The Charlie Kirk Show - A Catholic, a Jew, and an Evangelical on Saving the West with Sohrab Ahmari and Josh Hammer (Part 2)

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, part two of our episode of An Evangelical, a Jew, and a Catholic trying to figure out what's wrong with America.

00:00:05.000 This is the private behind-the-scenes part of this.

00:00:07.000 So share this with your friends.

00:00:08.000 It's a lot of fun.

00:00:10.000 I want to thank Amber from Indianapolis, Indiana for supporting us at charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:00:15.000 Robert from Chesterfield Township, Michigan, charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:00:20.000 Rebecca from 20inps at charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:00:26.000 Jenna from Fullerton, California at charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:00:31.000 I want to thank Rick Warren for supporting us.

00:00:33.000 I think it's a different Rick Warren than from Saddleback Church.

00:00:36.000 Maybe he is.

00:00:37.000 I mean, San Ramon, California.

00:00:39.000 I don't know where that is.

00:00:39.000 CharlieKirk.com slash support.

00:00:41.000 Maybe Rick Warren has really become a monthly supporter.

00:00:44.000 Maybe so.

00:00:45.000 A Jew, a Catholic, and an evangelical try to figure out where we're going. 0.95

00:00:48.000 Get involved with TurningPointUSA, tpusa.com.

00:00:50.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:51.000 Here we go.

00:00:52.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:54.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:56.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:00.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:03.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:04.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:05.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:01:07.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

00:01:12.000 Turning point USA. 0.65

00:01:13.000 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.

00:01:22.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:26.000 If you run a conservative or faith-based business or organizations that accept credit cards for donations, events and merchandise or anything, listen carefully.

00:01:34.000 Do not expose yourself to being shut off because of canceled culture.

00:01:38.000 The Charlie Kirk Show relies on Cornerstone Payment Systems to provide uninterrupted credit card processing for all of our work.

00:01:45.000 We trust Cornerstone for our processing because I believe, and I think you will too, you'll benefit from their solutions, their low costs, and most importantly, their commitment to safeguard your transactions.

00:01:57.000 Cornerstone provides all types of credit card solutions, including e-commerce, retail, donations, crowdfunding, and text to give.

00:02:05.000 Please contact Cornerstone Payment Systems today and let them know you heard about them on my show.

00:02:11.000 You can reach Cornerstone at 714-912-2617 or online at cornerstone.cc slash Kirk.

00:02:22.000 Again, that's cornerstone.cc slash K-I-R-K. 0.96

00:02:26.000 Let them know I sent you.

00:02:30.000 Hey, everybody, we are now in the overflow conversation from our Turning Point USA Student Action Summit.

00:02:36.000 Josh and so, Rob, welcome.

00:02:38.000 And I want to get right into it.

00:02:39.000 So, Rob, is this idea of liberty that we founded our country on, the Enlightenment principles, is it inevitable to result in authoritarianism and totalitarianism, the erosion of our rights?

00:02:52.000 Is it possible to actually sustain it?

00:02:55.000 So, I kind of go back and forth on this, that what we're suffering now, the woke totalitarianism, is it a natural outgrowth of some of the enlightenment ideas embedded in our founding?

00:03:09.000 By the way, our founding, as Josh said in the main conversation, had other strands, including the Puritan one, which makes it more complicated.

00:03:16.000 And so, I don't condemn the whole founding, but it certainly had some of those kind of enlightenment elements.

00:03:23.000 Is it a natural outgrowth?

00:03:25.000 Or is it, as our friend David Azarad said, there is some natural disposition because precisely because it's willing to tolerate any view, eventually it'll tolerate views that would destroy a decent society.

00:03:38.000 Do you think it's like the second law of thermodynamics?

00:03:40.000 Like, eventually it's going to decay if we don't have a real strong principle around it.

00:03:45.000 Well, it's like this: my friend Adrian Vermeule calls it the ever-receding horizon of liberalism.

00:03:51.000 What that means is, if you've noticed, as soon as liberals won, let's say, abortion, then it became gay marriage.

00:03:59.000 As soon as they won gay marriage, then it became trans stuff.

00:04:01.000 As soon as they won trans stuff, it became a new racial politics. 0.83

00:04:04.000 There's always, there's something in this ideology of you always have to be liberating something, liberating yourself from some dark past, and that there's always more to overcome.

00:04:16.000 There's no limit.

00:04:17.000 So you said that on our podcast, and I thought it was the best point I've heard, and I have used it repeatedly, sometimes with reference, but I forget.

00:04:25.000 So, Josh, do you agree with that?

00:04:27.000 And are you as harsh on the founders as Sorab?

00:04:30.000 I'm not saying you're harsh, but you know, you have balanced it.

00:04:32.000 Do you think that this idea of the Enlightenment has an inevitable kind of conclusion in chaos?

00:04:39.000 Like, it starts kind of somewhat excitedly, gets to this point of kind of this society that we're enjoying, but then eventually you're going to end up in chaos.

00:04:49.000 So, part of the problem is that we on the American right speak of the capital F founders as if they were one kind of monolithic school of thought.

00:04:55.000 It was actually an immensely complicated and intellectually diverse school of thought, right?

00:05:00.000 Many of them were pious Christians.

00:05:01.000 John Adams, perhaps chief among them.

00:05:04.000 Many of them were deists, Thomas Jefferson, of course, being the leader of that camp.

00:05:09.000 The deists, who really were just intellectually downstream of kind of like a strong form of kind of Locke and Enlightenment liberal thinking, did kind of think that America was a true revolution in like the truest sense of the term.

00:05:21.000 It was effectively kind of synonymous.

00:05:22.000 We kind of the French Revolution.

00:05:23.000 It was kind of just, you know, it was these self-evident truths that we can just use pure reason, unadulterated reason with no sense of tradition whatsoever.

00:05:31.000 And then we just kind of go out there and kind of build our utopia.

00:05:34.000 But the other strand of thought, this John Adams, kind of Alexander Hamilton, kind of the early era Federalist Party and the first party system, was a very different strand of thought.

00:05:44.000 It was kind of much more Anglophilic. 0.95

00:05:46.000 They took a much stronger view of the common law.

00:05:48.000 And for a lot of these statesmen, the American Revolution really wasn't so much a quote-unquote revolution insofar as it was kind of a restoration of the 1688 English Bill of Rights that the Englishman or excuse me, the Crown had actually cracked down upon on the American colonists, who, you know, because they were still Englishmen, deserve the rights of Englishmen.

00:06:07.000 So it's very complicated stuff here.

00:06:10.000 To go back to what Saurabh was saying here, though, look, there is a kind of this tension between kind of, you know, I guess Patrick Denin would be a good example, who basically says that kind of liberalism is kind of inherently kind of, it was corrupted at kind of a get-go, that we were going to get this kind of woke, illiberal authoritarianism.

00:06:24.000 David Azarad refers to it, as Saurab said, as kind of liberalism's genetic predisposition.

00:06:29.000 I also go back and forth on this.

00:06:31.000 I'm closer to the Azerad view, but the reality here is that it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to have a purely quote-unquote neutral public square.

00:06:43.000 This utopic fantasy of kind of liberalism in its purest form, that there will be no such thing as kind of substantive values, that everything will be pure kind of proceduralism and values neutral and live and let live, was always, always, always a lie.

00:06:58.000 Because human beings in our core, we know this from both the Bible and from the Greeks, from our reading of Aristotle, we are moral creatures who strive to lead moral lives and we strive to kind of inculcate those moral teachings unto others.

00:07:10.000 So I really like what Saurabh said about how Adrian frames this kind of the receding tide of liberalism or whatever the exact line is.

00:07:17.000 Horizon.

00:07:18.000 Horizon.

00:07:19.000 So that makes a lot of sense to me.

00:07:19.000 Okay.

00:07:20.000 I mean, it's true they obviously went from gay marriage to the transgender stuff.

00:07:23.000 You know, Joram Hazzoni, Miami Burke Foundation colleague, wrote a fabulous essay at Quillette just about a year ago, last August, kind of a, he called the challenge of Marxism.

00:07:31.000 And the point of this essay was just to show that what's happening right now in terms of kind of the woke movement is literally just Marxism under a different name.

00:07:40.000 It's just not economic class warfare.

00:07:41.000 It's a different kind of kind of identitarian warfare.

00:07:44.000 So these problems don't go away.

00:07:46.000 And a lot of it is kind of baked into the equation of liberalism, no doubt about that.

00:07:49.000 So, Saurabh, what would you say about a critic who says, look, well, some of the liberalism has been rather helpful for humanity.

00:07:55.000 Women's right to vote, Civil Rights Act, freedom of speech.

00:08:01.000 These are some of the fruits of the Enlightenment.

00:08:04.000 Should we say that those things would have happened without this kind of movement towards more of a Lockean philosophy?

00:08:12.000 Because that is the greatest selling point that small L liberals have: look how far we've come. 0.98

00:08:19.000 In fact, you hear this quite often.

00:08:22.000 And most people don't even realize they're saying it, honestly.

00:08:25.000 It's become so...

00:08:28.000 It's like an ambient assumption.

00:08:30.000 Yes, where it's like, look how far we've come.

00:08:31.000 We're not who we were in 1619.

00:08:33.000 Look at us now.

00:08:35.000 Is there some truth to that as well as some danger to that?

00:08:40.000 So here's what I would say is that a lot of the things that liberal ideology takes credit for has its roots in pre-liberal, pre-modern achievements of Western civilization, right?

00:08:56.000 The idea of regular, predictable administration is not something the liberals invented three, 400 years ago.

00:09:05.000 It is found in ancient China.

00:09:07.000 It is found in a lot of even non-Western civilization.

00:09:10.000 The idea that power has some limits and it should, in its treatment of people, it can't go beyond certain limits, especially limits imposed by spiritual authority.

00:09:24.000 That was an achievement of the church.

00:09:27.000 You know, the Magna Carta is pre-liberal and decidedly pre-modern.

00:09:32.000 So I think that liberal ideologues do this kind of trick where, as you said, people take it for granted and it's ahistorical, where it's like, well, if you lose liberalism, then you're going to lose everything.

00:09:45.000 We're going to go back to barbarism.

00:09:47.000 And in fact, that's not the case, right?

00:09:49.000 I mean, a lot of these institutions that we cherish have pre-liberal, pre-modern roots.

00:09:53.000 Therefore, it means that if we transcend liberal ideology, it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to go to some tyranny.

00:09:59.000 And of course, then you look at society as it exists today, and there's a tremendous lot of tyranny meted out by liberals themselves.

00:10:07.000 So I just, I think it's basically a psyop when they say for our listeners, we're talking about small L liberalism, not the kind of liberalism that you might think is your kind of double mask wearing, weed-smoking liberal who is constantly screaming at your children and burning flags.

00:10:25.000 We're talking about the small L classical liberal, this idea that although a lot of them were kind of like that for the 18th.

00:10:33.000 They were basically the double mask wearing weed smoking of the 18th century.

00:10:37.000 Did you talk about that?

00:10:38.000 Yeah, I mean, a lot of them had 18th and 19th century.

00:10:41.000 I mean, John Stewart Mill had a degenerate life.

00:10:46.000 The father of utilitarian ethics.

00:10:48.000 You know, a lot of them were childless and unmarried in a weird way.

00:10:54.000 You know, Rousseau didn't lead a wholesome life.

00:10:57.000 He kind of bragged about it, though.

00:10:59.000 I mean, his whole philosophy.

00:11:00.000 You know, kind of just read confessions.

00:11:00.000 Sure.

00:11:03.000 So I guess my question.

00:11:04.000 That was a side joke.

00:11:05.000 No, it's fine.

00:11:05.000 Sorry.

00:11:06.000 We talked about Rousseau Rabbit here.

00:11:07.000 He was the worst of the social contract theorists.

00:11:10.000 So I guess here's where this, and Josh, I'd love to get your take on this.

00:11:13.000 The way that American history is told, even by conservatives, is this arc of progress and self-improvement.

00:11:22.000 And the bad guys have always been standing in opposition to it.

00:11:25.000 And therefore, then we take that story, implement it to today, and therefore we say, if you actually stand against our current campaign to liberate whatever group, you would have been against all these other things as well.

00:11:40.000 It's a very, it's a very disarming tactic.

00:11:44.000 So Josh, I want you to talk about something that really got my curiosity.

00:11:48.000 You mentioned Leo Strauss earlier, which, of course, I love.

00:11:52.000 And I think Harry Jaffa was probably his best student and the most prolific.

00:11:56.000 And you're a good Claremonster, Charlie.

00:11:57.000 Not yet.

00:11:58.000 No, we're getting there.

00:11:59.000 I'm actually going there in a couple of weeks.

00:12:00.000 So Lincoln Fellowship and all that stuff.

00:12:03.000 But the point is what you made, which is really interesting, is what we're taught in our schools that the American founding was strictly enlightenment.

00:12:11.000 Can you talk about this tension of actually how the founders wrestled with tradition and keeping things the way they are and then also kind of throwing the tables up as we know it?

00:12:22.000 Sure.

00:12:23.000 I mean, we really do kind of, we are really told, I think, like in elementary school and high school, I mean, frankly, at most university campuses, I'm sure.

00:12:23.000 Yeah.

00:12:30.000 I didn't take that many U.S. history courses in college, to be honest with you, but I'm sure if you did, they would tell you the same thing, which is like the American founding was just straight up enlightenment liberalism.

00:12:39.000 You know, the whole point of what I was saying earlier is there obviously was that strand of thought, okay?

00:12:43.000 The Jeffersonian school definitely viewed this experiment as basically being kind of Thomas Paine, you know, famously wrote his pamphlet, Common Sense.

00:12:51.000 In 1776.

00:12:52.000 Yeah.

00:12:53.000 He very much was also kind of a traditional, well, it's kind of an oxymoron, but a strong form enlightenment thinker.

00:12:59.000 I was going to say traditional Enlightenment thinkers.

00:13:01.000 Well, and Locke was the early 1700s, just so people, everyone understands.

00:13:04.000 This was building up for decades for this literature to really saturate the psyche of the West.

00:13:09.000 But like, again, the men who became, we in the right, I can't emphasize a point enough.

00:13:09.000 Right.

00:13:15.000 We talk about the capital F founders as if they are one monolithic block. 0.98

00:13:18.000 It's just so silly.

00:13:19.000 I mean, I could tell you as a lawyer, like, I have poured over the first, second Congress and looked at the intensity of the debates they had. 0.94

00:13:25.000 They disagreed on almost anything.

00:13:28.000 There's this infamous exchange called the Helvidius Pacificus debates between Madison and Hamilton, where they're debating kind of various constitutional clauses.

00:13:36.000 That was kind of in its most academic setting, in its most kind of, you know, a visceral kind of animalistic setting.

00:13:42.000 You got kind of the election of 1800 between Adams and Jefferson, where there's all sorts of, you know, terrible things being said in the newspapers.

00:13:49.000 They were not one block.

00:13:50.000 They disagreed about a lot.

00:13:52.000 And the point is kind of this: John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, probably the most famous person in this camp of the men who largely became the Federalist Party in the first party system.

00:14:02.000 They really were not straight liberals.

00:14:04.000 I cannot emphasize that point enough.

00:14:06.000 Go back and read George Washington's first inaugural address.

00:14:08.000 It's amazing.

00:14:09.000 He literally talks about how the future of the national whole, how America will not sustain itself unless it begins in private morality in the home.

00:14:18.000 That is not kind of Jon Stuart Mill, Anthony Kennedy, mystery passage, living.

00:14:22.000 John Adams famously said the Constitution was written solely for immoral and religious people, totally inadequate for the people of any other.

00:14:30.000 Absolutely.

00:14:30.000 That without that kind of foundation, this idea in self-government will fall apart.

00:14:37.000 So when's the last time you think you had American meat?

00:14:40.000 Well, I could tell you last time I had American meat.

00:14:42.000 You see, good ranchers, they send you this box.

00:14:45.000 It's a big box.

00:14:46.000 And every time it arrives to the office, it's almost a ceremony of eager expectation.

00:14:52.000 You see many people that work on the Charlie Kirk show, they're wondering, maybe, will they get a T-bone filet, stripper, gourmet burger as a reward for their good work?

00:15:01.000 And the answer is usually no.

00:15:02.000 Not because they don't do great work, but because I want all that meat for myself because it's so good.

00:15:09.000 Big box of meat arriving to your home.

00:15:11.000 Sounds too good to be true.

00:15:13.000 Well, it's all American-made meat.

00:15:15.000 And did you know that over 80% of the grass-fed beef sold in America is imported from overseas, like China?

00:15:20.000 You don't want Chinese meat?

00:15:22.000 Well, look, goodranchers.com delivers American craft beef and better than organic chicken.

00:15:29.000 I could tell you, it's summertime.

00:15:30.000 So you guys want to be grilling and cooking and having real meat.

00:15:33.000 Look, I'm a big believer in getting meat back in the diet of young people.

00:15:37.000 Too much of this fake stuff.

00:15:39.000 You need real meat so young people can build muscle mass. 1.00

00:15:42.000 It worked for our ancestors.

00:15:44.000 It can work for you.

00:15:45.000 So just go to goodranchers.com to buy now or subscribe today to save 20% off each box of mouth-watering meats.

00:15:52.000 Again, it's super simple.

00:15:53.000 You order this box, it comes to you, and it's a very exciting experience.

00:16:00.000 Goodranchers.com slash Charlie, or use the code Charlie at checkout.

00:16:04.000 You get all this meat, and quite honestly, all of your grocery store shopping is done.

00:16:11.000 You guys can freeze it.

00:16:12.000 I don't recommend that, but you can do that.

00:16:14.000 But the cuts they have that you've been craving, T-bone strips, fillets, gourmet burgers, boom, it's all right there.

00:16:20.000 And you know you support.

00:16:21.000 Here's three things that gets done when you go to goodranchers.com slash Charlie.

00:16:24.000 Three things.

00:16:25.000 Number one, you get food.

00:16:26.000 Everyone listening to this needs food.

00:16:28.000 Okay, unless you're in a fasting cycle, eventually you're going to need food.

00:16:31.000 Number two, you get American food and good food.

00:16:33.000 Number three, you support the show.

00:16:35.000 How cool is that?

00:16:36.000 So if every person listened to this, says, hey, I want to eat, well, I hope you want to eat.

00:16:42.000 I want to eat good food, obviously, and I want to support this show.

00:16:45.000 Trifecta.

00:16:46.000 Eat food.

00:16:48.000 Good food.

00:16:49.000 Support the show.

00:16:50.000 Pretty simple.

00:16:51.000 It's good meat.

00:16:52.000 Goodranchers.com slash Charlie and save $20 off.

00:16:55.000 Or better yet, subscribe and save each box of mouthwatering American meats.

00:16:59.000 We get it.

00:17:00.000 My wife and I, we get the boxes.

00:17:02.000 It's a whole ceremony.

00:17:03.000 We text our friends.

00:17:05.000 Mikey knows about it.

00:17:07.000 Jake knows about it.

00:17:08.000 It's meat day when Good Ranchers arrives.

00:17:11.000 So get involved.

00:17:12.000 Support the show.

00:17:13.000 Support American meat.

00:17:14.000 Goodranchers.com slash Charlie right now.

00:17:21.000 So, so, Rob, I want you to put our audience at ease because I can tell that there's some people that have maybe of a libertarian leaning.

00:17:28.000 That is it ever right to change things?

00:17:32.000 And if so, when?

00:17:34.000 So what should our process be to change things?

00:17:38.000 Because I think you would agree, of course, Civil Rights Act was a good thing in our country, that the, you know, that there has been legislative adjustments and passages that have been done.

00:17:46.000 So we, so how are we supposed to use prudence and practical judgment?

00:17:50.000 Because it's not saying that we're saying all change ever has always been bad, or maybe you are saying that.

00:17:55.000 Just help us do that.

00:17:56.000 No, I mean, look, not everything that's been handed down is good.

00:18:01.000 So tell us how do we differentiate that then?

00:18:04.000 So in order to do that in a prudent way, as you said, you have to have the benchmark of some other sound tradition.

00:18:13.000 So, for example, the natural law, right?

00:18:16.000 The natural law is a great mechanism for judging the changes of the past two, 300 years.

00:18:23.000 And so, for example, it would look at the abolition of slavery, and the natural law would immediately say, of course, right?

00:18:32.000 Because men are born equal.

00:18:35.000 And so to institute slavery is an offense against that.

00:18:39.000 And let's wage war, if need be, to eradicate this evil.

00:18:44.000 If there's going to be voting, if that's the system we want, then to withhold it from some people just by mere dint of their sex or their skin color is against, again, it runs against our sense of justice.

00:18:56.000 So you have to have some ultimate standard of justice.

00:19:01.000 And then you can make those, you can make kind of prudential judgments.

00:19:05.000 You can make debates about it and so forth.

00:19:09.000 I think the much more dangerous threat today is the idea that all change is good.

00:19:15.000 Well, that's the cult of progress.

00:19:17.000 And you were saying, you were mentioning it earlier, too.

00:19:19.000 It's like, well, we've done this, we've done this, we've done this.

00:19:21.000 So what's the next thing?

00:19:22.000 Might as well keep the momentum going.

00:19:23.000 Exactly.

00:19:23.000 Of course, equals massive money.

00:19:25.000 Well, this is the ever-receding horizon that we were just talking about, right?

00:19:27.000 I mean, there is this kind of liberal impulse, even a classical liberal impulse, say nothing of the modern progressive movement, to constantly find.

00:19:34.000 It's funny.

00:19:35.000 I think back when the gay marriage fight was still kind of a fight, well, to be clear, we're still fighting.

00:19:40.000 It's just, you know, the Supreme Court to say what it said.

00:19:42.000 But before the court affirmatively ruled on this, I'm thinking back to like 2014, 2015, right around then, there was this Atlantic essay that I remember reading.

00:19:49.000 I don't remember who wrote it, but it was talking about how the gay marriage by the time was kind of like the new generations, I guess the millennials' version of like their Selma march.

00:19:59.000 Look, I find that analogy abhorrent, frankly.

00:20:02.000 And reprehensible. 0.94

00:20:03.000 Yeah, I mean, it's utterly, it's ridiculous, frankly, for lack of a better term.

00:20:07.000 But there is this impulse in kind of the leftist, both progressive and, frankly, more classical liberal mindset to find your next Selma.

00:20:15.000 And that is like the way that you fulfill yourself.

00:20:17.000 Totally agree.

00:20:18.000 But, you know, it's funny.

00:20:19.000 Dennis Prager's most recent syndicated column, he actually takes this head on.

00:20:23.000 He says that there is kind of this impulse, frankly, for a lot of people to best fulfill, best kind of maximize your potential to best serve kind of the nation to the extent liberals even care about that anymore by finding kind of the social justice cause du jour, like the hot cause of the day.

00:20:39.000 And, you know, what Prager says, he outlines kind of five concrete steps.

00:20:42.000 I could not agree with this more, to actually meaningfully improve your life in a way that you don't need to have these kind of abstract goals.

00:20:48.000 And it's his column is profoundly conservative.

00:20:51.000 He talked about the imperative of marrying, raising children, of providing for your children, providing for your parents when they get eligible, something that a lot of conservatives, frankly, have forgotten.

00:20:59.000 It's a potential commandment.

00:21:00.000 It is only with a promise.

00:21:01.000 Absolutely.

00:21:02.000 No, in the Jewish liturgy, we literally, that is in our liturgy every single day, actually, is the imperative to care for your parents.

00:21:08.000 He talks about going to church or synagogue and just morally improving your own life, which, by the way, is straight out of that George Washington quote that I said earlier, right?

00:21:15.000 This is the traditional mindset: if you want to take action on a broader level, on the nationalistic level, or even your true utopian mindset to the global level, it all starts in the home.

00:21:26.000 It starts in your private life.

00:21:27.000 So I want to ask you more about Judaism in a second.

00:21:29.000 So don't let me forget, because I have something I'd love to have you walk me through when it comes to Judaism and liberalism.

00:21:34.000 And I want you to explain to me the ever constant mystery in my mind and how those things seem to be happily married together.

00:21:41.000 But first, because it just seems that is the predominant view.

00:21:45.000 First, I want to ask you, Saurob, about this idea of constant change and things around us.

00:21:54.000 Let's just talk pragmatically and concretely and kind of get out of the clouds.

00:21:58.000 Not that there's anything wrong with the clouds.

00:21:59.000 I think it's, you know, nice to kind of live in Plato's world, but let's go into Aristotle for a second.

00:22:03.000 Of things we can see and things we can know and things we can understand, which is what is it going to take for people to want to re-embrace tradition?

00:22:10.000 Is it going to take this kind of just really unhappy existence, just kind of the chaos of the moment?

00:22:20.000 Is that the only way to get us back to tradition?

00:22:22.000 You have to hit metaphorical rock bottom before you can start to rise up again.

00:22:27.000 That's a point I often make.

00:22:29.000 People say, what do you have hope in?

00:22:30.000 And one of the things I have several answers.

00:22:33.000 One of them is gravity.

00:22:34.000 No, precisely, you're right.

00:22:35.000 That's the sense where I always make this point, you know, because if you're a populist conservative, if you're opposed to big tech, some of our critics will say, well, but this is a free society.

00:22:50.000 You know, what are you going to do with freedom?

00:22:52.000 It's like, do you feel free?

00:22:53.000 Do you feel free really?

00:22:55.000 I mean, again, the three of us around this table do, but lots of the people at this conference do not.

00:23:00.000 Well, it's also like, I just have to interject.

00:23:02.000 I'm sorry.

00:23:03.000 It's just becoming more and more unenjoyable to live in this country.

00:23:06.000 Or I can't even watch baseball anymore.

00:23:08.000 That's just like a very basic.

00:23:09.000 No, I know exactly what you're doing.

00:23:10.000 You know what I mean?

00:23:11.000 Yeah.

00:23:11.000 It's like, I don't want to live in this country.

00:23:12.000 Some things got to happen.

00:23:13.000 I have to kind of police my sports decisions now.

00:23:17.000 That's not a fun place to live.

00:23:18.000 Yep.

00:23:19.000 So, and then you go into like much deeper social crises, the opioid crisis.

00:23:25.000 No, no, no, but that's part of it too.

00:23:26.000 Baseball's part of it because it's part of the American kind of American tradition.

00:23:30.000 That's the feminine story. 1.00

00:23:31.000 But then you have opioid crisis.

00:23:33.000 You have what labor arbitrage has done to the working class for this country.

00:23:39.000 Two and a half million jobs maybe lost in the heartland to offshoring in China.

00:23:44.000 What has that done to families?

00:23:45.000 So the point I'm trying to make is, I think I do get hope from how bad things can get, because at some point people, you hope, will say, well, how else have people organized their lives?

00:23:58.000 Just one more point.

00:23:59.000 The only point I was going to say is, as a political movement, though, the constant change, much of it is baked into how we organize our economy, right?

00:24:10.000 Our economy is designed for people who are kind of college graduates, super mobile, and they like being in mobile.

00:24:21.000 They gravitate toward urban cores.

00:24:23.000 They leave their families behind.

00:24:24.000 They don't have a filial piety.

00:24:26.000 And they just sort of thrive in these environments.

00:24:28.000 And they're like that.

00:24:30.000 But there's lots of other people who either don't want to and or can't live that kind of a kind of overclass lifestyle, as my friend Michael Lynn calls it.

00:24:43.000 But the economy that the overclass has created creates constant change. 1.00

00:24:46.000 If you want tradition, if you want people to go to church or synagogue, if you want them to show filial piety, that needs a level of stability, a level of calm.

00:24:56.000 If your job is always at threat of being shipped off overseas, if you're constantly under these kind of pressures that a neoliberal economy creates, you don't have time to worry about tradition.

00:25:07.000 If you're working for Jeff Bezos and he only gives you 20 minutes time off task, and in order to relieve yourself, you have to use a bottle because that's not enough time.

00:25:17.000 There is a kind of material substrate to being able to live a fulfilled life.

00:25:22.000 And that's what we have to think about, what is that ordinary American who works in these kind of exurbs of large cosmopolitan cities and has, you know, is his livelihood is ever at threat of being threatened by automation or free trade.

00:25:40.000 What does he need or she need to be able to live a virtuous life?

00:25:43.000 And so there's some of the work we have to do has to do with political economy.

00:25:46.000 Well, I totally agree.

00:25:47.000 I'd go a step further and say it has to do with space as well.

00:25:50.000 I think a highly centralized way of living concentrated, you're going to have people that then, by definition, start to become more in the direction of collectivist and totalitarian when you're more likely to rent than own.

00:26:04.000 Well, then of course it's the tragedy of the commons.

00:26:06.000 Why would I conserve anything?

00:26:07.000 It's the public park.

00:26:08.000 It's the public elevator.

00:26:10.000 But if you're spaced out by a mile from your neighbor, you've got a lot of acreage between you and your neighbor.

00:26:16.000 By definition, you have to have self-government.

00:26:18.000 You also have a lot of time, time of travel, more to ponder and reflect.

00:26:22.000 So I think that the kind of concentrating our population in smaller and smaller areas has been really bad.

00:26:31.000 And it's happened because of our economic policy, because then all of a sudden the family from Hubbard, Ohio, they're going to tell their 16-year-old kid, look, get out of town.

00:26:41.000 Go work in Detroit.

00:26:43.000 Go work in Chicago because it's not going to happen here in Hubbard.

00:26:46.000 We're going to sell the home in a couple years and move to Florida.

00:26:49.000 And the next thing you know, that happens over two generations and Hubbard, Ohio becomes kind of a skeleton of what it used to be.

00:26:57.000 So Josh, I want to ask you about something unrelated, but somewhat related to all of this, which is that one of the most reliably liberal groups in America is the American Jewish population.

00:27:10.000 I've heard a lot of different explanations for this.

00:27:13.000 I've asked everyone from Dennis Prager to Ben Shapiro.

00:27:16.000 Super fascinating to have you explain this.

00:27:18.000 I get this question a lot from our listeners.

00:27:20.000 I don't think we've talked about this for quite some time.

00:27:22.000 But it's the way I've heard it explained is the more religious you are, the more conservative you are.

00:27:27.000 And some Jews aren't that religious.

00:27:29.000 Which is true in basically every religion.

00:27:30.000 Yeah, which that's right.

00:27:31.000 And so, but can you tell me, though, that in a religious tradition, which has such an emphasis on things that are passed down, on doing customs and meals and even names that existed thousands of years before, why is it that that group seems at times even the most enthusiastic about deconstruction?

00:27:52.000 Charlie, you're getting at one of my biggest pet peeves in all of life, I would say.

00:27:58.000 I have been frustrated by this question for virtually since high school.

00:28:02.000 I mean, I first identified as someone right up center, broadly speaking, in like seventh or eighth grade.

00:28:07.000 And basically since high school, I've just been utterly baffled by this.

00:28:10.000 I mean, obviously, like immense amount of ink has been spilled on this very question.

00:28:14.000 Lots of books have been written about it.

00:28:16.000 Look, the shortest answer that I can give is that most American Jews today, you know, we're in the year 2021, are frankly 100 years.

00:28:24.000 I mean, no more than 120, 125 years removed from their ancestors from the great Ellis Island immigration wave, right?

00:28:31.000 I mean, speaking personally here, I mean, you know, my great-grandparents mostly came in an immigration wave.

00:28:37.000 You know, they grew up in kind of those traditional like Lower East Side tenements in New York City.

00:28:41.000 My great-grandfather, my father's side, was an immigrant from Poland, kind of worked the graveyard shift overnight six days a week deep in the heart of Brooklyn.

00:28:51.000 So there was kind of this scrappy kind of working class mentality that kind of naturally inured itself to kind of FDR style welfare state liberalism, I guess you would say. 0.53

00:29:01.000 And I think just kind of subsequent generations of Jews, especially obviously the less Orthodox, the less religious ones, just imbibe this like it was mother's milk. 1.00

00:29:10.000 And you can't disentangle the two, right?

00:29:13.000 The more often like a Jew will stop being a traditional Jew will be the kind of Jew who, you know, their Judaism is effectively watching Seinfeld, eating bagels, going to Shul once or twice a year. 0.93

00:29:24.000 That is naturally going to be the kind of Jew that gravitates towards a political party that doesn't care about tradition. 1.00

00:29:30.000 Because Judaism, as we said on the panel earlier, Charlie, I mean, it's the oldest monotheistic religion in the world.

00:29:38.000 I mean, the reason why the anti-Semites ultimately end up hating Christianity as well is because without Judaism, there obviously is no Christianity.

00:29:47.000 I mean, Karl Marx was the grandson of an Orthodox rabbi.

00:29:50.000 I mean, Karl Marx was probably the most famous self-hating Jew in Jewish history.

00:29:54.000 But he, of course, despised Christendom.

00:29:56.000 He, of course, despised Christian civilization. 0.74

00:29:59.000 The two cannot be disentangled.

00:30:01.000 So look, what's happening in the Jewish community, I think, is very sad and is tragic. 1.00

00:30:06.000 You know, Ben Shapiro, my former boss and friend, he uses the crass term, or he has in the past, he hasn't used it a while.

00:30:13.000 He used to use the phrase gino and stuff like instead of rhino for Republican name only.

00:30:16.000 He would say like Jew in name only.

00:30:19.000 I read Ron Baum.

00:30:20.000 That's what we call Maimonides on the Mishneh Torah, who speaks pretty clearly about not speaking ill of other Jews.

00:30:27.000 And I would never tell Ben Shapiro, who's a better Jew than I am, frankly, how to observe Judaism.

00:30:31.000 So I would not go quite that hard as far as kind of rhetorical barbs are concerned.

00:30:35.000 But that obviously is true to an extent.

00:30:36.000 There are very, very, very few kind of observant Jews.

00:30:40.000 I think the Orthodox Jewish community broke for Trump like 83 to 17 or something like that.

00:30:44.000 That's literally a higher percentage than evangelical Christians.

00:30:47.000 And they're winning demographically, aren't they?

00:30:49.000 They are.

00:30:50.000 I mean, they're having three, four children.

00:30:52.000 The Reformed Jews are intermarrying. 0.99

00:30:54.000 They're by definition kind of breeding out.

00:30:56.000 So I am hopeful over the long term, but I'm frustrated how slow the movement is.

00:31:00.000 So I'm going to throw it now to Saurabh.

00:31:02.000 Why are Catholics so liberal? 1.00

00:31:05.000 And I heard the JFK explanation, but another religious belief that has a heavy emphasis on tradition.

00:31:15.000 Why is it that the American Catholic population at least largely tends to be more to the side of gay rights, whatever that is, you know, to abortion?

00:31:27.000 Help us through that.

00:31:29.000 Yeah, I mean, I think the assimilationist pressures that Josh talked about with respect to Jews is also a factor.

00:31:43.000 That's JFK, essentially saying, in order for me to seek political power, I will reassure you that I don't take my views, my beliefs, my most dearly held beliefs that seriously.

00:31:56.000 That was his bargain.

00:31:58.000 And again, we see it with now President Biden as well.

00:32:03.000 I think it's partly because the bishops over a very long time have relinquished their role of trying to discipline, because Catholicism is a public religion.

00:32:14.000 It is most definitely a public religion.

00:32:17.000 It cannot be relegated to just like a, meaning it makes claims on public life.

00:32:22.000 It has an account of the common good of what society should look like.

00:32:28.000 And certainly it's kind of its moral teaching.

00:32:31.000 And so what that means is that, but that requires an element of the bishops disciplining Catholic politicians.

00:32:40.000 And they've, over a very long time, maybe starting really with Mario Cuomo, Governor Cuomo's father.

00:32:48.000 I think he really pioneered the idea that, well, I oppose abortion personally, but I support it as a lawmaker.

00:32:56.000 They really relinquished the role of disciplining him.

00:32:59.000 And now I think the bishops are kind of trying to do that with Biden.

00:33:01.000 I don't know if you've been following them.

00:33:02.000 Oh, I've been following.

00:33:03.000 It hasn't happened yet, though, because they have to appeal to their, I don't know, the hierarchy as well.

00:33:07.000 I had someone explain it to me.

00:33:08.000 But the bottom line is, I think that's been part of the process.

00:33:13.000 You know, it's that assimilation. 0.91

00:33:15.000 I mean, the American Catholics gave up with enthusiasm their ethnic ghettos where the religion was thick and the priest was taken very seriously to move to the suburbs and kind of become kind of like wasps and they kind of settled in. 0.76

00:33:32.000 The last factor is, I think, more recent is unfortunately the sexual abuse crisis.

00:33:38.000 There used to be a time, and this is the tragedy because the Cardinals in the big cities were a great restraining force on urban liberalism, right?

00:33:47.000 They were kind of pro-working class, support workers.

00:33:50.000 That's so true.

00:33:52.000 But Cardinal Law, for example, could pick up the phone and be like, hey, cut it out with this, whatever.

00:33:56.000 In Boston.

00:33:57.000 In Boston.

00:33:58.000 Or whatever.

00:33:59.000 You could go in Chicago.

00:34:01.000 And then after the sexual abuse crisis, especially in Boston.

00:34:04.000 They lose that power.

00:34:06.000 They lose that authority.

00:34:07.000 And so urban liberalism has no restraining force.

00:34:13.000 With the ever-increasing numbers of makes and models like Fiat, Kia, Pacifica X-T Vive, and more, it is now impossible to stock all the parts you need in a traditional chain storefront.

00:34:25.000 Why endure often pointless or seemingly intimidating questioning and wait while the counterman orders the parts on his computer, choosing the only brand his warehouse happens to carry?

00:34:36.000 You have computers with access to rockauto.com at home and in your pocket.

00:34:41.000 One reason to repair and maintain your cars is to save money that you can then use for other important things.

00:34:47.000 Chain stores have different price tiers for professional mechanics and do-it-yourselfers.

00:34:53.000 Rockauto.com, a wonderful family-run company, will always offer the lowest prices possible rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear like airlines do.

00:35:05.000 Rockauto.com is for everybody and does not require membership or an account login.

00:35:11.000 Rockauto.com is a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.

00:35:18.000 Go to rockauto.com to shop for auto and body parts from hundreds of manufacturers.

00:35:24.000 Rockauto.com catalog is unique and remarkably easy to navigate.

00:35:29.000 Go to rockauto.com right now and see all the parts available for your car or truck.

00:35:34.000 Right?

00:35:34.000 Charlie Kirk in the how did you hear about us box so they know we sent you.

00:35:38.000 Amazing selection, reliably low prices, all the parts your car will ever need.

00:35:43.000 Rockauto.com.

00:35:48.000 Do you think that there's this kind of younger Catholic community of priests that didn't grow up in the shadow of this kind of sexual crisis, which it was a crisis and is disgusting, quite honestly, it was institutionally handled in a lot of different ways.

00:36:03.000 They're kind of like, you know what?

00:36:04.000 I don't have to apologize for something I wasn't involved with.

00:36:07.000 And they're kind of going to be more bold.

00:36:09.000 Do you see that in the Catholic Church among some of the younger priests?

00:36:12.000 Not just priests, but the laity as well.

00:36:15.000 There's a lot of based Catholics, if you will.

00:36:18.000 But I hear this term a lot.

00:36:20.000 But you know what?

00:36:23.000 And by the way, they don't line up easily with GOP Orthodoxy either.

00:36:27.000 This is the refreshing part of it.

00:36:29.000 They certainly disagree with Biden on abortion and sexual matters, but they're not so easily like kind of rah-rah-rah free marketeers or foreign policy neoconservatives as they were maybe a comparable generation in the 80s and 90s.

00:36:44.000 So it's this kind of combination that we're going to take the church's kind of moral and sexual teaching seriously, but we're also going to take its economic teaching seriously, which is far more kind of corporatist and concerned.

00:36:57.000 Corporatist is badly used in American discourse, but the idea that society as a whole should be organized with various units kind of aiming at the same end, including private sector, labor, government, this kind of tripartite alliance of all working for the common good of the whole.

00:37:12.000 But anyway, they take the economic and social teaching seriously.

00:37:16.000 They take the moral and sexual.

00:37:18.000 And so they're going to come up.

00:37:19.000 And this is a very important thing.

00:37:20.000 I see that happening.

00:37:21.000 I'm sure you see it on Twitter, but in minor ways.

00:37:23.000 Yeah, I see it in other ways too, just kind of private conversations.

00:37:26.000 When I do these events, and I'm not Catholic, but we talk a lot about how we have such a respect for the Catholic Church in a lot of ways, because at least they won't waver on some of these issues.

00:37:37.000 And I go to these events and these priests show up.

00:37:40.000 Like, I'm a huge fan of yours.

00:37:42.000 Like, I'm evangelical, like Protestant.

00:37:42.000 I'm like, really?

00:37:42.000 You are?

00:37:45.000 They're like, oh, yeah, I love, when you talk about abortion and all this, it's like, there's something happening here that I think is really unique.

00:37:50.000 In Judaism, do you see that same sort of trend?

00:37:53.000 Do you see that kind of Orthodox conservative ranks increasing or decreasing outside of kind of the Hasidic community that you mentioned demographically?

00:38:01.000 Do you think some of the younger Jews, are they becoming more secular Jewish or more kind of...

00:38:06.000 Yeah.

00:38:06.000 So at a sheer demographic level, you know, like we were saying earlier, I mean, the average American Jewish Orthodox home, I think, has between three and four children.

00:38:14.000 The Hasidic black hat community is obviously even higher than that. 0.99

00:38:16.000 You're right, exactly.

00:38:17.000 Yeah, it's somewhere in that range, right?

00:38:19.000 It probably is right around six or seven, actually.

00:38:21.000 And the Reformed Jews are intermarrying at like a 50, 60% rate, which is really quite tragic.

00:38:27.000 You know, there was a recent, there's a recent chief rabbi in Israel.

00:38:31.000 I think he was a Sephardic, not as Kennazi rabbi.

00:38:33.000 I might be wrong about that.

00:38:33.000 But in any event, he referred to intermarriage as kind of a silent Holocaust.

00:38:37.000 And it kind of really kind of shook a lot of American Jews up, which is like.

00:38:40.000 Is that Rabbi Sachs?

00:38:41.000 I don't think it was Rabbi Sachs who said that.

00:38:43.000 So let's just make sure we're defining our terms.

00:38:45.000 Intermarrying, which means that a Reformed Jew will marry a non-Jew and not carry on the Judaism to the children. 0.91

00:38:52.000 Is that correct?

00:38:53.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:38:54.000 Specifically in Jewish law, halakha is what we call it.

00:38:56.000 Through the mother.

00:38:57.000 It's through the mother, exactly. 0.90

00:38:58.000 It's matrilineal descent. 1.00

00:39:01.000 But intermarriage, you know, I would endorse that.

00:39:04.000 I do think it's a silent Holocaust. 0.97

00:39:06.000 I've seen in my own life.

00:39:07.000 It is tragic every time I see it.

00:39:10.000 But based purely in the demographic data on the one hand, obviously, I think Jews will get more conservative over time. 0.98

00:39:17.000 I am saddened that it hasn't happened more quickly.

00:39:20.000 But there are other factors at play here too, which is, look, the Democratic Party, which is increasingly a woke, illiberal, authoritarian institution, whatever you want to call it.

00:39:31.000 You say illiberal like it's a bad thing.

00:39:33.000 It's funny.

00:39:34.000 I literally was like thinking as the words coming out of my mouth, it's like, authoritarian.

00:39:38.000 Yeah, okay.

00:39:39.000 Totalitarian.

00:39:40.000 Yeah, I mean, like, woke is.

00:39:41.000 To a word that Sir Rob doesn't like.

00:39:42.000 Wokeism.

00:39:43.000 Look, let's just define wokeism as a substantively abhorrent strand of anti-liberal thought.

00:39:50.000 I guess would be the best way to quickly say it.

00:39:52.000 But in any event, the woke ideology, and it is an ideology.

00:39:56.000 It is an ideology that kind of takes the place when you have kind of a heathen, godless civilization.

00:39:59.000 Oh, it's religious.

00:40:00.000 Yeah, it is absolutely religious.

00:40:01.000 They condemn the heretics.

00:40:03.000 They shun them from society.

00:40:04.000 It is, frankly, it's neo-puritanic.

00:40:06.000 Yeah, they have rituals.

00:40:07.000 Yeah.

00:40:08.000 It really is neo-puritanical zeal.

00:40:10.000 They kneel together and all this stuff.

00:40:11.000 That's right.

00:40:12.000 It's a liturgy.

00:40:13.000 And they also have a hierarchy.

00:40:14.000 And it is a religion.

00:40:16.000 That's exactly the point I was going to make, though.

00:40:18.000 So when you get to kind of intersectionality, this is intersectional hierarchy in its truest form.

00:40:24.000 The Jews are always at the bottom. 1.00

00:40:26.000 I mean, what we saw in the most recent Israel Hamas skirmish in May, hold aside for a second, the predictably abhorrent rhetoric from AOC and people like that, Israel apartheid state, all this total garbage. 0.99

00:40:37.000 But Jews were being beaten up on the streets of America. 0.92

00:40:41.000 And this is no longer like just an anti-Zionism, is not anti-Semitism kind of thing.

00:40:45.000 The proof is now in.

00:40:47.000 The jury is out.

00:40:47.000 And they obviously are effectively synonymous with one another.

00:40:50.000 Because when you are taking it out, when you are punching Jews in Midtown Manhattan or in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles because what's happening halfway around the world, you are an anti-Semite.

00:40:58.000 Yeah, but then we have to be lectured by ADL that the biggest threat to the world is Tucker Carlson.

00:41:03.000 Like, spare me the swan song, okay?

00:41:05.000 You know what I mean?

00:41:06.000 And it's just, it creates this kind of pent up, like, you don't actually care about the real problem. 0.96

00:41:11.000 Look, the American Jewish establishment is completely corrupt in myriad ways. 1.00

00:41:15.000 I probably need to write like a long form essay just smacking these clowns, basically. 0.97

00:41:20.000 But what we're seeing here just in general is that as the intersectional identity politics mentality reaches its logical conclusion, even holding aside those demographic data about higher Orthodox birth rates, I think we will see more and more less observant Jews who even have like a vestige of fidelity, of pride in their tradition and their inheritance. 0.96

00:41:40.000 Even some of them will come around and see that this is a threat to my life because the Jews who are getting beaten up, they're not all black hat Jews.

00:41:49.000 They're going around smacking even like some Reformed Jews too. 1.00

00:41:51.000 So for sheer survival reasons, if we want to think like it's like basis, like more pure form, I do think we'll see more Jews of all stripes come around to see the light.

00:42:00.000 So here's how I want to close.

00:42:01.000 Talk about whether or not adhering to your religious tradition personally has enriched your life.

00:42:08.000 A lot of young people right now that are listening that are straying and they know it.

00:42:14.000 It would mean a lot if they heard from you.

00:42:15.000 Maybe not.

00:42:16.000 Maybe the more you adhere, you find it to be frustrating and kind of puzzling.

00:42:21.000 I don't think that's the case, but we'll start with you, Sir Rob.

00:42:23.000 We'll go to.

00:42:24.000 And what can I say?

00:42:25.000 I mean, I found it so enriching that I wrote a memoir about it to try to explain what is.

00:42:30.000 What's the name of that book?

00:42:31.000 It's From Fire by Water.

00:42:33.000 As you mentioned, my new book is called The Unbroken Threat.

00:42:36.000 That's right.

00:42:36.000 Unbroken Thread.

00:42:37.000 That's why we discussed it.

00:42:40.000 But no, it's this sense of security, right?

00:42:45.000 It actually is a really great feeling that set aside salvation, which is no small thing.

00:42:54.000 But to know that you're walking on solid ground, that if you stumble, the church is there to salve your wounds.

00:43:04.000 And again, I personally find I can leap into what's really important in life as a professional, as a husband, with this sense that there's a kind of cosmic order.

00:43:17.000 I fit into it in my own way, you know, where I'm supposed to be.

00:43:22.000 And I don't need to kind of, again, anxiously, I mentioned this in the main program, anxiously, constantly self-examine what I really believe.

00:43:29.000 So, for someone listening right now that's maybe 20 years old and they grew up in a secular home and they're really confused about what they're seeing, they might have self-identity problems, they might be all of a sudden dealing with all these kind of quasi-nihilistic thoughts, nothing matters.

00:43:42.000 Does the church and your experience religiously, does it help you make sense of the world?

00:43:47.000 I mean, of course.

00:43:48.000 Yeah, I mean, it's obvious, of course, for you.

00:43:50.000 Yes, exactly.

00:43:51.000 That's a fair point.

00:43:54.000 Yeah, I mean, I'll mention my 20s.

00:43:55.000 I was, I mean, again, career-wise, it was successful going from strength to strength, if you will.

00:44:01.000 But there were these moments of, you know, where you suddenly face, feels like an abyss, like life itself is kind of being drained down.

00:44:08.000 And if there's no meaning, if there's no God, the abyss goes all the way down.

00:44:15.000 Not just culturally, but personally.

00:44:17.000 Yes.

00:44:18.000 But luckily, I mean, there is a solid ground.

00:44:20.000 And the first you begin is: forget about the Bible.

00:44:23.000 Forget about Revelation.

00:44:25.000 You don't have to go there.

00:44:26.000 Just stick with reason.

00:44:28.000 And the classical proofs for the existence of God.

00:44:30.000 Aquinas's.

00:44:32.000 Five books.

00:44:33.000 I think are still extremely persuasive.

00:44:36.000 So if you're an intellectually-minded 20-year-old and you think religion is just revelation or superstition or what have you, read the five proofs.

00:44:45.000 I totally agree.

00:44:46.000 Summa Theologica is the best.

00:44:48.000 Yeah, I mean, no, no, no, but it was a much shorter book by a professor called Edward Phaser.

00:44:55.000 And it's titled like Aquinas.

00:44:58.000 I think he teaches it.

00:44:59.000 I actually teach at a college in California.

00:45:01.000 But anyway, the book is Aquinas: a Beginner's Guide.

00:45:05.000 And the title makes it sound like it's intelligent.

00:45:07.000 It's time to read the Summa.

00:45:08.000 Well, I mean, look, you can graduate to, but start with Phaser.

00:45:13.000 Start with Phaser.

00:45:14.000 And if you're intellectually minded and you're like, yeah, no, the thing that people believed is reasonable too.

00:45:24.000 And a lot smarter people than you have believed.

00:45:27.000 And I totally agree with that.

00:45:29.000 And I was just having this conversation with an evangelical, spirit-filled Protestant pastor, and their son has recently started to kind of get into deconstructionism, right?

00:45:41.000 And I sat down with this Protestant pastor and I said, your son is a very smart, high-IQ guy.

00:45:48.000 I said, has he ever read Aquinas?

00:45:49.000 And this guy was like, I really am not familiar with Aquinas.

00:45:53.000 I said, here's the problem with evangelicalism right now is that we don't know how to deal with this kind of deconstructionist stuff because we have no idea what classical education is.

00:46:02.000 And so the way that evangelicals and Protestants educate their kids is they will tell a five-year-old the Bible is true, it's inerrant, and if you disobey, you're going to hell. 0.58

00:46:11.000 Now, that's effective with a five-year-old.

00:46:14.000 For a five-year-old, a 10-year-old, a 15-year-old, but it's not effective when that 23-year-old opens up Instagram and all of a sudden gets introduced to Christopher Hitchens or to liberal theology.

00:46:26.000 The 23-year-old who is classically educated in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, Aquinas, Augustine, and the church fathers, the five proofs of God, all of a sudden has already naturally grown to that place where all of a sudden that doubt, they're like, oh, no, no, no, I know how to kind of work through this.

00:46:42.000 And that's the crisis right now in the evangelical world.

00:46:45.000 And I'm dealing with that personally.

00:46:47.000 Josh, has your, and I'd love to sidebar with you on that because I think it's just really interesting.

00:46:51.000 Definitely.

00:46:51.000 Your specific religious tradition, the way you eat, right?

00:46:57.000 You honor the Sabbath, which is kind of my most, the thing I'm the most jealous of in the world is how Jews have like an awesome reason to kind of just rest for a day. 1.00

00:47:06.000 We're trying to find our best to do it.

00:47:09.000 Has that given you a sense of purpose and a sense of clarity in this ever-increasingly confusing world?

00:47:15.000 So Ariana Huffington of all people wrote like a beautiful like, let's imitate the Jewish Sabbath essay like a year or two ago.

00:47:22.000 That's right.

00:47:22.000 She had the book on napping or rest or something, right?

00:47:25.000 Sleep or something.

00:47:25.000 The essay was timed around that, yeah.

00:47:28.000 Saurab recently wrote a, he excerpted your book in the Wall Street Journal, if I'm not mistaken, about the Sabbath as well.

00:47:34.000 It was a beautiful essay.

00:47:35.000 I would highly encourage listeners to check out that as well.

00:47:38.000 Look, I mean, we talk about this in the main program a little bit as well, but I firmly echo what Saurap said.

00:47:45.000 In order to go out there to do what the three of us do every day, we are all engaged in the battle of ideas.

00:47:50.000 We have chosen this as a profession.

00:47:52.000 It's a pretty fun profession.

00:47:53.000 I happen to be having a good time.

00:47:54.000 I mean, it's a lot of fun.

00:47:55.000 I love speaking in conferences like this.

00:47:57.000 But in order to kind of have the fortitude, the spine, the backbone to go out there and be confident in your convictions, in order to have just, not just the confidence, but just the, frankly, just the personal strength in order to not like be pliant and bend easily when someone presses the first, you need something to point to.

00:48:15.000 It literally is just that simple.

00:48:16.000 You need something to fall back upon.

00:48:18.000 You need a personal anchor.

00:48:20.000 And for Jews, that's obviously the Torah. 0.79

00:48:22.000 I mean, you know, God Torah Israel is the Jewish trinity. 0.94

00:48:25.000 Yeah.

00:48:26.000 Yeah, that's basically right.

00:48:27.000 That's what Prager says.

00:48:28.000 So if you've got a problem, you could.

00:48:29.000 No, that's fine.

00:48:32.000 I mean, it's a little simplistic, but like, it's totally fine for my purposes.

00:48:36.000 But the point is, yeah, you need something to fall back into.

00:48:39.000 And, you know, look, I mean, as I've gotten more observed in the past few years, you know, as I travel in my suitcase with my prayer book and my tefillin and what I wrap myself with, it's very powerful when I wrap myself in tefillin, when I put on my kippah, when I'm kneeling during the Shimona Esra, the Amidah, which is the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy.

00:49:00.000 I feel that.

00:49:01.000 I feel that strength.

00:49:02.000 And that does give me a backbone to then go out there and do what I do, whether it's writing, speaking, podcasting, anything along those lines.

00:49:08.000 So it's very powerful.

00:49:10.000 Can I tell you what I love about Jews?

00:49:11.000 Please.

00:49:12.000 I have a theory.

00:49:12.000 Only one thing, though?

00:49:14.000 A lot of things I love about Jews.

00:49:15.000 One of the reasons why Jews are so smart is it's in Isaiah 1, where there's this idea of let us reason or debate or argue with each other.

00:49:24.000 If you go to a Jewish meal, which you grew up in, you always have to have your argument pretty well articulated or else someone's going to run you over.

00:49:31.000 From a seven-year-old, an eight-year-old, a 10-year-old.

00:49:33.000 So these young kids are experiencing very informative, rational arguments.

00:49:39.000 And even if you're an eight-year-old and you're not articulating your opinion, you're going to kind of like, yeah, okay, come back next week, Jacob.

00:49:44.000 Right?

00:49:44.000 And so it increases the kind of mental, kind of how alert they are.

00:49:50.000 It's kind of ingrained in our tradition, actually.

00:49:51.000 So just a quick point on this.

00:49:53.000 The Talmud, which is our oral Torah, is the written Torah on the oral Torah.

00:49:58.000 There's a program called Dafiomi, which is you read one page of Talmud every day.

00:50:02.000 It's a seven-year, roughly seven-year cycle.

00:50:04.000 I started the Dafiomi cycle for the first time about a year and a half ago.

00:50:07.000 So January 2020.

00:50:08.000 So I'm a year and a half into the seven-year cycle now.

00:50:10.000 So I've been kind of going through this now for a year and a half.

00:50:13.000 The rabbis, and the Talmud is basically rabbis kind of hashing out various elements of Jewish law.

00:50:20.000 They disagreed about everything.

00:50:21.000 I mean, they disagreed about Jewish law probably more vociferously than like Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed about like, you know, American founding stuff.

00:50:28.000 Right.

00:50:28.000 And the way that they did that is because they ultimately had, for the most part, a certain level of respect for one another.

00:50:35.000 But, and here's, I'm going to take it back to my good friend Sorba over here.

00:50:38.000 This is a really, really, really interesting thing.

00:50:40.000 They respected one another, but they were not afraid to be uncivil if need be.

00:50:46.000 In fact, I published a beautiful op-ed in Newsweek a number of months ago from Rabbi Ari Lamb, who's one of my favorite new thinkers.

00:50:53.000 Oh, I run him too.

00:50:55.000 He's absolutely fabulous.

00:50:57.000 He's based in New York, Yeshiva University.

00:51:00.000 Joshua Project is his new kind of pan-faith kind of think tank of sorts.

00:51:05.000 Anyway, so Rabbi Lamb's op-ed for me, I can tell the op-ed was like against civility.

00:51:10.000 And he was basically saying, like, if you read the Talmud, if you go into a yeshiva, you know, Eshatora, which is like this big Baltashu yeshiva in like the right next to the old city.

00:51:20.000 It's in the heart of the old city of Jerusalem.

00:51:21.000 Yes, I know exactly.

00:51:22.000 I've been there numerous times.

00:51:23.000 You go in there and like, it's loud.

00:51:25.000 People are arguing.

00:51:27.000 They're like, they're not, they're not afraid to like hurt someone's feelings if need be.

00:51:30.000 There's a baseline level of respect, but there's a line you don't cross.

00:51:33.000 There's a line you don't cross.

00:51:34.000 You're not going to dominate.

00:51:35.000 It's not going to be right up to that line.

00:51:36.000 Right.

00:51:36.000 But you will not be afraid to get in there to pursue the truth, which is kind of the whole point, obviously, of SORAP's kind of fuselage against David French's, which is that civility is, I guess, an overstated principle, which is exactly right, of course.

00:51:48.000 The goal here is to find out.

00:51:49.000 It's a WASP culture for sure. 1.00

00:51:50.000 Yeah.

00:51:51.000 I could get into that.

00:51:52.000 In WASP culture, you didn't win the game. 0.98

00:51:55.000 Your team won the game.

00:51:56.000 Big difference, right?

00:51:58.000 And it has great virtues, by the way.

00:51:59.000 Oh, no, no.

00:52:01.000 Our WASP elites were a lot better than our woke elites. 0.92

00:52:05.000 That's totally agree.

00:52:06.000 But our WASP elites, to talk about my people, they made some awful mistakes in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, especially corporately and with capital flows.

00:52:14.000 We are over time.

00:52:17.000 What do you want to plug your book?

00:52:18.000 Yeah.

00:52:19.000 Unbroken Thread from Preserving Tradition in Age of Chaos.

00:52:22.000 I get that.

00:52:23.000 Yeah, Discovering Tradition in Age of Chaos.

00:52:24.000 Really close.

00:52:25.000 It's close.

00:52:26.000 It was good.

00:52:26.000 Josh Hammer, Newsweek.

00:52:28.000 Yeah, I've got no new book out.

00:52:29.000 Follow me on Twitter at Josh underscore Hammer.

00:52:31.000 You got to write a book about some of this stuff.

00:52:32.000 It'd be super interesting.

00:52:33.000 It is my next-to-do item, Charlie.

00:52:35.000 I'm telling you, this idea of the Jewish culture of debating and arguing, I think would be really fascinating.

00:52:41.000 We'll take that to heart.

00:52:42.000 All right.

00:52:42.000 Thank you guys so much.

00:52:43.000 Thank you.

00:52:46.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:52:47.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:52:50.000 Thanks so much for listening.

00:52:51.000 God bless.

00:52:55.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - August 13, 2021

A Catholic, a Jew, and an Evangelical on Saving the West with Sohrab Ahmari and Josh Hammer (Part 2)

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript