The Charlie Kirk Show - March 20, 2025


Another Promise Kept: Abolishing the Department of Education


Episode Stats


Length

35 minutes

Words per minute

145.36053

Word count

5,107

Sentence count

401

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Breaking News! President Trump is Abolishing the Department of Education. Breaking news! We explain what it means, as we go deep into the history of education and its ramifications. Dr. Pastrito from Hillsdale College also joins us to explain the progressive era and the nationwide education crisis.

Transcript

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Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, President Trump is abolishing the Department of Education.
00:00:03.000 Breaking news.
00:00:03.000 We explain what it means as we go deep into the history of the Department of Education and its ramifications.
00:00:10.000 Dr. Pastrito from America's greatest college, Hillsdale College, also joins us to explain the progressive era and the nationwide injunction crisis.
00:00:18.000 You guys can support Hillsdale College and learn from their incredible online courses at charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:00:25.000 That's C-H-A-R-L-I-E for Hillsdale.com.
00:00:29.000 charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:00:31.000 Email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:34.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:34.000 Here we go.
00:00:35.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:37.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
00:00:39.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:00:42.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:00:46.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:00:47.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:00:48.000 His spirit, his love of this country.
00:00:49.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:56.000 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.
00:01:05.000 That's why we are here.
00:01:08.000 Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
00:01:18.000 Learn how you can protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com.
00:01:25.000 That is noblegoldinvestments.com.
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00:01:34.000 Today, momentarily, imminently, right around the corner, President Donald Trump will be signing an executive order, a major executive order, to keep one of his campaign promises, one that we care about deeply here on The Charlie Kirk Show, which is the abolishment, the abolition, the elimination of the Department of Education.
00:01:56.000 The Department of Education was created in the 1970s under President Jimmy Carter, who separated from what it was previously called the Department of Health Education.
00:02:07.000 Now, I think that is worthy of a little bit of a pause.
00:02:10.000 That means we were able to send a man to the moon, win two world wars, become an industrial superpower, a world superpower, balance our budget, build the world's greatest middle class, have a well-read, well-grounded citizenry without a federal Department of Education.
00:02:32.000 We were able to become the envy of the planet without a centralized bureaucracy called the Department of Education.
00:02:41.000 How were we able to do that?
00:02:43.000 Well, for most of America, education happened between parent and child, pastor and child, community and child.
00:02:51.000 For most of American history, it was local, local, local, because education is the most personal of all the things.
00:03:00.000 It happens in the soul of an individual.
00:03:03.000 Education is very hard to put 2,000 miles away in a bleak, downtrodden building.
00:03:12.000 Basically a glorified cabinet file.
00:03:16.000 Our founding framers and our founding fathers were classically educated.
00:03:21.000 They studied the great books.
00:03:23.000 They understood the big ideas of human nature.
00:03:27.000 They could tell you what was good or evil, holy or profane, right or wrong, the difference between a citizen and a serf.
00:03:35.000 Now when I go to college campuses, they can't tell me what a woman is. 1.00
00:03:41.000 They can't tell me what a man is.
00:03:43.000 We went from an education system that would explore eternal truth, one that would challenge children to go after what is beautiful and what is good.
00:03:56.000 And instead, we gravitated away towards an administrative state model of education.
00:04:00.000 The Germans, which have a tendency to introduce the worst ideas imaginable, introduced this idea of historicism. 1.00
00:04:08.000 Coupled with historicism, which is an idea that history has an endpoint, and we must keep on growing the state to get us closer to that endpoint, it is Hegelian in nature, was this idea of the administrative approach to education.
00:04:23.000 This was largely authored by people such as John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson.
00:04:28.000 They wanted the centralization of education, that no longer should parents be in charge of education, no longer should churches or synagogues or communities, but we need to prepare students to become good worker bees.
00:04:45.000 Now, every time I hear a Republican politician say, well, we want our education system to create the best workers of the future, I cringe.
00:04:55.000 That is not what education is about.
00:04:58.000 Education is about creating good citizens.
00:05:01.000 Education is about creating people that are capable of answering life's deeper questions.
00:05:07.000 You see, if you create good citizens, they can do any job that you throw in front of them.
00:05:12.000 Instead... We entered into the hyper-specialization of American education.
00:05:19.000 You're going to sit in single-file lines.
00:05:22.000 No longer would we have dialogue or discussion in the classical form of education.
00:05:27.000 You will be taught science, technology, engineering, and math.
00:05:32.000 You will keep your mouth shut.
00:05:35.000 You will do what you are told is hyper-authoritarian.
00:05:38.000 And over the last hundred years, we have seen the downfall of American education, and Jimmy Carter accelerated that trend.
00:05:47.000 Away from the proven model that led us to a superpower and closer towards a Marxist version of how to educate our kids.
00:06:00.000 Since the creation of the Department of Education.
00:06:03.000 Spending on education has gone way up, while American education performance has actually gone down often dramatically.
00:06:10.000 For decades, Republicans have promised rhetorically to get rid of the Department of Education.
00:06:18.000 Reagan said he would.
00:06:19.000 In fact, that'd be fun to get a clip of that.
00:06:22.000 Congressmen have talked about doing it, but nothing has happened.
00:06:26.000 People assumed that Trump would be the same way, that he would talk about abolishing it, but it wouldn't happen.
00:06:33.000 Oh, it's just a bunch of rhetoric.
00:06:34.000 It's just a bunch of talk.
00:06:35.000 It's just a bunch of jibber-jabber.
00:06:37.000 But President Trump is the promise keeper president.
00:06:41.000 He is the promise keeper president.
00:06:43.000 So today, he is signing an executive order, ordering Education Secretary Linda McMahon to do everything possible to make herself the last Education Secretary.
00:06:54.000 Now, of course, there are some obvious caveats.
00:06:57.000 The department was created by Congress, so it probably can't be completely abolished.
00:07:02.000 Without Congress.
00:07:03.000 But we can do as much as possible to make the department's demise a mere matter of paperwork.
00:07:10.000 Trump has already laid off or furloughed thousands of the department staff.
00:07:14.000 He can relocate the programs we can't get rid of.
00:07:17.000 There's no reason we need a special cabinet department to run Pell Grants. 0.99
00:07:22.000 We had them before we had an education department.
00:07:26.000 We can apply the same principle to federal student loans and have the Treasury Department run them.
00:07:31.000 Scott Bessett would do a much better job running anything to do with financial transactions than the Department of Education.
00:07:37.000 Does the Department of Education need its own civil rights office?
00:07:42.000 Why not just have it at the Department of Justice?
00:07:45.000 And while we're at it, let's have a go after real discrimination that occurs in our schools against white, Asian, and Jewish students.
00:07:55.000 Not just going after fake hate crimes that happen on college campuses.
00:08:00.000 Now, getting rid of the Department of Education also won't cut the budget quite as much as it might seem.
00:08:06.000 The Department has a massive, colossal budget of $250 billion.
00:08:10.000 Most of that is stuff that we can't get rid of for now.
00:08:13.000 Pell grants, student loans, and important stuff like special education funding that we should, of course, keep.
00:08:20.000 It's Title I funding for schools.
00:08:22.000 But the principle here is incredibly important.
00:08:25.000 We are getting rid of a department that never should have existed in the first place.
00:08:32.000 Getting rid of this department would be a major step forward towards the localization and the restoration of the Parents' Party movement.
00:08:44.000 This was a pledge that President Trump made to the Parents' Party.
00:08:48.000 That no longer are bureaucrats going to say that they are in charge of our kids. 1.00
00:08:52.000 What President Trump is saying declaratively today is that it is your kids, not the state's kids.
00:09:01.000 It is not some government bureaucrat.
00:09:04.000 Here is Ronald Reagan making a promise.
00:09:07.000 I'm going to get rid of the Department of Education.
00:09:10.000 Ronald Reagan said, play cut 243.
00:09:13.000 The budget plan I submit to you on February 8th will realize major savings by dismantling the Departments of Energy and Education and by eliminating ineffective subsidies for business.
00:09:25.000 Thank you.
00:09:26.000 Yeah, none of that happened.
00:09:28.000 In fact, the Department of Education grew and added more headcount.
00:09:30.000 It strengthened, it deepened, and it did more damage.
00:09:34.000 Ronald Reagan failed in that regard.
00:09:36.000 And that was when it was early.
00:09:38.000 That was before it was this beast that it is today.
00:09:42.000 I had the opportunity to walk the halls of the Department of Education, and Linda McMahon is doing a phenomenal job a couple weeks ago. 1.00
00:09:49.000 That is a sad, depressing, Stalinistic Soviet building.
00:09:54.000 You walk, and it is a massive building.
00:09:58.000 Massive. And you gotta wonder, what are these people doing all day long?
00:10:04.000 What? And I thought to myself, as I walked the halls of the Department of Education, and I stared at five or six, Bureaucratic worker bees that wouldn't even look up from their work to look at who was coming by.
00:10:17.000 I said, what does that person, right there at that computer screen, what business does that human being have over my daughter in Arizona? 0.91
00:10:32.000 The answer is none.
00:10:34.000 Zero. They don't know her.
00:10:36.000 They don't know anything.
00:10:39.000 So it's time to retire them.
00:10:42.000 End it.
00:10:44.000 No mas afuera.
00:10:46.000 Delete it.
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00:11:48.000 Thank you.
00:11:55.000 Which, by the way, do you know Hillsdale receives no federal money?
00:11:59.000 Almost all of your local alma maters receive federal student loans.
00:12:03.000 Hillsdale does not.
00:12:04.000 It's one of the reasons why they're America's greatest college.
00:12:07.000 According to Dr. Larry Arnn, there are 23 million civilian employees of the government, state, federal, and local.
00:12:17.000 11 million of them work in education.
00:12:20.000 11 million of them.
00:12:22.000 Almost half.
00:12:24.000 But did you know out of 11 million, 6.7 million of them are not teachers or teachers assistants.
00:12:32.000 Over half.
00:12:34.000 So you have 11 million people in education.
00:12:39.000 11 million people that work in education in this country.
00:12:45.000 And 4.3 million of them are teachers.
00:12:49.000 So 4.3 million are teachers.
00:12:52.000 And the remainder, 6.7 million, are...
00:12:57.000 Principals, assistant principals, deans, paper workers, administrators.
00:13:04.000 This is the problem with education.
00:13:07.000 Most fundamentally.
00:13:08.000 Is that we have become a bloated, overweight country.
00:13:13.000 Both metaphorically and literally, by the way.
00:13:16.000 But that's a whole separate topic for a different time.
00:13:18.000 And our institutions have found themselves to be a little bit lethargic.
00:13:25.000 Getting a little bit slow, a little bit slug, and not caring about the delivering of the education for our kids.
00:13:34.000 You can walk into any local high school.
00:13:37.000 The high school I went to was falling victim to this.
00:13:39.000 I saw it happening at Wheeling High School when I was sophomore, junior, senior.
00:13:45.000 I saw this trend really accelerate towards the end part of my high school years, which was...
00:13:55.000 All of the extra money that District 214 was receiving, where I grew up, District 214, very well-funded, incredible, unbelievable amounts of money going to schools.
00:14:06.000 Teachers were earning $100,000, $120,000, $130,000 a year.
00:14:09.000 That's when I was going to school.
00:14:11.000 And it's a lot more now.
00:14:13.000 I mean, the pay increases are through the roof.
00:14:16.000 Huge pensions.
00:14:17.000 It was very common to have a PE teacher where I went to school earn $145,000 a year.
00:14:24.000 Very common.
00:14:25.000 And I started to see this trend where the more money that Wheeling High School would receive, it wasn't going towards teachers or teachers' assistants.
00:14:40.000 It was going towards a part of the building that I rarely visited.
00:14:45.000 A part of the building that I wasn't really even sure who all these people were.
00:14:50.000 And it was right in the administrative bloat.
00:14:53.000 And they would be adding on new offices and they'd be adding on new areas.
00:15:00.000 And we were wondering, who are all these people?
00:15:03.000 I think I saw my guidance counselor like twice throughout my four years.
00:15:10.000 And boy, these guidance counselors would make a ton of money. 0.99
00:15:13.000 And some of them were nice, wonderful people.
00:15:14.000 It's not an indictment of them, but their role is largely unnecessary and would cost the taxpayers.
00:15:21.000 Hundreds of thousands of dollars and then pensions for the rest of their life.
00:15:27.000 Our nation's report card is a failure.
00:15:31.000 We cannot meet basic standards.
00:15:35.000 Only 61% of 4th graders are proficient in math.
00:15:40.000 There was a story recently that I thought was a parody.
00:15:46.000 A young lady graduated with honors.
00:15:49.000 With honors, and she can't read or write.
00:15:52.000 The school gave her honors distinction, and she cannot read or write.
00:15:57.000 It's a true story.
00:15:59.000 You can go through over 20 schools in downtown Baltimore, and you cannot find a single student in fifth grade that can read.
00:16:09.000 Not a single student.
00:16:11.000 Yet these teachers keep on getting paid.
00:16:13.000 And the administrators, they keep on getting paid.
00:16:15.000 And the administrators are there allegedly to try to keep standards up for the kids.
00:16:20.000 And a whole different topic for a different time is how public sector teacher unions have done more damage to America than Vladimir Putin ever will.
00:16:32.000 How public sector teacher unions, like the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, they operate as a cartel.
00:16:41.000 Very similar.
00:16:42.000 The Sinaloa Drug Cartel.
00:16:44.000 Very similar.
00:16:45.000 They are harming our kids.
00:16:47.000 They are poisoning them with bad ideas.
00:16:50.000 Public sector teacher unions, run by Randy Whitegarten, who might as well be Education El Chapo, has sent tens of millions of kids' lives backwards.
00:17:03.000 And they are an arm of the Democrat Party.
00:17:07.000 Eliminating the Department of Education is a death blow against the education cartel that has been harming our country.
00:17:16.000 Private student loan debt in the United States totals about $300 billion.
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00:18:20.000 Our next guest, who is the professor of politics, the dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship, and the Charles and Lucia Shipley Chair in American Constitution at Hillsdale College, Dr. Ronald J. Pastrito.
00:18:34.000 Doctor, welcome to the program.
00:18:36.000 Thanks for that welcome, Charlie.
00:18:37.000 It's good to see you.
00:18:38.000 Absolutely. And I am a student of yours, both in person and remotely through the Hillsdale online courses at the Claremont Institute.
00:18:46.000 I loved your course on the Federalist Papers.
00:18:49.000 So there's lots to discuss here.
00:18:50.000 I would love to get your historical take on injunctions.
00:18:55.000 When did they come about?
00:18:57.000 How should we think, from a constitutional perspective, the very rapid use of nationwide district court injunctions?
00:19:08.000 Well, there's a little bit of recent history on this, actually.
00:19:11.000 And to be honest, I think Republicans have to look in the mirror a little bit because back when we got the Obama administration, came into office and was not able to get its program through the Congress, they decided to go very aggressive with administrative power.
00:19:29.000 And the Republicans at that time...
00:19:32.000 Instead of using the powers constitutionally that Congress has, instead of fighting the Obama administration itself, especially through the budget process, the power of the purse, instead the Republicans ran from that and decided to go crying to the courts.
00:19:48.000 And so they took the Obama administration to the courts.
00:19:51.000 Now that's been a practice in both Republican and Democratic administrations since then.
00:19:57.000 It's certainly a...
00:20:00.000 It's been ramped up massively now that we have the second Trump presidency.
00:20:05.000 But it's really a practice that unfortunately probably even Republicans have relied upon too much instead of using the Article 1 powers that they do have.
00:20:15.000 And so it seems as if the growth of this is very disturbing and is compromising Article 2 specified powers.
00:20:25.000 Does a district court judge have any jurisdiction over foreign policy decisions made by a president?
00:20:32.000 No, he does not.
00:20:34.000 And the federal courts have been, including the Supreme Court historically, have been very, very reluctant to involve themselves in any kind of question that might involve foreign policy or what one might...
00:20:51.000 Say, or even some of the core discretionary powers of the executive under Article 2. And so that's why some of the reasons taken by some of these district court judges...
00:21:03.000 Ordering the turning around of airplanes or instructing the Department of State to disperse funds even while they're just taking a pause, you know, the $2 billion funding order that we had recently reviewed by the courts.
00:21:20.000 These things are typically way out of bounds for federal courts.
00:21:25.000 And, you know, I have to say, I do think that...
00:21:29.000 A good amount of this will ultimately end up being reversed at the Supreme Court level or at the higher court level.
00:21:40.000 But the question is, how long is that going to take?
00:21:43.000 And how much trouble and harm to our country is going to be done while we wait for the Supreme Court to get into the ring?
00:21:55.000 We heard Chief Justice Roberts come out just recently and make the case that, hey, the impeachment isn't appropriate kind of language to use.
00:22:04.000 The appellate process is the way in which we handle potentially rogue district court judges.
00:22:10.000 And in one sense, he's right about that.
00:22:12.000 But if his own court is going to be so reluctant to police the lower courts, then he really is almost...
00:22:22.000 Setting the situation up for this kind of rhetoric.
00:22:26.000 And the other thing that I haven't heard mentioned very much is, of course, there's a layer of courts in between the district court level and the Supreme Court level, and these are the courts of appeal.
00:22:38.000 And where most of these cases are being brought, and they're being brought here for obvious reason, they're being brought in the District of Columbia.
00:22:48.000 And the appeals court...
00:22:50.000 In the District of Columbia, the Federal Appeals Court, is the one that was notoriously stacked with Democrats by Harry Reid.
00:22:57.000 And so it's not as if once these district court decisions get up to the appellate court level, there's not likely to be a terribly sympathetic hearing there either.
00:23:08.000 And so these are really matters that should be...
00:23:12.000 In front of the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court should be policing this.
00:23:15.000 You saw four justices in the case on the USAID funding get really quite angry.
00:23:23.000 Justice Alito was quite angry at the court for not intervening in that case sooner.
00:23:30.000 So it'll be a matter of when the Supreme Court wants to get involved.
00:23:33.000 So the lower court judges are making these decisions.
00:23:39.000 They seem to have a little bit of an arrogance where they know they're going to probably get slapped down and get an angry judgment, but they don't really care.
00:23:47.000 That's what's so disappointing is the naked partisanship here.
00:23:52.000 Deep down, I think these district court judges know they're acting improperly, but they justify it because Trump is so bad and we have to do what we possibly can to stop him.
00:24:04.000 Is there any recourse that can be delivered against these?
00:24:08.000 Rogue decisions?
00:24:10.000 Well, I think ultimately the most likely recourse is there being overturned by a higher court and especially by the Supreme Court.
00:24:19.000 That's the most likely.
00:24:20.000 Now, you know, we have heard talk of impeachment and...
00:24:24.000 I'm certainly not opposed to impeachment for judges who knowingly betray their judicial duty.
00:24:31.000 The problem is it's simply not a realistic remedy.
00:24:34.000 Impeachment requires a supermajority vote in the Senate that is simply never going to happen.
00:24:41.000 And so it's just, to my mind, not a very practical remedy.
00:24:46.000 And the leftists know this.
00:24:49.000 They know how to judge shop, quite frankly.
00:24:52.000 The Republican lawyers, when President Obama and President Biden were in office, they knew how to judge shop as well.
00:25:00.000 It's very easy to do at the district court level.
00:25:02.000 There are 90-some-odd district courts, and you only need to win in one of them, right?
00:25:09.000 That's the great problem with a lot of these universal injunctions, is you can go district court to district court to district court and lose, lose, lose.
00:25:18.000 And then if you find just one district court judge, Who's willing to enjoin the government, then that's it.
00:25:26.000 They only have to go for one out of 94, essentially.
00:25:29.000 And it's not hard to do.
00:25:31.000 It's like getting an indictment, you know, a prosecutor getting an indictment, you can indict a ham sandwich.
00:25:37.000 And getting an injunction in district court, especially in D.C., if you can't do that and you're a Democratic attorney, you should consider a new line of work.
00:25:46.000 And that's so disappointing for the Republic and bad for the country.
00:25:49.000 So another big case happening right now is that Trump has fired two members of the FTC, which Democrats are claiming is illegal.
00:25:57.000 Can you explain the case of Humphrey's executor to our listeners?
00:26:02.000 You bet.
00:26:03.000 And in one sense, it is illegal under existing Supreme Court precedent, under the Humphrey's executor precedent from 1935 that you just named.
00:26:13.000 And of course...
00:26:14.000 The Trump administration knows that, and one has to guess that the very reason that they have decided to go after these officers from the FTC is they know that that will put the question squarely before the Supreme Court of the United States.
00:26:33.000 The case of Humphrey's executor was about the question of whether or not Congress could create an agency like the FTC, but...
00:26:42.000 Protect it from presidential control.
00:26:44.000 And the way in which, principally, it is protected from presidential control is by the president not being allowed to remove the commissioners whenever he likes.
00:26:54.000 And that was challenged in the 1930s.
00:26:57.000 FDR tried to remove Mr. Humphreys, who was a pre-New Deal commissioner.
00:27:03.000 And the court came in and said, no, Congress can, when it wants to create independence for these agencies, Carve out a special zone of protection from presidential control.
00:27:16.000 And of course, the obvious problem with that is, well, where are they if they're not in the executive branch?
00:27:22.000 The president has the executive power, according to our constitution.
00:27:27.000 And so if they're not controlled by the elected executive, then by whom are they controlled?
00:27:33.000 And so for years, constitutionalists have really wanted to get the court to look anew.
00:27:40.000 At the Humphreys' executor precedent.
00:27:42.000 And the good news is, it's pretty clear if you follow the jurisprudence over the last several years, the court is pretty sympathetic with Humphrey's executor,
00:28:05.000 I've said many times, perhaps other than Dred Scott, is probably the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court in terms of its historical ignorance and constitutional incompetence.
00:28:18.000 So I think there's going to be a sympathetic I want everyone to check out...
00:28:46.000 Your latest book, America Transformed, The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism.
00:28:53.000 Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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00:29:55.000 Dr. Pastrito continues with us from the great Hillsdale College, author of America Transformed.
00:30:01.000 Doctor, tell us about your book.
00:30:02.000 Well, the book...
00:30:03.000 Chronicles how we got to the place that we currently are.
00:30:07.000 So people might wonder, you know, we were talking about the FTC and the Humphreys executive decision.
00:30:14.000 People might wonder, well, why is it that Congress would have wanted to kind of wall off an agency and protect it and apparently make it unaccountable?
00:30:26.000 And the story of how that happened and what a just...
00:30:31.000 Incredible departure that is from the original Republican vision of our founders really goes through the progressive era, the original progressive era, back to the likes of Woodrow Wilson especially, and also folks like Teddy Roosevelt.
00:30:47.000 And so what I try to do in the book is to say, all right, all of this...
00:30:52.000 All of these developments today, these rogue agencies, the fact that you have hundreds of thousands of people governing us and they go on doing it regardless of election.
00:31:05.000 Elections come and go and the administrative state just sort of chugs on.
00:31:09.000 Well, that didn't just happen.
00:31:11.000 It wasn't just in the last five years or ten years.
00:31:15.000 It's been a project underway in this country for a hundred years.
00:31:19.000 It goes back even into the end of the 19th century.
00:31:23.000 And so the book basically traces the very different arguments about the purpose of government, the great critique of the Constitution, the progressive argument that Hey, the time of the founding has passed and we've got to get some new ideas here.
00:31:38.000 Traces that into what they did then to institutions in the 1930s and how the law changed and how we ended up here, you and I, today talking about, you know, why can't the president go ahead?
00:31:52.000 He's elected, after all, by the majority of the country.
00:31:54.000 Why can't he go ahead and control other people in the executive branch?
00:31:58.000 How did we get here?
00:32:00.000 And so the short version is the book tries to tell that story.
00:32:03.000 Over the last hundred years, power seems to have concentrated in the unelected bureaucracy and the unelected judiciary, both of which seem to be the protectorate of progressivism and the grovel.
00:32:15.000 What would you say is the philosophical foundation for progressivism that led towards...
00:32:31.000 Where did this come from?
00:32:33.000 What did Wilson, what did Dewey, what did these people believe?
00:32:36.000 Well, what they did, Charlie, was they imported a philosophy of government that was a real novelty to America.
00:32:45.000 American government, as you know very well, was founded on the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
00:32:52.000 The point of government is to secure the God-given rights that individuals have.
00:32:57.000 And government by consent of the governed is the only legitimate form of government.
00:33:02.000 Well, what the progressives argued was that That was perhaps an appropriate way of thinking for the late 18th century, but that we had now been presented with a whole new host of problems, economic problems, social problems.
00:33:19.000 The old principles were inadequate.
00:33:22.000 For the crisis that they faced when they came on the scene in the latter part of the 19th century.
00:33:29.000 And so the dominant philosophy, to get at your question, the dominant philosophy was that of the German state.
00:33:36.000 Woodrow Wilson, for example, wrote very admiringly of the bureaucratic system of government in Bismarck's Prussia and wondered how we might Bring that kind of government by expertise, not government by consent, but government by expertise.
00:33:53.000 Consent gets in the way, right?
00:33:55.000 Ordinary consent gets in the way.
00:33:57.000 People have different opinions and they want their interests to be respected.
00:34:03.000 Much better, the progressives argued, if we could just bring in a kind of scientific elite.
00:34:09.000 And, you know, often when I'm doing this for longer than I want to admit, And often when I used to bring it up, people's eyes would kind of glaze over, talking about the Germans and bureaucracy and state theory and so on, until we got COVID.
00:34:24.000 Until we got told basically that, hey, elected people should get out of the way. 0.91
00:34:31.000 We need the experts.
00:34:33.000 We need to do whatever Tony Fauci and his minions tell us.
00:34:38.000 And all of a sudden, it became very real for people.
00:34:41.000 And so that was a kind of renewed appreciation of what happens when you see too much of government by consent.
00:34:47.000 Wonderful summary.
00:34:48.000 We are out of time.
00:34:49.000 Thank you, Dr. Pastrito.
00:34:50.000 Everyone check out the book, America Transformed.
00:34:52.000 And also, take the free online courses, A Constitution 201, by Dr. Pastrito at charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:35:00.000 Charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:35:01.000 Doctor, thanks so much.
00:35:02.000 Thanks for having me on, Charlie.
00:35:03.000 Good to see you.
00:35:04.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:35:05.000 Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.