The Charlie Kirk Show - July 17, 2020


Chris Bedford | The Coming Rebellion


Episode Stats


Length

37 minutes

Words per minute

192.00539

Word count

7,133

Sentence count

494


Summary

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

Transcript

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00:00:00.000 Thank you for listening to this podcast one production.
00:00:02.000 Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast One, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcast.
00:00:08.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:09.000 One of the most fun conversations I've had recently is with Chris Bedford from The Federalist.
00:00:14.000 You're going to really enjoy this conversation.
00:00:16.000 He's wicked smart, has a great wit about him, and really has a unique take on the issues and has been ahead of the curve for years.
00:00:23.000 Honored to call him a friend.
00:00:24.000 Please email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:29.000 Get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com, tpusa.com.
00:00:34.000 Also, if you want to win a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine, type in Charlie Kirk Show, hit subscribe, give us a five-star review, screenshot it, and email us at freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:44.000 Fun conversation in store.
00:00:46.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:00:47.000 Here we go.
00:00:48.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:00:50.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
00:00:52.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:00:55.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:00:59.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:01:00.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:01:01.000 His spirit, his love of this country.
00:01:03.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:09.000 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.
00:01:18.000 That's why we are here.
00:01:20.000 Hey, everybody.
00:01:21.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:24.000 Super thrilled to be joined by one of the smartest and wittiest people that I have had a chance to get to know, Chris Bedford, who's a senior editor at the Federalist.
00:01:32.000 Chris, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:34.000 Thanks for having me.
00:01:36.000 So I was really, we spent time together last summer at an undisclosed location fishing somewhere.
00:01:43.000 And you said something that was super interesting that I've used and reused with sometimes giving you credit, where you said that this Marxist movement in our country is one of the first ever that is against the country they're trying to take over.
00:01:57.000 Let's just start with that.
00:01:58.000 Can you elaborate on that?
00:01:59.000 Because that is a very just prescient observation that I don't think enough people realize.
00:02:06.000 Well, thank you for that.
00:02:06.000 And that was a really good trip.
00:02:08.000 I still actually haven't worked my way through my haul of fish from that trip yet.
00:02:13.000 I'm not very good at eating salmon or cooking it.
00:02:16.000 The problem, the weird thing about America's left is I don't think they've got a real place in history outside of maybe some of the anarchists, certainly not with the traditional left, of how much they hate this country.
00:02:29.000 I mean, if you look at the previous more modern left-wing revolutionaries, from the Nazis to the communists, the Bolsheviks, all of these groups were fiercely, fiercely patriotic.
00:02:43.000 They had different ideas about what the country should be.
00:02:46.000 They didn't like the Tsar.
00:02:48.000 They didn't like the Jews or they didn't like whoever.
00:02:51.000 They pick enemies.
00:02:53.000 But at the end of the day, they are fierce nationalists.
00:02:55.000 Che Gruvera was a fierce Cuban nationalist.
00:02:58.000 So was Castro.
00:03:00.000 Hitler, obviously, a little bit of a nationalist.
00:03:02.000 The Soviets were all about the motherland or the fatherland.
00:03:05.000 And the Chinese, as we're seeing today, are strict nationalists, even as a essentially Soviet-style economy Leninist economy, which, by the way, Russia still is.
00:03:16.000 The American left is very different from that.
00:03:19.000 They hate this country.
00:03:20.000 They like the other countries more.
00:03:22.000 They want to destroy this country and everything that made it.
00:03:25.000 They want to, I mean, they go from the radical environmentalists who just think that humans are a bad thing and a pollutant.
00:03:32.000 Carbon is maybe one of the more socially acceptable pollutants to them, to the leftists on campus who, and now in our streets, and now in the New York Times, and now disrupting your events, who just think that white people are the horrible thing and white genocide needs to happen.
00:03:49.000 This is a toxic way of thinking.
00:03:52.000 There's no end to it, and it's constant self-flagellation.
00:03:55.000 And there's no way to respond to it except with American exceptionalism and doing our own thing.
00:03:59.000 It's not a reasonable cult.
00:04:01.000 Yeah, so I guess my question is: there's so many different ways to take this.
00:04:06.000 First of all, how are they successful in creating a movement of self-loathing?
00:04:10.000 Because the reason why the Soviets were fierce nationalists, but also they wouldn't have been able to assume political power being anything else.
00:04:20.000 I mean, there was almost an expectation to the agrarian class against the Romanovs, like you have to love this place if we're going to put you into power.
00:04:31.000 It was just kind of obvious, right?
00:04:32.000 I mean, Fidel Castro would not have been able to assume power saying, you know, this whole Cuba thing is awful.
00:04:39.000 I hate it all.
00:04:41.000 In fact, it was the reason he was able to win over the workers, at least in appearance, I think he was much less popular than the revisionists would tell us, is because he used the symbology and the history of Cuba to his advantage, right?
00:04:56.000 So can you walk us through, first of all, have we ever seen this before?
00:05:01.000 Where you have a movement to try to almost convince the country that now it's time to commit suicide and to go wherever.
00:05:10.000 Now this is kill yourself.
00:05:12.000 Right.
00:05:12.000 That's basically what it is, though, right?
00:05:14.000 I mean, and second.
00:05:15.000 And secondly, why is this happening?
00:05:18.000 Because that's a very, that's a deeper question that I think you'll be able to give a pretty, you know, a pretty substantial answer.
00:05:24.000 Something to answer.
00:05:26.000 As much as I can, I wish I could help us all just solve it.
00:05:28.000 I would definitely give you the key if I could activate all the campuses.
00:05:34.000 The only close thing I can even think of are the anarchists, the Bolshevik, not the Bolshevik, the Russian anarchists, the German anarchists, the assassin of President Garfield, Charlie Gitta, the people who, it was a cult of death and a really strange thing in that movement, not unlike religious extremism that we've seen in ancient biblical history and the Jewish fights versus the Romans and now more frequently in Islam.
00:06:02.000 There was a willingness to die in a glory of death where people would run into crowds holding bombs, these anarchists, just to kill as many people as possible.
00:06:11.000 Or some of the Bolsheviks followed through on this old Russian idea of carrying bombs and rolling under the Tsar's carriage in attempts to kill him.
00:06:19.000 Suicide for them was kind of an interesting, glorious thing for the revolution.
00:06:24.000 But I will give credit to our revolutionaries here.
00:06:28.000 People have been asking me, how do we fix the press?
00:06:31.000 It's become so dishonest.
00:06:32.000 And I actually think the press is about as honest as they've ever been.
00:06:37.000 And they're fully exposed now.
00:06:38.000 The New York Times is no longer pretending to be some kind of arbiter.
00:06:42.000 They're straight up saying we can't, we're sorry that we ran a Republican senator because he called for law and order.
00:06:49.000 The people have had to resign.
00:06:51.000 People are being fired from major newspapers.
00:06:53.000 They're saying that there's no more objectivity.
00:06:56.000 There is only learned truths.
00:06:58.000 They're straight up telling us that the Soviet Union is better than us because they had more diversity in their cosmonaut suicide program and that the white people are horrible and the history of this country is not starting with our founders.
00:07:13.000 They're very, very honest about it.
00:07:15.000 I think the left is so happy or so content and so accepted with this fear-mongering that they're actually able to pull a lot of this off.
00:07:25.000 And the root of the rot is you'll see it in corporations outside of school.
00:07:29.000 You'll see it in school.
00:07:30.000 You'll see it in newspapers.
00:07:32.000 These young cadres are coming out of the universities, people you have to deal with all the time, who are being indoctrinated in this stuff, and they believe it.
00:07:40.000 And they take over the HR departments and they start their own slack channels, the black New York Times staffers, black gay female Times staffers, black gay persons, transgenders, people of weight slack channels, all these different groups breaking it down.
00:07:57.000 A lot of the poison and toxicity that takes over the newsroom or takes over corporations begins in those little cloistered groups that are taught in college to be like that.
00:08:06.000 And then they have the HR department.
00:08:08.000 So you're sitting there, maybe you've been in the company for 20 years, 30 years.
00:08:12.000 You're an old classical liberal at the New York Times or at the Bay Capital.
00:08:16.000 Yeah, Barry Weiss, any one of these folks who is generally a centrist or more open-minded to these ideas, and you're afraid.
00:08:24.000 Because if you were to post on your Facebook page at a major corporation that you stand with the blue, you are going to be pulled in front of your HR department, at some of the more woke ones, some of the more lawsuit-resistant ones, and you're going to possibly lose your job.
00:08:39.000 The reason why the silent majority is so silent is because they're being silenced by the threat of massive reprisal from their corporations, from losing their jobs.
00:08:49.000 From all of that, and Tucker Carlson's talked about this, I've never seen a movement before where the most powerful people in the country are doing everything they can to destroy the least powerful people in the country.
00:09:03.000 It's sickening, and I wish I could get a more simple answer to this pathology of trying to hurt people who are lesser than you.
00:09:12.000 But it's kind of like that Game of Thrones cult where they, you know, they got some good ideas.
00:09:16.000 They've got some problems.
00:09:18.000 The monarchy is not perfect at all.
00:09:19.000 That little kid's a bastard.
00:09:22.000 But their isolation to whip themselves and flagellate.
00:09:26.000 And you can even see this with the crowds when they yell, shame, shame.
00:09:30.000 I mean, that was a putrid nightmare scene just a few years ago, even when it happened to a very bad woman on television.
00:09:36.000 Now it's just public.
00:09:38.000 It's just like you do this to people.
00:09:40.000 The Democrats think they can harness it.
00:09:42.000 They're pushing it.
00:09:43.000 Amazon thinks Jeff Bezos thinks he'll be killed last, so he's funding it.
00:09:47.000 Bank of America is giving away a billion dollars to Black Lives Matter, which is a fraudulent near-terror organization.
00:09:56.000 The pathology, I think, of fear, wanting to be part of this club and this junior class of acolytes who are just walking through the streets, you know, barefoot chanting, those things are combining, I think, to people who are without religion, an America that's lost its eternal truths, lost objectivity, been told for decades there's no objectivity, there's no beauty, there's no truth, it's only science.
00:10:21.000 Follow God Fauci, the new Pope.
00:10:24.000 These people, it's just lost and they don't have anything to stand for other than making themselves feel better.
00:10:30.000 And it leaves us very vulnerable as a civilization.
00:10:34.000 That's really well put.
00:10:35.000 And so I think one of the reasons why we have this insurgent Marxist attempted revolution that is actually having success around self-loathing is that post-Reagan, I think the Republican Party became far more interested in protecting corporate interests and trying to create an idolatry of corporations, not of the country.
00:10:57.000 And so because of that, you're going to have hierarchies and haves and haves-nots, right?
00:11:01.000 Have-and-have-nots.
00:11:02.000 It's going to happen.
00:11:04.000 The issue is that we expanded wealth so dramatically for certain zip codes, particularly around Washington, D.C. or Silicon Valley, Malibu, and Manhattan.
00:11:14.000 And the rest of the country felt continually disenfranchised.
00:11:18.000 So those places that felt disenfranchised, what do they do?
00:11:20.000 Well, they send their kids to try to be like the Malibu people to the universities, right?
00:11:24.000 That's what you do.
00:11:25.000 Okay, I'm going to go send my kid to Ohio State.
00:11:27.000 And they come back and they become like a Bolshevik.
00:11:32.000 What is this?
00:11:32.000 And non-binary and they don't believe in the history.
00:11:35.000 And you do that for about 15 or 20 years and you send your most prized possessions, your young people, to these universities.
00:11:42.000 It shouldn't come as a surprise that self-loathing all of a sudden becomes fashionable.
00:11:47.000 And unlike the Soviet Union in 1917 or 1921 or 1930, through every variation of their allowance of the transition from agrarian, let's just say monarchy to whatever was replaced there, I think they handled the transition economically improperly, basically, because you have people that lived under this agrarian rule for 5,000 years,
00:12:12.000 and all of a sudden this industrial revolution begins all throughout Europe, and the Bolsheviks allegedly had an answer to that.
00:12:19.000 But the reason why the Bolsheviks had to be nationalistic is the middle class, they still loved their country, right?
00:12:28.000 They said, no, we actually still love where we are from because that's the only thing that we know.
00:12:33.000 It's completely different now.
00:12:34.000 And I think, and I'd love your analysis of this, Chris, there's a lot there to unpack.
00:12:38.000 A lot of it has been our inability to handle this explosion of wealth, or at least this explosion of wealth for certain people, while also communicating what the country actually is.
00:12:49.000 It's not just an idolatry of corporations.
00:12:51.000 And I love free enterprise.
00:12:52.000 I do.
00:12:53.000 But one of the most eye-opening things the last couple of years is how the conservative movement has almost prioritized corporate America over the country that we live in.
00:13:00.000 I'd love your thoughts on that.
00:13:02.000 They absolutely have.
00:13:04.000 And we should be clear.
00:13:05.000 I should be clear that even though the Bolsheviks were, to your point, you know, to our point, patriotic and nationalistic, they really did at the end.
00:13:13.000 This is why our modern leftists so honest, they hated their country.
00:13:16.000 They destroyed everything about it, but they had the experience of nationalism.
00:13:20.000 Yeah.
00:13:21.000 Right?
00:13:21.000 I know.
00:13:21.000 I know we're both on the exact same page on that.
00:13:24.000 Most of these groups, you know, they don't let you know how much they hate you until they're in charge.
00:13:28.000 We're blessed to have one that's very clear about it right now in our midst.
00:13:33.000 You know, the GOP was always kind of traditionally a northern industrial party.
00:13:37.000 That's where there was the trading up in Salem and Boston, and then the factories later, the Industrial Revolution.
00:13:43.000 And Calvin Coolidge is famous for his defense of business and how it was a part of the American character.
00:13:50.000 But Coolidge and people around his time, and you see it with Barry Goldwater later in the 1960s, did not confuse the nature of man with what a lot of the modern GOP has.
00:14:01.000 Barry Goldwater in Conscience of a Conservative wrote in the 60s that the difference between Democrats and Republicans, or at least conservatives and liberals, because he hadn't yet taken over the party, was that liberals look at man as a material creature and conservatives understand man as a spiritual creature, which is why conservatives say, hey, throwing money at this, reparations, welfare, expanded government access, that doesn't make anyone happy.
00:14:26.000 It doesn't make you better.
00:14:27.000 A job makes you better.
00:14:29.000 And the reason, I mean, just watch any of your friends.
00:14:31.000 They can have all the money they want.
00:14:32.000 But if they've got no job and they've got no, you know, they've got rich dad giving them a credit card on campus, you might notice they develop drug problems and other kinds of antisocial activity because what is there to do?
00:14:43.000 I mean, what is there to chase if you have no self-worth from a hard day's work?
00:14:49.000 And the Republicans have forgot a lot about that.
00:14:52.000 And in their defense of business and in their defense of free markets, they confuse that thing with free trade.
00:15:00.000 And the ability to trade between Massachusetts and Missouri, they're largely on equal playing grounds.
00:15:06.000 That's different when you deal with China and other mercantilist countries that look at trade as war.
00:15:11.000 And people get hurt.
00:15:12.000 And you can't replace lost jobs simply with consumer goods.
00:15:17.000 I mean, we've got companies like Walmart that a lot of people defend, a lot of Republicans very fiercely so, and they've done some good things.
00:15:25.000 These companies like Walmart, it's hard to tell if they destroyed the town or if they came into the dead town and just lived there because the main streets, the folks that open up small shops, they can't compete with that.
00:15:38.000 They can't provide cheaper goods.
00:15:39.000 They can't provide the same amount of employment.
00:15:43.000 We end up with parking lots, and these companies import their goods, which is why they're so cheap.
00:15:48.000 It helps gut the American industrial base.
00:15:51.000 And at the same time, they're huge lobbyists for food stamps and other things that their employees and a lot of their customers rely on to buy these cheap goods.
00:15:58.000 It's kind of like a reverse Chinese opium trade.
00:16:01.000 And I sing all at Walmart not because they're the only ones who do this.
00:16:05.000 It's incredibly difficult right now to find made in American products.
00:16:08.000 It's basically a luxury good to find a pair of sperries that are made in America.
00:16:12.000 It's like 350.
00:16:14.000 Walmart is the best at it.
00:16:15.000 And they've used that to go throughout America and expand and make billions of dollars off of a lot of suffering in the country.
00:16:24.000 Apple's another one.
00:16:25.000 It's something we'd want to think of as a flagship company, but they opened up business in China.
00:16:31.000 It's a billion people.
00:16:32.000 It's ability to manufacture cheaper, sell us this plastic, sell us this addiction, sell us this information.
00:16:38.000 We buy it, and before you know it, they're completely beholden to the enemy and not even willing to call themselves an American company anymore.
00:16:45.000 This global elite is so separated from the needs of us, Americans, human beings, that they think of themselves as global citizens and global elite.
00:16:56.000 And then that's kind of a trigger word because when you hear some people raving about the globalists, sometimes that's a sign that they're insane.
00:17:02.000 But there really is a globalist group of very powerful and elite businessmen, politicians, proponents of the United Nations, proponents of world trade, that don't care about this country.
00:17:17.000 And when your ruling class doesn't want to defend your country, it's very difficult for those who don't have those resources to stand up and do it in their stead.
00:17:24.000 And that's why the middle class saw Trump as their champion.
00:17:28.000 And that's why they rose up in numbers.
00:17:30.000 They said, finally, there's a defector from the ruling class to defend us.
00:17:33.000 And they were largely correct about that.
00:17:35.000 That's a Teddy Roosevelt figure.
00:17:37.000 Not a mob.
00:17:37.000 That's exactly what it is.
00:17:38.000 Yes.
00:17:39.000 Not a mob outside the mansion, a guy inside who says, hold on a second, guys.
00:17:43.000 This whole place is crooked.
00:17:45.000 Yeah.
00:17:45.000 And so he was right.
00:17:46.000 And what I think is very interesting, though, is, and I've really come to realize this with a lot more clarity in recent years, is, you know, Chris, I got my start in the conservative movement in 2012, 2013, reading a lot of the pamphlets and the policy papers pushed by these think tanks, and I don't have to say any names.
00:18:01.000 That, you know, I was an 18-year-old coming into the movement, right?
00:18:04.000 And I love the free market.
00:18:06.000 I love all that.
00:18:07.000 And there were those vociferous defenses of Walmart and how us trading with China is like the greatest thing ever.
00:18:12.000 And I remember so vividly, and I still have the emails back and forth with some of the scholars there at some of these think tanks that were, you know, in long-form detail.
00:18:21.000 And I can't help but look back and say, were these purchased?
00:18:25.000 Were these paid for?
00:18:26.000 Was this really what you?
00:18:28.000 And I do not believe that the continual importing of mountains of plastic from China has made our country better, more fulfilled, more meaningful.
00:18:36.000 And if you dare say that, though, in certain circles, and I think this circle's really disappearing quickly, it's considered like heretical to the religion of free markets.
00:18:46.000 And again, I love free markets.
00:18:48.000 I love private property, but I also love my country a lot more than some abstract theory that you put on a wall, right?
00:18:54.000 And I don't think, you know, I don't think it's a good thing that Walmart has that kind of consolidation of power at all.
00:19:01.000 And I'll give you a quick example.
00:19:02.000 It was just so materially evident.
00:19:05.000 I recently was in Montana backpacking.
00:19:07.000 And thank you, Teddy Roosevelt, for preserving these beautiful parts of our country so that I don't have a target in the middle of the Bitterroot Mountains, right?
00:19:14.000 So, and I went to Darby, Montana.
00:19:16.000 It's right there in the Bitterroot Mountains.
00:19:18.000 And it was so clear: the only thing Darby has left is it's become basically a standing museum of what small towns used to be.
00:19:25.000 So you go and you talk to the person who owns the restaurant and all that.
00:19:28.000 They don't make anything.
00:19:29.000 All they are is an old cowboy town that tourists come and see what it used to be like.
00:19:34.000 That was it.
00:19:35.000 They used to have a manufacturing base.
00:19:37.000 They used to have, they used to make everything in their town.
00:19:39.000 It's all gone.
00:19:40.000 And it was just so clear.
00:19:42.000 And I asked how it was going.
00:19:43.000 They said, well, you know, we have a big opioid problem.
00:19:45.000 We have a suicide problem.
00:19:46.000 We have this recovery clinic.
00:19:47.000 And it's just destroyed.
00:19:49.000 And so you can go up to Hamilton, Montana, 30 miles north, and they have their Walmart and they have their big box chains and their stores and mountains of plastic and all that.
00:19:57.000 And I'm more convinced than ever that's not sustainable for a country.
00:20:01.000 It just isn't.
00:20:02.000 And so you have, to your point, about 90 miles away, Sun Valley, Idaho, right?
00:20:08.000 Which is where the ruling class gathers in the summer and they Davos in the winter.
00:20:12.000 Their association with our country is like, oh, yeah, I love America.
00:20:15.000 I have a place in Aspen and Sun Valley.
00:20:17.000 Like, okay, hold on a second.
00:20:18.000 Like, that's a nice place.
00:20:20.000 Yeah.
00:20:20.000 I keep my jet in, you know, Phoenix.
00:20:23.000 I think I love America, right?
00:20:24.000 And really, what it is, is you have a growing economic elite that were educated in these universities that actually share the ideology with the Huffington Post reporters and the Berkeley intelligentsia.
00:20:36.000 They see America as nothing more than a sandbox to maximize profits and to just go to the next place.
00:20:42.000 Can you expand on that?
00:20:43.000 Because this is different philosophically than how conservatives were talking six or eight years ago.
00:20:49.000 And I actually think it's a good thing.
00:20:51.000 I think it's a great thing.
00:20:52.000 And I think you're right on all of those counts.
00:20:54.000 One of the biggest tricks that the folks pulled on us, the free trade people, is taking advantage of the fact that you and I and other people like us love free markets.
00:21:03.000 We think that there should be a fair competition between our fellow Americans.
00:21:07.000 Taking that free market love and saying that free trade is the exact same thing.
00:21:11.000 It's obviously not the same thing.
00:21:13.000 I mean, I was talking to some ranchers in South Dakota on a cross-country trip, reporting trip recently, and they don't even know what they got for it.
00:21:21.000 And I promise someone's going to look into it once the world stopped ending.
00:21:24.000 What happened to Made in the USA?
00:21:27.000 You're not allowed to put that on American beef products anymore.
00:21:29.000 Someone in the U.S. government who was working on the treaty with the World Trade Organization made some decision to make a trade where they would no longer advertise and even let Americans know, unless they buy it from the farm themselves, where beef came from if it came from this country.
00:21:44.000 And the reason is because Brazilian and Canadians decided Brazilians and Canadians said that it would unfairly target them because Americans might prefer to buy their own beef as opposed to beef from a foreign country.
00:21:57.000 I sure hope so too.
00:21:58.000 And the cattle ranchers are struggling so hard.
00:22:01.000 It's horrible right now.
00:22:02.000 But some bureaucrat decided they didn't want to be unfair to Brazil.
00:22:05.000 Now, the average politician in Brazil doesn't think like that.
00:22:09.000 And the average politician in Canada maybe actually does.
00:22:11.000 But most of the world doesn't think, well, how can I be more fair?
00:22:15.000 How can I represent the other citizens?
00:22:18.000 I mean, look at the Democratic Parties.
00:22:20.000 Look at Joe Biden's number one priority.
00:22:22.000 The first thing he's going to do, he said, is take care of the DREAMers and import 20 million people or however many illegal immigrants there are, make them legal citizens.
00:22:32.000 So his first duty as president of the United States is to the citizens of Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador and Mexico and fine countries, all of them.
00:22:41.000 But you'd think that the president of the United States, who's asking for the vote of the American citizenry, would put at least something, maybe get a snack or a glass of water for the American citizenry before you take care of the citizens of foreign countries.
00:22:56.000 This backwards thinking that's completely supported by the schools, and thank you for fighting this every day.
00:23:02.000 Unfortunately, they're on break right now, right?
00:23:05.000 That's completely supported by the schools is that thing.
00:23:08.000 And these companies, they really do take advantage of the fact.
00:23:13.000 When I used to be at the Daily Color, we called around to about 15 or 20 of the major U.S. companies, Ford, Chrysler, Microsoft, and asked them if they consider themselves an American company.
00:23:24.000 Most of them said they consider themselves a company of the world.
00:23:28.000 Now, there are some rules to that, because if you say you're an American company and you're Twitter, then France is going to crack down on you because they want you to be a French company.
00:23:35.000 But in reality, they take advantage of our IT.
00:23:37.000 They take advantage of our safety.
00:23:39.000 They take advantage of what used to be a law and order country, our Navy that protects the seas, our ability to defend them, and then they sell us out entirely.
00:23:48.000 Yes.
00:23:49.000 The only companies that were willing to say they were still American were the car companies, because I think Ford, someone at Ford, had the good sense to say, wait a second, our whole brand is being an American company.
00:23:59.000 We can't sell this out.
00:24:01.000 And they gave us the right answer.
00:24:02.000 Well, I think Fiat Chrysler would have a tough time saying they're American for obvious reasons, but that's a different topic.
00:24:08.000 But I think, and this is one of my new themes I'm really focusing on.
00:24:13.000 And Tucker really opened my eyes to this when he said it.
00:24:16.000 And I think he just said it in like a 20-second off tangent, but it was so insightful to me, which you look back to the people that were supposed to hate, and I do think they had too much power.
00:24:24.000 And I think we could learn a lot from Teddy Roosevelt, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, J.P. Morgan, Chase.
00:24:29.000 They were actually patriotic ruling class.
00:24:32.000 They were not trying to serve the interests of another country.
00:24:36.000 I think that they knew they were in charge.
00:24:38.000 They assumed that mantle.
00:24:39.000 And they said, yeah, you know, we are distinctly pro-American.
00:24:43.000 We do have a lot of money.
00:24:44.000 We have a lot of resources.
00:24:45.000 But we are going to kind of be the protectors of this country.
00:24:48.000 And I do think it was the right thing to act on them.
00:24:51.000 Whereas you look at the modern-day equivalents, to your point, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, the Google people, Sergei Brin, and all those individuals.
00:24:59.000 Do you really think that they have a patriotic, any sort of patriotic core?
00:25:04.000 Absolutely not.
00:25:05.000 They look at themselves as citizens of the world.
00:25:08.000 They look at themselves as America being this awful place that sure has a lot of money and resources, and maybe we can maximize profits here.
00:25:14.000 And so I think the kind of shift in how we view corporate America has to be one of the most profound takeaways for conservatives.
00:25:21.000 I want to ask you another question, though, as kind of a sidebar to this, Chris, which is the Republican Party's failure to, I think, reform itself to an actual workers' party, I think will go one of two ways.
00:25:35.000 If we think that Donald Trump was just a one-off aberration, we're fooling ourselves.
00:25:40.000 I think Donald Trump's the beginning of a trend of a revolt against the elites.
00:25:43.000 And it's either going to go in a socialist workers' direction or it's going to be kind of an Eisenhower-Teddy Roosevelt direction where the Republican Party represents the middle class of America again.
00:25:53.000 How would you grade Republicans' reaction to the recent BLM nonsense to all of this in the last couple months, let's say, the kowtowing to corporate America, a lot of their silence?
00:26:03.000 How would you judge the Republican Party and all this?
00:26:07.000 Terribly.
00:26:08.000 I think the elected representatives and senators of the Republican Party are cowardly.
00:26:13.000 They don't want to fight on anything.
00:26:15.000 They want to take away the lessons from everything that this is simply economics.
00:26:19.000 I think the first probably revolt that we really saw against the elites was 2010 with the Tea Party.
00:26:26.000 That's exactly right.
00:26:26.000 And there are some articles, some articles that came out from a Claremont Review from American Spectator, Rest in Peace, that came out and said, this is a revolt against the ruling class.
00:26:36.000 And for people like Paul Ryan to take it as just, all right, this is my blank check to eliminate Social Security and do more free trade deals, like that was not actually the answer.
00:26:46.000 We're just going to balance the budget.
00:26:47.000 I think all of those things can be important.
00:26:49.000 But that was not what the Tea Party revolt was about.
00:26:52.000 It was a revolt against elites who seemed disconnected from America, embodied in the Barack Obama administration with all the fancy Kennedy-esque bureaucrats who came in, all the know-it-alls.
00:27:03.000 That's continued.
00:27:04.000 And the Republican Party, I mean, Mitch McConnell, a shrewd tactician, strong Republican Senate leader, he cares about judges and he cares about protecting campaign finance.
00:27:15.000 There's basically no case on campaign finance he hasn't been involved with except for Citizens United.
00:27:20.000 And he's very, very important on judges.
00:27:22.000 Now, things like abortion, things that a lot of social conservatives and Americans care about, things like immigration, a lot of Americans care about, things like the entire Trump populist idea, those are hard fights he'd rather not have.
00:27:36.000 So he'll give, he'll make great ads to them, and he'll say all the right things on the campaign trail until the Republicans who are in safe red districts do the same.
00:27:45.000 But then that's it.
00:27:46.000 It's always, well, next year we'll fight that battle.
00:27:48.000 Next year we'll fight that battle.
00:27:49.000 Keep coming back and voting for us because, and this is true, the Democrats are not an alternative.
00:27:55.000 The Democrats are antagonistic to all of these things.
00:27:58.000 They think that abortion should be more common.
00:28:01.000 It's amazing to see their honesty recently.
00:28:04.000 Republicans have a Republican voters have no other home, I think, than the GOP.
00:28:10.000 Unfortunately, they've taken it over, but it's been a tough takeover since Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and now Donald Trump.
00:28:18.000 The Democrats are completely hostile, and the only hope is to hold these organizations severely accountable from the think tanks you talked about to the Republicans.
00:28:27.000 But even though I like the guy, I don't think Kevin McCarthy is going to lift up the populist torch.
00:28:32.000 I don't think that Secretary Pompeo is going to be the next Donald Trump.
00:28:36.000 I have a difficulty seeing the next Trump, just like I have difficulty seeing the next Lincoln or TDR.
00:28:42.000 And I'm not comparing them, but those guys are just forces of personality.
00:28:46.000 They're not exactly like each other.
00:28:48.000 But I do see exactly to your point that this genie is not going to go back into the bottle.
00:28:53.000 You and I are now sitting here.
00:28:55.000 We might have had a different discussion 10 years ago on what it means to be conservative.
00:29:00.000 And visiting the GOP recently in Connecticut, I had a great time with the Greenwich Republicans, a phenomenal group, and Fairfield Republicans.
00:29:07.000 It's a very, very wealthy aspect of Connecticut.
00:29:10.000 I was speaking up there.
00:29:11.000 And the entire left of the state, the entire west of the state is working class and it's solidly blue.
00:29:16.000 I think that if the GOP is successful in this and the policies that Trump has pushed onto the GOP and you've been pushing are successful, then that'll hopefully be reversed in the next 10 years.
00:29:26.000 And the elites of the coast will be blue and the working class will be red.
00:29:31.000 And I think that's the future for the GOP.
00:29:33.000 It has to be.
00:29:34.000 And we also have to ensure we have a working class, not just the consumption class.
00:29:37.000 And it's two completely different things.
00:29:39.000 You have to have people that are making things and at least having value in the marketplace, not just buying piles of plastic on the little crumbs that they get redistributed.
00:29:47.000 And I don't mean insignificant crumbs in Nancy Pelosi's sense, but just whether it be some sort of government handout or something that, oh, yes, now you can go buy XYZ.
00:29:57.000 I think that we've, in a lot of different ways, we've overvalued whatever it means to get a college degree, and we've undervalued labor.
00:30:06.000 I really do.
00:30:07.000 And if you dare say that, I think there's more space to say that now in the conservative circles, but if you would have dared say that 10 years ago, they say, oh, it's creative destruction.
00:30:15.000 It's all these great things.
00:30:17.000 I've been to these towns.
00:30:18.000 You have destroyed them, and you have forced them and their children to go relocate to these miserable cities that have no rules of law.
00:30:25.000 They're honestly the most depressing places of America, San Francisco and New York.
00:30:29.000 It's awful.
00:30:30.000 There's no spirit.
00:30:31.000 It's awful.
00:30:32.000 The religion is whatever the new vogue woke thing of the month is.
00:30:35.000 It's either the LGBT thing or the BLM thing.
00:30:38.000 It's no different.
00:30:39.000 No, seriously, it's no different than...
00:30:40.000 I know, you're right.
00:30:41.000 It's like Pope Fauci.
00:30:43.000 Right, but it's no different than the Catholic Church.
00:30:46.000 Like, this is the month of Holy Week.
00:30:49.000 There's Holy Week.
00:30:49.000 This is the month of the Pentecost.
00:30:52.000 You have these different themes in the Christian tradition.
00:30:54.000 It's no different in New York.
00:30:55.000 It's like this month is LGBT month.
00:30:57.000 Like, wait, what?
00:30:58.000 And then this month is BLM woke month.
00:31:00.000 It's essentially, I will be unsurprised in the next decade if they have to take the Eucharist in some sort of vegan snack in Central Park to they get blessed by some sort of atheist figurehead.
00:31:13.000 And I'm half kidding, by the way, because we all have a yearning.
00:31:16.000 We have a yearning for worship and connection and ritual.
00:31:19.000 And the only difference...
00:31:20.000 Have an original sin now, something that you're born with, and something you can never get rid of.
00:31:24.000 That's a great point.
00:31:25.000 Yeah, so through baptism, they've got a priest class, the columnists.
00:31:29.000 They've got rituals.
00:31:30.000 You've seen them bowing and worshiping at the feet of other activists.
00:31:35.000 It's wild.
00:31:36.000 Yeah, and from a social psychology standpoint, it's no different than the creation of early day Christianity, except that there's no moral just, there's no morality to this at all, and their figurehead is anything but righteous and true.
00:31:51.000 So, Chris, we're running low on time.
00:31:52.000 Can you just give us a general observation of where we're going into November?
00:31:56.000 I think you and I are completely on the same page with the future of the party.
00:31:59.000 And I laugh.
00:32:01.000 I talked to some of these Republican senators, and you could just tell that they think that this is just kind of like a thunderstorm that's going to pass.
00:32:07.000 Oh, yeah.
00:32:08.000 Like, I can't wait for this.
00:32:09.000 They hope it all passes.
00:32:10.000 Yeah, I can't wait for the tornado siren to go off and we can go out and play again.
00:32:13.000 And, you know, you don't understand.
00:32:16.000 It's never going back.
00:32:17.000 It's just not.
00:32:18.000 In fact, if you guys want to go be some lobbyist for some foreign country, go do that now because the parties have completely changed.
00:32:26.000 I think the Republican Party's changing for the better.
00:32:28.000 So where do you think things are going into November specifically?
00:32:31.000 I believe firmly we have to get President Trump re-elected.
00:32:35.000 And Joe Biden, for a variety of different reasons, should be incredibly beatable.
00:32:39.000 I'd love your analysis on that.
00:32:40.000 You know, I think you're right in that President Trump needs to be re-elected because Joe Biden is not, unfortunately for Joe Biden, he's not there anymore.
00:32:49.000 And the people who are running Joe Biden are so far to the left.
00:32:53.000 They are the people we're seeing in the streets and those who are condoning it.
00:32:56.000 And our society is going to have a difficult time.
00:32:59.000 Very, very difficult time with Joe Biden.
00:33:02.000 I'm talking existential crisis.
00:33:04.000 That's the level that we're at of breakdown of law and order, breakdown of fact, public shaming, firing, basic professional lynchings.
00:33:12.000 And there's only a matter of time before it actually turns into violence against conservative citizens and simply peaceful citizens who are silent in the face of the new party orthodoxy.
00:33:21.000 Donald Trump, however, really needs to step up to the plate on this.
00:33:25.000 Republicans are just, they cannot wait for him to be defeated.
00:33:28.000 They're already talking about how, well, at least when he's defeated and this goes away, the nation can go back to normal, and then maybe we'll retake the Senate in two years.
00:33:36.000 Like, that's the way they think, and that's the way that they were thinking in 2016, too.
00:33:40.000 Well, Orange Man's going to get beat by Hillary Clinton, and then maybe we can make some money, things will go back to normal, and then we can regain maybe the House or get back the Senate in 2018.
00:33:52.000 Trump is basically alone on this.
00:33:54.000 The military leadership's not behind him.
00:33:56.000 The Republican leadership's not behind him.
00:33:58.000 So he's going to need the votes, but he's going to need also to focus dramatically, really dramatically, on Joe Biden, on his policy and what he's running for.
00:34:06.000 Right now, he's not running on wall, immigration, trade, working class like he did the first time.
00:34:11.000 He's kind of all over the place, and he's working a lot in different feuds.
00:34:15.000 So I'd like to see some message discipline from Donald Trump.
00:34:18.000 But I am getting the feeling that the mainstream class is once again very wrong in predicting that he will go down easily.
00:34:25.000 A lot of Americans are completely fed up.
00:34:27.000 And unbelievably, the left has gone and taken moments of national tragedy where we all looked together and said, wow, that's a horrible thing that happened in the streets out there.
00:34:35.000 And they've turned it on America and they've held a gun to our heads.
00:34:39.000 And it's waking the country up.
00:34:40.000 I think that hopefully that silent majority that's been quieted is still out there.
00:34:45.000 Yeah, I mean, look, we have elections, so we don't have civil wars.
00:34:48.000 I mean, this is, people have been asked, well, when are we going to speak out?
00:34:51.000 I say, well, thankfully, the founders came with this brilliant idea of representative government, so you don't have to resort to defending yourself.
00:34:59.000 I think a lot of people are saying, let's just take it easy.
00:35:01.000 I do have still the right to vote.
00:35:02.000 I still can do that.
00:35:04.000 And that's not as good as...
00:35:06.000 We saw how the left reacted to the last election.
00:35:08.000 They literally rioted.
00:35:09.000 No, that's correct.
00:35:10.000 That's right.
00:35:10.000 That's right.
00:35:11.000 And I don't want to be overly dramatic.
00:35:16.000 I mean, I don't see any other pressure release valve except an election.
00:35:20.000 I just don't.
00:35:21.000 And I don't want to say if it goes unfavorably, we're going to go in that direction because we're decent people.
00:35:26.000 We won't.
00:35:27.000 But it's really hard to say that things are going to end well if these people that are so disenfranchised and so ridiculed do not have at least some semblance of being able to get towards victory in November.
00:35:40.000 And I do think that the polling is incorrect and wrong and misguided.
00:35:44.000 So, Chris, final question: anything you're working on you want to make our audience aware of?
00:35:49.000 Anything that you're working on a big piece right now about a prominent magazine that might have made a serious error in judgment.
00:35:58.000 Well, there you go.
00:35:59.000 That's a nice tease.
00:36:00.000 So it's the Federalist, one of my favorite websites.
00:36:02.000 And, Chris, you're always very thought-provoking.
00:36:04.000 So, we got to have you come out to Phoenix and do a longer-style thing.
00:36:06.000 But thanks for joining us.
00:36:07.000 I'd love to.
00:36:08.000 It's great to talk to you, as always.
00:36:10.000 You too.
00:36:10.000 Thanks, Chris.
00:36:10.000 Talk to you soon.
00:36:13.000 Thanks for listening, everybody.
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00:36:41.000 Thank you guys so much for listening.
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00:37:06.000 God bless you.
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