00:00:30.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:37.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:17.000Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:19.000With us today is Thomas D. Klingenstein, who is the chairman of the board of the wonderful Claremont Institute, where I spent a week in Las Vegas as a Lincoln fellow with some wonderful people there.
00:01:33.000Tom, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:37.000So you gave a speech and also wrote an article that really caught my attention, which was the reason I wanted to have you on this program, because I have not heard anyone in recent memory put it so bluntly and concisely, and I say bluntly in a good way, where you say we're in the middle of a Cold Civil War.
00:01:56.000And it's just the question of whether or not we want to win it.
00:02:00.000And we need wartime generals to kind of make that happen.
00:02:03.000Please summarize your argument, kind of why we're in a cold civil war, and then we'll go from there.
00:03:01.000Well, it's group outcome equality, right?
00:03:06.000All groups having proportional to their representation in society, the same amount of prisoners and CEOs and, you know, school suspensions and all the rest, right?
00:03:18.000The problem there is that America, whose understanding of justice is individual freedom, there will always be group outcome differences between men and women and also among various subcultures.
00:03:34.000So to eliminate, the only way to eliminate those outcome differences is by force, by tyranny.
00:03:41.000And so that's why we can have no peace with the woke communism.
00:03:48.000And my, I guess the pitch of that speech was directed at the Republicans.
00:03:56.000You know, their job is to explain all this.
00:04:00.000American people, I think, many have a sense that there's something grievously wrong with America, but they might not be able to give a good accounting of it.
00:04:10.000And that's what we need our leaders to do.
00:04:13.000And so far, they haven't been doing it.
00:04:16.000So when I talk to the police officer or the taxicab driver or the welder, the normal man, they say, man, we're losing our country.
00:04:25.000And if I press them, which I don't, because I don't want to be a jerk, but sometimes I do, they kind of fumble around a little bit because it's more just kind of a cascading effect, right?
00:04:34.000They're not even able to articulate it as well as you would, not even close, but they can see it.
00:05:03.000Make the argument that we are indeed in the midst of a cold civil war.
00:05:09.000Well, it was the argument that I, part of which I answered, I think, in the last question.
00:05:18.000We are fighting a regime that has a different understanding of justice and a different end.
00:05:25.000Again, the analogy I gave was slavery, right?
00:05:28.000One side wanted to grow, one side contract.
00:05:30.000Those are differences in ends, and ends cannot be negotiated.
00:05:34.000Now, there are a lot, you know, what does the enemy have to do?
00:05:39.000And this gets, I think, more closely to your question about war.
00:05:43.000Well, it has to remake everything in American society, and it has to remake it to comport with their understanding of America and the future.
00:05:56.000So you got to change the history, right?
00:05:58.000So that means you got to take down statutes.
00:06:00.000You have to teach critical race theory.
00:06:21.000And what that means is, or what the implication of that is, if you think America is systemically racist, if you think racism has insinuated itself into all nooks and crannies of American life, then you have to throw out the American way of life.
00:06:40.000So some of this is just the way they're thinking and talking now.
00:06:44.000Tech censorship is another big one, right?
00:06:48.000If you're going to perpetrate lies like America is racist, then you have to shut up the people who challenge the lies.
00:06:56.000And I don't think most Americans have any doubt that they're being shut out.
00:07:01.000Even a speech I gave, you know, we had to think long and hard about what to say.
00:07:09.000This stuff is just unbelievably dangerous.
00:07:13.000Well, and what we do on our show is we have a pre-show meeting and we literally have to go through what stories are we going to describe in a certain way to not get censored.
00:07:27.000And we're already living under that tyranny of not even political correctness, but it is a tyranny of a one-party state.
00:07:35.000You write in this article here, and you just mention it, and I want to really zero in on this.
00:07:40.000Every time Joe Biden accuses America of being systemically racist, he is, though he doesn't know it, calling for the overthrow of the American way of life.
00:07:49.000Now, you mentioned this earlier in the piece, but I really want to zero in on this.
00:07:53.000As soon as I heard that phrase American way of life, which originated from the Claremont Institute, might have been from you, I loved it.
00:09:25.000And I think, you know, I'm sitting in Maine and, you know, people even in Maine, out in the sticks, you know, they're pushing back against critical race theory because it teaches that America is racist.
00:09:40.000Well, most people don't think America is racist, but our leaders have to say so.
00:09:45.000That's part of my part of the speech is when they say we're systemically racist, we have to say absolutely not and provide some evidence as to why not.
00:09:59.000How many years have I been telling you about Relief Factor?
00:10:02.000Truth is, I know millions of people, in fact, that over 100 million people that are struggling with some kind of pain, whether it knee pain, back pain, joint pain, back pain, and exercise or getting older or whatever it might be.
00:10:14.000I'm so impressed with the team at Relief Factor.
00:10:37.000So you say here in the piece, education, corporate media, entertainment, big business, especially big tech are to varying degrees aligned with the Democratic Party.
00:12:05.000I love the description woke comms or woke communism.
00:12:08.000And I want to emphasize this because this is an important point, which is you, woke communism is built on a particular understanding of justice.
00:12:20.000And that really is the most important question when you think of how you're going to design a government or put together the appropriation of power.
00:12:29.000And the classics teach us a lot about this question of what is justice and is it what every man is owed to their due and what their action is?
00:12:40.000And so can you expand on that even more?
00:12:42.000You mentioned it a couple of times, but that really is the critical component here, right?
00:12:46.000The other side believes it needs to be redistributive.
00:12:49.000Abolition of private property needs to be based on group or identity, things that cannot change, which is at direct odds with what has always been embedded in our country up until recently.
00:13:02.000Yeah, I think you actually did as well this job as I could.
00:13:07.000You know, I think social justice, as I said before, though I may not have mentioned the term, social justice is group outcome equality.
00:13:16.000So all groups having the same of everything.
00:15:15.000So let's pretend that a couple of the generals in the culture war are listening or you are one of them.
00:15:19.000What needs to be done then to mount a successful counteroffensive in this cold civil war?
00:15:24.000Obviously voices, things speaking out, but you say this wartime requires very different rhetoric, strategy, and people than peacetime.
00:15:33.000And so I was just sitting in a meeting with a conservative group and they said, well, Charlie, our philosophy is we don't like to personalize things.
00:16:12.000But that's not what the opposition is doing.
00:16:14.000They're saying, you got to live our way.
00:16:17.000If you don't live our way, we'll punish you.
00:16:21.000And so this is where we need a sense of urgency.
00:16:24.000I can't tell you all the policy things.
00:16:27.000You know, I got some ideas, but have no particular expertise.
00:16:30.000But I know that we're not going to adopt the right policies unless we get serious, right?
00:16:38.000Unless we think we're heading for a cliff.
00:16:41.000If we don't think that, we're going to, you know, we're going to do what we have.
00:16:46.000And again, within the Republican Party, I don't know anybody except maybe Trump, who has the necessary urgent C and then has the courage, right, to say things like the media is fake and, you know, to get rid of CRT once he figured.
00:17:28.000It doesn't require a lot of explanation.
00:17:30.000So it starts with our leaders explaining to us where we are and explaining why, for example, it's so important to get rid of critical race theory.
00:17:42.000Now, so Tom Cotton made a big deal of that in the military.
00:17:52.000I think this has to be the platform of the Republican Party.
00:17:56.000In fact, I think that the party should be united around woke communism or anti-woke communism, right?
00:18:06.000In the same way, the Republican Party in earlier times cohered around communist anti-communism or anti-slavery.
00:18:15.000And especially in the 1980s, it was really the defining characteristic of how Reagan kept the Republican Party together was anti-Soviet communism.
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00:19:48.000And so I love that you say we must minimize the influence of libertarianism.
00:19:52.000And libertarianism only would work if you live amongst only other libertarians.
00:19:57.000As soon as a tyrant or a tyrannical or authoritarian party starts to rise up, then all of a sudden this kind of live and let live mentality becomes increasingly unrealistic.
00:20:09.000And so what I want to read from your piece here, you say, how should Republicans respond?
00:20:15.000The essential thing, as I've tried to stress, is for Republicans to understand we are at war and then act accordingly.
00:20:21.000Well, I want to get your thoughts on this.
00:20:23.000Most baby boomers I talk to, they don't want to admit that because it might change their lifestyle.
00:20:29.000Is there also a problem where it's like, no, no, no, I'm going to try to convince myself otherwise, regardless of the body of evidence and the destruction of the country around you?
00:20:40.000I think it's true, but I think it's always true, right?
00:20:43.000To get people really motivated to fight, that requires hardship, right?
00:21:33.000And failing to rebut this lie, as virtually every Republican has, Republicans are conceding the basis premise of woke communism without saying any names.
00:21:41.000But one of the largest think tanks in the country, Tom, came out and said last summer that America is systemically racist.
00:23:11.000And how long have you been saying this out loud?
00:23:14.000Well, at least since before Trump's first term.
00:23:19.000But I don't know how long before that.
00:23:21.000But what I've always been concerned about, and I mean for the last 30 years, is breaking up the country by race, right?
00:23:30.000We started out colorblind in the mid-60s, then we evolved to black separatism and pitting races against each other is just not going to end well.
00:23:42.000So that's, you know, we just can't, you know, people say that diversity is America's greatest strength.
00:23:50.000And they're referring to ethnic and racial diversity, but that's absolutely, excuse me, wrong.
00:23:57.000Our greatest strength has been to transcend race.
00:24:01.000And the one time we failed miserably, obviously, was the case of blacks.
00:24:07.000So given our history and the history of the world, the idea that you're going to separate along racial and other group lines is just suicidal.
00:24:16.000I can't, you know, I sit here sometimes and I think how stupid can we be?
00:24:23.000This is the greatest country the world has ever seen.
00:24:27.000We have given more prosperity, more freedom to more people than any other country in the world.
00:24:34.000And yet we are gratuitously throwing it away.
00:24:39.000This is about the biggest unforced era that I can imagine.
00:24:54.000And part of it is also, as Christopher Caldwell writes beautifully in his book, Age of Entitlement, that we prioritized short-term gratification over actually preserving the country.
00:25:07.000How much of this do you actually put on the leaders and the elites for the last couple decades who seemingly seem more interested in international trade policy and mass immigration and invading a country that most Americans couldn't identify than actually being able to understand the domestic threat and making sure we still have a nation?
00:25:31.000You know, if I could bring this to the presidential next 2024, you know, this is, you know, this is what I'm looking for is someone who understands that foreign policy, our ability to defeat China, is not going to occur unless we have confidence in ourselves.
00:26:01.000So if you take somebody like Mike Pompeo, I don't know him very well.
00:26:07.000You know, my question to him is not foreign policy, which he's obviously very good at and talks about, but how does he understand America and its problems today?
00:26:19.000I'm looking for someone who understands where we are and then of course would be an effective fighter.
00:26:26.000I don't mean to keep pushing Trump and I think it's way too early, but I think of all the talked about presidential candidates, I think he understands the stakes.
00:26:39.000Again, not always so great explaining it, but he understands the stakes and he has the courage.
00:26:45.000You know, Trump would probably be the worst president we ever had in any other time, but this time.
00:26:54.000But he has the attributes, the commitment to America, the courage, right?
00:27:01.000The willingness to attack political correctness, which is really a defense of America.
00:27:20.000And I do think that the people are with you and with this kind of idea that we're in this cold civil war.
00:27:26.000I was just in Fargo, North Dakota, with 1,500 people were there, and they were locked in, but they've been betrayed by their political class.
00:27:34.000I mean, their senators are negotiating multi-trillion dollar infrastructure packages behind their back.
00:27:39.000Their governor has gone totally COVID crazy, and they're wanting someone to actually fight for them.
00:27:45.000And that's why I called Donald Trump the bodyguard of Western civilization.
00:27:50.000He was the only one that was willing to actually defend our civilization against threats.
00:27:55.000And you don't hire a bodyguard for cocktail party conversation, right?
00:27:59.000You don't hire a bodyguard to go sit at the state dinner.
00:28:02.000You hire a bodyguard to protect you against the thugs that are going to try to burn down your family, your neighborhood, your home, or your business.
00:30:58.000As we said earlier, live and let live.
00:31:01.000We'll lose to do it our way or else every time.
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00:33:37.000Well, and this is what people don't understand is that the live and let live attitude is fine if you're in the hills of Vermont with 50 people and you have a commune, until all of a sudden someone says, you know what?
00:33:50.000No, I actually want to call the shots.
00:33:53.000Is that or here's or here's another way to look at it.
00:33:56.000Maybe you can do this, live and let live stuff.
00:34:00.000If all the population generally agrees on an understanding of justice yes, and what a just society looks like.
00:34:08.000But if all of a sudden it's happened now different understandings of justice, different understanding of a just society, then you got to fight.
00:34:17.000And in fighting you don't necessarily compromise, because if you compromise you're likely to end up on the enemy's turf, and the Republicans seem to do that all the time.
00:34:30.000You know when the moderate Democra Uh, Republicans agreed, have a commission to study January 6th.
00:34:43.000And that reflects, I think, of a lack of appreciation of where we are and failure to understand exactly how these moderates, Liz Cheney, for example, how they're going to be used.
00:34:57.000I mean, I think that was about the dumbest thing I can imagine.
00:35:02.000And so I want to ask you, and it's a very obvious question to you, but it won't be to our listeners.
00:36:09.000The woke comms have to do this to affect their agenda.
00:36:14.000And so people should understand that we're going to denigrate and eliminate the traditional mother, father, family, religion, education, which we've mostly eliminated.
00:36:29.000You end the peace, which I love with Abraham Lincoln, of whom I'm a massive fan of, because Lincoln was willing and he was prudent to do what was necessary to achieve something that was deemed impossible.
00:36:42.000You write, perhaps one of the people who voted to keep Lincoln's name on that San Francisco high school remembered that Lincoln at 30 years old, unknown beyond central Illinois, wrote about an aspirational fantasy, which was, I suspect, inspired by his heroes, George Washington and Henry Clay.
00:36:57.000If ever I feel worthy, Lincoln once said, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country deserted by all the world, and I standing up boldly and alone, hurling defiance at our victorious oppressors here without contemplating consequences.
00:37:11.000I swear eternal fidelity to that just cause of the land of my life, my liberty, and my love.
00:37:17.000But if after all we shall fail, be it so, we still have the proud consolation of saying to our consciousness, conscious, we never faltered.
00:37:27.000What can Lincoln teach us and also Churchill in times like this?
00:37:34.000He can teach us who we are, what we stand for.
00:37:38.000He can educate us on specific things like the founding, right?
00:37:42.000But basically, what he did was he explained what we were fighting for, why it was necessary to die for this cause.
00:37:55.000A cause, by the way, necessary not just to preserve freedom in America, but freedom around the world.
00:38:03.000Lincoln understood if democracy died here, it died everywhere for a long, long while.
00:38:10.000Now, Prue, you know, that quote that I used, which was supposed to be motivational, right?
00:38:19.000We're looking for a Lincoln at the moment.
00:38:24.000We're looking for someone with the sense of urgency that Lincoln communicates.
00:38:31.000This is what a great souled man looks like.
00:38:35.000Now, you said something that was very important, and that is Lincoln's prudence.
00:38:41.000He not only knew what was right, he not only knew the end goal, he knew how to get there, right?
00:38:48.000So he, he, it's kind of like Trump in a way that I think it's prudent to favor Trump at this moment because he fits, as I said before, the current circumstances.
00:39:04.000He may not even be prudent himself, but it may be prudent to vote for a man who fits the circumstances.
00:39:17.000And as you no doubt learned from your Lincoln fellowship, you know, prudence is the central aspect of statesmanship.
00:39:30.000And that is something that Churchill did about 100 years after Lincoln, not even about 80 years after Lincoln, in a totally different set of circumstances, but also eerily similar, where there was only a couple options, surrender or fight.
00:39:45.000And Lincoln had a very similar set of options in front of him.
00:39:49.000So in closing here, any specific marching orders for what people can do?
00:39:53.000Because you talk a lot about generals here, right?
00:40:21.000As you know, there's a bunch of national groups, not national political, but national not-for-profit groups who are organizing people running for school boards, local council, right?
00:41:19.000People in their own little way, standing up at a meeting and saying, this is nonsense, and then incurring the wrath or incurring the charges of racism.