Jonathan Keeperman joins me on The Charlie Kirk Show to discuss Gavin Newsom's 2020 campaign and why he's running for President of the United States. Jonathan is the founder of Passage Press, a publishing company that focuses on books and other media. He's also the author of a new book, "Always With Honor," a memoir of the Great White Army General Peter Rangel, who fought the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War.
00:00:34.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. 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.
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00:02:29.000General Rangel was our great white army hero who, despite the odds and despite everything coming against him, was one of the few people in that conflict who made...
00:02:39.000He maintained his sense of integrity and fought valiantly, and despite the fact that, of course, as we all know, the Bolsheviks won, he managed to save hundreds of thousands of lives in getting his fellow countrymen to safety.
00:02:53.000So he was on the czar's side, is that right?
00:02:55.000I'm not as familiar with the Russian support.
00:02:57.000Yeah, well, you know, it's a really fascinating story that is becoming, unfortunately, increasingly relevant to our own time.
00:03:03.000Now, I think, you know, this election, we probably forestalled the worst outcomes, okay, and replaying the devastating and sort of catastrophic events of the Russian Civil War.
00:03:14.000But I think the takeaway lesson is not so much the historical analog, but how as a man, as an honorable person with some influence, you are required to behave during times of great stress and when people are looking to you in time.
00:03:32.000Periods of chaos to restore some order to the polity.
00:03:43.000So I fled along with hundreds of thousands of other Californians around 2020. COVID was the catalyst for a lot of people to leave California, but it was going to happen one way or the other.
00:03:58.000California had become a place that was hostile to middle class families.
00:04:02.000And my wife and I, we had started our family.
00:04:05.000Our oldest son was starting school and we had to get out because this is not a place where you can raise a family on a middle class income.
00:04:14.000And a lot of that, frankly, is because of some of the policies that either Gavin Newsom was responsible for authoring or enabling.
00:04:22.000And so this is something that I think, as Gavin Newsom very clearly seems to be making a play for 2028, a little bit, we have to remember what he did to the state of California.
00:04:35.000And despite everything he might say to try to pivot to the center and make peace with some of the radicals on his side, he ruined California in a lot of ways.
00:04:48.000Well, so firstly, the proof is in the pudding, okay?
00:04:50.000As I was saying, net out-migration from California really started to accelerate the moment Gavin Newsom came into office in 2019. You started to see hundreds of thousands of people flee the state, especially, again, middle-class families.
00:05:10.000You have this kind of radical leftist cultural agenda that's infecting the schools and that was enabled by Gavin Newsom.
00:05:19.000And I don't know if it was brought up in your interview, but I would encourage people, for example, to look up AB 101. AB 101 was an education bill that got put before Newsom in 2020, which he signed, which mandates DEI education for all California high schoolers.
00:05:41.000A semester of DEI education for high schoolers.
00:05:44.000So all he might say about his sort of animosity or certain hesitation he might have about pursuing some of this DEI agenda...
00:05:53.000Well, he didn't really act on that, okay?
00:05:56.000And he signed this bill into law, and now, starting in 2024-25, this year, all high school kids have to take DEI classes.
00:06:05.000Okay, so you have homelessness, crime, you have the cultural degradation.
00:06:11.000You also have a state that doesn't work financially.
00:06:18.000Part of that is the demand for housing, but part of that are these onerous regulations that are imposed not just on business owners, but on anybody who wants to build anything.
00:06:29.000It's just a state that is hostile to people, to ordinary people.
00:06:34.000It's very friendly to criminals and homeless.
00:09:03.000I've never heard anyone say it that quickly.
00:09:04.000So, yeah, preserving knowledge, preserving our intellectual and cultural heritage.
00:09:10.000Not only have they neglected to do that, there has been an active effort to erase that intellectual.
00:09:18.000And so I think, you know, if you really get into sort of granular details of it, there's all sorts of room for plausible deniability.
00:09:27.000Someone like Gavin Newsom can say, well, that's just some one-off crazy thing.
00:09:31.000It's not reflective of the entire institution.
00:09:33.000But I will tell you, as someone who spent a lot of time with these kids, they are not coming out any better than they came in.
00:09:40.000And in fact, they're coming out a lot worse.
00:09:42.000And of course, then in tons of debt, too.
00:09:45.000So they're saddled with this tremendous debt.
00:09:46.000And they haven't improved what we call their human capital, their ability to actually perform in the workplace and make good use of their lives and skills and talents.
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00:10:42.000That is 1-800-4-RELIEF. 1-800-4-RELIEF. So Lomas, before we play more tape here, I want to just reiterate, you believe that probably 90% of the academy is rotten to the core.
00:11:20.000And from 9-11, we'd go to JFK. Over time, you know, I started teaching about 2010. Over time, what I started to find was they didn't know what these things were.
00:11:32.000I mean, now part of this was a huge percentage of my students at UC Irvine were international students, over 20% at one point.
00:11:40.000So they had no real connection to our cultural history.
00:11:57.000They might have heard the name, but tying that to a specific period in history or tying it to a specific assassination and the context around that and things like Vietnam and the Cold War was totally absent from their mental framework.
00:12:14.000You know, large part of my classes, especially for first-year students, was basically teaching them Wikipedia-level history, basic American history.
00:12:23.000And so, you know, and it's not their fault, by the way.
00:12:25.000This is not something these kids did to themselves.
00:12:28.000This is because of neglect from our educational institutions.
00:12:33.000And a lot of this comes out of the educational graduate programs that determine curriculums for statewide schools.
00:12:42.000There's also, again, just this sense that Over time, our powers that be have decided that it's better for us to start from scratch, again, to sever our connection from our intellectual and cultural history and replace it with something else.
00:13:00.000This has been going on basically since the political correctness period of the 90s, probably even before that, but it really accelerated in the 2000s and in the Obama years.
00:13:11.000And this has a drastic effect on the students when they come in.
00:13:14.000So by the time they get to college, they're not ready to absorb and get anything out of the material that perhaps you and I got in college and certainly from generations before got out of college.
00:13:27.000They're playing catch up all the way through.
00:13:28.000And then you add that to the fact that their instructors and the people who now run the colleges are almost exclusively one dimensional ideologues.
00:13:47.000There's nobody to the right of Barack Obama circa 2008. That's about as far right as you're going to get.
00:13:54.000And so this one-dimensional ideological trajectory...
00:13:58.000Doesn't produce any kind of education per se.
00:14:02.000What it is is ideological instruction.
00:14:06.000They are trying to impose their beliefs and political agenda on these students, and anybody who deviates from that even a little bit learns very early on there's consequences for it.
00:14:18.000So you know, if I want to get a good grade, I just repeat back to my teacher what they want.
00:15:58.000And, you know, I think the promise, the ideal of college is we all get together with fellow smart people who are intellectually curious and we sort of work through difficult and old ideas and try to make better sense of the world.
00:16:12.000AI, social media is going to give us alternatives.
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00:19:04.000A lot of people are going to consume it.
00:19:06.000Because it's also politics and entertainment have begun to overlap, right?
00:19:11.000And the old adage is, well, politics is downstream from culture.
00:19:14.000I think politics and culture are indecipherable from one another now.
00:19:17.000Donald Trump became a cultural phenomenon, right?
00:19:19.000You go into inner city Compton, you'll see guys with Trump shirts with the hand up, fight, fight, fight.
00:19:27.000So what Democrats are doing is you're still playing in a very old, hypersanitized media environment.
00:19:33.000My advice is you got to go where it's unpredictable, where it's treacherous, where it's dangerous.
00:19:37.000What do you think about the masculine element of that?
00:19:39.000Basically, Gavin was like, well, what is masculinity is what he was asking.
00:19:42.000Well, I'm sure Gavin would ask that question.
00:19:45.000I'm sure it's very difficult for him to come up with a coherent definition of masculinity.
00:19:49.000It's not something probably that is often modeled in the kind of places that he hangs out and among the kind of people he hangs out with.
00:19:58.000I think the general point is a really important one.
00:20:02.000And this idea of having conversations that are totally unscripted, that are removed from familiar talking points, is something that the right has come to dominate.
00:20:15.000And what this reflects to me is a willingness to go after the truth.
00:20:22.000There isn't some target that we're aiming at.
00:20:25.000We don't know necessarily where we're aiming at.
00:20:28.000Our only lodestar is what is true, what is good, and being willing to follow that wherever it may lead.
00:20:36.000Perhaps this is something that just comes about when you're in a position of sort of cultural subordination.
00:20:42.000So the right was kind of on the outside for a long time, and we had to sort of explore the wilderness.
00:20:53.000Because there are certain true things that are in direct contradiction with what the left needs to believe in order to sustain its ideological agenda.
00:21:02.000And so the moment they let themselves off the leash and start exploring some of these ideas, they're going to run into, you know, these what we call thought terminating cliches.
00:21:12.000They're just going to have to stop themselves and retreat back into their talking points.
00:21:16.000And look, if I didn't believe that just following the truth would lead to the political preferences that I have, then I wouldn't be on the right.
00:21:27.000It's because I believe that just following the truth naturally will lead to the kinds of things I believe in and the kinds of things I want to see happen that I'm willing to do it.
00:21:38.000And to the masculine-feminine issue, one of the more masculine things that one can do is to go where there is uncertainty and to go up against opposition.
00:21:51.000In some ways, and I was getting at it, it is a...
00:21:55.000It is an intellectual, non-violent way to do a UFC fight, right?
00:22:00.000I mean, it is like, we're going to see who wins.
00:22:09.000So this is something I've actually written about.
00:22:10.000I wrote an essay for First Things called What is the Longhouse?
00:22:13.000And the premise of this essay was to suggest that our current arrangement, at least in official capacities to negotiate over ideas, took on a kind of feminine nature.
00:22:25.000And what that means is the goal is to reach consensus.
00:22:35.000More masculine way of arguing is to pursue truth.
00:22:40.000Oftentimes, if the pursuit, if our aim is to find out what is true, we are going to come into conflict with each other.
00:22:48.000It is going to be necessarily combative.
00:22:50.000It is entirely anathema to the notion of consensus.
00:22:55.000And so where these two paths diverge, where the masculine and feminine diverge, is either you're aimed at truth or you're aimed at consensus.
00:23:06.000I want to play an element that we discussed with Gavin Newsom about how the race politics are in our schools, race hate in our schools, if you will.
00:23:18.000And I know you could talk at length about this.
00:23:20.000Let's play cut 178. To make an eight-year-old feel like they're racist is absurd and outrageous.
00:23:26.000But Governor, with all the respect, that's happening right now in California public schools.
00:23:29.000And I'm not trying to drill you on you.
00:23:31.000You could say that, but maybe you should convene a special session and say no more race-based teaching against white people in the schools of California or Asians.
00:23:43.000I'm just saying, though, that this is not a conjecture.
00:24:32.000He signed this in 2020. This goes into effect in 2024-25.
00:24:37.000At the risk of repeating myself, this is all you need to see and read about to know where Gavin Newsom's heart is at or where his lack of spine is at.
00:24:49.000He may actually want to not have these things in place.
00:24:53.000I don't think he has any core beliefs.
00:25:08.000And so all we've got to do is point to that track record and say, wait a minute, you're saying X, but clearly what you actually believe or are willing to do is the exact opposite of X. We'll have no way to really reconcile that except to just kind of dissemble and, you know, smile on camera, which, you know, may be appealing to a certain amount of people, but I think most voters and most people on our side who, you know, might be looking at Gavin Newsom as someone they could convert to, I really hope not, please.
00:25:35.000That is not going to make anybody's life better, but they'll see through that.
00:25:38.000I really think the American voters are smarter than that, and they see through that kind of transparent sort of political actor-type behavior.
00:25:48.000Another interesting piece of tape here about how Democrats have a purification process to constantly be kicking people out of their party that don't agree with them or in their intellectual circles.
00:26:21.000This is a great point, though, Governor, is that Bobby Kennedy was a heterodox opinion on a thing that a lot of people were concerned about.
00:27:17.000And so, you know, you had the sort of paroxysms of the 60s in this first big wave, not the first big wave, but in modern times, post-war era, this first big wave of sort of leftist excess, it peters out and that leads into, you know, the malaise of the 70s and then into Reagan.
00:27:33.000You have the political correctness craze of the 90s.
00:27:35.000And now we have this 2010s thing happening.
00:28:34.000I think they need to now go into the wilderness.
00:28:36.000wilderness and rediscover what it means to be on the left.
00:28:39.000And in the meantime, and I think this is where we have a real opportunity, conservatism has had this bad habit of kind of letting this cycle sort of restart every 10 years or so, totally letting these people back in tolerating really bad ideas, not standing up for themselves, totally letting these people back in tolerating really bad ideas, not standing up for themselves, not No, we want them to remain in the wilderness.
00:29:24.000You just have to have the courage of your convictions.
00:29:27.000And so, you know, if there's anything I could encourage the right to do in this moment is don't shy away from this moment of potentiality in front of us.
00:29:36.000Seize it with two hands and assert your right to rule.
00:31:01.000We have a number of titles on there that I think would be really interesting to your readership.
00:31:06.000You know, I want to say something, too, about these young people we've been talking about and how their sort of mental landscape has just kind of been bombed out and, you know, scraped away, and they need to fill it with new good ideas, old stuff as well as new stuff.
00:31:19.000And so what we're trying to do with Passage is sort of reaccumulate, re-aggregate a kind of canon for young, intellectually curious people to make better sense of their world.
00:31:31.000And so, you know, this is a long collection of new philosophers, intellectuals on our We have great books coming out from Charles Cornish Dale, writing about masculinity, writing about what's happened with masculinity.
00:31:44.000We have Paul Godfrey, a great writer who was a longtime prominent right-wing intellectual.
00:32:01.000We have his audiobook coming out soon, so anybody who reads audiobooks, that'll be available.
00:32:05.000So here's an interesting little moment here where Gavin Newsom is trying to maybe be a little economically populist.
00:32:12.000I don't think he's doing a very good job of it considering he basically oversees the oligarchy.
00:32:16.000But let's play Cut 184. Listen carefully.
00:32:19.000Look, the number one thing, which I know you're going to agree with, and I'm sure you'll have a super slick response, right, that's about half true, which is the cost of housing.
00:33:14.000Okay, so again, this just betrays what's actually happening in California.
00:33:20.000Listen, if you're a young guy, you're starting out a family, and you want to live in California, which, by the way, is a beautiful place, and California is...
00:33:29.000Filled with a lot of conservatives and red-leaning people, and I really don't want people to abandon California.
00:33:35.000It really should be the crown jewel of the American empire, and it will be again, okay?
00:33:40.000But for the time being, Gavin Newsom is ruining it, and one way he's ruining it is by eliminating the possibility for a middle class to thrive there.
00:33:47.000You either can afford to live in a rundown neighborhood full of homeless people and criminals with schools that are going to destroy the minds of your children.
00:33:58.000I know that sounds like hyperbole, but it's the truth.
00:34:04.000side and be completely insulated from the rest of the problems of the state and kind of merrily go along your way, pretending as if everything is fine.
00:34:20.000Middle class Californians are leaving.
00:34:22.000They are in some number being replaced by foreigners coming in.
00:34:27.000But the middle class domestic out migration from California is as big now as it has ever been in the history of the state.
00:34:35.000And what can, if you were to give advice to the American right, more broadly, because you said something, we need to have the intestinal fortitude and spine that it's okay to rule.
00:35:24.000But they can walk and chew gum at the same time.
00:35:26.000And it's simply finding the right people, finding people who are from those institutions, who are aligned, who can help facilitate retaking control of them.