00:01:02.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:22.000But let's start with kind of a news of the day question from Addison in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
00:01:27.000And before I answer Addison's question from Chattanooga, I want to thank those of you that support our program at charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:01:34.000You allow us to do two episodes every single weekday.
00:01:37.000It's Labor Day, but we are still delivering two episodes a day to you because you guys so faithfully and generously support us at charliekirk.com slash support.
00:02:08.000You now win a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine.
00:02:10.000This is from a September 3rd article in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg.
00:02:14.000This was a bombshell, quote-unquote, bombshell article that we're all supposed to care about that came over Labor Day weekend that said, Trump, Americans who died in war are losers and suckers.
00:02:24.000Jeffrey Goldberg continued by saying, The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades.
00:02:42.000And then, allegedly, in a separate conversation on that same trip, Trump referred to more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Bellew Woods as suckers for getting killed.
00:02:53.000So, look, and if you know anything about Bellow Wood, it is a consequential battle in American history.
00:02:58.000And the ground, according to Jeffrey Goldberg on which it was fought, was venerated by the Marine Corps.
00:03:34.000It's either fake in nature and they've been waiting for it, or it's political in nature.
00:03:38.000And both of them actually are cousins of each other.
00:03:41.000And neither of them are rooted in truth.
00:03:45.000The president has been defended by John Bolton, who hates him, who came out against him, by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is loyal to him, and by other people that were around him the entire day.
00:03:55.000And they said, nothing in this story is true.
00:03:58.000Jeffrey Goldberg is hiding behind anonymous sources.
00:04:00.000And we have known throughout the entire Trump presidency that anonymous sources has become the almost go-to tactic of an activist media that can find something in the rumor mill, extract it from that rumor mill, and use it to try to bring down Donald Trump's favorability ratings and also give a little gift to the Biden campaign so they no longer have to talk about the arson, the riots, and the terror happening in our country.
00:04:25.000So President Donald Trump visited France in 2018.
00:04:32.000And because of that, he did not visit the Ayn Marin American Cemetery near Paris in 2018.
00:04:40.000And this was reinforced by the Secret Service that it was rain that canceled it for the last minute decision, saying that the helicopter couldn't fly.
00:04:48.000However, the media said that is fake news, but it's actually completely and totally correct.
00:04:53.000It's funny when the media calls things fake news.
00:04:56.000You know exactly what their agenda is.
00:04:59.000This story has become the most bombshell story of the weekend, large in part because the media has been on defense by President Trump, talking about the lockdowns, talking about Nancy Pelosi not wearing a mask in San Francisco, and talking about issues that they themselves cannot articulate well, that they themselves are not comfortable talking about because it does not benefit them politically.
00:05:24.000So Biden was very quick to capitalize on this.
00:05:26.000He cut an ad almost immediately attacking the president for saying something that he didn't say with no facts at all whatsoever.
00:05:32.000However, if Biden really wants to talk about foreign policy, he should be very careful because it's actually one of his greatest political vulnerabilities.
00:05:40.000And the president can use all the weight of the media and of the Biden campaign that is being thrown at him against them.
00:05:47.000So when Biden tries to have a conversation around troops, the correct response for the president should, of course, be to deny these false allegations.
00:05:56.000But if Biden wants to have a conversation around foreign policy, the real question should be, you've been in Washington, D.C. for 40 plus years.
00:06:04.000Can you even remember all the wars that you voted for in Congress, like the invasion of Panama under George H.W. Bush or the Gulf War, the Bosnian War?
00:06:13.000Or how about Clinton's intervention in Haiti, the Kosovo War in the late 90s, or Operation Infinite Reach?
00:06:19.000Or how about under George W. Bush, the war in Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Iraq War, and also, of course, the continuation of all conflicts in Afghanistan?
00:06:30.000Or how about when you were vice president, when you oversaw Operation Ocean Shield, or how about the continuation of troops in Afghanistan, a further surge under President Barack Obama, or how about the conflict in Libya?
00:06:43.000And then you look under President Donald Trump.
00:06:45.000President Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime not to start new wars, not to send middle-class sons and daughters overseas to go fight a conflict where we could not tell you where or how this conflict would actually serve the best interest of the middle class.
00:07:00.000And this is something I think the president really has to reinforce.
00:07:04.000When we have a conversation of commander-in-chief, foreign policy becomes a very important issue for the presidency.
00:07:10.000In fact, some say it's the most important issue.
00:07:12.000And there's some argument to that, saying that if you can't defend the nation from enemies foreign and domestic, then what good is high taxes or low taxes?
00:07:24.000I think there's a lot of wisdom to that argument.
00:07:27.000President Donald Trump is the first president to have less wars on the books after his first term in office than before he became president.
00:07:37.000And it's also not enough for former Vice President Biden to just criticize President Trump for what he did with Iran.
00:07:43.000President Donald Trump avoided war with Iran because he is not a neoconservative hawk.
00:07:48.000Instead, he actually believes in ending the endless wars, while also not sending billions of dollars we do not have to our bitter enemies that fund terror, like the Iranian mullahs.
00:08:00.000President Donald Trump is also unafraid to strike with decisive force against proxies that have killed Americans without putting us in endless entanglements in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, or otherwise, such as killing Qassam Soleimani or al-Baghdadi.
00:08:17.000So the president is able to actually boast that more of America's enemies are dead and more troops are coming home.
00:08:24.000It is an incredible foreign policy portfolio that the president is able to run for on re-election.
00:08:31.000Unlike Biden, who everything that was in the Biden Middle East portfolio got worse, whether it be the withdrawal from Iraq, and yes, I'm all for ending foreign wars, but I'm for doing it correctly.
00:08:42.000In Iraq, it was just a quick and unnecessary retreat, which resulted in the rise of ISIS or in Libya with the complete and total dictator displacement strategy oversaw by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, where Muammar Gaddafi was displaced from power.
00:08:58.000So everything Biden ever touched overseas has turned to chaos and uncertainty.
00:09:04.000So I do not believe that President Trump said that Americans who died in war are losers and suckers.
00:09:10.000People around him, people in his closest proximity, myself included, never heard him talk like that.
00:09:16.000I wish they would put faces and names to these accusations, not just going on anonymous sources always to try and destroy political opponents.
00:09:25.000I think it is one of the most disgusting forms of journalism we have seen in modern times.
00:09:32.000But look at what the president has done for veterans.
00:09:46.000And Jeffrey Goldberg has stood by his reporting, has stood by his anonymous sources, and the entire media is in absolute bedlam over this story.
00:09:55.000They have finally found their chance to destroy Donald Trump.
00:09:57.000They have finally found a time for Biden to be able to shift the narrative from lockdowns and from BLM Incorporated.
00:10:21.000Why is it that 60 days out from an election, actually less than that, we're all of a sudden in a conversation about something that happened in 2018, maybe because it didn't happen.
00:10:32.000This was a carefully orchestrated political hit to try and destroy President Trump, to try to destroy and destabilize one of the core constituencies that the president enjoys, which is with veterans, which is people that served our country.
00:10:45.000They love President Trump because he's actually trying to save our country from the bitter forces within America and externally.
00:10:52.000So this is going to be a story for the next couple of days, but brace yourself.
00:10:55.000There are more stories coming out like this with anonymous sources all throughout September and October.
00:11:00.000And if the president's able to survive that and still win re-election, despite the media saving their best, juiciest, and most salacious stuff till now, it's going to be one of the most amazing political victories in American history because the media is not done.
00:11:13.000The media has been saving their worst stories for the last 45 days of the election.
00:11:18.000I've been talking about this quite often and quite frequently.
00:11:20.000This is the opening shot of their diabolical campaign to destroy the president.
00:11:26.000My guess is that there are going to be more baseless stories coming out from now to early November.
00:11:32.000They've been saving the stuff that they think is going to be most effective.
00:11:36.000If you're a supporter of the president, know that the media is doing whatever they possibly can to demolish this man.
00:12:21.000Well, critical race theory is one of the most dangerous ideas that has seeped all throughout our educational system.
00:12:28.000If you're a father or mother and you have kids, this is what your children are learning.
00:12:32.000This is what BLM Incorporated is teaching young people all across the country.
00:12:37.000If you're a pastor and you have pandered to BLM Incorporated, you are partnering with critical race theory.
00:12:45.000Do you even know what critical race theory is?
00:12:47.000If you go to a church that has pandered to BLM Incorporated, if you work for a boss that has pandered for BLM Incorporated or has posted the Black Square, just ask them, do you know what critical race theory is?
00:13:30.000They view racism as a power struggle between the systems that were allegedly built for white people and white supremacy and white oppression, as they call it, or I should say black oppression for white people to oppress black people.
00:13:45.000That racism is not white versus black or black versus white.
00:14:05.000Usually we think we're talking about racism when in reality the person we're talking to, which might be a leftist activist, is actually talking about some sort of Marxist power struggle of how they can radically redefine and revolutionize our entire country.
00:14:19.000And so while you might think when you're talking about racism, it is one person discriminating or hating another person based on the color of their skin, if you're talking to someone who believes in critical race theory, which many of our young people are being taught right now this, and almost every university embraces critical race theory, they believe that black people cannot be racist because the systems were not built for them.
00:15:00.000There is no interaction that you can engage in that is not built on behalf of white people for the benefit of white people to exploit black people.
00:16:28.000They don't in China and India, the two most populous countries on the planet.
00:16:32.000They do not believe in what you do or how you act.
00:16:36.000Instead, they care about what caste you're from, or they care about what economic theory you subscribe to, ideology at all costs in China and caste system at all costs in India.
00:16:48.000So in critical race theory, they almost want to put us back into our tribal elements.
00:16:53.000They almost want to put those of us in a Western world that have tried to bring us closer and closer to colorblindness and not look at each other based on the color of our skin, but bring us back into a situation where we do look at people based on the color of their skin.
00:17:07.000The third thing you should know about critical race theory is that critical race theorists hate free societies and they favor Marxism.
00:17:14.000Now understand, the president just recently signed an executive order.
00:17:18.000I'm going to reinforce this, to not allow federal institutions to teach critical race theory to any federal employees.
00:17:24.000In fact, this should follow with a Department of Education order saying that if you teach critical race theory in our schools, you'll have all of your federal funding polled.
00:17:32.000The third thing again is that critical race theorists hate free societies and they favor Marxism.
00:17:39.000They believe that dialogue is a self-defeating exercise.
00:17:43.000They believe that the exchange of ideas, there's something sinister and wrong with it.
00:17:47.000They believe that if person A is talking to person B about a certain topic, there's something evil about that.
00:17:54.000Instead, all they care about is power.
00:17:56.000Everywhere across the world, critical race theorists hate free societies.
00:18:00.000They hate free enterprise because they believe that free enterprise is a system designed just for white people, which is a ridiculous thing to believe.
00:18:08.000I mean, just in America, if you just took black Americans in America and they formed their own country and you judge that country economically, they would be the 18th wealthiest country in the world.
00:18:19.000The fourth thing you have to know about critical race theory is that there are no individuals.
00:18:24.000This is against the biblical idea and the Western idea that the individual must atone for your own sin.
00:18:31.000Critical race theorists do not believe in individualism.
00:18:36.000This is one of the reasons why Marxists are always calling themselves comrades.
00:18:40.000It's because it's almost a term of egalitarianism.
00:18:43.000We're all in this fight together is one other way to put it.
00:18:47.000So the biblical idea is that you must first look after your own salvation, the individual, then after your family, then the community, then the nation, and then the world.
00:18:58.000These are the concentric circles of the Bible when it comes to your relationship with the Almighty.
00:19:04.000First, you have to commit your own life to Jesus Christ.
00:19:07.000Then you should try to make sure your family does the same and your kids.
00:19:10.000Then you can worry about the community, then maybe the nation, and then eventually the world.
00:19:15.000These concentric circles of the West always start with the individual.
00:19:19.000It is of no use if you do the opposite, which is what the left always is teaching our children.
00:19:24.000Instead of teaching our children that they are the problem, that they need to fix themselves, find self-control, and build a better life, they are told that the country is the problem, that America is the problem, and the kid themself is great.
00:20:02.000And I'm not saying that's a good thing.
00:20:04.000But if you start arguing for tribalism, people are going to go to what they can associate with just on the aesthetic or the melanin in one's skin.
00:20:16.000Critical race theory is a return to thousands of years prior to where we did not judge people based on their creativity, their ideas, or their values.
00:20:28.000Instead, just on what tribe they are from.
00:20:31.000The fifth element of critical race theory that is essential for you to know is they believe that science, math, and evidence are all symptoms or tools of, quote, whiteness.
00:20:44.000You saw the Smithsonian mention this recently when the Smithsonian Museum came out and they said that being on time, talking properly, and science are all attributes of being white.
00:20:56.000This is a racist idea, first and foremost.
00:20:58.000It is no different than what a KKK member would have said in the 1880s or in the 1920s.
00:21:10.000Newtonian physics, which of course is the three laws of motion by Newton, Sir Isaac Newton, which was one of the most important thinkers of the Enlightenment.
00:21:21.000The first law is, of course, that an object remains at rest or continues to move at a rate, constant velocity unless acted upon by a force.
00:21:29.000The second law is, of course, that force equals mass times acceleration.
00:21:34.000The third law is when one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction of the first body.
00:21:46.000You see, critical race theorists believe that science, that Newtonian laws of motion, they really just are there to benefit white people.
00:21:55.000It's hard to even challenge it because it's just such full of rubbish.
00:21:59.000So explain to me why a black person can't learn and understand Newtonian physics and apply it to their own life, to their own invention or their own entrepreneurial endeavor or math or evidence.
00:22:14.000These are all things that critical race theorists believe that we should get rid of in our society.
00:22:19.000They believe that science and evidence-based pursuit or logic or reason, all of these things have done nothing but perpetuate a system of white supremacy and white oppression.
00:22:30.000And for those of you that are listening that might have thought that this entire movement around racial justice in our country was rooted in good intentions, that is not the case at all whatsoever.
00:22:41.000This was an opportunity that was preyed upon by people that do not believe in science, math, evidence, reason, logic, or history.
00:22:48.000They believe all those are just tools of white supremacy.
00:22:52.000The sixth element of critical race theory is that critical race theorists reject any form of accommodation.
00:22:58.000It's that old expression, my way or the highway.
00:23:00.000White silence is violence, what they say.
00:23:03.000That if you do not speak, you are part of the problem.
00:23:07.000This is one of the most dangerous elements of the BLM Incorporated movement, that if you do not abide to every single element of our dogmatic view, then you are the enemy.
00:23:18.000If you do not subscribe to everything that we as critical race theorists or BLM Incorporated espouse, we will destroy you.
00:23:27.000These people would have made phenomenal Stalinists, let me tell you.
00:23:31.000Every single totalitarian movement that we have studied, that we know to be true, from Southeast Asia to Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, to the failed attempts at totalitarianism at times in India, to the Soviet Union, to Mussolini's Italy, to Cuba's Castro, to Venezuela, to Argentina.
00:23:52.000Conformity and lack of pluralism and a lack of different ideas is a fundamental attribute of totalitarians.
00:24:04.000They reject any form of accommodation.
00:24:06.000You see that by white silences violence, and you see the BLM Incorporated terrorists walking the streets of our cities, going up to people that are just eating dinner outside, and they go up to them and lean into them with their fists raised saying, apologize and take a knee.
00:24:22.000The seventh element of critical race theory that is very important for everyone to know is that they only care about race and skin color is their sole focus.
00:24:47.000Anyone who believes in critical race theory is a racist in and of itself.
00:24:51.000Any pastor that subscribes to critical race theory or BLM Incorporated should resign as a pastor because their theology is backwards and against the teachings of Jesus Christ.
00:25:02.000Any Christian leader that even begins to entertain these ideas should be very quickly educated on the topic and hopefully they will correct course.
00:25:14.000But unfortunately, some of these pastors and Christian leaders are educated and they stay on the critical race theory course.
00:25:21.000So it's worth asking the question: what do the critical race theorists actually want?
00:25:27.000This is just another weapon that the Marxists have to try and foment rage in Western society.
00:25:43.000Could you imagine believing that black people are nothing more than their skin color and white people are nothing more than their skin color?
00:25:51.000There's no such thing as ultimate pursuit.
00:25:53.000There's no such thing as agreed upon truth.
00:25:56.000There's no such thing as scientific discovery or inquiry.
00:25:59.000There's no such thing as mathematic exploration.
00:26:02.000There's no such thing as speech dialogue.
00:26:06.000Now, mind you, this used to be a fringe idea in the academy, but now our largest corporations in America and around Europe and around the world are funding critical race theory.
00:26:16.000They're having Robin DiAngelo teach them about white fragility.
00:26:20.000Your children, if they go to public schools, are probably learning this.
00:26:22.000And if you think they're not, look harder because it's within the most subtle aspects of the curriculum where children are being taught that racism is nothing more than a power struggle.
00:26:35.000That free societies are the problem and Marxism is the solution.
00:26:38.000That there's no such thing as individuals and individual action really doesn't matter.
00:26:43.000That science, math, and evidence are just weapons of whiteness.
00:26:48.000That anyone who dares disagree is complicit with the opposition.
00:26:52.000That pluralism must be destroyed and that skin color matters.
00:26:57.000We fought a civil war, marched in the streets of Selma, and passed a Civil Rights Act against this idea that skin color matters.
00:27:07.000Now we are teaching our children just two generations later, with the help of corporate America and the biggest tech companies and the political elite, that skin color matters much more than values.
00:27:21.000So when the president signs an executive order eradicating critical race theory from all the federal agencies, he should be given a medal and a parade and be no different than teaching 1880-style KKK eugenics of just saying that one race is better than the other.
00:27:39.000If you focus on skin color, you're a racist.
00:27:41.000If you focused on values, you're a Westerner or an American.
00:27:47.000People that have the same skin color, but different values have almost nothing in common.
00:27:54.000Nothing except the visual or the aesthetic.
00:27:56.000People that have the same skin color, but different values have nothing in common except the melanin in their skin.
00:28:05.000If a white person and a white person have completely different values, for example, if I meet with a secular socialist and we're both white, I have very little in common with this person as far as a worldview, as far as believing in God, as far as believing in free enterprise.
00:28:24.000However, I have plenty in common with Brandon Tatum, who's a black conservative.
00:28:31.000I have more in common with Brandon Tatum, a black man, than I do some sort of white socialist liberal from Seattle and Portland.
00:28:51.000Alexander Solshenitsyn, who wrote the Gulag Archipelago, he famously said that all of Stalinism and Soviet-era communism, which resulted in the death of 60 million innocent people, was all thanks to ideology.
00:29:07.000It was thanks to a dogmatic belief in one subset of ideas.
00:29:14.000What we enjoy here in America, we think it's always going to be that way.
00:29:18.000Man, do we take stuff for granted here?
00:29:21.000But I'm here to warn you right now, what we are teaching young people, what we are teaching recent graduates, what we are teaching people in corporate America through critical race theory and suburban moms that are going along with it and weak and woke Christian pastors that are going along with it.
00:29:40.000This is not going to end well for our country, everybody.
00:29:43.000It's not, because you're going to see a collision of these sort of tribal thousand, 2,000-year-old sinister, wicked ideas collide right up against small L liberalism of freedom of speech and the individual.
00:29:58.000And when they collide, it's just going to matter, it's going to be a matter of who basically clenches their fist harder and who wants it more.
00:30:05.000And unfortunately, part of the American ethic is decency and is reasonability.
00:30:11.000And is that old expression, agree to disagree?
00:30:14.000Critical race theorists do not believe that.
00:30:16.000They believe in an absolute power struggle where they must suffocate the West into submission.
00:30:38.000And this is a good thing to ask any of your college peers or friends or professors, ask them the question: what is racism?
00:30:45.000If people say anything other than the textbook definition of racism, which is discriminating and having prejudice against somebody of another skin color, and they say, well, it's a power struggle, time out.
00:31:03.000In fact, America is the least racist, multiracial country in the history of the world.
00:31:08.000America is a place where, regardless of your skin color, you can still succeed, where we have black billionaires in our country, where we have a black middle class, where the blacks in our country, if they form their own country, as I said previously, it would be the 18th wealthiest country on the planet.
00:31:22.000We are at risk of losing all of that if you embrace tribalism.
00:31:54.000White privilege is a bitter, racist, divisive lie.
00:31:57.000No one has privilege in our country just based on the color of their skin.
00:32:00.000If you believe that, then you're a eugenicist and you would have been a great KKK leader.
00:32:04.000I do not believe that anyone in America, just based solely on the color of their skin, is afforded any sort of better hand, if you will, than anybody else.
00:32:13.000However, I do believe there are three types of privilege.
00:32:16.000Number one, two-parent privilege, having a mother and a father.
00:32:20.00060% of all prisoners in the Illinois Department of Correction system that were murderers grew up without a father.
00:32:26.00075% of rapists grew up without a father in the Illinois Department of Corrections system.
00:32:32.000A black child raised by a mother and a father is far more likely to succeed than a white child just raised by a mother.
00:32:39.000This is not a slight at single mothers.
00:33:18.000LeBron James grew up in a less than desirable part of Ohio and was able to rise up to tell the country how bitter and awful we are, worth $600 million and still says we're oppressed country.
00:33:32.000But yes, LeBron James' kids are going to fly private for the rest of their life.
00:33:36.000They're going to have the best attorneys, the best PR agents, the best doctors, the best nutrition.
00:33:56.000So in this country, there's not a direct connection between your skin color and your wealth.
00:34:01.000Now you might say, well, Charlie, why is it that white people do so much better than black people in our country?
00:34:06.000And the reason is, first of all, white people have done worse over the last 20 years because white people have not stayed married as much as they should.
00:34:14.000And the number one reason is because black America has a fatherless epidemic, the likes of which we have never been able to address properly in our country.
00:34:23.000In the 1960s, we passed the Great Society Act authored by Lyndon Baines Johnson, where we subsidize fatherlessness, where a woman will effectively marry the government, not marry a man.
00:34:35.000And this resulted in an explosion of single mothers and missing fathers all throughout the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.
00:34:44.000And you play that out over a couple decades.
00:34:56.000And that does not mean that if you are white, you are guaranteed to have wealth at all.
00:35:01.000In fact, if you're Asian, you're not even guaranteed to have wealth.
00:35:03.000There are people that are poor all across the socioeconomic ladder in this country.
00:35:08.000The best way we can solve that is through putting pressure on public sector teacher unions that continually and assuredly guarantee the children that go to their schools cannot read, cannot do math, and cannot succeed in America.
00:35:25.000And the third type of privilege that does exist in our country is called woke privilege.
00:35:31.000I got this term from the great Victor Davis Hansen, and I think it's just phenomenal.
00:35:36.000If you espouse a certain subset of woke ideology, such as BLM Incorporated, there is no God, open the borders, give amnesty to everybody, billionaires shouldn't exist, capitalism is evil, free education for all, orange man, bad, Trump pence out now, all of a sudden you are actually given privilege in society.
00:36:17.000There is wealth privilege, woke privilege, and two-parent privilege.
00:36:20.000Those are the three types of privileges that exist in our country.
00:36:22.000And by the way, two-parent privilege, that is biblical.
00:36:27.000That is something that should be defended and is a good thing.
00:36:32.000Meanwhile, on blacklivesmatter.com, they say, and I'm reading right here, I have it pulled up, it is their goal to destroy and disrupt the Western prescribed nuclear family, to disrupt the Western prescribed nuclear family.
00:39:25.000According to a Traufeger poll, which accurately predicted the 2016 election results, it showed that Donald Trump was winning by two points in the state of Michigan.
00:39:35.000Now, it's very unusual for Democrats to take this tactic.
00:39:39.000This is something that Hillary Clinton refused to do in 2016, but a very wise staffer for Joe Biden is now running ads now saying that Donald Trump very well could win.
00:39:53.000It actually will grow and strengthen Joe Biden's base support.
00:39:58.000Now, I don't know if it'll be enough to beat Donald Trump, but if I were to motivate the angry Democrat base, I would run that ad all day long, micro-targeted to Democrat voters in the industrial Midwest and base voters, especially younger voters.
00:41:55.000Well, congratulations, you win a signed copy of the New York Times bestseller.
00:41:58.000Well, look, I really enjoy diving into the ideas that built Western civilization.
00:42:03.000I have a great thrill in diving into the thinkers and the writers and the authors of the great documents throughout American history and, of course, world history, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Montesquieu, and more.
00:42:19.000But if I were to recommend the thinkers that I think are most important to know in today's time, let's first just start with the social contract authors.
00:42:27.000There are three authors that came up with this idea of a social contract, which essentially was that individuals must have some form of contract with their government.
00:42:38.000Thomas Hobbes came out with this first with the book Leviathan, which was written during the English Civil War.
00:42:43.000Then Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who we talked about at length here on the Charlie Kirk show, who has probably had more of an influence on the American left and the trajectory of, let's say, collectivist thinking in the last 150 years, more so than any other thinker except maybe Karl Marx.
00:42:59.000And we have an episode coming up on Karl Marx later this week.
00:43:02.000And then finally, the last social contract theorist was John Locke.
00:43:07.000And so it's really important to know the differences between those three.
00:43:10.000Thomas Hobbes believed men in the state of nature, meaning absent of government or other social pressures, that man and humanity was nasty, brutish, and short.
00:43:20.000John Locke actually believed in a generally good nature of human beings, but he thought that men could be corrupted.
00:43:26.000And this is something I actually disagree with John Locke on, who actually had a very big role in the formation of the American system of government.
00:43:33.000And then Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that people were absolutely good.
00:43:37.000He was the first proto-socialist, if you will.
00:43:40.000And Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that we must have submission to the general will.
00:43:45.000All of these bad ideas through Jean-Jacques Rousseau resulted in the reign of terror in the French Revolution, which resulted in tens of thousands of people getting guillotined, literally.
00:43:54.000Rousseau also is actually hated by a lot of feminists, by the way, because he actually advocated gender roles.
00:44:00.000Anyway, those three thinkers I think are really important to catch up on, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
00:44:05.000And if I were to add a fourth on top of it, it would be Montesquieu.
00:44:08.000Montesquieu was also a French thinker and author, a French judge in particular, who actually theorized the American system of government.
00:44:29.000The most important writing that he had was called The Spirit of the Laws.
00:44:33.000He was actually a French judge, and he asked the question, how do we organize government on Enlightenment values?
00:44:39.000Now, Enlightenment values, of course, are the belief in the individual, the old saying that Immanuel Kant used to say, which is we have to dare to know this whole idea of the liberation of the individual.
00:44:50.000How do we build a society around Enlightenment values?
00:44:54.000So he actually, based on Cicero and, of course, which derived from the Bible, he came up with this idea of the legislative, executive, and the judicial.
00:45:02.000Founding Fathers loved this and they implemented it directly.
00:45:06.000He said that it's not good for one person to have all the power.
00:45:09.000Not exactly a novel idea, but he theorized it better than almost anyone else throughout the early 1700s.
00:45:16.000He argued that when one person has too much power, it's actually not just bad for the people, it's bad for the person in power and the civilization at large.
00:46:07.000I think those ideas are atrocious, and I think that we should reject the Rousseauian tyranny that actually has grown throughout our country and our culture.
00:46:17.000But it's very important to know Rousseau.
00:46:19.000And I guess if I were to throw one more thinker on top, I mean, those are four very, very heady thinkers, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, not exactly easy daytime reading.
00:46:30.000It would be the writings and the reflections of Adam Smith.
00:46:35.000Adam Smith, the individual who did not create capitalism.
00:46:39.000He was not the individual that was the inventor of capitalism.
00:46:45.000He was basically the first person to see in real time and describe it, analyze it, articulate it, and defend it why free enterprise was important, not just for the producer, but for the consumer, the price system, what he called the invisible hand.
00:47:02.000So those are some important thinkers that really built our entire country and culture and actually are trying to destroy it as well.
00:47:09.000But Montesquieu is someone that is not talked about enough.
00:47:12.000In fact, Montesquieu's full name was Baron de La Brede Ét da Montesquieu.
00:47:21.000I probably butchered the pronunciation, but we are going to keep it as is.
00:47:25.000Look, the American system of government was the first system of government to be planned, theorized, reflected, preyed upon, deliberated, and implemented.
00:47:33.000It's a very important thing to recognize because it wasn't an accident.
00:47:37.000The American Revolution was not something they stumbled backwards into.
00:47:40.000And understand that also the American Revolution was a successful one that created the entire West as we know it: of freedom of speech, dialogue, private property rights, free markets, the family, the Judeo-Christian ethic.
00:47:53.000Whereas the French Revolution was a complete and total disaster.
00:47:55.000It resulted in Napoleon and his genocidal campaigns across Europe and endless wars for decades.
00:48:03.000That was a byproduct of the French Revolution, not to mention the reign of terror, Robespierre, the elimination of time, and the infiltration of pseudo-communist socialist values all across Europe, thanks to the French Revolution.
00:48:15.000That's because the American Revolution was about liberty, thank you, John Locke, and the French Revolution was about equality, thank you, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but not equality as we know it today, not equality under the law.
00:48:26.000They wanted equality of outcome and equality of being.
00:48:29.000Those are two completely different things.
00:48:31.000And the Rousseauans to this day, who of course they transform themselves into Marxists and thinkers that were inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx would be closer to Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida.
00:48:44.000Those thinkers now believe in a postmodern cultural identity that we touched on earlier in this show, critical race theory, postmodernism.
00:48:52.000These things are so dangerous that they can destroy all of the good and the wise and the noble creation of the founding fathers and the great thinkers that built our civilization.
00:49:03.000So happy to go into that more in future episodes.
00:49:05.000And I know that some of the philosophy here is actually one of the reasons why a lot of you listen.
00:49:09.000So I always want to try to do some of that.
00:49:11.000And thank you so much for the question.
00:49:38.000In fact, President Trump has been tougher on Russia, and it's been warranted and deserved more so than any other president in the modern era, especially tougher than President Barack Obama.
00:49:49.000In the UK, two Russian ex-Secret Service agents were targeted, Alexander Litvenko fatally with radioactive polonium 210 in 2006, and Sergei Skirpal with a toxic nerve agent, Novoshok 2018.
00:50:03.000Look, Russia has not gone through a massive westernization campaign, okay?
00:50:07.000Russia is the same Russia from the Soviet Union.
00:50:10.000I don't think they're that big of a geopolitical threat, but this goes to show the crackdown of freedom of speech, the crackdown of different ideas, the crackdown of anyone that might disagree.
00:50:19.000You have now seen what has happened in Russia.
00:50:21.000So I, for one, have no love lost for a Russian government run by the thug Vladimir Putin that goes after dissidents like this individual, who quite honestly was just trying to challenge Putin's entire monopoly of power.
00:50:35.000Alexey Navalini, who was basically physically attacked, and Russia has been known to disappear political dissidents for quite some time.
00:50:43.000We are going to keep a close eye on the story and the crackdown of those people that might disagree.
00:50:48.000By the way, I don't care who does it at any time.
00:50:50.000Anyone who cracks down on opposing ideas is a collectivist totalitarian thug, and there's no love lost for me whatsoever.
00:52:03.000I think these are going to be the most consequential and important vice presidential debates in American history since the 1960s, I should probably say, of Lyndon Baines Johnson when he was vice president and vice presidential nominee and former governor of Texas.
00:52:16.000Most important vice presidential election since LBJ in the 1960s when he was vice president with John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
00:52:26.000I think that Mike Pence is going to do a lot better than people think with Senator Harris.
00:52:29.000The vice presidential debates are coming up, and I think that Vice President Pence is going to shock a lot of people as being very well informed, very fair, and especially towards suburban voters that are afraid of the arson of America, that are very afraid of what could possibly transpire if Joe Biden becomes president.
00:52:52.000Mike Pence is very smart and very, very good on his feet.
00:52:57.000So keep an eye out for those vice presidential debates.
00:53:00.000I think they're actually going to swing in the president's direction, and I think that the president is going to benefit tremendously because of them.
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