The Charlie Kirk Show - My Conversation with Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, happy Saturday.

00:00:01.000 What a week it has been with Virginia and New Jersey all across the country.

00:00:07.000 And this Saturday we want to bring you a partnership.

00:00:10.000 Actually, it's a perfect word to use because the word college actually comes from the word partnership with our college that we love here on the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:19.000 Hillsdale College, the beacon of the North, the place where real learning gets done.

00:00:27.000 We have the president of Hillsdale College, Dr. Larry Arn, the last college you could call Hillsdale College, where they talk about Christianity, faith, theology, liberty, truth, America.

00:00:39.000 I have learned so much from Dr. Larry Arn over the last year and a half and especially, or last year and a half, especially.

00:00:48.000 And before we get into that conversation, I want to tell you more about our partnership with Hillsdale College.

00:00:52.000 I have completed eight online courses.

00:00:55.000 It is my goal to finish every single online course that they offer.

00:00:59.000 It takes work and things in life that are meaningful.

00:01:04.000 It take work, takes commitment.

00:01:07.000 I asked Dr. Arne about this in our conversation, and I could definitely agree with this in my own personal life, which is we want to point upwards.

00:01:16.000 We want to go towards things that matter.

00:01:19.000 I know in my own personal life, when I push myself to keep climbing to eternal things, to beautiful things and good things, I find that fulfilling.

00:01:28.000 And I wouldn't have told you that five or six years ago.

00:01:31.000 Not that I wouldn't have thought it mattered, but as you start to realize the more you learn, the less you know when you thought you knew it all.

00:01:40.000 So we've partnered with Hillsdale College, charlie4hillsdale.com, for you to be able to take the very same courses that I think will actually help you make sense of some of the things we talk about here on this program.

00:01:51.000 We are going a million miles a minute sometimes and dropping names like John Locke and Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato.

00:02:02.000 Who were these guys?

00:02:03.000 Were they important?

00:02:04.000 From Shakespeare to Winston Churchill, Hillsdale has courses on all that stuff.

00:02:10.000 And they're interactive.

00:02:11.000 They're easy to learn, easy to understand.

00:02:14.000 It takes work.

00:02:15.000 It takes time.

00:02:16.000 But I'm right now working through their American Civil Rights course.

00:02:19.000 It's incredible.

00:02:20.000 I never knew there was so much depth to the history of civil rights in America.

00:02:25.000 And as I told many of you, I have finished the Western Heritage course all about Rome, ancient Greece, the medieval period, all the way up to the glorious revolution.

00:02:37.000 I got an 85% on that test, actually.

00:02:40.000 So maybe you're at a stage of life where you feel as if there is something missing.

00:02:46.000 And maybe you come to this podcast to learn something.

00:02:49.000 Well, let's learn together.

00:02:50.000 That's what we're doing at Hillsdale College.

00:02:52.000 Their mission is to try and supply the nation with the information, the knowledge, and the wisdom, which is the knowledge of things that do not change, to anyone who wishes to learn.

00:03:05.000 I believe right now when we have chaos and uncertainty around us, it's the perfect time to learn.

00:03:13.000 It's the perfect time to open up books and pursue big ideas.

00:03:16.000 And that's exactly why I've been so enthused and so excited to tell you about this partnership and work through it.

00:03:23.000 We have a fair amount of people that are already taking these courses, and I know that it will enrich your life.

00:03:28.000 And if you have children, or if you are a college student or high school student, these classes will help give you another side of the story if your teacher is teaching all this left-wing, Marxist, post-modernist, deconstructionist, socially relativistic, atheistic garbage.

00:03:44.000 I think the Hillsdale Online Course can help you at charlie4hillsdale.com.

00:03:48.000 Or if you're homeschooled and you're just looking for a little bit of an addition to what you're already teaching your children, I think that it can be very beneficial to you.

00:03:58.000 I asked Dr. Arn about what does education mean?

00:04:02.000 And Dr. Arne goes through in great detail why we need to dismiss this phrase.

00:04:08.000 Oh, we just want to teach young people how to think, not what to think. 0.98

00:04:12.000 He says that's a bunch of rubbish. 0.76

00:04:14.000 So charlie4hillsdale.com, check it out. 0.98

00:04:16.000 It's free of charge.

00:04:17.000 You guys can go through the courses.

00:04:18.000 You just put your email in there.

00:04:20.000 You can download them as podcasts.

00:04:22.000 I know personally, even with my hectic schedule, 90 minutes a day I dedicate towards learning.

00:04:27.000 I know a lot of you can't do that because I'm literally in the business of teaching at times.

00:04:32.000 And so therefore, I need to always be learning.

00:04:34.000 But I encourage you guys to just put part of your schedule saying we want to pursue things that are eternal, beautiful, good, and true.

00:04:41.000 And I love hearing from you when you guys email us freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:04:45.000 Two more short things.

00:04:46.000 I'm really excited to see all of you in Phoenix, Arizona at AmericaFest, tpusa.com slash A-M-F-E-S-T, December 18, December 19, December 2021.

00:04:57.000 We have Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., Candace Owens, Jesse Waters, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and so many other amazing speakers, including my wife, will be there as well.

00:05:07.000 Tpusa.com slash a mf.

00:05:11.000 You can get your tickets today.

00:05:13.000 In fact, we're running out of space.

00:05:14.000 We're anticipating well over 10 000 people.

00:05:17.000 Tpusa.com slash amf.

00:05:20.000 While you're at it, start a high school or college chapter.

00:05:22.000 Every young person out there should get involved with their Turning Point USA chapter on their high school or college campus today.

00:05:28.000 I want to thank all of you that support our show at Charliekirk.com slash.

00:05:31.000 Support you.

00:05:32.000 Allow us to continue to grow strong and remain honest with all of you.

00:05:38.000 Okay, dr Larry Arn is here.

00:05:40.000 We talk about education, we talk about the founding fathers and he is so wise, so get your pens out, start taking notes and I hope this course actually I hope this conversation motivates you to enroll in one of their free online courses, charlie4hillsdale.com.

00:05:58.000 It's time to learn.

00:05:59.000 Everybody, buckle up.

00:06:00.000 Here we go.

00:06:01.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:06:03.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:06:05.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:06:09.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House.

00:06:10.000 Folks, I want to thank Charlie.

00:06:13.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:06:14.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:06:16.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

00:06:21.000 Turning Point USA.

00:06:22.000 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.

00:06:31.000 That's why we are here.

00:06:34.000 Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk show.

00:06:36.000 With us today is someone who has taught me more than anyone else in the last year and a half.

00:06:41.000 I have listened to hundreds of hours of his lectures and read many of his books and honored to have him on the show today.

00:06:46.000 The president of Hillsdale College, where we have a great partnership together.

00:06:50.000 Charlie4hillsdale.com, dr Arene, honored to have you with us today.

00:06:54.000 It's great to be with you.

00:06:55.000 I've become a great admirer of Charlie Kirk.

00:06:59.000 Well, thank you, and you've taught me quite a lot.

00:07:02.000 I tell everyone that your Aristotle course really touched me and strengthened my beliefs in a variety of ways.

00:07:09.000 So, dr Arn, To start with this open question, and we see this in the news lately: of what is education?

00:07:14.000 What is the purpose of education?

00:07:16.000 I see a lot of people kind of fumbling that recently, even people on the center right that would call themselves conservatives, people that say, Well, we got to teach people how to think, not what to think, or we got to listen to kids and give them what they want.

00:07:28.000 What is the purpose of education?

00:07:30.000 And that's not the how to how to think, not what to think.

00:07:34.000 If you just think about it for a minute, it's silly, right?

00:07:37.000 Do we want to raise them up to think that the moon is made out of green cheese?

00:07:42.000 Uh, so the point is, if you step back from our mechanistic engineering society, which touches across the political spectrum, by the way, education is not like making anything, it's like helping something to grow.

00:08:00.000 But the growth is in the thing, right?

00:08:04.000 You can plant an acorn all day long and you'll never get a pine tree out of it, right?

00:08:09.000 No matter how you cultivate it.

00:08:12.000 So, education is growth.

00:08:16.000 Now, you know, the Latin word education means to lead forth, educare, and that raises the question: which way is forth?

00:08:27.000 And that means, you know, the Bible says, train up a child in the way he should go, which is not the same thing as the way he wants to go in all cases.

00:08:37.000 But of course, people do want to grow to be fully what they are.

00:08:42.000 So, education is just helping them learn.

00:08:45.000 And you have to step back again in another way, too, because human beings love to know.

00:08:52.000 The first line of Aristotle's metaphysics: the human being stretches himself out to know.

00:08:59.000 We want to know.

00:09:01.000 And that means in any class, it's just highly likely that if you've got something interesting to talk about, the kids will be interested.

00:09:11.000 And what we think is all the focus, it's across government and it's rooted in education.

00:09:18.000 We think it's something we do to people and we don't.

00:09:23.000 So, some parents are saying that they are dissatisfied, they are angry at what's happening at the local school district for good reason.

00:09:34.000 In response, we see the American Federation of Teachers and Randy Whitgarten say that parents have no role in their kids' education.

00:09:43.000 In the ideal, Dr. Arne, what is the parents' role in education?

00:09:48.000 Well, they're partners in it.

00:09:51.000 In the ideal situation, I mean, first of all, see, parents are in the same position as teachers, by the way.

00:10:00.000 You know, I have four children, and now I have a grandchild, and I have another one on the way.

00:10:04.000 And the current grandchild is the most important being on earth.

00:10:10.000 And my wife and I are going to help her parents raise her.

00:10:14.000 But that doesn't mean we're going to make anything out of her.

00:10:17.000 We're going to help her be what by nature she is born to be.

00:10:22.000 And she is going to do it.

00:10:24.000 And, you know, she's 11 months old.

00:10:27.000 You can already see her working on that.

00:10:30.000 So parents are like teachers.

00:10:33.000 Now, what should happen is the parents should join with the teachers.

00:10:37.000 They should be involved.

00:10:39.000 And, you know, in any partnership, you know, the word college, by the way, means partnership.

00:10:45.000 And parents are in the partnership.

00:10:48.000 And you have to agree the terms of the partnership.

00:10:53.000 But if you do, then you can cooperate.

00:10:56.000 You're all trying to get the same thing done.

00:10:59.000 I noticed about homeschools, by the way, that very encouraging thing.

00:11:03.000 Homeschooling itself is very good and it's growing very fast now because this point you make that people are sick of the schools.

00:11:12.000 A great exciting thing is co-ops.

00:11:15.000 Parents get together and pool their resources and their children and they teach them, take turns, hire somebody sometimes, right?

00:11:26.000 In other words, they're building a school and a school is a natural thing.

00:11:35.000 Schools are as old as Plato's Academy or older.

00:11:40.000 So yeah, they should be in the schools.

00:11:43.000 And see, here's another point.

00:11:44.000 The curriculum, K through 12, almost everything that's taught are things that anybody can know if they have common sense and take trouble to gather knowledge and think about it, right?

00:12:03.000 And that means that expertise is not the thing in school.

00:12:07.000 In fact, at almost any level, you know, you don't have to be a rocket scientist unless you're teaching rocket science.

00:12:17.000 And so schools can be, must be, should be transparent.

00:12:24.000 And that means parents can understand too.

00:12:27.000 Of course they can.

00:12:29.000 And this whole deal, you quoted the guy from the teachers' union, that we're just the experts and you know nothing.

00:12:39.000 Think what that would mean if it was true.

00:12:41.000 It means that you're not competent to raise your own child.

00:12:46.000 Yes.

00:12:47.000 And then what work is there for you in the world then?

00:12:50.000 What can you do?

00:12:51.000 Everything.

00:12:53.000 Here's a great episode from the life of Winston Churchill.

00:13:00.000 When the socialists beat him after the cataclysm of the war, they put a guy named Mr. Douglas Jay, he's famous, for this statement, in charge of education.

00:13:14.000 And there weren't any ministry of education back then, but he was the guy working on it.

00:13:20.000 And he said this, and he made the terrible mistake of making it in the hearing of Winston Churchill.

00:13:25.000 He said, mothers don't often know what's best for their children.

00:13:33.000 The gentlemen in Whitehall know better.

00:13:35.000 Whitehall is the governing center of England.

00:13:38.000 The gentlemen in Whitehall know better, right? 1.00

00:13:42.000 That's just exactly like that idiot Terry McAuliffe in Virginia. 0.99

00:13:49.000 In other words, because we're scientifically trained in some way, by the way, and almost none of these bureaucrats are actually scientifically trained because you can't be scientifically trained in this kind of thing. 0.99

00:14:04.000 So, yeah, it just, and just remember, these arguments that lie behind the administrative state will deprive us of the ability to operate as effective human beings because everything will have to be done for us.

00:14:20.000 And we are then mere subjects in every sense, like subjects of a tyrant, but also like subjects of all of their work upon us.

00:14:31.000 And that's it's just despotic.

00:14:33.000 And it's, you know, very entrenched.

00:14:37.000 And one of the reasons I think education is important is, you know, you, Charlie Kirk, are a young phenomenon.

00:14:47.000 And have you got married yet?

00:14:50.000 Yes.

00:14:51.000 Back in May.

00:14:52.000 So you got yourself a girl now, a lady, and you got to take care of her, right? 0.99

00:14:56.000 And that means your domain is growing.

00:15:00.000 And it starts with the family.

00:15:03.000 And no matter what success you have in your life, and I expect you're going to have a lot more, if you get yourself some kids, which I encourage, then what you will know because they live is that there will be that many people who think something is extremely important has happened the day you die.

00:15:24.000 You'll have this relationship with them, and it's sacred and it's tight and it can't go away.

00:15:31.000 If it's destroyed, the resentment will last forever.

00:15:36.000 And so that's the first thing: the primary human experience.

00:15:42.000 After that, you got to make a living.

00:15:45.000 You got to get your bread from the sweat of your face, as Lincoln would say.

00:15:50.000 And that is sacred to people.

00:15:53.000 And then the last thing is your contact with the divine, which is written in every reflection you have about right and wrong, every perception you have about what things are and how they fit and in what order.

00:16:07.000 You're always thinking about God when you're thinking that way.

00:16:10.000 That's something you said you liked about this course in Ethiopia.

00:16:13.000 We taught on the ethics, which is Aristotle just explains that sublimely.

00:16:19.000 And that means that those three things, right?

00:16:22.000 Your family and your work and your contact with the divine as a moral, intellectual, responsible agent, those are the three fundamental elements of human life.

00:16:36.000 And Lord, they're messing with them all.

00:16:39.000 And that means there'll be nothing left for us to do.

00:16:41.000 And I think what happened in Virginia is people are coming to see that now.

00:16:46.000 I completely agree with that.

00:16:48.000 And so I want to kind of zero in on one thing you mentioned, which is debated, which is if education means to lead forth, and I learned this in a Hillsdale online course.

00:16:59.000 So for everyone listening, go to charlieforhillsdale.com and check it out.

00:17:03.000 It's a phenomenal course on Western philosophy and just intro to philosophy.

00:17:08.000 The lead forth, I believe, Dr. Arne, you could correct me, is from the allegory of the cave, is where that imagery came from, where it's a lead forth from darkness into light, which is, so then what is the proper way to lead children?

00:17:23.000 That is the debate in some ways, because there is three types of camps right now in the education debate that I'm able to perceive.

00:17:31.000 One that wants to lead children forth towards critical race theory, an emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion, the 1619 project.

00:17:39.000 Another camp that says, we're not going to make any truth claims.

00:17:42.000 We're just going to show the kids everything that's out there and they can kind of go through the buffet line and choose as they see fit.

00:17:48.000 But then there's another way, I would call it the Hillsdale way or the classical education way that says we're going to lead them forth towards truth, towards people of strong character, or I learned from you, which means that which is etched in like tattoo.

00:18:00.000 So, Dr. Arn, can you help explain that a little bit?

00:18:03.000 Because some parents get nervous when you say you're going to lead them forth to something and say some things are better than others.

00:18:09.000 Well, remember the caveat, they're going to make the trip, right?

00:18:16.000 You don't grow for the plant, you just nourish it.

00:18:19.000 And if you nourish it right, it will grow better.

00:18:22.000 But yeah, so the first thing, you know, in this day and age, it's kind of extreme.

00:18:30.000 And so this thing that I think is always true in education is especially important today.

00:18:36.000 And that is all you do is show them, help them figure out what things are.

00:18:42.000 And it starts with what they are.

00:18:44.000 What are you?

00:18:45.000 What kind of thing are you?

00:18:47.000 How are we able to have this conversation?

00:18:49.000 That's one reason why Aristotle is so great.

00:18:52.000 Because he explains all that, right?

00:18:55.000 But just think, now compare Aristotle's account of the human being, which, you know, anybody can understand, by the way.

00:19:04.000 I mean, it takes some work to divine it directly from Aristotle, but Aristotle says, how do you see the cup on the table and know what it is?

00:19:16.000 How do you do that?

00:19:18.000 First of all, what is the cup on the table?

00:19:21.000 And what he says is, like everything that's a being, it's an essence.

00:19:27.000 It's not just matter, because you could grind it up and it'd be just a pile of matter, right?

00:19:34.000 It has a form.

00:19:36.000 It has something to hold it together as what it is.

00:19:40.000 And the reason we can see its essence is because we have a receptive soul.

00:19:49.000 Whatever is holding this cup together, I've got one in my hand, whatever is holding that together is also working on my intellect to build it in there.

00:20:03.000 And he says the intellect is nothing before it thinks.

00:20:08.000 It is only what it thinks.

00:20:11.000 And that means it's more perfectly receptive than anything except God.

00:20:17.000 Now, an immaterial thing cannot have a color, right?

00:20:27.000 And so when they teach that your race is a structural feature of your being, they are telling the students it is impossible for you to have objective knowledge of anything.

00:20:38.000 It destroys the enterprise at the first step.

00:20:42.000 And, you know, that's all materialism, communism, socialism, Nazism, all of those things.

00:20:49.000 What they do is they reduce the human being to matter.

00:20:53.000 And so education, and you're not going to get all that in kindergarten.

00:20:59.000 Education has to be built on the assumption from the first day that you are a free being able to think and comprehend and speak.

00:21:10.000 And reason and speech are synonyms in Greek.

00:21:12.000 Logos is the word, right?

00:21:15.000 And so you start on the first day and you're telling them that.

00:21:19.000 You're displaying that in various ways.

00:21:21.000 And as they gain knowledge and character, the way is open for them to understand even that slightly complex thing that I just explained.

00:21:30.000 And, you know, the best of them will be reading Aristotle's Deonima, which is not a simple book, but it is a beautiful book.

00:21:37.000 That argument about the soul, that is in book three of chapter four of Deanima, which is Latin for the soul.

00:21:47.000 The Greek is perisuc. 0.99

00:21:48.000 Suce is soul.

00:21:50.000 That's where we get psychology from.

00:21:52.000 And that chapter, book three, chapter four, is about four pages long.

00:21:58.000 Now, they're difficult pages, but they're very worth understanding.

00:22:02.000 And things like that should be put out as a goal to students early.

00:22:07.000 Like, you know, you think you're going to, like there's a proscription in literature today that you do not privilege the text over the reader.

00:22:22.000 What that means is don't tell them that this is good or bad.

00:22:25.000 Let them make up their own mind, right?

00:22:28.000 And, you know, when they're young, you're establishing a point already, and that is whatever claims about excellence are made are questionable, right? 0.99

00:22:41.000 Maybe even foolish. 0.80

00:22:44.000 So instead, what you do is you want students to learn Shakespeare. 0.99

00:22:49.000 You want them even to learn to love it.

00:22:54.000 But you have to start by telling them, this is very valuable.

00:22:58.000 This is a wonderful thing.

00:23:00.000 You're going to see the beauty of it.

00:23:03.000 In other words, that's how you lead them.

00:23:07.000 You show them a way up.

00:23:10.000 They have to travel that way.

00:23:12.000 I had a kid say to me one time, my dad made me go to church.

00:23:22.000 And I said, good.

00:23:23.000 And he said, he never thought to ask me if I should go.

00:23:28.000 And I said, of course not.

00:23:31.000 And he said, why is that right?

00:23:33.000 And I said, because, first of all, he thinks it's valuable.

00:23:37.000 Telling you that's neutral, that's a position too.

00:23:41.000 Telling him it's bad, that's a position, right?

00:23:44.000 But by taking you to church, he could be certain that in the end, you would have to make up your own mind, as you have just demonstrated.

00:23:56.000 And he said, how did I demonstrate that?

00:23:58.000 I said, by asking me that question about your dad.

00:24:02.000 In other words, you're not, you have to get them on a road to build their essential skills, which are reading, writing, and arithmetic, and their knowledge.

00:24:14.000 And as they learn to evaluate, they will be able to question whatever they need to question.

00:24:19.000 Whereas if you start them off with the final answer, which is nothing is true except what we think is true, then that crushes all questing for knowledge.

00:24:33.000 Education works that way.

00:24:36.000 It needs to be enthusiastic.

00:24:39.000 It needs to be presented to the students as good, as good for them, as good to know, as beautiful thing to know.

00:24:47.000 And, you know, by the time they get to college, it's a, you know, the way we proceed around here is, first of all, we, you know, everything is open to question.

00:24:59.000 But that doesn't mean the teachers and the college are not very influential with the kids because we have a structure here.

00:25:05.000 And, you know, you can't get into this college unless you commit to the structure.

00:25:11.000 That means you have to be a volunteer.

00:25:14.000 And we even explain at the moment that they volunteer that they can't right now understand everything they're getting themselves into.

00:25:21.000 They will be able to think it through while they go.

00:25:24.000 And that means they're free and their freedom is cultivated in them by the discipline of learning.

00:25:32.000 That's education.

00:25:34.000 So, Dr. Arn, you say this in some of your interviews where some freshmen or sophomore students will say, well, Dr. Arne, I feel or I think a certain way.

00:25:44.000 And you'll say, well, I don't really care about how you think.

00:25:45.000 Can you talk about that?

00:25:46.000 Because that's an interesting way to put it.

00:25:49.000 Maybe I'm miscategorizing it, but it's a different way than most colleges would do it, which is to say, well, the students know best.

00:25:57.000 We got to listen to them first and foremost.

00:25:59.000 Well, so, you know, I'll illustrate with a story.

00:26:04.000 Many years ago now, 15 years ago or something, I had a young man stand up and it's a crowd, a big, big crowd of people, four or five or six hundred of them.

00:26:14.000 And he said, if I come to Hillsdale, will you respect my opinion? 0.98

00:26:20.000 And I said, yeah, we don't give a crap about that. 0.98

00:26:24.000 And everybody laughed. 0.97

00:26:26.000 And I said, are you 18 years old, 17 years old?

00:26:33.000 What can your opinion be worth?

00:26:36.000 And I said, shouldn't you be about the business of improving your opinions until they approximate the truth?

00:26:44.000 By the way, you also will not be encouraged to respect my opinion.

00:26:50.000 You will be encouraged to respect the forming of opinion into truth.

00:26:55.000 And that's a lifelong effort.

00:26:57.000 But first, by the way, you have to learn a bunch of stuff in order to go about it.

00:27:02.000 I think I asked a young man at one point, he, you know, that young man's a graduate of Hillsdale College now.

00:27:08.000 He asked me, he said, Should I go to Hillsdale or should I go to Princeton?

00:27:11.000 And I said, You should go to Princeton.

00:27:14.000 And he said, Why do you say that?

00:27:15.000 I said, Did you name Princeton because it's very prestigious?

00:27:19.000 And he said, Well, it is.

00:27:21.000 I said, Good.

00:27:22.000 If that's what you want, you should go there.

00:27:25.000 But if you want to hold to your opinion and be prestigious, go to Princeton.

00:27:32.000 What if you want to know the truth?

00:27:34.000 That takes some finding out.

00:27:37.000 And it's no good me just telling it to you.

00:27:40.000 You know, I know some things that are true and can argue for them, but why are they true?

00:27:46.000 How do they fit into all the other things that are true?

00:27:49.000 That's a quest you have to go on.

00:27:51.000 And so that's the thing.

00:27:53.000 You know, it's, you know, the great question to ask young people is always why.

00:28:00.000 You know, I get kids come up to me wanting to get into Hillsdale College, which turns out it's difficult to get into now.

00:28:07.000 And they'll say, I'm a conservative and I'd like to go to Hillsdale College.

00:28:12.000 And I always say, What's a conservative?

00:28:15.000 It turns out it's kind of hard to define that word, right?

00:28:19.000 Because there are lots of things.

00:28:21.000 How do you know which ones to conserve?

00:28:25.000 You know, there's a lot that need destroying.

00:28:28.000 And so, you know, eventually you'll reach the definition that, first of all, all such definitions depend upon a claim that the thing is good.

00:28:38.000 And, you know, because only good things.

00:28:40.000 And then, and then that raises the question: what makes a thing good?

00:28:46.000 Which are the prime subject in the Socratic dialogues, for goodness sake, right?

00:28:51.000 Some of the most important and beautiful things ever written, exploring all the time what is it for a thing to be good.

00:28:59.000 Aristotle does that too.

00:29:01.000 And so you've got to get kids on that quest, and then their souls will elevate and they'll become good at figuring out things that are good and not good.

00:29:13.000 And that's, you know, that's what education is.

00:29:17.000 Well, I can say that taking the online courses and reading your work, Dr. Arne, I've been on that journey and it's been so fulfilling.

00:29:25.000 And I might have got a later start than I would have liked, but it's been nourishing to my soul.

00:29:31.000 So I want to ask you about one of your books, The Founder's Key, and kind of a series of arguments you make in that book and the lectures that you do around this topic.

00:29:41.000 I think it ties into some of the national news items today around our history and also education.

00:29:48.000 So it's a good segue.

00:29:50.000 In the book, you make the argument that the Declaration and Constitution fit almost perfectly within one another.

00:29:57.000 This argument is rejected by a lot of academics.

00:30:01.000 They think they're actually two separate types of documents, and the Constitution was fixing the errors of the Declaration of Independence.

00:30:08.000 You argue that the Declaration is kind of our birthday, our birth certificate.

00:30:14.000 And that's a big deal where the French or the Chinese or other nations, you could kind of approximate within a couple hundred years where they started, but not a specific date and a moment.

00:30:23.000 Please explain that to our audience and just also about the exceptionalism of our founding and a little bit of what you talk about, the connection, the divine connection between the Declaration of the Constitution.

00:30:34.000 Okay.

00:30:35.000 Well, you know, first of all, remember, it's conservative scholars when they differ with the Declaration of Independence who say that the Constitution fixed its errors.

00:30:44.000 The liberals think that the Constitution blemished the Declaration of Independence.

00:30:51.000 And my argument, I claim it's the true argument, is that they're hand in glove.

00:30:57.000 And that's easy to demonstrate on just these simple grounds.

00:31:01.000 First of all, there's a wide overlap between the people who wrote them.

00:31:06.000 Second, they didn't understand the Declaration as a departure.

00:31:11.000 I mean, there's a historical record about that.

00:31:14.000 The third thing is just read the documents, right?

00:31:18.000 The Constitution gives its chief task is to give a structure of government.

00:31:25.000 And the structure is a beautiful thing.

00:31:27.000 It's worth thinking about for years about that thing, because remember, the first three articles of the Constitution are each about a branch of government.

00:31:37.000 And the branches are separate.

00:31:40.000 And the reason for that, Madison says, is because something about the human soul.

00:31:47.000 Men are not angels, and angels do not govern men.

00:31:51.000 And so you would only entrust all the powers of government to God.

00:31:57.000 Now, come to find out.

00:31:58.000 In the Declaration of Independence, God appears four times.

00:32:03.000 He appears as the creator, which is the equivalent of a founding father.

00:32:09.000 He appears as the maker of the laws of nature and of nature's God, the legislative branch.

00:32:15.000 He appears as divine providence.

00:32:20.000 That's the executive branch.

00:32:23.000 And he appears as the supreme judge of the world, the judicial branch.

00:32:29.000 And those are the four times he occurs.

00:32:31.000 And the lesson, even in the Declaration of Independence, is you put all those powers in one set of hands if they were God's hands.

00:32:40.000 Then inside the Declaration of Independence, because you know, the Declaration of Independence is in three parts, a beautiful beginning that's a kind of universal statement of the authority under which they are proceeding.

00:32:53.000 And they needed that, by the way, because they're getting ready to throw off the English law, and they need something outside and above that to start.

00:33:04.000 And they start with the laws of nature and nature's God.

00:33:07.000 The last part is the legislative act, very grand.

00:33:11.000 Appealing to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, we hereby declare these free and independent states.

00:33:22.000 So that's the legislature.

00:33:24.000 In the middle is the case.

00:33:27.000 They make a case against the king.

00:33:29.000 That case is introduced at the end of the first part when they say, prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established will not be changed for light and transient causes.

00:33:41.000 In other words, you need an argument why it's right to do this crazy thing.

00:33:46.000 And so they make the case.

00:33:48.000 And the case is in 17 paragraphs.

00:33:51.000 And the paragraphs are about the bad things the king did.

00:33:58.000 He interfered with representation.

00:34:02.000 That is to say, he messed with the legislative branch.

00:34:05.000 He prevented elections.

00:34:07.000 He prevented the legislatures from meeting.

00:34:11.000 The case is about violating separation of powers.

00:34:15.000 He makes himself more than one branch of government.

00:34:21.000 And then the third thing is he deprives people of government.

00:34:27.000 He won't let them make any laws.

00:34:30.000 And so if you just think about it, what would it, if you just read all of those charges and think, what kind of procedure would it take to remedy all these evils he's done?

00:34:43.000 And the answer you get is the Constitution of the United States.

00:34:47.000 And that's how they wrote it.

00:34:50.000 And so this idea, and see, they also are related in this way.

00:34:57.000 The Declaration of Independence is a statement of principle.

00:35:00.000 And the word principle is a very interesting word because it means beginning in its root.

00:35:07.000 It means the first thing.

00:35:09.000 But for the thing to be a thing to be a first thing in a series of things, what makes the things into a series?

00:35:18.000 The answer is they all share the same essence, right?

00:35:23.000 So that means the word principle has to be a statement of essence.

00:35:26.000 It has to mean this thing means this.

00:35:30.000 This thing is this.

00:35:33.000 That's what the Declaration of Independence does.

00:35:36.000 Although it outlines, now, for anything to be a being, I'm using these complicated words, I can't help it.

00:35:45.000 They've become familiar to me.

00:35:47.000 For anything to be a being or an entity, it has to have something more than a principle.

00:35:56.000 It has to have a form.

00:35:58.000 It has to be shaped in a way.

00:36:00.000 It has to be something you can look at and see.

00:36:03.000 And the form of the government is named in the Constitution of the United States.

00:36:11.000 If you want to know what the United States looks like when it acts, it looks like three branches of government.

00:36:20.000 And you can actually visibly see it because if you, you know, which I do not encourage, if you watch TV, don't.

00:36:30.000 If you're still going to watch TV, don't watch the news.

00:36:33.000 Read instead.

00:36:34.000 Or listen to the radio.

00:36:35.000 It's better.

00:36:37.000 But a big event happens in the government.

00:36:40.000 The TV cameras will be outside the White House because the executive branch has acted, or outside the Capitol, because the legislative branch has acted, or outside the Supreme Court because the judicial branch has acted, right?

00:36:56.000 And that's what America looks like when it's acting as a whole.

00:37:01.000 Now you have to have the principle or the final cause, and you have to have the form or formal cause in order to have an entity, a being.

00:37:12.000 And they each are necessary and related.

00:37:17.000 Now, it's interesting about the Constitution that they made a form, the Articles of Confederation, during the Revolution, and they regarded it quickly as faulty.

00:37:33.000 And what was wrong about it?

00:37:35.000 Well, you know, first of all, it doesn't have separation of powers.

00:37:40.000 It doesn't have an executive that can act and a judiciary that can check the executive.

00:37:48.000 And it doesn't have legislatures that can empower the action. 0.70

00:37:52.000 And then the worst thing about it of it all is because our form of government is so radically from the bottom up.

00:38:03.000 We authorize and make the government.

00:38:06.000 The government does not authorize and make us.

00:38:09.000 And the trouble was the Article of Confederation were passed in the ordinary legislature.

00:38:15.000 And that meant that it couldn't be an authority above them.

00:38:20.000 And that's what Madison says in a very important document called The Vices of the Political System of the United States.

00:38:26.000 One of the documents that led to the Constitutional Convention, he says that's a fatal flaw, right?

00:38:34.000 We, the Constitution of the United States, is the only law that the people as a whole have ever passed.

00:38:43.000 And then, by the way, the method by which they passed it, which was constitutional conventions appointed by the people, especially for this purpose, singularly for this purpose, and then that whole method disappears, right?

00:38:58.000 So we make a law, and it can be the supreme law because it's the only one we ever made.

00:39:03.000 And the only partial making of it after that are the amendments to the Constitution.

00:39:10.000 And that means those are all recurrences to extraordinary method so that the ultimate authority of the people can remain above the government.

00:39:21.000 Now, I said that the I just described the United States as a in form as a relatively simple thing, three branches of government.

00:39:31.000 But of course, there are now 150 or so, it's actually controversial how many there are, law-making bodies in America.

00:39:40.000 It's very difficult to name them all, right?

00:39:42.000 But they make laws through procedures that are quite outside the Constitution, and they make the great majority of our laws now.

00:39:51.000 That's the reason there can be so many laws.

00:39:55.000 And that's a change in the form that is, in my opinion, extremely threatening to our liberty.

00:40:03.000 And we have to subject those agencies again to the legislature.

00:40:08.000 And that's their ways of doing that.

00:40:10.000 There are plans for that that have been partially, one of them is passed the House of Representatives.

00:40:15.000 That is to say, if a regulatory act is not ratified by the legislature within a certain period of time, it becomes null.

00:40:30.000 And then you'd have to have some checks so they don't just automatically ratify them all without thinking about it.

00:40:36.000 And this is a fundamental change in American government.

00:40:41.000 If you look at each of the three articles, the first three, there's seven in the original Constitution.

00:40:49.000 They all begin: this power shall be invested in, right?

00:40:54.000 So legislative, judicial, and executive.

00:40:58.000 Only in the first one, only in the legislative power, does it say all the legislative power shall be invested in.

00:41:07.000 And that's very important because the doctrine, there's a chapter in John Locke's second treatise on government about this on the delegation of the legislative power, he says.

00:41:18.000 And that's a great evil, dangerous, right?

00:41:22.000 And so the greatest single overturning of the Constitution is the creation of this administrative state.

00:41:29.000 And my opinion is we got to bring it back under control.

00:41:33.000 Well, I totally agree.

00:41:34.000 And for people that want to learn more about it, they can go to charlieforhillsdale.com.

00:41:39.000 And Dr. Arn, I want to next time talk to you about Churchill and Lincoln.

00:41:43.000 But unfortunately, we're out of time for this conversation.

00:41:46.000 And I just want to reiterate our gratitude to Hillsdale College for what they're doing for our nation.

00:41:51.000 Just in primus alone, I think makes America a more free place, not to mention their online courses, which, as I mentioned, have really blessed me.

00:42:01.000 And we have lots of people taking the online courses, Dr. Arnon, and they're finding great fulfillment in them.

00:42:06.000 So thank you.

00:42:07.000 I really enjoyed this conversation.

00:42:09.000 And together we're going to keep fighting for liberty.

00:42:13.000 Let's save the world, Charlie.

00:42:14.000 We can do it.

00:42:17.000 I like the sound of that.

00:42:17.000 Thanks so much, Dr. Arn.

00:42:18.000 Talk to you soon.

00:42:19.000 Take care.

00:42:22.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:42:23.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:42:25.000 And if you want to support our show, you can do so at charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:42:30.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.

00:42:34.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - November 06, 2021

My Conversation with Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College

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