The Charlie Kirk Show - Finding the Political Will to Crush the Left and Save America

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, Tana Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:01.000 One of the smartest people I know, Arthur Millick, from the Center for the American Way of Life from the wonderful Claremont Institute.

00:00:08.000 We talk about what does success look like?

00:00:09.000 What do we need to do to actually solve America's problems?

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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.

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00:00:59.000 He's an incredible guy.

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00:01:30.000 With us right now is Arthur Millick, who is the executive director at the Center for the American Way of Life at the Claremont Institute.

00:01:36.000 Arthur, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:38.000 Thank you very much, Charlie.

00:01:40.000 So, Arthur, we've been kind of framing the conversation, if you will, right now, around how a majority of the political discourse is around things that are patently insane, the woke, if you will, and that there needs to be kind of a recentering around team reality, and that only conservatives can help make that consolidation possible.

00:01:59.000 What are your thoughts?

00:02:00.000 Well, I think that's true.

00:02:03.000 But, you know, when you look at some of the polling, some of which is honest, I suspect, and you see that there's actually strikingly little support for a lot of these very radical left-wing ideologies.

00:02:16.000 And then you wonder, well, how on earth is it that these remain the center conversations of the nation if there's so little public support?

00:02:26.000 And then you begin to think through how much money and institutional support there is for these causes and the immense disproportion in power on the left versus the right.

00:02:39.000 And then you start seeing how many conservatives over the last generation have been snoozing at the wheel.

00:02:46.000 They've been fighting on some very irrelevant issues.

00:02:50.000 One kind of trick that I like to think about is: if you implemented the full agenda of many of the think tanks on the mainstream right, nothing would change about America.

00:03:04.000 Not a thing.

00:03:05.000 It would all be a total domination of the left's institutions.

00:03:09.000 And so, what we have not thought through is trying to win back territory in real ways, trying to repeal the immense power of those institutions.

00:03:22.000 We like to do lawsuits.

00:03:23.000 That's fine.

00:03:24.000 But when we lose in the courts, we just say, oh, shucks, you know, we'll try again.

00:03:29.000 We'll try to do the same thing again.

00:03:31.000 Whereas when you look at the immense, as I keep saying, institutional power of the left, they own the universities, which we refuse to defund.

00:03:40.000 They own a lot of K-12.

00:03:42.000 These are American tax dollars that are being used against patriotic Americans.

00:03:47.000 It's an astonishing thing.

00:03:49.000 And nobody ever really does anything about it.

00:03:51.000 It's a really interesting and thought-provoking take, which is if the agenda, if the, you know, the wishes of the think tanks were actually implemented, would the country look any different at all?

00:04:11.000 And the answer is probably no.

00:04:13.000 I mean, we might have lower tax rates.

00:04:17.000 Arthur, please continue.

00:04:19.000 Yeah, sure.

00:04:21.000 Let me just keep kind of riffing on this a little bit.

00:04:24.000 Look, the universities in K-12 is low-hanging fruit.

00:04:28.000 And, you know, there have been some outrages, some actions on the K-12 level not long ago.

00:04:34.000 But when you start to look at the funding, you start to see that states, which is where I think the main game is, are funding a lot of these state-based institutions.

00:04:45.000 And, you know, we live in this dream world where we think that college improves everybody.

00:04:51.000 Everybody ought to go to college.

00:04:53.000 Well, in 1970, something like 20% of the college-age population went to college.

00:04:57.000 And today it's 40%.

00:04:59.000 Why?

00:05:00.000 Why should it be that number?

00:05:03.000 There are alternatives that states need to start thinking through about pipelines, internship type, apprenticeship type programs, where you can learn real hard skills that actually the country very much needs.

00:05:19.000 In fact, needs so much that the left says, well, that's why we have so much illegal immigration.

00:05:23.000 It's good for us because we can't fill those jobs.

00:05:26.000 The key is to start thinking creatively and seriously in a way that we haven't done regrettably in about a generation.

00:05:34.000 And there's a lot of very interesting things to be done once you reframe your mind and start thinking about the territory that the right holds, the institutions that it has to recapture at the level of the states, so as to build themselves up and make them resilient in a real way and not just in a, I wrote an op-ed way.

00:05:52.000 There's that.

00:05:53.000 Didn't we win?

00:05:55.000 That's such an important point of actually building institutions and building new things that actually matter.

00:06:01.000 Can you give any examples of where that is happening meaningfully of any good news or positive movement in that regard?

00:06:09.000 Well, the state that everybody is now looking at, which is Florida, what DeSantis has done is he has thought through this problem and realized that the real power, the real stakes for the future of the country are at the level of the states.

00:06:25.000 Now, he's not the only one, however.

00:06:27.000 He today announced that he's going to figure out what the pension fund in Florida can do to remove itself from Twitter in case Elon Musk doesn't win that perfectly legitimate battle.

00:06:42.000 But he wasn't the first one on this.

00:06:44.000 It was actually the state of West Virginia.

00:06:46.000 The treasurer said that he is removing something like $8 billion that's saved up that's managed by the state treasurer in the West Virginia Pension Fund, removing that money from BlackRock.

00:06:58.000 This is a first step that I hope continues to rev up.

00:07:02.000 This is a step that should lead to many states pooling all of that money, the pension plan money together and creating various EPFs to start protecting, bolstering, growing businesses that are patriotic.

00:07:17.000 That's such an important point.

00:07:18.000 And being unafraid to use political power towards a desired outcome.

00:07:23.000 And I want to explore that with you, Arthur, of what does success look like?

00:07:27.000 So many conservatives kind of just fumble over their words and they just say, corporate taxes.

00:07:32.000 They're like, okay, I got that.

00:07:33.000 But what is the country you actually want to live in?

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00:09:09.000 So, Arthur, you know, what does success look like then?

00:09:11.000 What is the country we actually want to live in?

00:09:13.000 How should we be able to articulate that?

00:09:16.000 Well, it's a good question.

00:09:18.000 Look, what we want, what we always have been, is a constitutional republic.

00:09:24.000 The question is, what precisely is in the way of that?

00:09:26.000 And there are many things in the way.

00:09:28.000 And what we're after is political liberty.

00:09:31.000 And as I said before, I don't see any other way than through the states, at least for now, that that can be safeguarded, protected, and expanded.

00:09:44.000 The right has simply defaulted.

00:09:47.000 It has not really fought a political fight in a way that it ought to have done, to the point where it has lost institutions that it thought it worshipped and it thought it owned forever.

00:09:59.000 Just as an example, I mean, you know this and your listeners know this.

00:10:02.000 It would have been unimaginable 20 years ago that the Fortune 500s, which the right made its main client, would have gone the other way and laughed in the face of the right after all of the innumerable endless benefits that were given to them.

00:10:18.000 It's also unimaginable that they would have lost the military, which is teetering, but its leadership right now has very clearly sided with the left on anti-racism, on identity politics.

00:10:31.000 These are very strong signals to the right that it has lost those elements of society.

00:10:38.000 It would be one thing if we were just at this point the normal nation and, you know, we were still basically 20 years ago where the parties disagreed in marginal ways.

00:10:51.000 But what the left now wants is, you know, a very different thing while it has the military in its hands, while it has, you know, a trillion dollars in of corporations in its hands.

00:11:05.000 The stakes are very different and it's a very dangerous situation.

00:11:10.000 Yeah.

00:11:10.000 And so I suppose this is the question that, you know, conservatives need to need to answer.

00:11:16.000 And this is something that I think attracts me to the candidacy of JD Vance, amongst many others, which is, are we willing to use political power to try and get our desired outcome, right?

00:11:28.000 Our desired outcome would be increased church attendance, a stronger family unit, middle-class wages going up, a happier country, right?

00:11:36.000 Lower suicide levels, less drug use.

00:11:39.000 These are outcomes that I think are necessary.

00:11:43.000 And one of the things that really bothers me about kind of some of the libertarian think tanks out there in Washington, D.C., and if you really drill them down, they will admit they are outcome agnostic.

00:11:54.000 They think that outcomes might be nice, but they're not willing to do what's necessary to get that outcome.

00:12:00.000 Instead, they would rather have an ideological framework that is quote unquote consistent, even if the country might be led to serfdom or some sort of oligarchy.

00:12:10.000 Can you help expand on that and riff on that a little bit?

00:12:14.000 Yeah, sure.

00:12:15.000 I mean, you know, these are deeply unpolitical, small-souled people that want, that are okay with tyranny, that are okay with losing the country so long as the divine doctrine, whatever they have in mind, is fulfilled. 0.77

00:12:37.000 And this is a big problem of how the professionalized right has structured itself over the last generation.

00:12:44.000 It's promoted these kinds of people rather than donors looking seriously under the hood and saying, what exactly am I spending my money on?

00:12:53.000 And then asking questions like, what do you think this op-ed actually accomplished?

00:12:58.000 You're losing institution after institution.

00:13:01.000 And when you win elections, it doesn't matter because the institutional power of the left is so overwhelming that your candidate, your congressman, your president can't do anything.

00:13:11.000 He'll just be basically like it was with Trump, steamrolled by the administrative state, stimmied, humiliated, leaked on, while the press carries the water.

00:13:23.000 Why have those institutions grown to such a degree while the right was allegedly watching out?

00:13:30.000 So it's partly a donor problem, a not looking under the hood, but it's partly just a living in a big city and not seeing that there are people out in the country suffering who are your constituents, who you should be fighting for, while you have your tidy, cared for, sinecure job.

00:13:51.000 But the last point is the most important one, which is that the left lives inside the mainstream right's heart in a way that is not true in the opposite way.

00:14:05.000 The right does not live in the left's heart.

00:14:07.000 The left has contempt for the right.

00:14:09.000 Sometimes it's scared.

00:14:10.000 Sometimes it puts on hysterics, but often it just has contempt.

00:14:14.000 Whereas the right deeply cares about what the left thinks, the right deeply, the professionalized right, anyways, deeply wants to be quoted in the New York Times.

00:14:22.000 That psychology has to change.

00:14:24.000 Why do you think that's the case?

00:14:25.000 That's always, I mean, I used to be that way, and now I'm not anymore.

00:14:29.000 You know, I was 19 years old and I'm not anymore.

00:14:31.000 I used to be like, wow, I'd really love to have like the affirmation of the Washington Post or whatever.

00:14:36.000 Why is that?

00:14:38.000 Yeah, well, look, it's a part of human psychology.

00:14:41.000 You know, you look up to who rules you.

00:14:44.000 And they all, by virtue of that, admit that those institutions actually do rule them.

00:14:50.000 And so they're satisfied with, you know, a five square inch sandbox where they can play and talk about occupational licensing reform as though that's nothing against that issue.

00:15:00.000 It's just not a civilizational level issue.

00:15:02.000 You can have that, and then nothing changes about the trajectory of the country.

00:15:07.000 Yeah.

00:15:08.000 And so that's, and that's, it's just also like a psychology thing, right?

00:15:11.000 Which is like, I don't, I think I could save the country without having to get my hands messy, right?

00:15:16.000 Is that there is, is there like a, is there a idealism that has plagued the conservative movement that somehow we're all just kind of in this, like not this continual Socratic debate with one another, when in reality, we're closer to political warfare?

00:15:33.000 Yeah, it's partly just the prejudices of the last generation that, you know, ideas win the day.

00:15:39.000 Well, sometimes they don't.

00:15:41.000 You know, if that was true, then a lot of the left ideas, which are, you know, being pounded into many minds, would lose.

00:15:49.000 So the thesis is so easily falsified, not seeing that that was true at one point in America when the majority of the country was unabashedly on the right and conservative.

00:16:01.000 And almost all of the major national institutions were that way too.

00:16:06.000 So it's not just a matter of debating.

00:16:08.000 It's not a matter of writing an op-ed.

00:16:11.000 It's a matter of controlling institutions or working to lessen the power of the left institutions.

00:16:18.000 And once you get into that paradigm of thinking, there are many, many things that can be done.

00:16:24.000 I have a question here that I think is really important.

00:16:28.000 And this is something that I get asked a lot, which is, you know, the duration of the fight.

00:16:33.000 For whatever reason, a lot of conservatives, you know, they kind of have this timetable that this can be over in a summer.

00:16:40.000 I'm sure you've experienced this phenomenon.

00:16:43.000 Is that true?

00:16:44.000 And I think we know the answer to that.

00:16:46.000 And if, of course, it's not, where does that phenomenon come from, where we just have to win one more election and we can get back to the country of our grandparents?

00:16:56.000 Yeah.

00:16:57.000 Well, when the left said, you know, a generation ago, you have to politicize everything, they did.

00:17:04.000 And they thought that we are going to take over this country, at least its major institutions and a lot of its populace, and we're going to own it.

00:17:13.000 And everybody understood that they, in their own lives, have marching orders, not just at the top, not just the institution builders, not just the members of Congress, not just the journalists, but even the day-to-day people who, you know, made it a symbol of their pride to hassle people on the right, just normal people minding their business.

00:17:33.000 So they have successfully politicized everything.

00:17:36.000 And the right in turn has done the opposite.

00:17:39.000 It's withdrawn.

00:17:40.000 It's felt reasonably that like this country may not belong to me anymore.

00:17:46.000 It's not a right-leaning country.

00:17:47.000 All the institutions are hostile.

00:17:49.000 So I am going to withdraw my kids from school.

00:17:52.000 I'm going to homeschool them.

00:17:53.000 I'm going to move away to the rurals.

00:17:55.000 And, you know, we'll try and hide there.

00:17:58.000 But that doesn't work.

00:18:00.000 You will not hide there.

00:18:02.000 Yes, that's right.

00:18:03.000 And so there needs to be a mindset shift.

00:18:06.000 And I think it was you that might have said on Tucker Carlson's show, and I wrote it down in one of my notebooks that I have where I hear things I like.

00:18:14.000 And correct me if I'm wrong, it wasn't you, but I'm 99% sure it was you that we just have now started to fight.

00:18:19.000 In some ways, the clock is now starting.

00:18:21.000 Can you elaborate on it?

00:18:22.000 I think that's really interesting.

00:18:24.000 Yes.

00:18:25.000 I don't know if it was me, but I agree with it.

00:18:28.000 Okay, good.

00:18:28.000 Well, it's you.

00:18:29.000 So why not?

00:18:30.000 So look, look, we haven't really fully fought.

00:18:36.000 What I keep talking about, and I hope at some point we'll get into it in more detail, on the level of the states, we haven't fought.

00:18:43.000 We haven't even done the kind of psychological rejection of many of the left's concepts that live in the right's mind, many of their moral doctrines that live in the right's mind.

00:18:56.000 I mean, when you go to a mainstream conservative think tank, you talk to people, they're to a great degree morally on the left side.

00:19:06.000 But which is why they just defend things that they're never attacked for.

00:19:12.000 It's easy to be that way.

00:19:13.000 You agree and it's safe.

00:19:15.000 Those are safe spaces.

00:19:17.000 So while the country is being ruled on your behalf, you have your little safe space there.

00:19:22.000 But the real issue is: look, I'll just give you an example.

00:19:25.000 I mean, so much federal money is spent on left-wing causes.

00:19:31.000 It's appropriated by Congress.

00:19:33.000 It's siphoned off through the executive agencies, and then it's given to NGOs or to school districts who indirectly give it to NGOs.

00:19:41.000 So, this is just one tiny example.

00:19:43.000 And I don't mean to bring this up as like you solve that, you solve the country, far from it.

00:19:48.000 But that's just one example of the extent to which there has been no fight.

00:19:53.000 You haven't even taken the money away.

00:19:56.000 I mean, the idea that you have right-leaning or deep-red states with these huge campuses that you, right-wing taxpayers, are funding so that they can teach your children to despise you, to despise the country.

00:20:12.000 The money hasn't even been taken away from them.

00:20:16.000 And then there is a whole assortment of laws that should be examined, should be thought through, that would help the middle class, help the working class, and would cut down on all of the many noxious things that the laws currently allow. 0.96

00:20:32.000 I'll just give you one example.

00:20:34.000 Why is it that you can just have mobs of antifa running around in states?

00:20:44.000 Why aren't there laws that say, no, you are assembling with a view to do violence?

00:20:50.000 Your openly declared group doctrine is to overthrow the U.S. government.

00:20:57.000 And this is allowed in the states.

00:20:59.000 So, when I say we have not begun to fight, I mean these types of things, and there are many, many of them.

00:21:05.000 We just live like browbeaten children within the morality, within the little sandbox allowed for us by the left.

00:21:14.000 So, it's a psychological liberation.

00:21:16.000 And once that takes place, you see the multitude of tools available to us.

00:21:23.000 So, yeah, that comes back down to this idea of the Overton window and what is permissible.

00:21:27.000 But let's talk about, you said something interesting to the left morally.

00:21:31.000 What do you mean by that?

00:21:32.000 What spectrum of moral kind of right and wrong are you articulating there?

00:21:39.000 Yeah, well, look, here's an easy, here's a very easy example.

00:21:44.000 Many on the right don't even believe in the equal rule of laws.

00:21:50.000 That's a foundational civilizational principle.

00:21:54.000 Without that, the country's through.

00:21:57.000 Without that, what you end up having is what the left is kind of building up now, which is, you know, some strange racial hierarchy that is used to evaluate qualifications for all sorts of jobs.

00:22:13.000 That's just in conflict with the rule of law.

00:22:15.000 And yet, or letting mobs get away with it, or letting the elites get away with it.

00:22:20.000 I mean, this is kind of one of the amazing things is that I haven't heard for any calls in Congress to investigate the very obvious, I mean, it's like known to everybody except journalists, abuses of power inside of our intel state.

00:22:39.000 No serious investigations taking place, but yet that's one of these rule of law issues that protects elites, protects people behind security clearances on the one hand, allows, on the other hand, mobs to get away with it.

00:22:53.000 And the middle class that is, you know, to a great degree right-leaning is crunched relentlessly by various laws, by their jobs being shipped away.

00:23:02.000 I mean, by so many things.

00:23:04.000 So this is what I mean by we haven't begun to fight.

00:23:08.000 This is what I mean by living within the left psychology that you can't even defend the most basic thing like the rule of laws.

00:23:15.000 I know that that's not a sexy issue.

00:23:17.000 I know that that's a boring issue.

00:23:19.000 But when you explain it the way that I did, you see everything is actually at stake on that.

00:23:24.000 Yeah, I mean, it's fundamental.

00:23:25.000 And so other moral questions, though, would be this idea of is there some form of absolute truth or is truth inherently subjective?

00:23:36.000 This is something that I encounter all the time.

00:23:39.000 For example, when I went to Berkeley recently, I kind of sat at a table and talked to students at length, and they were insistent that truth is merely an opinion.

00:23:49.000 It's just what you believe it to be.

00:23:52.000 Is that an important topic for us to be thinking about, Arthur, or is that just kind of a silly philosophical thought experiment on a college campus?

00:23:59.000 Does it have civilizational implications?

00:24:02.000 Yes, it does, obviously, but I'm of two minds on this.

00:24:06.000 Look, we are a liberal democracy, which is to say that these things are private.

00:24:14.000 However, there are public, obvious truths on which the nation was founded, like human equality, like natural rights.

00:24:24.000 And so it's those truths that I'm most concerned about.

00:24:30.000 And it's protecting them, it's fighting for them, and it's cutting off having the capacity to cut off the various forms of dissent from those things.

00:24:41.000 I mean, you know, half of the country has already dissented from the fact that we are equal in our natural rights.

00:24:49.000 The current teaching is, no, you are an oppressor group member.

00:24:53.000 That's exactly right.

00:24:54.000 Why should you have any rights?

00:24:56.000 You've used those rights only to harm people.

00:24:59.000 And maybe even psychologically or maybe biologically, I don't know at the end what they think on that.

00:25:05.000 There's some evil to you.

00:25:09.000 And if that's true, then you can't have the same amount of rights as these innocent and morally pure people.

00:25:15.000 That's right.

00:25:16.000 So.

00:25:17.000 Well, and so, but let me kind of go a step further though, but doesn't that rejection of natural rights, it happens earlier if you believe that there isn't anything objective at all?

00:25:28.000 I mean, that's an objective, like, that's a moral statement, right?

00:25:32.000 That is that there is an equality of what a human being is.

00:25:35.000 We can define that.

00:25:37.000 But if you believe that, for example, I heard this at Berkeley, which blew my mind.

00:25:40.000 I never knew Pier said, we don't know what a human being is, right?

00:25:43.000 A dog and a human being, no different.

00:25:45.000 One might have consciousness that's elevated.

00:25:48.000 So doesn't that, it starts earlier, doesn't it?

00:25:50.000 It's a philosophical question at some level.

00:25:54.000 Yeah.

00:25:55.000 Well, look, I think that there's a lot of mouthing off and showing off going on.

00:26:02.000 Just as one example, they say there's no absolute truth.

00:26:06.000 You know, they say that they're atheists.

00:26:08.000 They don't know what atheism means.

00:26:10.000 Atheism means everything is permissible.

00:26:14.000 And they don't live their lives that way.

00:26:16.000 They always believe in justice, in morality.

00:26:19.000 In fact, their whole lives are often devoted to justice.

00:26:24.000 And they would be deeply unsettled if you were to say, well, then justice doesn't exist.

00:26:29.000 And therefore, you know, it's really just the strongest that get the better of the weakest.

00:26:34.000 And right now, you're actually weak.

00:26:38.000 They don't think these things really.

00:26:41.000 I will say, though, Arthur, I agree.

00:26:43.000 If it was three, four years ago, what I saw, and it could be just a very inaccurate sample size, mind you, was there was a nihilism and a darkness of a philosophy that did articulate some of that, which threw me off.

00:26:59.000 But I think you're right.

00:27:00.000 I don't think most people on the left actually believe that.

00:27:02.000 I don't.

00:27:04.000 Because at some point, you must have a standard of what is justice.

00:27:06.000 Yeah, if anything, I think that they're pretending to be atheists to be sophisticated. 1.00

00:27:12.000 And just because you hate Christianity and this seems like the opposite of that.

00:27:16.000 But in reality, they're moral fanatics.

00:27:19.000 Yes.

00:27:20.000 But look, Charlie, the truth is, I think that the real game is about showing people the way rather than just confronting them on these big issues.

00:27:34.000 That comes later.

00:27:36.000 Right now, they are in a psychological state of total obstinacy, total hatred.

00:27:41.000 When you look at some of the just interestingly, you know, when you look at some of the Socratic, the Platonic dialogues, you see that Socrates doesn't fully engage with everybody.

00:27:51.000 Sometimes the conversation just trails off because he sees that this person can't be convinced and it's not worth his time.

00:27:57.000 Yeah, that's interesting.

00:27:58.000 So a lot of people will come our way, the skeptical, the open-minded, the open-hearted, once there is this play to create our own institutions and to have institutional power, because that's how things sell.

00:28:13.000 I mean, you can use this as an analogy to science.

00:28:17.000 Nobody knows.

00:28:18.000 I mean, few, very few people, like real scientists actually know, you know, some of the laws of physics.

00:28:23.000 But what you see is the works of physics.

00:28:27.000 And that's the focus, the works of what we're trying to do.

00:28:30.000 So the powerful institution.

00:28:32.000 Yeah.

00:28:32.000 Yeah, let's use some examples.

00:28:35.000 Are you encouraged by the rise of Rumble, for example, or University of Austin, this new university that's coming?

00:28:44.000 Or is that just kind of thrilling on the edges?

00:28:46.000 Are you talking more kind of like a center right Marshall plan that's going to require hundreds of billions of dollars?

00:28:53.000 Like let's talk scale, right?

00:28:54.000 So let's get less abstract and more concrete.

00:28:58.000 What does kind of building your own institutions look like?

00:29:02.000 Yeah.

00:29:03.000 So you're right.

00:29:05.000 It's a very important correction that you make to the vagueness of that word.

00:29:11.000 Because, you know, in America, we say that the family is an institution and also that universities are institutions.

00:29:18.000 It's like that's such a difference.

00:29:20.000 It's like, what on earth does that mean?

00:29:23.000 What I'm actually talking about are powerful, wealthy assets that are right-leaning, that are in the states, and that are assisted by the states.

00:29:34.000 So let me give you an example of what I have in mind.

00:29:38.000 I think that DeSantis should nominate basically some kind of like private equity czar who should go to blue states, scout out real productive capacity and help those companies move to Florida.

00:29:53.000 I don't mean moving, you know, a wing of Goldman to Florida.

00:29:57.000 I don't wish that on Florida.

00:29:58.000 I'm talking about like real manufacturing, real value creation, and bringing those to red states, bulking up red states.

00:30:08.000 So what I'm getting at is that I think that there is this two-fold strategy on the level of the states.

00:30:15.000 Number one is a policy of de-wokification. 0.99

00:30:18.000 That means getting rid of all of the funding that goes to these things, getting rid of, thereby getting rid of those institutions.

00:30:27.000 It also means doing laws like some of the ones that DeSantis has passed.

00:30:33.000 It's obvious that states should be in control of their education system.

00:30:37.000 It's like the lesson number one of constitutional governance.

00:30:43.000 At the same time, it means building up.

00:30:44.000 It means attracting people.

00:30:46.000 I think that red state governors should start openly making plays for citizens to move there.

00:30:52.000 Not this tacit thing that has happened during COVID, which has been awesome.

00:30:55.000 But I mean, speaking to American citizens, you're a red person trapped in a blue state. 0.96

00:31:00.000 Yeah, but do you want the San Francisco person to move to Dallas?

00:31:03.000 Is that what we want?

00:31:04.000 No.

00:31:05.000 No, I don't.

00:31:05.000 But I also think that there are ways to slow that down.

00:31:12.000 Social policy being one of them.

00:31:13.000 When they see pro-life laws, it's a repellent.

00:31:16.000 Absolutely.

00:31:17.000 And that's how you got to think of them.

00:31:18.000 Prayer in school.

00:31:22.000 All of the laws that DeSantis is working on right now on LGBTQ issues, those things look, and you know, those are our fellow citizens, and they don't want to live in such a place where their kids are educated in that way, but we do.

00:31:35.000 And so they can stay in New York, they can stay in San Francisco, they can stay with their mobs, and that's fine.

00:31:45.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

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00:32:49.000 The question will be then: outside of the kind of governmental action, there does have to be a private sector institution buildup, right?

00:32:57.000 Or you're saying that the government should aid and assist that alongside kind of the this is one of the things that I think, um, and I'd love your take on it, that is attractive and is exciting about Elon Musk's potential takeover of Twitter, right?

00:33:12.000 Um, look, I don't want to live in a country where an oligarch has to save us to defend Western values, but I want to win, and therefore, my commitment to winning, I'm all for it.

00:33:22.000 Can you help unpack that?

00:33:25.000 Yeah, well, no, I mean, state assistance, um, uh, property tax assistance, subsidy assistance that would help create the essential infrastructure that states need to wean themselves off of the woke regime that rules a major part of America.

00:33:48.000 So, for example, uh, there should be protections for state banking systems, there need to be banks that are there, there need to be channels of communications that are assisted by the states.

00:34:02.000 So, why doesn't Texas and Florida have its own servers when companies, people are taken offline?

00:34:11.000 Um, these are just two examples.

00:34:14.000 Um, but you see, the key is to start thinking in these ways, to start thinking about de-wokification, uh, and to start building up our own infrastructures in those states.

00:34:26.000 I'll give you one last thing on this.

00:34:29.000 Look, this is a bit of a controversial take.

00:34:32.000 Maybe you and I disagree, maybe some of your listeners will disagree, but I think that what happened with the Canada truckers and Bitcoin should be a wake-up call.

00:34:45.000 That I don't understand the technical side well enough, I have my hunches, but it in my mind has proven that this escape valve that everybody hoped would get you out of the system once and for all-untouchable money that is yours in perpetuity.

00:35:02.000 Turns out it doesn't stand up well to state power.

00:35:06.000 You need this is one of our side.

00:35:10.000 You know, you asked me a moment ago, well, can we solve some of these problems in a summer?

00:35:14.000 That's the problem.

00:35:15.000 This is how the right thinks.

00:35:16.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:35:17.000 Is one of those things like we found our safety valve, we found our silver bullet, it's going to get out of it.

00:35:22.000 It's like, no, you need real banking systems.

00:35:27.000 And I don't know enough about the technology of Bitcoin to disagree the Bitcoin defenders, of whom some are your Claremont uh colleagues, by the way.

00:35:36.000 Absolutely, I think it's James Poulos, if I'm not mistaken, is a huge advocate of Bitcoin, and he knows it better than I do.

00:35:42.000 But I think you're right, and I also would say, in its ideal, Bitcoin probably had that, but we've allowed the government into the Bitcoin universe by having to declare cryptocurrency on tax forms and all these things.

00:35:55.000 They're more like crypto assets.

00:35:57.000 But there is something in the psychology of a conservative patriot, and I think it's rooted in our nostalgia, which can be healthy.

00:36:04.000 That since you lived it, you think it can be easily redone.

00:36:07.000 Like, people think that the past can be easily revisited in the future is more difficult, if that makes sense.

00:36:12.000 It's just part of human psychology because it's a memory, therefore, you think you can go back to it.

00:36:16.000 They're like, oh, yeah, just one summer.

00:36:18.000 I mean, Trump can get us back to how the country was in 1980.

00:36:21.000 Like, come on.

00:36:22.000 Actually, you're like, yeah, that's actually hard.

00:36:24.000 It's harder to go to 1980 than it is to go to 2030, right?

00:36:27.000 Or wherever they want to lead us.

00:36:28.000 It's more likely things will actually unfold than go back to how they were.

00:36:32.000 There's a psychological component to that.

00:36:34.000 But building new stuff is hard.

00:36:36.000 Conservatives would much rather be laissez-faire about it.

00:36:40.000 Let the market figure it out and just kind of let the chips fall where they may.

00:36:44.000 Yeah.

00:36:45.000 And Trump himself was a romantic on this too.

00:36:50.000 You know, all the generals, because they're all normal patriots, like the generals that I grew up seeing when I was a boy, they're all the same.

00:36:58.000 There's no path back.

00:37:00.000 There's only forward.

00:37:01.000 And forward means creating these kinds of genuine bulwarks, not the bulwark of an op-ed, but a real bulwark that is institutional that gives you independence.

00:37:14.000 You're talking about power.

00:37:16.000 You're talking about power is what you're talking about: we must have the ability to be self-governed.

00:37:21.000 And look, this is a provocative view for a conservative.

00:37:24.000 I believe in it 100%, by the way.

00:37:26.000 And this is why you and I hit it off: is that you are admitting that we are in the midst of a power struggle.

00:37:31.000 Conservatives don't like admitting that, right?

00:37:33.000 It's a postmodern view.

00:37:35.000 It's built into kind of the Nietzschean belief of struggle.

00:37:39.000 Like basically, you're going to have one person stronger than the other.

00:37:41.000 And like, we're kind of like, yeah, we agree.

00:37:43.000 We don't want to live in that country.

00:37:45.000 I want speech to be supreme.

00:37:46.000 I want dialogue to be the way we solve things.

00:37:48.000 But if it comes down to power struggles, we're going to win and we're not going to be taken by surprise.

00:37:54.000 Well, yes, but I wouldn't say it's Nietzschean just because it's in the service of political liberty.

00:38:01.000 What I'm proposing is that there's no way but this.

00:38:05.000 There are no silver bullets.

00:38:07.000 There's no dreaming back a past America.

00:38:10.000 It still exists in pockets.

00:38:11.000 And so what I'm asking is to reclaim those pockets, to make them fully yours and to expand them.

00:38:17.000 That's the only way that this works.

00:38:18.000 It's what the left did so successfully.

00:38:20.000 I mean, you have to marvel at the left.

00:38:22.000 You know, you have to just marvel at some of what people.

00:38:26.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:38:27.000 But the problem people have, though, is the tension between their ideology and what needs to be done.

00:38:32.000 Because you said some things that are thought crimes, Arthur.

00:38:35.000 You just violated the Ten Commandments.

00:38:37.000 You talked about subsidies and you talked about state power.

00:38:40.000 So how do they reconcile that, right?

00:38:42.000 So they say it's in the service of political liberty.

00:38:44.000 Do the ends justify the means?

00:38:46.000 Are we all Machiavellians?

00:38:47.000 Now, like, walk us through that.

00:38:48.000 It's interesting.

00:38:49.000 Yeah.

00:38:50.000 Well, look, as I said before, look at what has happened over the past 40 years.

00:38:58.000 Look at how every single institution was taken from the right.

00:39:02.000 Look at now what the ideology is that is being used to govern those institutions and govern the public.

00:39:09.000 It is an ideology that basically says that There is a sacred, unfalsifiable class of citizens who cannot be contradicted, who to whom all things should be given.

00:39:23.000 And then there's the oppressor class who has to be punished at every turn, who has to be punished through the laws, who has to be humiliated, who has to be crushed because he illegitimately ruled this country.

00:39:36.000 When that's the dynamic, if you're not struggling for political liberty by understanding that you cannot have political liberty without powerful institutions on your side, then you are just living in a romantic fantasy and you will lose.

00:39:53.000 And that is exactly where most conservatives live: a romantic fantasy of a country that no longer exists.

00:40:01.000 And I want to get back to that place.

00:40:03.000 I want to get back to a place where the better argument wins.

00:40:07.000 I grew up in that country.

00:40:09.000 It's dead.

00:40:11.000 And it's going to require us to be more powerful to be able to defeat these people.

00:40:16.000 And I believe, you know, if you want to, if you want to broker a détente, if you want to broker a ceasefire, if you have servers, banking systems, schools, then all of a sudden, what can they do to you?

00:40:30.000 Then all of a sudden, they might all of a sudden take you more seriously.

00:40:33.000 Final thoughts?

00:40:35.000 That is exactly it, Charlie.

00:40:37.000 That the right will never be taken seriously until it has these things.

00:40:43.000 And that's how some kind of, if it's possible, that is how some kind of return to normalcy takes place.

00:40:50.000 Yes, that's exactly right.

00:40:52.000 And the right never looks, you know, they're constantly being interviewed with all these history books behind them.

00:41:02.000 And, you know, they claim to have read them.

00:41:04.000 And I take their word for it.

00:41:06.000 And if they really did, then they would know that a lot of incredible countries have fallen in the past.

00:41:13.000 And they think somehow that can't happen here, but it can.

00:41:17.000 And the only thing that prevents it is smart people who think through the actual politics of this.

00:41:24.000 Not the talking for the sake of, you know, one little clip because you're in Congress and all the cameras are on you or on the campaign trail, but like a real single-minded focus on building up these institutions and peeling back the other ones.

00:41:39.000 That's how you get to some kind of return to normalcy ceasefire.

00:41:43.000 And that's what will save us.

00:41:45.000 Arthur, thank you so much for joining us.

00:41:46.000 Claremont Institute, Center for American Way of Life, Arthur Millick.

00:41:49.000 Thank you so much.

00:41:49.000 We'll have to have you back on.

00:41:50.000 Thank you.

00:41:50.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:41:54.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

00:41:55.000 Email us your thoughts as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.

00:41:58.000 You want to support the show?

00:41:59.000 Go to charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:42:01.000 Thank you so much for listening.

00:42:02.000 God bless.

00:42:06.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - April 20, 2022

Finding the Political Will to Crush the Left and Save America

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