racism, as far as I see, whether we should actually use the power of the state to ban this outright or to just let it be.

00:30:45.000 You know, the predictable actors have all taken their kind of usual battle lines, this debate.

00:30:50.000 The short answer is, of course, we should ban critical race theory.

00:30:54.000 I mean, properly, this is, you know, hold aside the fact that it's already illegal under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, but of course we should feel comfortable at a state level banning the racial indoctrination of our children to hate their heritage, to hate their race and all of that.

00:31:11.000 At a local kind of municipal governance level, of course, we should get on board with banning drad queen story hours.

00:31:17.000 And then at the federal level, you know, we talked about the tech issue.

00:31:20.000 The big tech issue, one of the reasons that I find it so interesting is really as kind of tip of the spear for this kind of broader discussion here.

00:31:25.000 Really is kind of big tech is the ruling class's quote-unquote private sector enforcement arm.

00:31:30.000 That's exactly what happened to Soraba, the New York Post with this Hunter Biden story.

00:31:34.000 You know, I called it their Pearl Harbor attack at the time when Facebook and Twitter kind of, it seemed to me, to kind of gang up and suppress this Hunter Biden story.

00:31:41.000 Little did I know that literally, you know, two and a half months later in January, after January 6th, what happened to Parlor?

00:31:47.000 It was naked collusion.

00:31:48.000 It was literally naked collusion from Apple, Amazon, and Google to do that.

00:31:51.000 So what do we do about that?

00:31:53.000 Well, it's kind of an all-the-above strategy.

00:31:55.000 We talked about Section 230 reform.

00:31:57.000 Any conservative, you know, who called himself conservative, who does not see the imperative of trying to get rid of big tech's gratuitous Section 230 immunity, again, does not see what time it is.

00:32:07.000 And there are other things, too.

00:32:08.000 We need to get more comfortable with antitrust enforcement, for example.

00:32:11.000 There's a very long Republican Party tradition of antitrust, by the way.

00:32:14.000 It was literally a Republican policy when it was founded.

00:32:17.000 John Sherman, who gave his name to the Sherman Antitrust Act, was the brother of William Tecumseh Sherman, the famous general for the Union in the Civil War.

00:32:27.000 Teddy Roosevelt, of course, was a Republican, the Great Trustbuster.

00:32:30.000 And then, of course, there's a common carrier regulation as well, which Justice Clarence Thomas had a fabulous recent Supreme Court writing on.

00:32:36.000 These are all things I'm thinking about that I'm writing about, but big tech is really the tip of the spear at a federal level for kind of putting this into action, I think.

00:32:43.000 So, Rob, you know, a lot of these students here are going to go back to campus for the first time in a long time, and they're going to come back to a campus environment.

00:32:50.000 For some of them, it will be even more hostile and even just quite honestly, unrecognizable.

00:32:55.000 I think that just to put yourself in their shoes, many of these students kind of had a half-campus experience this last semester with very little activism on campus for obvious virus protocol reasons.

00:33:08.000 Some students were online, but this is the first semester where it's going to be college again for the first time in almost a year and a half. 0.62

00:33:16.000 And since then, we saw the BLM Incorporated kind of, you know, just, I could call it a revolution almost in the last year, not for the better. 0.88

00:33:25.000 And so, a lot of the students here are going to be asked the question in their class and from their friends: why is this civilization worth saving?

00:33:37.000 It's colonialist, misogynistic, hateful, homophobic.

00:33:41.000 Don't you realize this is nothing more than an oppressor and oppressed scheme?

00:33:45.000 Give them a little bit here of how they can deal with that because they are constantly bombarded with this line of propaganda.

00:33:54.000 Well, I mean, you have to defend the West.

00:34:00.000 But what I would do is, I would defend the West rightly understood.

00:34:05.000 And again, I will repeat this: Greek philosophy, Judeo-Christian religion, and Roman law, that combination.

00:34:12.000 And it's the source of an incredibly humane civilization.

00:34:17.000 It's the source, as I said, of a civilization that says that God so loved the world that He sent his only son.

00:34:23.000 And that son, that person is truth, is reason itself.

00:34:29.000 Now, if you do that, then you can be nuanced.

00:34:36.000 They bring up some colonial crime.

00:34:38.000 You say, Yeah, that was bad.

00:34:40.000 It fell short of what the civilization's true meaning was, but also then put it into perspective next to civilizations that didn't have that.

00:34:50.000 And so the barbarism of the Roman Empire before its conversion in some ways, as wonderful of a civilization it was, it also had its barbarous aspects, or the kind of civilizations of the Americas before the arrival.

00:35:08.000 I mean, there was brutality there. 0.58

00:35:10.000 But you can judge it all next to the absolute standard of truth rather than trying to apologize for everything.

00:35:15.000 You don't have to apologize.

00:35:16.000 There's some things that were bad.

00:35:18.000 So, Josh, in closing here, There's this narrative that continues, which is that freedom is being able to do whatever you wish.

00:35:27.000 We touched on this earlier.

00:35:28.000 If you go to the Harvard Law School in one of their stairware corridors, they have this big saying that says the law is the wise restraints that keep men free.

00:35:38.000 So I want everyone to think about this, that it's the restraints that you put on yourself that keep you free.

00:35:44.000 It's not doing what you want to do that keeps you free.

00:35:47.000 How do we take back the word of freedom?

00:35:49.000 Because I think we have allowed these beautiful words of liberty and freedom, which are the Greek words eleutheria and isonomia.

00:35:56.000 We've allowed it to be corrupted into almost indulgence.

00:36:00.000 Some would call it licentiousness.

00:36:02.000 How do we take that back?

00:36:04.000 And then it's hard for an 18 and 19 year old because there's kind of this I'm bulletproof and I walk on water mentality.

00:36:11.000 How do we win that argument?

00:36:13.000 Yeah, it's kind of a million dollar question, obviously.

00:36:15.000 First of all, I'm shocked at that Harvard Law School.

00:36:18.000 It'll be removed soon.

00:36:19.000 I keep mentioning it.

00:36:20.000 Exactly.

00:36:21.000 Harvard will take that down in a blazing glory soon.

00:36:23.000 Yeah, no, I'm shocked it's not already canceled, to be honest with you.

00:36:26.000 But I mean, that was effectively that quote right there, that was the consensus.

00:36:31.000 I mean, that was the way that human beings, whether in Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, at English common law, you know, the United States, obviously, we inherited the English common law.

00:36:40.000 It's still kind of our state level law for property, torts, all this stuff.

00:36:43.000 The English common law was emphatically based on the quotation that Charlie's just said there, that without restraints, without kind of an inherent orientation towards societal, national interest, common good-oriented virtue, that the law itself was not true law, that it was not substantive law.

00:37:02.000 So how do we actually kind of go ahead and take that back?

00:37:05.000 Well, you know, I don't have all the answers, but I can just give a couple of ideas here.

00:37:09.000 I mean, like I said, you know, there are, I think, some legislators, there are some politicians who I think get this.

00:37:13.000 The fact that in kind of a hands-off approach to big tech is increasingly anathema in the Republican Party is great.

00:37:20.000 It's a great place to start, I think.

00:37:22.000 But it ultimately, and Saura kind of hinted at this earlier, it has to go beyond that.

00:37:26.000 The threat of woke capital, the threat of corporate power in general in America, is very real.

00:37:31.000 And I think there was a time, you know, where it probably made sense for the American right, for the GOP establishment, for the Chamber of Commerce, et cetera, to kind of get in bed and cozy up one other because, you know, the corporations would promise more choice, more consumer choice, you know, lower prices, right?

00:37:45.000 All this kind of like neoliberal fantasies that we were sold.

00:37:49.000 And what was the result of that?

00:37:50.000 What was the result of kind of this maximal bipartisan neoliberalism?

00:37:54.000 An unprecedented opioid crisis, ripping apart the industrial heartland, job shipped like you've never seen to China, to say nothing, of course, of Mexico and countries in our own hemisphere.

00:38:04.000 So we have to kind of just talk about and just get there in the public discourse through conversations just like this at the federal government level.

00:38:12.000 Senators like Josh Hawley are kind of already saying things along these lines that freedom is only is only true freedom insofar as we are looking out for the common good of the whole, insofar as we are expressly legislating and enacting policies oriented towards that.

00:38:28.000 So Tom Conn is another example, and I'll just end on this note.

00:38:31.000 He has a recent kind of policy proposal.

00:38:33.000 I don't remember the exact details, but he basically would just tax Harvard, Princeton, Yale, et cetera, their endowments, and then directly take that money to provide better access to kind of technical training, community college.

00:38:44.000 These are exactly the sort of policies that we should be looking at, whether they call us status authoritarians, leftist central planners, who cares?

00:38:52.000 That's what we have to do.

00:38:53.000 That is a time in America, and we can only just encourage it with conversations like this.

00:38:56.000 So here's how I want to close.

00:38:58.000 I know that we're going a little over time.

00:39:00.000 First, if you want to hear this conversation and the extended backstage conversation, you guys can hear it on the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.

00:39:07.000 Thank you for subscribing to it.

00:39:08.000 If you guys aren't yet subscribed, if everyone in this room subscribed, we would beat Rachel Maddow in the New York Times and the podcast charts.

00:39:15.000 So that would mean, if you take out your phone and subscribe, it would mean a lot.

00:39:18.000 And we're going to have some backstage conversations that we're looking forward to diving deeper.

00:39:22.000 Here's how I want to end this conversation.

00:39:25.000 So, Rob, talk about what your faith has meant for you.

00:39:28.000 Talk about your faith journey.

00:39:29.000 I know we have like 30 to 45 seconds.

00:39:32.000 And just because some people out here might be drifting away from their faith, they might have been raised Catholic.

00:39:37.000 They might have gone to a Catholic school and they're like, ah, I don't want to get involved in that.

00:39:41.000 Talk about your own personal story.

00:39:43.000 Sure.

00:39:43.000 I mean, I converted in December 2016.

00:39:48.000 And I mean, I was, thank you.

00:39:51.000 I don't, you know, the church needs the claps, not me.

00:39:56.000 But what it's meant to me is, you know, frankly, I mean, look, I was living my 20s.

00:40:01.000 I was working as a journalist in New York and London, but had this sense that there's more to life.

00:40:07.000 And that sense found its fulfillment ultimately at the altar.

00:40:11.000 And since this is a panel about tradition, tradition, the best definition I've encountered, it's the shortest, is tradition is ordered continuity.

00:40:20.000 That is, you have this sense that there are steps leading behind you, therefore steps leading in front of you.

00:40:26.000 And to live within the bounds of tradition, you actually get a lot of confidence, right?

00:40:32.000 I know what I am, I'm a man, and I will find my true fulfillment in family life, in having children.

00:40:38.000 And that allows me to actually be free to leap forward.

00:40:42.000 And I can kind of eliminate a lot of distractions that I actually don't need once you do that.

00:40:47.000 Rather than being like looking inside yourself, hmm, who am I?

00:40:51.000 What do I really believe?

00:40:53.000 There are certain truths, really fundamental truths, that have been handed down.

00:40:57.000 That's tradition.

00:40:58.000 Traditio is hand down.

00:41:00.000 And so you don't have to explore your insides for wisdom.

00:41:04.000 You probably won't find it there.

00:41:07.000 When you have this, you don't need to reinvent the wheel.

00:41:10.000 That's the beauty of all tradition.

00:41:12.000 And speaking of things that are traditional, basically the world's first religion, tell us about your faith and what it's meant for you, Josh.

00:41:22.000 Sure.

00:41:22.000 So, you know, I mentioned Edmund Burke in passing earlier.

00:41:25.000 Edmund Burke was not Jewish, to be clear, but he did famously speak of this notion of a partnership among the generations, dead, dead, living, and an unborn.

00:41:39.000 That is how I think about politics, and that's how I think about religion in general.

00:41:43.000 I take an immense amount of pride and joy, frankly, in the fact that as a Jew, I can directly trace my lineage to Revelation at Sinai.

00:41:50.000 It's an incredibly powerful thing for me.

00:41:54.000 And, you know, look, I grew up personally in a fairly kind of secular home. 0.69

00:41:58.000 I mean, I grew up in a Jewish home that would really only go for kind of the high holidays, you know, poor Rosh Hashanah. 0.95

00:42:04.000 As I've gotten older, you know, now when I travel for conferences like this, when I go speaking and stuff, I always travel with my sitter, with my prayer book, with my tefillin, which is what Jews always every day they wrap themselves with. 0.75

00:42:15.000 It's part of the liturgical morning prayer, the chakra it service. 0.87

00:42:19.000 And what I've learned, it's kind of similar really to what Saurabh said, is that you are not prepared, especially in this line of business, Charlie.

00:42:26.000 In this line of business, you are like not prepared.

00:42:28.000 We are not prepared to go out there and do kind of intellectual fisticuffs, to kind of engage in the public square, to duke it out in the battle of ideas.

00:42:38.000 If you don't have something to point to, you need something in there to guide you, to sustain you, to look at every single day.

00:42:48.000 You know, as I've become more observant in the past few years, as I've come to kind of pray every day, I find that.

00:42:54.000 And I only hope that all of you can find that as well.

00:42:57.000 It's wonderful.

00:43:00.000 I want to keep talking to these two, and you guys can hear that exclusive stuff if you check out the podcast.

00:43:05.000 For me personally, I gave my life to Christ in fifth grade.

00:43:08.000 It's meant more every single year as I've gotten older.

00:43:11.000 And it's been the most amazing thing.

00:43:14.000 And I totally agree, Josh.

00:43:16.000 In this space, if you don't have something anchoring you, and that means a personal relationship with Christ and realizing that I am not enough, that salvation is not going to be earned and checking a bunch of boxes, but instead being obedient and accepting Christ into my life and making him the chairman of the board of all of my decisions and everything that I do.

00:43:37.000 And so I just want to say that this kind of conversation is really unique and we need more of it.

00:43:44.000 And I don't think we disagreed on basically anything.

00:43:47.000 But for all of you guys out here, the big takeaways are respect tradition, to know that Roda had asked those coming back.

00:43:55.000 And Lord Falkland famously said that if it's not necessary to change things, it's necessary not to change them.

00:44:02.000 And I think all of you can be articulate and compassionate, yet firm and courageous spokespeople for this beautiful gift that we have been given, which is Western civilization.

00:44:13.000 Quite honestly, the greatest experiment in self-government in human history.

00:44:17.000 And that's really what we're fighting here for at Turning Point USA to save the West.

00:44:21.000 God bless you guys.

00:44:22.000 Thank you so much.

00:44:27.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:44:28.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:44:31.000 And if you want to support our program, you can do so at charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:44:35.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:44:37.000 God bless.

00:44:40.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - August 11, 2021

A Catholic, a Jew, and an Evangelical on Saving the West with Sohrab Ahmari and Josh Hammer (Part 1)

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