Sorab Amari and Josh Hammer join me to talk about what it means to be a Jew, a Catholic, and an Evangelical in the 21st century, and why we should all work together to save Western civilization.
00:00:43.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:51.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:08.000In fact, some people say over 100 million people are struggling with some kind of pain, maybe from exercise or just getting older.
00:01:15.000Now, Pete and Seth Talbot, they are on a mission.
00:01:17.000You rarely see this kind of focus and commitment.
00:01:19.000They recently shared with me that they are doubling down and want to literally double their total number of happy customers in the next year.
00:01:38.000So maybe you want to be able to do cartwheels or be able to do backflips like producer Andrew.
00:01:43.000Maybe you want to be able to run a marathon, swim under seas, swim underwater, go scuba diving, jump out of an airplane, but maybe it's your knee pain, back pain, joint pain, whatever pain it might be.
00:02:07.000I've been so excited about this conversation that we have today.
00:02:11.000With 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.
00:02:20.000And we wanted to have this discussion around different religious views, all agreeing that we need to save Western civilization.
00:02:29.000And I want to kind of start this conversation first by asking what is Western civilization.
00:02:35.000So 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.
00:02:59.000You know, Saurabh and I got dinner last night.
00:03:00.000We were joking about how we can possibly talk about how to save the West in 30 minutes.
00:03:04.000So let's kind of dive right in and get right to the point here.
00:03:07.000So, 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.
00:03:24.000You know, I'm a research fellow at the Edmund Burke Foundation, which is Yoram Hazoni's think tank.
00:03:29.000It's a home for kind of national conservatism.
00:03:31.000And 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.
00:03:43.000So 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.
00:03:58.000So it starts with the Bible, truth, Jerusalem, Athens, and then obviously Rome as well, which is more my good friend's territory, of course.
00:04:15.000And dare we say, is the West better than other civilization projects currently or previously?
00:04:23.000So, I would define the West not too dissimilar from what Josh shared, as the combination of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Judeo-Christian religion.
00:04:34.000And 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.
00:04:49.000And 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.
00:05:02.000And 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.
00:05:31.000But nevertheless, we love it because it's God's creation.
00:05:35.000And we can ultimately then help people reach that flourishing using law, which is where the Roman aspect comes in.
00:05:43.000So, that tension between those three, that synthesis between those three is the West, and it's made for a truly glorious, beautiful civilization.
00:05:53.000So, I hear from both of you that it's this balance between reason and revelation.
00:05:58.000So, 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?
00:06:10.000Who are we and how are we supposed to live?
00:06:12.000How are we supposed to strike that balance?
00:06:14.000Because you're saying that we shouldn't forsake reason.
00:06:17.000It sounds like an argument that Thomas Aquinas would make about how reason being a gift from God.
00:06:23.000At 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.
00:06:32.000Well, I would reformulate the question.
00:06:34.000I 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.
00:06:47.000The 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.
00:06:57.000And everything else becomes revelation or opinion or superstition.
00:07:01.000Whereas the tradition that stretches from Aristotle to St. Thomas Aquinas says, no, actually, we can also know by reason.
00:07:10.000We 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.
00:07:18.000So, 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.
00:07:50.000And what happens when we decide to organize society around everyone's independent view of how they think society should be organized?
00:07:58.000So, I mean, the short answer is that, no, of course not.
00:08:01.000There's no such thing as quote-unquote my truth.
00:08:03.000So, 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.
00:08:11.000So today is actually Tishaba on the Jewish calendar, which is actually the saddest day on the entire Jewish calendar.
00:08:46.000And it's kind of a very roundabout way of answering your question, Charlie.
00:08:50.000But it was my first time seeing the ghetto, seeing the death camps for myself.
00:08:54.000And when you see that level of human depravity, when you see that level of evil, but you also learn the good stories.
00:09:02.000You 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.
00:09:10.000You see that there's also such good, that human beings are capable of such good.
00:09:16.000And 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.
00:09:27.000And from my perspective, it obviously starts in the Bible.
00:09:30.000And, 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.
00:09:36.000But that is where truth begins, obviously, is in the Bible.
00:09:42.000You know, so in the Jewish belief of the Old Testament, it's this belief in the law that was given by God.
00:09:50.000And 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.
00:09:59.000Using 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.
00:10:26.000There 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.
00:10:36.000A lot of it is kind of is intellectually downstream of the Enlightenment, of particularly bad strands of Enlightenment thought, I would add.
00:10:42.000The Enlightenment is obviously complicated.
00:10:43.000The Scottish Enlightenment is a heck of a lot better, for example, than other strands.
00:10:47.000But 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.
00:11:04.000In 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.
00:11:18.000Lawyers call it the mystery passage, where he talks about how like the great achievement in human life, it's the eternal mystery.
00:11:24.000It's everyone's duty to define his or her own existence.
00:11:27.000That's kind of this mentality to its climax, right?
00:11:32.000And it explains a lot as to why Western civilization has just gone totally off the rails.
00:11:37.000Saurabh has been adamant about this, probably more eloquent about it than basically anyone in this space.
00:11:42.000I don't want to take up too much of his time.
00:11:44.000But there is a different conception of freedom.
00:11:47.000There's a different conception of freedom that is not just libertarian live and let live.
00:11:52.000There'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.
00:12:05.000When the founders, you know, we speak of the founders in broad terms, the founders disagreed about this among themselves.
00:12:10.000Perhaps Jefferson, when he spoke of self-evident truths, he had this more enlightenment-motivated, kind of strong form of Lockeanism.
00:12:19.000But there were other founders too, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, who definitely adhered to this more traditional view of freedom.
00:12:26.000And, you know, we see current politicians today.
00:12:29.000A lot of what sender Josh Holly is doing, for instance, is really trying to, I think, kind of recover this definition of freedom.
00:12:34.000So that is what Sorb and I and a lot of our work are trying to do for sure.
00:12:39.000No matter how you're feeling about getting back out there, there's no denying it's an adjustment.
00:12:44.000When the world gets too loud, something I love to do is create my own soundtrack by popping in Raycon wireless earbuds.
00:12:50.000Sometimes you need upbeat music to pump you up before you see people or stay calm with some guided meditation.
00:12:55.000Let me tell you right now, Raycons are the best way to listen.
00:12:58.000Raycon have a 32-hour battery life, and they start at half the price of the other premium audio brands, but they sound just as good.
00:13:05.000At Raycon, they come with a 45-day happiness guarantee.
00:13:23.000So, 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.
00:13:42.000And 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?
00:14:08.000How what, you know, like, I don't like it, but who am I?
00:14:10.000And then I heard very articulate argument.
00:14:13.000So, Rob, and I won't dare steal the argument from you, but you won me over.
00:14:18.000And 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?
00:14:30.000Just walk us through that argument a little bit and then the impact that it had.
00:14:35.000Yeah, 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.
00:14:47.000I actually happen to live literally above a drag bar.
00:14:52.000And Josh has seen it because my place.
00:14:55.000You know, that's one thing because it's known as, okay, that's where you go.
00:14:59.000You have your, like, if you're about to get married, you know, you have your bridal party at the drag, fine.
00:15:04.000But 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.
00:15:18.000Maybe 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.
00:15:35.000And 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.
00:15:47.000And what that paradoxically does, because it gets rid of various traditional limits, it makes us less free.
00:15:56.000We see this in gender ideology so much more, right?
00:16:00.000Gender 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.
00:16:08.000Why don't you recognize it and let me do what I want?
00:16:11.000It doesn't stop there because my demand for full autonomy begins to become, you have to recognize me as such.
00:16:20.000Therefore, you have to alter your language.
00:16:22.000Therefore, we have to create a new pronoun system.
00:16:24.000Therefore, you may be banned from social media if you use the wrong pronoun and so on and so forth.
00:16:29.000So I know she's speaking here when Tomi Lauren said, well, why are people picking on Caitlin Jenner?
00:16:36.000Of 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.
00:16:47.000It's important because reality itself is at stake.
00:16:50.000Those 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.
00:17:02.000No, gender differences are fundamental.
00:17:04.000You don't need to go to Genesis to know this.
00:17:13.000And we're an educational organization, not commenting on politics.
00:17:17.000I 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.
00:17:25.000And 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.
00:17:40.000In 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?
00:17:48.000So 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.
00:18:01.000How about like just a man is a man and a woman is a woman?
00:18:04.000Help equip our audience to be able to be prepared for that.
00:18:08.000Yeah, I mean, the language to use is the language of equal indignity, but also different.
00:18:15.000Men and women have equal dignity, but they are different.
00:18:19.000And when you attempt to cross that boundary, it ends up in far worse coercion than what we had before.
00:18:26.000Again, it's the coercion that you face on campus.
00:19:13.000And ultimately, we prevailed as much as you can.
00:19:16.000At least we got our account back and now you can share that story.
00:19:19.000But 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.
00:19:33.000Because you're individually, we are too alone.
00:19:36.000We have to, the pressure of big tech is a matter of fundamental danger to what matters, political speech, right?
00:19:47.000Section 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.
00:20:05.000Perversely now, they use Section 230 to repress conservative political speech, but all sorts of prurient content can be found on these platforms.
00:20:16.000And 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.
00:20:27.000It'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.
00:20:36.000So 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.
00:20:50.000And as an evangelical, I think that we need to realize we're in a spiritual battle, not just in a material battle.
00:20:56.000And 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.
00:21:05.000However, so often conservatives say, well, I agree that Drag Queen Story Hour is wrong.
00:21:13.000I agree that I don't want to see men go into a restroom that's a woman's restroom.
00:21:24.000Josh, is it time to start using political power?
00:21:27.000The time for that has long since passed, I think, is the short answer.
00:21:31.000Look, anyone who is answering no to that question does not understand what time it is in America.
00:21:37.000If 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.
00:21:48.000But, you know, you can go back again to the writings of the American founders, a very kind of intellectually and politically diverse group.
00:21:55.000But 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.
00:22:06.000The preamble of the United States Constitution enumerates seven substantive ends for governance.
00:22:12.000I 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.
00:22:25.000A 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.
00:22:35.000If you actually look at what the phrase secure the blessings of liberty is saying, it's the blessings that they're trying to secure.
00:22:43.000The liberty is an instrumental means to achieve those substantive blessings, which of course are downstream of biblical principles.
00:22:50.000But 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.
00:23:01.000I guess my reaction to that is always, it's a two-way arrow.
00:23:04.000The two very clearly do relate to one another.
00:23:08.000I 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.
00:23:30.000And look, we have to know what time it is in America.
00:23:32.000I realize I've said that already, but like that, you guys are the future.
00:23:36.000I mean, you have to look out there and see what the left has done.
00:23:39.000And I guess here's kind of the other thing I'll say about this.
00:23:41.000Look, Saurabh's already talked about this a little bit.
00:23:44.000You 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.
00:23:50.000That probably was true at the time he said that.
00:23:54.000I 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.
00:24:01.000That is what we see with this new Biden administration, you know, countering domestic extremism document.
00:24:07.000That is what we see with this grotesque partnering with the federal government and big tech most recently, this Facebook COVID misinformation stuff.
00:24:17.000It 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.
00:24:32.000Just 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?
00:24:48.000I'm sorry, but in any civilization across all of human history, people go into government to use power.
00:24:56.000It's only this bizarre class of the GOP establishment, I think, which relative recently has convinced itself its role is to not use power.
00:25:07.000Of course, and anyone who labors still under the idea that, you know what, the public square can be neutral.
00:25:13.000So-and-so can believe that there are 157 genders.
00:25:17.000I think there is only two sexes, but we can go.
00:25:23.000There 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.
00:25:31.000So 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.
00:25:42.000That's the orthodoxy that the West has, broadly speaking, enshrined and should be enshrined again.
00:25:47.000And the great irony of it is that each side did the opposite of what the other side was afraid of.
00:25:55.000And 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.
00:26:05.000And 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.
00:26:16.000It'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.
00:26:27.000Saurabh, I want to ask you this as a follow-up, though.
00:26:29.000Someone like David French would say, who you know very well from your debates, you're nothing more than a central planner.
00:26:36.000You want to use political power because you don't trust people to have their own ability to self-govern.
00:26:42.000There's two statist movements, and one calls themselves conservatives, one call themselves liberals.
00:26:54.000I'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.
00:27:06.000They 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.
00:27:15.000And I totally believe in evangelizing the culture.
00:27:55.000If 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.
00:28:44.000It 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.
00:28:52.000And they can even sell your data to advertisers.
00:28:55.000That's why I use ExpressVPN to keep my online data secure and private.
00:28:59.000ExpressVPN makes sure your ISP internet service provider and third-party trackers can't see your online activity and location.
00:29:06.000It does that by rerouting your connection through a secure encrypted server.
00:29:10.000ExpressVPN is also the fastest and most trusted VPN on the market.
00:29:14.000That's why they've rated number one VPN by CNET.
00:29:17.000So protect your online activity today with the VPN that I trust to keep me private.
00:30:02.000Because 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.
00:30:21.000So, I mean, part of this depends on which sphere of government we're talking about.
00:30:24.000So, you know, on the state level, a lot of the action nowadays is obviously at the state level.
00:30:29.000Look, 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.
00:30:45.000You know, the predictable actors have all taken their kind of usual battle lines, this debate.
00:30:50.000The short answer is, of course, we should ban critical race theory.
00:30:54.000I 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.
00:31:11.000At a local kind of municipal governance level, of course, we should get on board with banning drad queen story hours.
00:31:17.000And then at the federal level, you know, we talked about the tech issue.
00:31:20.000The 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.
00:31:25.000Really is kind of big tech is the ruling class's quote-unquote private sector enforcement arm.
00:31:30.000That's exactly what happened to Soraba, the New York Post with this Hunter Biden story.
00:31:34.000You 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.
00:31:41.000Little did I know that literally, you know, two and a half months later in January, after January 6th, what happened to Parlor?
00:31:57.000Any 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.
00:32:08.000We need to get more comfortable with antitrust enforcement, for example.
00:32:11.000There's a very long Republican Party tradition of antitrust, by the way.
00:32:14.000It was literally a Republican policy when it was founded.
00:32:17.000John 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.
00:32:27.000Teddy Roosevelt, of course, was a Republican, the Great Trustbuster.
00:32:30.000And then, of course, there's a common carrier regulation as well, which Justice Clarence Thomas had a fabulous recent Supreme Court writing on.
00:32:36.000These 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.
00:32:43.000So, 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.
00:32:50.000For some of them, it will be even more hostile and even just quite honestly, unrecognizable.
00:32:55.000I 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.
00:33:08.000Some 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.
00:33:16.000And 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.
00:33:25.000And 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?
00:34:40.000It 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.
00:34:50.000And 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.
00:35:28.000If 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.
00:35:38.000So I want everyone to think about this, that it's the restraints that you put on yourself that keep you free.
00:35:44.000It's not doing what you want to do that keeps you free.
00:35:47.000How do we take back the word of freedom?
00:35:49.000Because I think we have allowed these beautiful words of liberty and freedom, which are the Greek words eleutheria and isonomia.
00:35:56.000We've allowed it to be corrupted into almost indulgence.
00:36:21.000Harvard will take that down in a blazing glory soon.
00:36:23.000Yeah, no, I'm shocked it's not already canceled, to be honest with you.
00:36:26.000But I mean, that was effectively that quote right there, that was the consensus.
00:36:31.000I 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.
00:36:40.000It's still kind of our state level law for property, torts, all this stuff.
00:36:43.000The 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.
00:37:02.000So how do we actually kind of go ahead and take that back?
00:37:05.000Well, you know, I don't have all the answers, but I can just give a couple of ideas here.
00:37:09.000I mean, like I said, you know, there are, I think, some legislators, there are some politicians who I think get this.
00:37:13.000The fact that in kind of a hands-off approach to big tech is increasingly anathema in the Republican Party is great.
00:37:22.000But it ultimately, and Saura kind of hinted at this earlier, it has to go beyond that.
00:37:26.000The threat of woke capital, the threat of corporate power in general in America, is very real.
00:37:31.000And 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?
00:37:45.000All this kind of like neoliberal fantasies that we were sold.
00:37:50.000What was the result of kind of this maximal bipartisan neoliberalism?
00:37:54.000An 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.
00:38:04.000So 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.
00:38:12.000Senators 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.
00:38:28.000So Tom Conn is another example, and I'll just end on this note.
00:38:31.000He has a recent kind of policy proposal.
00:38:33.000I 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.
00:38:44.000These are exactly the sort of policies that we should be looking at, whether they call us status authoritarians, leftist central planners, who cares?
00:38:58.000I know that we're going a little over time.
00:39:00.000First, if you want to hear this conversation and the extended backstage conversation, you guys can hear it on the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.
00:39:08.000If 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.
00:39:15.000So that would mean, if you take out your phone and subscribe, it would mean a lot.
00:39:18.000And we're going to have some backstage conversations that we're looking forward to diving deeper.
00:39:22.000Here's how I want to end this conversation.
00:39:25.000So, Rob, talk about what your faith has meant for you.
00:39:51.000I don't, you know, the church needs the claps, not me.
00:39:56.000But what it's meant to me is, you know, frankly, I mean, look, I was living my 20s.
00:40:01.000I was working as a journalist in New York and London, but had this sense that there's more to life.
00:40:07.000And that sense found its fulfillment ultimately at the altar.
00:40:11.000And since this is a panel about tradition, tradition, the best definition I've encountered, it's the shortest, is tradition is ordered continuity.
00:40:20.000That is, you have this sense that there are steps leading behind you, therefore steps leading in front of you.
00:40:26.000And to live within the bounds of tradition, you actually get a lot of confidence, right?
00:40:32.000I know what I am, I'm a man, and I will find my true fulfillment in family life, in having children.
00:40:38.000And that allows me to actually be free to leap forward.
00:40:42.000And I can kind of eliminate a lot of distractions that I actually don't need once you do that.
00:40:47.000Rather than being like looking inside yourself, hmm, who am I?
00:41:12.000And 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.
00:41:22.000So, you know, I mentioned Edmund Burke in passing earlier.
00:41:25.000Edmund 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.
00:41:39.000That is how I think about politics, and that's how I think about religion in general.
00:41:43.000I 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.
00:41:50.000It's an incredibly powerful thing for me.
00:41:54.000And, you know, look, I grew up personally in a fairly kind of secular home.
00:41:58.000I mean, I grew up in a Jewish home that would really only go for kind of the high holidays, you know, poor Rosh Hashanah.
00:42:04.000As 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.
00:42:15.000It's part of the liturgical morning prayer, the chakra it service.
00:42:19.000And 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.
00:42:26.000In this line of business, you are like not prepared.
00:42:28.000We 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.
00:42:38.000If 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.
00:42:48.000You 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.
00:42:54.000And I only hope that all of you can find that as well.
00:43:16.000In 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.
00:43:37.000And so I just want to say that this kind of conversation is really unique and we need more of it.
00:43:44.000And I don't think we disagreed on basically anything.
00:43:47.000But for all of you guys out here, the big takeaways are respect tradition, to know that Roda had asked those coming back.
00:43:55.000And Lord Falkland famously said that if it's not necessary to change things, it's necessary not to change them.
00:44:02.000And 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.
00:44:13.000Quite honestly, the greatest experiment in self-government in human history.
00:44:17.000And that's really what we're fighting here for at Turning Point USA to save the West.