The Charlie Kirk Show - Consolidating the Conservative Movement Against Corporate Oligarchy with Senator Mike Lee

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, a fun, spontaneous conversation with Senator Mike Lee, a friend of mine, someone who loves his country.

00:00:07.000 We talk philosophy.

00:00:08.000 We talk what's going on in D.C., where do rights come from, and so much more.

00:00:12.000 If you want to support us, go to charliekirk.com slash support to get behind the work we are doing to reach the next generation with truth at charliekirk.com slash support.

00:00:23.000 Email us your thoughts, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:27.000 Here we go.

00:00:27.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:29.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:31.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:33.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:36.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:39.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:40.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:41.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

00:00:48.000 Turning point USA.

00:00:50.000 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.

00:00:59.000 That's why we are here.

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00:01:08.000 Mike Lindell, he's got a lot of ambition.

00:01:12.000 He's a patriot.

00:01:13.000 He loves his country.

00:01:14.000 A lot of people like Mike Lindell.

00:01:15.000 In fact, I get emails from people.

00:01:16.000 They say, Charlie, how can I help you?

00:01:18.000 How can I help Mike Lindell?

00:01:20.000 How can I help the country?

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00:01:58.000 Hey, everybody.

00:01:58.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:00.000 Someone just came through our office here, very important person and a friend of mine and someone I really respect.

00:02:06.000 Senator Mike Lee.

00:02:07.000 Senator, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:02:08.000 Thank you.

00:02:09.000 It's an honor to be here.

00:02:10.000 Senator, you are one of the most articulate voices when it comes to liberty and the Constitution.

00:02:16.000 I'm going to ask a little bit about D.C., but actually, I'm less interested in what's happening in D.C. than ever before because it can easily be explained as the totalitarians want to take our rights away.

00:02:27.000 I just want to get deeper later in this conversation of where rights come from and why it's important to protect them.

00:02:32.000 But first, what's going on in D.C.

00:02:35.000 Well, they're trying to make government bigger, trying to make it a bigger part of people's lives, trying to increase the amount of money that has to be paid to Washington, D.C. so that people in Washington, D.C. can control their lives.

00:02:48.000 It's not a very good bargain.

00:02:49.000 You give up more of your property to, in turn, give up more of your freedom.

00:02:54.000 Bad deal.

00:02:56.000 And it must be really frustrating to be in D.C. right now.

00:02:59.000 Terribly, especially because so few people in Washington, D.C., particularly in the governing party, seem to have an appreciation for the fact that freedom isn't free and that government can't expand except at the expense of individual liberty.

00:03:17.000 Nor do they seem to grasp most of the tendency toward tyranny that exists in any government.

00:03:24.000 Government power is no less than electricity or fire or water, something that, while necessary, has to be very carefully guarded.

00:03:34.000 Otherwise, it'll become destructive of the very ends that it's there to protect.

00:03:39.000 And so I'm very outspoken about this.

00:03:42.000 I'd love to get your thoughts on kind of the motives behind some of these people.

00:03:46.000 It seems as if it's hard to get into motives because you don't know everything that drives someone, but it's hard to explain a pure motive when they want to expand government this dramatically, all the while keeping our borders wide open.

00:03:59.000 Yes.

00:03:59.000 Expanding our national debt and deficit, taxing job creators and people that create wealth in our country, and then also kind of pandering to a small subset of corporations.

00:04:10.000 What does drive the Democrat Party?

00:04:12.000 It might be the number one question we get, Senator.

00:04:14.000 Look, I'm willing to assume for purposes of this conversation, any conversation really, that there are probably as many mindsets within the Democratic Party as there are mindsets within the Republican Party.

00:04:28.000 I'm also willing to assume that some of them, maybe many, maybe most, I really don't know, genuinely believe that they are advocating on behalf of America's forgotten man and forgotten world.

00:04:43.000 Downtrodden.

00:04:44.000 The downtrodden.

00:04:45.000 Yeah, they're up there as the friend of the poor and middle class.

00:04:50.000 They may well believe that.

00:04:53.000 In other cases, there might be other people who just want to make it easier to get re-elected, or perhaps they're secure in their reelection prospects, but they want to be praised by the liberal media establishment and by the liberal entertainment media establishment, by the establishments of various sorts in all these disciplines, all of which are decidedly liberal.

00:05:21.000 And it's easier to do liberal things and get praised.

00:05:25.000 So it might be something as simple as that.

00:05:27.000 But regardless of what their motives are, it's actually easier for me as a human being, given that there are a lot of people I know and like and want to assume the best about who have fallen for this stuff.

00:05:40.000 It's easier for me to assume that most or all of them maybe have very good motives, but they're mistaken.

00:05:46.000 They're mistaken because they've fallen for something that, by its very nature, isn't populist, can't care for the poor.

00:05:53.000 Government lacks the capacity to love any more than it lacks, it has no more the capacity to love than it has the capacity to hug.

00:06:02.000 That doesn't exist.

00:06:04.000 And so that's what we have to battle: the public perception that they're the friend of the poor and middle class when really they're working to undermine it, whether they're intentionally or otherwise.

00:06:14.000 And it seems that no matter what the circumstance is, there is always either a federal government-style response that they want to try to empower.

00:06:24.000 And this virus and our reaction to it has only allowed that to happen with very few Republicans standing up to that.

00:06:31.000 I remember you and I shared a conversation last spring.

00:06:33.000 I think you had the virus.

00:06:35.000 And I said, Senator, please don't vote for this stimulus bill.

00:06:38.000 It was the first stimulus bill.

00:06:39.000 And you said, Yeah, I don't know how I would vote on this.

00:06:41.000 I can't remember what you said publicly.

00:06:43.000 I was quarantined at the time.

00:06:44.000 I remember that.

00:06:45.000 And we had a good conversation.

00:06:46.000 And I just wanted to have one senator vote against it.

00:06:49.000 That was my goal.

00:06:50.000 Just one.

00:06:51.000 Because I believe the only stimulus very well could have been reopening the American economy, not creating money and indulging in Keynesian economics as if that's going to somehow save us.

00:07:02.000 I was very unsuccessful in trying to steer one vote.

00:07:06.000 I think I don't know how you would have voted if you would have.

00:07:08.000 Well, Rand Paul and I were both quarantined at the same time.

00:07:11.000 That's why my mission failed.

00:07:12.000 Right, right.

00:07:13.000 And that may well have been your greatest chance of getting one or two votes.

00:07:19.000 But we were both sidelined at the time.

00:07:21.000 But you're exactly right.

00:07:23.000 This is one of the reasons why my wife, Sharon, frequently points out that all socialism is emergency socialism.

00:07:31.000 That's such a good point.

00:07:32.000 Socialism never came into being.

00:07:33.000 It never gained a foothold anywhere without some sort of emergency, real or contrived, or a combination of the two.

00:07:41.000 And that's how they do it.

00:07:42.000 And that's what has been concerning to me about our COVID response from the very beginning.

00:07:46.000 So, Senator, one issue that I want to talk to you about that I'm just curious how you think we should approach.

00:07:52.000 And I've become, some would say, a radical on this issue because I come from a natural rights doctrine.

00:07:59.000 Leo Strauss articulated this so well.

00:08:02.000 And the idea that we are made in the image of some creator, and who are you in the state of nature?

00:08:09.000 And we have a moral right to be able to speak.

00:08:12.000 We have a moral right to protect our family.

00:08:14.000 We have a moral right to not be searched and seizured against.

00:08:17.000 And I'm afraid, Senator, that we now have a small group of corporations that arguably might be more powerful than our government.

00:08:24.000 And you could call it because of technology or Section 230.

00:08:28.000 But we're seeing a dramatic consolidation of power, unlike anything that's different than even the early 1900s with what they would call the robber barons.

00:08:36.000 But I know that there are some people that would take exception with that.

00:08:40.000 We call these the tech companies, but they really are acting in a behavioral pattern against any sort of any of the best interests of the American people.

00:08:49.000 What do you think our approach to these companies should be?

00:08:52.000 In some ways, Standard Oil has got nothing on them.

00:08:58.000 At least with Standard Oil, there were alternatives.

00:09:01.000 That's such a good point.

00:09:02.000 There were substitutes in a way that there aren't really substitutes here.

00:09:06.000 Many Americans get their information from their phone, from an app on their phone.

00:09:11.000 And it's very difficult for many Americans to get information except through one of several corridors controlled by some combination of Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon.

00:09:27.000 If you can control those five levers or any one of them, you can control access to information.

00:09:32.000 And if you can do that, you can change all sorts of things, including the use of force that we call government.

00:09:38.000 So I totally agree.

00:09:41.000 And so what is the proper response?

00:09:43.000 Is it time to start using political power?

00:09:45.000 Is it time to start saying we have to use government, which we don't like to do, to go after these tech companies?

00:09:51.000 It may well be.

00:09:53.000 And for you to say that, that's a big deal.

00:09:55.000 It is a big deal.

00:09:57.000 Keep in mind, Charlie, our antitrust laws don't make it illegal to be a monopoly, but they do make it illegal to acquire or maintain monopoly power using anti-competitive conduct.

00:10:12.000 That is arguably what we're looking at now.

00:10:15.000 When you've got a small handful of them, again, having monopoly power isn't per se illegal, but how people get there and how people maintain it very often is.

00:10:26.000 It's starting increasingly to look a whole awful lot like some type of some combination of antitrust, anti-competitive behaviors that they've used either to acquire or to maintain monopoly power.

00:10:39.000 And the way I look at it is very similarly, how would we act if a government agency was acting this way?

00:10:46.000 And it's almost at that level.

00:10:49.000 Yes.

00:10:49.000 Now, it is important for us to bear in mind differences between this and government, because it's those differences that determine the kind of remedy to which we have access.

00:11:02.000 Clearly, if any of these companies were doing any of the things that they're doing relative to speech, it would violate the First Amendment.

00:11:12.000 And we've got to keep that lane clear so that we're talking about the right thing.

00:11:17.000 We lose credibility insofar as we say, oh, what Google is doing is unconstitutional.

00:11:22.000 It's not the right way to think about it.

00:11:24.000 The Constitution restricts governments.

00:11:27.000 In fact, with the exception of the 13th Amendment, all provisions of the Constitution deal with governments and not individuals or corporations.

00:11:36.000 But that doesn't mean that what they're doing is okay.

00:11:39.000 And so that's why we would describe it, not in the same terms we would use for a government, but we would describe it in terms of bad things that corporations can do that are often illegal, sometimes even criminal.

00:11:50.000 And immoral.

00:11:50.000 I mean, definitely.

00:11:51.000 And immoral.

00:11:52.000 And immoral.

00:11:52.000 And so I guess where I'm getting at is that the idea of the Constitution was always to limit power.

00:11:58.000 Yes.

00:11:59.000 So people can be free.

00:12:00.000 Yes.

00:12:00.000 And so now you have a question of is it time to limit the tech company's power.

00:12:05.000 I think it is.

00:12:07.000 And I believe that in many circumstances, existing law already does that.

00:12:11.000 In other circumstances, we might need some tweaks to the law to further empower government to protect us from the dangerous accumulation of power in the hands of the few.

00:12:20.000 In many respects, our existing antitrust laws are sufficient because these folks have become increasingly emboldened and brazen about their anti-competitive behavior.

00:12:32.000 Look at the antitrust action that was filed against Google just a few months ago by the Department of Justice.

00:12:41.000 Very well researched, very well reasoned.

00:12:45.000 And I think it's that sort of thing that's possibly going to have significant hope of bringing about a remedy that will stop some of this anti-competitive behavior.

00:12:56.000 And I think there's a game being played where some of the people on the left are using the threat of antitrust to try to get these tech companies to act in a more aggressive way with censorship.

00:13:06.000 Yes.

00:13:07.000 Almost like having a sword of Damocles over Google, saying, like, if you do not censor Trump and conservatives, then we're really going to punish you.

00:13:14.000 Yeah.

00:13:15.000 No, that's right.

00:13:16.000 And it's one of the things I serve on both the Commerce Committee and on the Judiciary Committee, both of which in different ways have significant roles over these areas.

00:13:27.000 In those hearings through those two committees, I've had the opportunity to question Jack Dorsey at Twitter.

00:13:33.000 You've done a wonderful at Facebook.

00:13:37.000 And each time we raise this issue with them and the rather blatant viewpoint discrimination that they engage in against conservatives, religious Americans, and libertarians, they'll always respond with a curious combination of answers.

00:13:55.000 Usually leading with, look, we've got people on both sides of the aisle mad at us.

00:13:59.000 It's not just conservatives and libertarians.

00:14:02.000 It's also progressive liberals who are mad at us.

00:14:05.000 And I'm always quick to point out when they say that, that is not an answer.

00:14:09.000 First of all, they're mad at you on the left for an entirely different reason that you're not doing enough to censor, that you're not punishing conservatives, libertarians, and religious people enough.

00:14:19.000 I've also asked them on multiple occasions, both of them.

00:14:22.000 You know, we can all think of 5, 10, 15, 20 examples of prominent conservative, religious, or libertarian groups or candidates who have been blocked, censored, otherwise had adverse action taken against them by Facebook and by Twitter.

00:14:37.000 And I've said, can you name me one liberal, one, that has endured that sort of thing.

00:14:44.000 And they always will say in a public setting, oh, there are a lot of them.

00:14:50.000 I could come up with a lot of them.

00:14:51.000 And I said, okay, I'm not asking you to tell me whether there are a lot of them.

00:14:53.000 I'm asking you to name one.

00:14:55.000 Just one.

00:14:56.000 That's right.

00:14:56.000 They can't do it.

00:14:57.000 They won't do it.

00:14:57.000 Then they come back and say, well, I'll get you a list.

00:14:59.000 They don't.

00:15:01.000 They can't because they don't do that.

00:15:02.000 That's exactly right.

00:15:03.000 That door swings one way and not the other.

00:15:05.000 Now, look, they have the right to do that part of it.

00:15:08.000 That part of it probably doesn't violate antitrust laws itself.

00:15:13.000 Other things might contribute to their violation of antitrust laws or other companies facilitating that.

00:15:19.000 But that runs afail of the law in another respect.

00:15:22.000 That's a deceptive trade practice.

00:15:24.000 And under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, it ought to be punished as such.

00:15:29.000 I've run a bill, legislation called the Promise Act that would clarify that and would direct the Federal Trade Commission to assert its Section 5 authority when they do that.

00:15:37.000 Because what they're doing is they're claiming publicly that they do not tip the scales politically when in reality they do quite the opposite of that.

00:15:46.000 That is fraudulently selling a service that they've mischaracterized.

00:15:50.000 That's illegal.

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00:17:14.000 With the Hunter Biden story, for example, where they didn't allow that story to be spread, which very well might have had an impact on early voting in some of these states.

00:17:21.000 That should have been the October surprise.

00:17:23.000 Undoubtedly.

00:17:24.000 Undoubtedly should have been.

00:17:25.000 And they suppressed it.

00:17:27.000 Over and over and over again, they've done these things.

00:17:29.000 And then the intelligence community came out of nowhere, which has now been debunked, and they said, oh, this came from Russian intelligence.

00:17:36.000 There is no basis of that.

00:17:37.000 None.

00:17:38.000 And they use that as the justification to censor.

00:17:38.000 None whatsoever.

00:17:41.000 It's one of the reasons, Charlie, one of many reasons why I am instinctively, reflexively resistant to anytime someone comes out and claims, purports to speak for the intelligence community.

00:17:41.000 No, that's right.

00:17:55.000 What does that mean?

00:17:56.000 It's so broad that it could mean anything and everything and nothing at the same time, which is their whole point.

00:18:03.000 And then when they use the word debunked in the same sentence as the intelligence community, you know that's BS because they've used that trick so many times.

00:18:12.000 It's usually what they say, what they say when they're trying to say something that they're doing.

00:18:15.000 Well, it's the same three guys that are giving marching orders, Brennan and Clapper.

00:18:20.000 They're all kind of saying the same thing.

00:18:22.000 And then all of their former employees that are now staffers at some college, like, oh, yeah, they'll sign a letter that says that we were briefed on something.

00:18:29.000 You're unbriefed on no intelligence.

00:18:30.000 Now, isn't it Brennan and Clapper that in the past deceived us about they lied under oath in front of Congress regarding mass surveillance of Americans?

00:18:38.000 Right, right.

00:18:39.000 Which is a big problem.

00:18:41.000 So I want to get into the now the more philosophical part and whatever time we have remaining.

00:18:45.000 I know that your time is very valuable.

00:18:47.000 Where do rights come from?

00:18:48.000 Rights exist because we exist.

00:18:51.000 They come from God.

00:18:52.000 And whether someone believes in God or not, they know that we exist.

00:18:57.000 They know that they themselves exist.

00:18:58.000 That's a very Aristotelian argument.

00:19:00.000 Yes, I like to think so.

00:19:02.000 Or just as common sense, he was kind of the pioneer of that.

00:19:07.000 We know that we exist.

00:19:10.000 There is an inherent dignity to the immortal human soul.

00:19:15.000 And by the way, whether you believe that or not, it still is.

00:19:18.000 It still is real.

00:19:21.000 And because we believe that each individual human being matters, rights exist.

00:19:27.000 And we therefore have certain rights that are inalienable and that come from our creator that exist because we do and he does.

00:19:37.000 And so what do you have to say when someone says, no, no, health care is a right.

00:19:42.000 No.

00:19:42.000 Housing is a right.

00:19:44.000 Rights are things government may not do to you.

00:19:48.000 Rights decidedly are not things that the government must provide for you.

00:19:53.000 That's different from a right.

00:19:57.000 Sometimes people in today's society have a tendency to describe as a right anything that they think is good or necessary or necessary or is important.

00:20:08.000 So if they want to say, I really like X, they'll say X is a right.

00:20:14.000 Netflix, for example.

00:20:15.000 It's silly enough to prove the point, though.

00:20:17.000 Yes, exactly.

00:20:19.000 Rights really are things that reflect what government can't do to you.

00:20:25.000 Government is best understood as the use of force.

00:20:28.000 It's the official collective use of coercive force.

00:20:32.000 It is violence that happens to be officially sanctioned.

00:20:36.000 Violence, in the case of our country, with a seal with an eagle on it.

00:20:41.000 Now, government is necessary.

00:20:43.000 I don't mean to sound like someone who's nihilistic in his approach to government.

00:20:47.000 I'm not.

00:20:48.000 We need it.

00:20:49.000 We need it to make sure that we don't hurt each other, kill each other, or take each other's things.

00:20:53.000 Or get invaded.

00:20:54.000 Or get invaded.

00:20:56.000 In some instances, it's also appropriate for the government to be involved in public goods, transportation corridors, for instance.

00:21:05.000 That's something that we've accepted in modern society as a role for government to play.

00:21:09.000 The further afield you get from those basic items, the more concerning it is.

00:21:15.000 Because government action is not only not a right, it's the opposite of a right.

00:21:22.000 Government acts only at the expense of individual liberty.

00:21:25.000 So if I can share with you my concern, Senator, and I do not have a good answer to this, it's a question of whether or not liberty is sustainable.

00:21:33.000 And Thomas Jefferson wrestled with this because he said eventually people will vote enough stuff in and this idea of self-governance, this idea of the pursuit of virtue, will fall upon itself.

00:21:44.000 Do you think we're on that last gasp of liberty where just the hordes and the masses are going to vote those of us that care about natural rights into oblivion?

00:21:52.000 I'm not asking you to make a prediction.

00:21:54.000 It's that I'm trying to ask philosophically, is liberty sustainable as a long-term governing model?

00:22:00.000 It is sustainable always.

00:22:02.000 It does not mean that liberty will in fact be sustained.

00:22:05.000 The difference lies in understanding the distinction between the French Revolution and the American Revolution, which ultimately comes down to the distinction between a democracy and a constitutional republic.

00:22:16.000 What is the difference?

00:22:17.000 The difference is that the pure democracy exists in the abstract for the purpose of carrying out the blanket will of the collective, the whole, the simple majority.

00:22:27.000 Whatever it wants is the right thing in the case of a democracy.

00:22:31.000 In the case of a constitutional republic, the point is let the people elect their own representatives and let those representatives determine the course of government, but make them bound to act only in certain areas where they are authorized to act and in the manner in which they're authorized, carving out certain areas as beyond their control.

00:22:54.000 That's where liberty lies.

00:22:56.000 That's perhaps why Jefferson had this very dark, dismal view of liberty over the long haul.

00:23:02.000 His experience with self-government was heavily influenced by what he saw in France.

00:23:08.000 Now, I think he was more optimistic than he should have been about the French Revolution and its durability.

00:23:14.000 But still, he's not a good idea.

00:23:15.000 He should have read some Edmund Burke.

00:23:17.000 Yes, yes, he really should have.

00:23:18.000 He should have spent a little bit more time thinking the way Edmund Burke thought.

00:23:23.000 Jefferson had some very hot takes that were not always right.

00:23:26.000 Well, look.

00:23:27.000 Madison cooled him down, though.

00:23:28.000 Right.

00:23:29.000 The obsession with France, the Francophile thing. 0.63

00:23:33.000 The need for a revolution every 20 years.

00:23:35.000 Now, it's interesting.

00:23:36.000 That's one of the most misquoted quotes ever because Thomas Jefferson wrote that in a letter to Madison.

00:23:41.000 And then Madison wrote him back, said, no, that's actually a really bad idea because we set up systems for the next generation.

00:23:47.000 And Thomas Jefferson basically said, yeah, you're right.

00:23:49.000 Don't you have the impression sometimes that Madison and Jefferson were playing off of each other?

00:23:54.000 No, of course they were. 0.95

00:23:55.000 Jefferson would say crazy crap like that, in part to get a reaction out of Madison, who he knew would reliably pull him back down to earth. 0.96

00:24:04.000 And Madison was kind of the more deliberate, deeper thinker. 0.96

00:24:07.000 Not to say that Jefferson wasn't.

00:24:09.000 I mean, I actually take a view that the Declaration and the Constitution are very much related, and that not everyone has that view.

00:24:16.000 Well, in fact, I wrote a book about this a couple of years ago called Our Lost Declaration, in which I explained that the Constitution.

00:24:22.000 I got a good idea from him.

00:24:22.000 Oh, glad to hear that.

00:24:25.000 The Constitution is the frame.

00:24:27.000 It's the framework.

00:24:28.000 The picture itself is the Declaration.

00:24:30.000 Because that's cool.

00:24:31.000 It gives us the vision of who we are and why it's so important to protect liberty and where those rights come from.

00:24:37.000 And so the difference between a Republic and a democracy is so important.

00:24:41.000 And every time a Republican says democracy, I just cringe.

00:24:44.000 We're a democracy.

00:24:45.000 Oh, my goodness.

00:24:46.000 Stop saying that.

00:24:48.000 And the word that lefties in both political parties often use, they're obsessed with saying our democracy, our democracy.

00:24:57.000 And, you know, I made some headlines, not necessarily favorable ones.

00:25:02.000 When during the vice presidential debate last fall, I was live tweeting the whole thing.

00:25:08.000 And while I was live tweeting the whole thing, I got tired of Vice President Harris, then Senator Harris, using our democracy over and over again.

00:25:16.000 And I tweeted emphatically, we're a constitutional republic, not a democracy.

00:25:22.000 It is a difference that matters.

00:25:23.000 So you're right to be irritated when they say that.

00:25:27.000 Because it matters because we matter.

00:25:32.000 Because we don't want government.

00:25:34.000 You don't want the use of officially sanctioned violence, coercive force, being brought to bear for light and transient reasons.

00:25:43.000 You want that force to be reserved to only those circumstances that we as a society have constitutionally adopted as appropriate and within the power of government.

00:25:53.000 And so we are seeing the trend that all of us have feared, which is totalitarianism.

00:25:59.000 Yes.

00:25:59.000 And that document has done more to prevent that than I think we ever realized because it spreads out power over space and time.

00:26:08.000 It's really hard to revolutionize the American government in just one election cycle.

00:26:12.000 Right.

00:26:13.000 33 senators are up.

00:26:14.000 You have thought on that?

00:26:15.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:26:16.000 No, you're exactly right.

00:26:18.000 It's hard to revolutionize everything all at once.

00:26:20.000 But if you can acclimate people to the idea that everything and everyone belongs to everyone.

00:26:30.000 That's very Huxleyan of you.

00:26:31.000 Yes.

00:26:32.000 Everyone belongs to everybody.

00:26:33.000 It is intentionally Huxleyan.

00:26:35.000 It's a brave new one.

00:26:37.000 That's right.

00:26:38.000 But that is the mindset of those who defiantly refer to our system of government as, quote unquote, our democracy.

00:26:47.000 Ultimately, that's where it leads.

00:26:48.000 Ultimately, it leads to socialism.

00:26:50.000 Ultimately, democratic government, if it really is a pure democracy, ultimately it leads to people coveting each other's property and using the blunt instrument of government to get it.

00:27:03.000 So let's conclude with this.

00:27:05.000 What do you think are the tangible steps that are necessary to change the trajectory, not save the nation overnight, really change the trajectory?

00:27:12.000 This is a tough lift because as soon as people start to get a little bit of addict, a little addicted to their sugar-high stimulus checks, why not keep them going?

00:27:23.000 Yes.

00:27:24.000 Now, it's going to be very difficult to break that habit, especially because these things are very politically popular.

00:27:31.000 It's not going to work.

00:27:33.000 In order for the restoration of the document written by wise men raised up by God for that very purpose back in 1787, to restore that document, which has fostered the development of the greatest civilization human history has ever known, we're going to have to start restoring the twin structural protections of the Constitution, which are more important in my view than any other single feature of it.

00:27:56.000 The vertical protection of federalism, keeping most of the power at the state and local level, and the horizontal protection of separation of powers, saying that each entity within the federal government has to fit within one of the three branches of government, and each branch has got to stay in its own lane.

00:28:11.000 To restore federalism, you have to restore separation of powers.

00:28:14.000 The best tangible first step we could take to restore federalism and thereby start the ball rolling toward both federalism and separation of powers is actually through the Reigns Act.

00:28:26.000 The Reigns Act, an acronym standing for Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny, is aimed directly at restoring separation of powers.

00:28:36.000 The minute you start to restore separation of powers by preventing the excessive delegation of lawmaking power to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, all of a sudden Congress will have to take more votes on more topics, including things like labor, manufacturing, agriculture, mining, powers that were stripped away from the states starting about 80 years ago.

00:28:56.000 And Congress, when it has to take more votes, will start realizing it's absurd that we regulate everything from Washington.

00:29:02.000 So federalism will start to be restored as we restore separation of powers.

00:29:08.000 If I had one single shot to take in the legislative chamber, in Congress, if I could have one free pass at passing legislation, it would be the Reigns Act.

00:29:18.000 Wow.

00:29:19.000 I wish Republicans would have done that when we controlled the House, the Senate, the presidency.

00:29:24.000 The House of Representatives voted each year, every year, at least once a year, to pass the Reigns Act when we have the majorities.

00:29:31.000 Sadly, tragically, inexcusably, in my opinion, never came up for a vote in the Senate, despite the efforts of many of us.

00:29:38.000 Probably more important than a corporate tax cut, but that's my opinion.

00:29:41.000 Undoubtedly so.

00:29:42.000 Senator, thank you for your leadership.

00:29:45.000 And I would love to talk even further about the philosophical basis of our country and our civilization because there's so much misunderstanding behind all of this.

00:29:54.000 And we have a beautiful country.

00:29:55.000 You're doing a great job fighting for the people of Utah.

00:29:59.000 Thank you for fighting to end these endless wars.

00:30:01.000 It's ridiculous what we've had to go through.

00:30:04.000 You've been terrific on that.

00:30:05.000 So thank you, Senator.

00:30:06.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:30:09.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:30:11.000 Email us your thoughts.

00:30:11.000 As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:30:14.000 And get involved with TurningPointUSA at tpusa.com.

00:30:17.000 Thanks so much, everybody.

00:30:19.000 Talk to you soon.

00:30:19.000 God bless.

00:30:23.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - May 14, 2021

Consolidating the Conservative Movement Against Corporate Oligarchy with Senator Mike Lee

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