00:00:09.000Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, we ask the question, how is it that civilizations are ripe for a revolution?
00:00:16.000We talk about Portland, Seattle, China, Venezuela, Cuba, and Russia.
00:00:20.000We tie it all together on a historically important foundational episode here on the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:00:26.000Please email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:30.000For the first 15 people that listen to just this episode, tell me that you have listened to this episode and tell me who you think the worst president in America is at freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:01:27.000His 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.
00:01:36.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:02:38.000Portland and Seattle are in a state of chaos.
00:02:42.000Now look, Portland and Seattle are some of the most left-wing, Marxist, quasi-totalitarian cities in the entire country.
00:02:50.000And it's easy to write off these two incredibly almost sovereign countries within our country as just, oh, that's left-wing, Seattle being Seattle.
00:02:59.000But there's a deeper lesson at play here.
00:03:01.000I want to dive deep into this episode of exactly what can we learn from what is happening in Portland and Seattle?
00:03:08.000And also what is happening in the news right now with the Trump administration mobilizing federal resources to try to solve these problems and these issues in our inner cities.
00:03:18.000I also want to ask the question, how do you get socialism in your country?
00:03:22.000We talk a lot about how socialism is growing in America, but rarely do we dive into the actual practicality of how socialist policies come to be and how socialist politicians are able to find a population of which their horrible and sinister and malevolent ideas are actually able to resonate.
00:03:43.000And so let's first focus in on what's happening in Seattle and Portland, and especially Portland.
00:03:48.000The main controversy happening right now is the deployment of federal troops on the streets of Portland to quell rioting and, quote, peaceful protests.
00:03:56.000Rioting that has been holding that city hostage and innocent business owners and bystanders for over 40 days.
00:04:04.000The Trump administration argues it retains authority to conduct law enforcement activities in cities where they are not welcomed by local officials, including in Oregon where Governor Kate Brown, one of the worst governors in America, insists that DHS withdraw and that Portland's mayor has made similar calls.
00:04:20.000Now, what exactly is the federal government responding to?
00:04:24.000Well, over this last weekend, rioters once again attempted to seize control of public property, both state and federal, eventually setting fire to the Portland Police Association building.
00:04:33.000The federal building in downtown Portland was also attacked when rioters tearing down barricades that were constructed to prevent the mob from overwhelming the facility.
00:04:41.000In a truly incredibly and historically weak response, still acting under the direction of Mayor Ted Wheeler, police, quote, ask the protesters to leave or face possible arrest.
00:04:51.000You don't ask when your police association building's on fire and when people are destroying federal property.
00:04:57.000Now, the move follows a similar announcement in Chicago.
00:05:00.000The Department of Homeland Security, DHS, is sending 150 federal agents to Chicago this week.
00:05:06.000Good for President Trump for doing this.
00:05:08.000The Homeland Security Investigations, HSI, agents are set to assist other federal law enforcement and Chicago police in crime fighting efforts.
00:05:17.000This is the type of movement that we need to restore order.
00:05:20.000Now, mind you, this is all after the creation of Chaz and CHOP in our country.
00:05:26.000This is all after statues, police departments set on fire, businesses in total flames.
00:05:34.000We're supposed to believe this is all because of the unjust killing and murder of George Floyd, of course.
00:05:41.000This all begs the question: how does something like this happen in America?
00:05:46.000How do you get a population that so willingly sacrifices the gift we have been given to live in this beautiful country?
00:05:53.000How does it make them ripe for a revolution?
00:06:13.000We talk frequently here at Turning Point USA.
00:06:15.000Whatever happens on college campuses will soon happen in corporate boardrooms, in the halls of Congress, and in the entire American culture.
00:06:23.000It's not just because of the media companies and the activist media and social media and Hollywood propagandizing a public to hate America.
00:06:32.000All of that has actually been happening for a couple decades.
00:06:35.000Now, mind you, it's much worse today than it was in the 1970s and 80s.
00:06:40.000But if we don't dive deep into the practicality of how a country becomes Marxist or socialist, and I mean economically, I mean financially, then we have an incomplete picture of how a country descends into tragedy.
00:06:57.000In 2015, according to multiple articles at Fortune.com, Businessweek, and many others, it says, quote, the middle class is no longer a majority of the country.
00:07:07.000There are many other figures and many other statistics to show this, one of which is by an economist by the name of Oren Cass.
00:07:15.000This was written up in the Washington Post and many other public media publications.
00:07:20.000And I'm not a fan of the Washington Post, but this study is completely true.
00:07:25.000It went to show this, that in 2020, you need to work 66 weeks in order to fulfill major household expenditures.
00:07:32.000And in it are the price of college, transportation, health insurance, and housing.
00:07:36.000Now, there's two parts to this metric.
00:07:37.000I don't think as many people need to go to college that are going to college.
00:07:40.000I think that health, insurance, and health care are going up dramatically because of government intervention, and we'll go into that.
00:07:46.000But a better metric is this, is that in 1985, you could work 36 weeks to be able to provide for a single family, a four-person family.
00:07:55.000Now you have to work 53 weeks in order to provide for one wage earner.
00:08:02.000Some people say that, well, the middle class is not disappearing.
00:08:14.000I think we definitely have nicer things.
00:08:17.000And for example, Kodak has gone out of business, but all of us have a supercomputer smartphone camera in our right-hand pocket.
00:08:24.000But that doesn't discount and that doesn't replace the fact that middle-income earners, primarily people that work with their hands, have been steadily disenfranchised.
00:08:34.000I really believe that the socialists intentionally use distraction issues such as the bathroom issue or things like pronouns, which I think are important.
00:08:44.000And I fight on those cultural issues, but a lot of them are kind of distracting versus the honest assessment of the economic decline of middle America.
00:08:54.000The middle class, or as Aristotle called the golden mean, has almost evaporated.
00:08:59.000And it is not because all of them got into the upper middle class.
00:09:05.000I encourage you to listen to our sister episode with Ben Shapiro, where I think we very politely disagree on this issue.
00:09:11.000I am a free market capitalist, but I also recognize that because of government policy, selfish politicians, and some, let's just say, anti-American corporations, the American middle class is in danger of going extinct.
00:09:24.000In fact, we almost have a permanent underclass that in one way or the other is dependent on the federal government and endlessly in debt.
00:09:31.000And then you have part of the 5% of America that has an incredible amount of wealth and income.
00:09:37.000And not necessarily at the expense of the rest of the country, but definitely it's not benefiting the rest of the country because they're primarily in information sharing industries where they have made decisions to deindustrialize our country and to bring back that capital to our country despite the predominant employment sector being in Wuhan or Shanghai.
00:10:03.000Now, mind you, in many places in Seattle and Portland, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles, there are microcosms of what happens when you allow leftist and radical policies to take root.
00:10:14.000Now, if you disagree the American middle class is evaporating, I just, it's a non-starter for me.
00:10:20.000Now, why it's evaporating, that's where we'll disagree with the left.
00:10:24.000I actually think it's because of FICA taxes, 8% of your earnings disappearing immediately, property taxes being too high, the cost of college being too high because of the federal government.
00:10:33.000I think it's actually because of left-wing ideas and because of too big of government, we are seeing the middle class be squeezed and destroyed.
00:10:42.000But income inequality is a real thing, and it's greater on the coasts and in the South than it is in the Midwest, incredibly, according to a 2019 report by the New York Federal Reserve.
00:10:52.000So basically, if socialism is the enemy that we are trying to prevent against, then we need to have an honest assessment of how that transition happens.
00:11:01.000We need to look at some real historical examples of what happens when skilled workers and those with college degrees have increasingly concentrated in large urban areas since the 1980s, which has happened here in this country.
00:11:14.000What happens when you leave rural America behind?
00:11:17.000And Detroit really exemplifies this trend.
00:11:20.000According to the New York Federal Reserve Report, increased global competition and tech advances precipitated massive job losses and plant closures in the auto industry, displacing lower and middle skilled workers, people that work with their hands.
00:11:34.000Make no mistake, when you no longer have a middle class in your country, when you allow your middle class to disappear, you are giving the socialists the greatest gift imaginable.
00:11:52.000We shouldn't discount, though, the history of how it became a communist country.
00:11:56.000We're going to go through three specific examples and a fourth one that is not as in-depth, but it's pretty obvious, which is we're going to go through the Cuban example, the Russian example, the Chinese example, and the Venezuelan example.
00:12:31.000He ruled through a series of different power struggles, but his most famous rule was from 1952 to 1959.
00:12:38.000Now, mind you, Cuba was plagued with massive illiteracy.
00:12:42.000The middle class had very little to any purchasing power.
00:12:46.000And business owners did not believe that their kids' life would be better than their life.
00:12:50.000This unfortunately led the way to a wannabe autocrat, a tyrant.
00:12:55.000One thing that human history tells us is that there will be no lack of self-righteous, evil, and pernicious tyrants that want to take power.
00:13:04.000Fidel Castro was locked up due to trying to rebel against Batista in the early 1950s.
00:13:11.000He met the anti-gay Marxist activist Che Guevara.
00:13:15.000They joined forces, and Che Guevara, alongside Fidel Castro, helped assume power in Cuba in 1959.
00:13:22.000Now, a lot of it was because the citizenry of Cuba lost faith in the very system that they were living in.
00:13:28.000A lot of the reason as to why Fidel Castro's awful ideas and his charismatic speeches were able to resonate with the middle-class Cuban is because the middle-class Cuban looked at Batista and looked at the capitalist system or the lack of a capitalist system as no longer working for them.
00:13:47.000Endless utopian socialist promises prey on the failures of a pre-existing ruling class.
00:13:54.000And some of those failures are very legitimate.
00:13:57.000I mean, Batista was not serving the best interests of the Cuban people.
00:14:05.000And some people, according to declassified CIA documents, Central Intelligence Agency documents of our country said that he was propped up by the United States government.
00:14:13.000That's still debated in a lot of different circles.
00:14:16.000So you have Castro, you have this tyrant, because the middle class of Cuba no longer felt invested in the status quo.
00:14:24.000It led to a perfect gateway to communism and socialism.
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00:15:10.000We obviously see the Chinese Communist Party today.
00:15:13.000But if you actually look at how Mao took power, he first took power in 1949 after a long power struggle, basically post-World War II, where Japan controlled a lot of Manchuria or it was then China.
00:15:26.000And Mao then took power in 1949, and he slowly but steadily implemented communist ideas.
00:15:32.000But in May 16th, 1966, Mao did something very different than most other communist leaders, and it was even different than Fidel Castro.
00:15:41.000He went on the most ambitious revolution, not economically, but tried to have a revolution in people's thinking.
00:15:49.000Mao recognized that most of the people of China post-World War II had no hope whatsoever that the prior little fiefdoms in China would continue to be able to portray faith in the general Chinese system.
00:16:06.000But in order for Mao to be able to assume total control of the country, he instituted a massive cultural revolution, a decade of slaughter, of blood, and totalitarianism.
00:16:20.000He created something called the Red Guard.
00:16:22.000The Red Guard were mostly young people.
00:16:24.000They traveled the country, destroying statues, burning books, and abolishing Chinese history.
00:17:05.000It was a little red book that was all 267 of the most famous quotations from Mao Sedong.
00:17:12.000In fact, there would be members of the Red Guard, which was their equivalent of the SS, that would go around and ask people, do you have your little red book with you?
00:17:22.000And if they didn't, they can go to prison.
00:17:26.000All loyal citizens were required to have a little red book.
00:17:30.000Now, this was made possible because there was not a vibrant and functioning middle class of people that owned private property that felt invested in their system.
00:17:40.000You allow incredibly evil people like Mao to take power when a majority of your country does not own anything.
00:17:48.000If a majority of your country owns nothing and does not believe that if they work hard and play by the rules a decade from now, they will be better than they are today, then all of a sudden like Mao starts to make sense.
00:18:00.000All of a sudden, someone like Mao actually, tragically, becomes very, very popular.
00:18:07.000And the same could be said for the transition in Russia.
00:18:10.000Now, for all intents and purposes, the Soviets could be considered as the world's first Marxists.
00:18:17.000Now, mind you, Marx was a mid-1800s author that theorized and complained about the mass industrialization happening in European cities.
00:18:29.000Marx made many different observations.
00:18:31.000Marx was a huge opponent to private property.
00:18:35.000Marx thought that work was inherently alienating, which is, of course, rubbish.
00:18:40.000He thought that modern work was insecure.
00:18:43.000He thought that workers get paid too little while their owners get rich and it's a primitive accumulation of wealth.
00:18:50.000That's a direct quote from the Communist Manifesto.
00:19:11.000And in fact, that's how we actually got a lot of the quasi-intersectional caucus between the radical feminists and the Marxists.
00:19:18.000And he wanted free public education and he wanted no private property at all whatsoever.
00:19:23.000And so Marx's ideas were really not taken very seriously at all during his time.
00:19:28.000It wasn't until a radical by the name of Vladimir Lenin were these ideas actually taken seriously.
00:19:34.000Vladimir Lenin was actually in prison.
00:19:36.000He was imprisoned for trying to cause a revolution against the Romanov dynasty in Russia and he was sent into a prison in Austria.
00:19:44.000As a way to try to break apart World War I, Vladimir Lenin was put in a rail car back to Russia in World War I and was told that, hey, why don't you go cause some trouble in Russia and try to begin the end of this war.
00:19:57.000And part of his contribution to the end of World War I was actually him causing so much chaos in Russia, it actually relaxed the Eastern Front.
00:20:05.000Now, Russia and the Russians were essentially the first Marxists.
00:20:08.000And you have to understand that the aristocracy all across Europe was crumbling.
00:20:13.000But what was really important is that in Russia, there was no middle class.
00:20:21.000And what the Marxists prey on are three of the worst attributes of the human psyche and how humans can actually operate: resentment, deceit, and arrogance.
00:20:32.000You combine those three, you're in a lot of trouble.
00:20:35.000Now, post-Lenin, you had Joseph Stalin.
00:20:40.000Joseph Stalin employed the worst possible tactics of a totalitarian.
00:20:46.000But the reason why Stalin was able to be successful as a common theme between Cuba, China, and the USSR, it was more than just cultural.
00:20:55.000It was more than just making persuasive arguments.
00:20:58.000It was more than just people not going to church.
00:21:01.000It was that people materially felt that their labor and their time and their dreams and their ambitions meant nothing.
00:21:10.000Stalin, for lack of a better term, was the gold standard of dictatorship.
00:21:15.000It was probably the most power you could possibly accumulate.
00:21:31.000He first instituted a series of edicts called collectivization.
00:21:38.000This collectivization was so dangerous and so destructive to the Soviet psyche because basically he went to the entire peasant class and he said, you cannot have more than a certain amount.
00:21:53.000In fact, there was an edict from the top that Stalin put forward to the peasant class that 25% of you are living too large and you will be punished because of that.
00:22:08.000He thought that Marxism was the transcendence of capitalism.
00:22:11.000Now, mind you, what's really amazing about the history of Joseph Stalin is he was actually a seminary student early in his life and he didn't just not believe in God.
00:22:46.000Stalin very well could have allowed capitalism to continue in the countryside.
00:22:52.000Stalin was assuming the first experiment in communism.
00:22:55.000Understand, the Romanovs ruled from 1613 to 1917 in Russia, basically 300 years.
00:23:02.000So people knew a status quo for 300 years.
00:23:05.000And one of the reasons that they basically rejected the provisionary government from the February Revolution of 1917 to the October coup that the Bolsheviks enacted in October of 1917 was because that provisionary government could not handle the question of industrialization as well as the Bolsheviks.
00:23:23.000The Bolsheviks had an answer: industrialization is awful.
00:23:26.000We must embrace communism and that the state should run the economy.
00:23:30.000Well, the people that had a lot of resentment and had a lot of anti-aristocratic feelings, sound familiar, and a lot of anti-ruling class resentment, sound familiar, all of a sudden embraced that.
00:23:47.000And when people owned nothing and they were in debt or had no resources, as it is today in America, all of a sudden, the demagogue and a dictator like Stalin and Lenin, they become incredibly popular.
00:23:58.000But Stalin was not, Stalin was not happy enough with just socialism in the cities, capitalism in the countryside.
00:24:06.000See, there are 120 million peasants, and capitalism in the countryside was actually working.
00:24:12.000Their ideology superseded the reality.
00:24:15.000You see, Stalin wanted communism so badly, he wasn't going to allow capitalism to continue in the countryside.
00:24:27.000See, the ideologues in America, they don't care what works.
00:24:30.000They just want themselves to be right.
00:24:32.000They want to be right more than what is good.
00:24:35.000The underlying, almost suicidal destruction of capitalism in the countryside resulted in the greatest famine that we know in human history.
00:24:47.000So he led a revolution against the kulaks.
00:24:50.000We've talked about this before on the Charlie Kirk show: of how Stalin wanted anyone that owned any sort of private property in the countryside to be destroyed.
00:24:59.000Stalin challenged his fellow ideologues whether they actually believed in Marxism.
00:25:05.000Because some of his fellow inner circles said, Joseph, don't actually go after the countryside.
00:25:22.000You see, the left, collectivists, or the Democrat Party in America today, they're never okay with just dominating their one little sphere of influence.
00:26:18.000Now, mind you, if there was privatization and not collectivization, the market would have compensated to have some resources be saved, some be stored away.
00:26:29.000A price system would have been enacted.
00:26:31.000And the market would have disallowed, basically, for mass famine, mass starvation to occur.
00:26:38.000Instead, five to seven million Ukrainians died.
00:27:12.000One-fifth of his regime died in 1932 because the starvation continued.
00:27:18.000And of the ethnic Kazakh population, one-third of them died.
00:27:23.000It was starvation, the likes of which the world has never seen.
00:27:26.000Not because the weather was worse, not because it was the worst uncontrollable disaster.
00:27:33.000This was the worst planned famine because of an ideologue named Joseph Stalin.
00:27:39.000Because prior to that, the Romanovs, they were unable to manage and produce a Russian middle class.
00:27:48.000Stalin continued to have quotas with very little concessions.
00:27:52.000And eventually, the entire peasant class was reduced from 120 million people to 80 million people.
00:27:59.000And if you dared disagree with Joseph Stalin, they would lock you up in prison, which then led to one of the most perplexing periods in American history, similar to Mao's Cultural Revolution, where he killed tens of millions of people.
00:28:11.000Mao probably killed anywhere between 60 to 100 million people.
00:28:15.000But Joseph Stalin then went on one of the most pathological, bloody campaigns in human history.
00:28:23.000You see, Stalin was committed and ideologically possessed to destroy capitalism.
00:29:00.000He wanted to almost break the will of his inner circle.
00:29:04.000Interestingly enough, if you study also Leon Trotsky, who is more popular in the West than in Russia, Leon Trotsky, they almost hated each other.
00:29:14.000They helped create the Leninist Russian Revolution and they ended up hating each other.
00:30:09.000He was murdered by Joseph Stalin with the confession that he was forced to sign splattered in his own blood as a signal to all the rest of the generals in the armed forces, you could be next.
00:30:24.000Joseph Stalin wanted the wholesale replacement of the elite and to make people confess for something they did not even commit.
00:30:36.000This incredible murder of innocents in Russia, in China, in Cuba, largely because the middle part of the country, as Aristotle called the golden mean, you see Aristotle dating all the way back to ancient Greece.
00:31:00.000Aristotle agreed with Plato on a lot of things.
00:31:02.000He disagreed with Plato and other things.
00:31:04.000Aristotle was so convinced that a middle class was necessary for a functioning society.
00:31:11.000That if you do not have that golden mean, and Cicero also talked about this, Cicero served as a Roman council in a lot of ways was a best-selling author of Roman times.
00:31:20.000That if you do not have people that think that their energy, their dreams are going to result in something better down the road, they will be ripe for a revolution.
00:31:31.000That in fact, those people will inevitably embrace the most malevolent ideas you could possibly imagine if they lose faith.
00:31:40.000You see, volatility is a precedent for authoritarian control.
00:31:46.000Traditionally, the American middle class has always been immune to these Marxist totalitarian movements for a couple reasons.
00:31:56.000The first of which was a faith in God is that it just, it didn't mix well.
00:32:01.000The middle class and most of the country was a very religious country.
00:32:04.000Believing in nothing and believing in societal redefinition, it just seemed so extreme compared to the teachings of loving your neighbor and the teachings of the Bible.
00:32:16.000As America has become less religious, it has become more likely to this Marxist experiment and these totalitarian revolutions we see happening in Seattle and Portland.
00:34:04.000And so the second reason as to why the American middle class, people that work for a living, earn between $60,000 to $80,000 a year in modern income terms, the reason why they've always been so resistant or reluctant to join with the Che Guevaras or the Joseph Stalins or the Vladimir Lenins or the Leon Trotsky's is because they bought into the system.
00:34:26.000They believed that the more they worked, the harder that they worked, eventually their life was going to improve.
00:34:34.000But if you look at the numbers here, and so you just look at the average debt burden in the country and consumer debt hit a new record of $14.3 trillion.
00:34:45.000And you look at credit card debt in particular, and student loan debt, which are, in essence, depreciating assets over time.
00:34:52.000You're just paying to service the debt.
00:34:54.000Credit card debt has a massive balance.
00:34:58.000The average American has about $38,000 in personal debt, excluding home mortgages.
00:35:02.000And that's up from $1,000 a year ago, according to Northwestern Mutual's 2018 planning and progress study.
00:35:08.000Now, mind you, I'm not indulging in victimology politics, Elizabeth Warren style, and blaming the evil capitalist companies because of this.
00:35:15.000I do think that corporations have to take more social responsibility for what they do.
00:35:19.000I think they've done an awful job of that.
00:35:20.000And when they fund BLM Inc., they're not exactly on my good list to want to get any sort of favors or goodwill or me to say nice things about them at all.
00:35:44.000Now, household debt is the only part of this, basically, if you're talking about mortgage debt, that I think is actually structurally okay.
00:35:51.000But the average debt burden, basically, right now, most middle-income earners are not going to be able to get debt-free by the time that they die.
00:35:59.000And so either that debt will be passed on to their kids or that debt burden will have to be reallocated somewhere else in the economy.
00:36:05.000And so going back to the number that I said earlier, according to Oren Cass, on a middle-income salary, median income, you have to work 66 weeks just to pay for modest expenses.
00:36:19.000That doesn't count saving, by the way, at all.
00:36:21.000And a lot of this also has to do with how we do our money supply.
00:36:25.000Again, I blame government for most, if not all of this, but it's a real problem.
00:36:31.000And to just ignore the economic aspect of this as being a gateway drug for socialism, I think is not looking at the full picture.
00:36:43.000And of course, part of it is cultural.
00:36:45.000Of course, part of it is the fact that we teach our kids to hate America.
00:36:51.000However, I look at my parents' generation.
00:36:54.000In some ways, these Marxist ideas were actually more fashionable in the 60s and 70s than they are now.
00:36:59.000I know that might sound very unusual, but in the 60s and 70s, there was a steady pro-Marxist movement within our universities that had widespread support.
00:37:10.000You just look at the 60s and 70s protest war music.
00:37:13.000A lot of it was pro-communist symbology.
00:37:17.000A lot of it was about fighting the man and empowering voices such as Angela Davis and many others.
00:37:24.000Why is it that people in the late 60s and all throughout the 70s, why is it by the time that they were in the 1980s and 1990s, they were voting for Ronald Reagan?
00:37:32.000And they kind of just turned their back on the nonsense that they were taught by these radical professors.
00:37:37.000And now, mind you, I'm not for a second saying that the radical infiltration of our cultural institutions has not worsened since the 1970s.
00:37:48.000I'm just saying that it was there then and it's also here today to some extent.
00:37:52.000And the reason is that this is reason number three, and it ties in reason number two why the middle class has always been immune to these sorts of revolutions is because those college graduates, my father's generation and my mother's generation in the 1970s and 1980s, they kind of saw their life improve after a few years after graduating college.
00:38:14.000By the time they were 28 or 31 or 35, they saw their incomes going up.
00:38:23.000They were able to buy a home, buy a car, start a family.
00:38:26.000And that kind of off-the-wall rant from Angela Davis or those extreme writings from Jacques Derrida resonated far less as soon as you own a home and you're able to take your family on vacation.
00:38:40.000The question today, for someone who is 32 that graduated college a decade ago and is $75,000 in debt, the question is this.
00:38:51.000Can you live a decent life without having to go into debt?
00:38:56.000And so we went through all of the debt burden in America and the fact that you're not even able to save, let alone survive on a middle-income salary.
00:39:08.000A lot of it is because of too high taxes and regulation and lack of social mobility and entrepreneurship.
00:39:13.000And some of it is because we decided to ship away all of our core industries to China and to third world countries and act as if we're getting richer because of it because we have mountains of plastic in our garage that we never use.
00:39:25.000I don't think it's total and complete surrender to the free market God that we must act as if it's a religion.
00:39:32.000And I definitely don't think it's a complete and total blame game on all things capitalist.
00:39:37.000I think it's mostly because of government.
00:39:39.000And I think capitalism and free enterprise is mostly the solution, absolutely.
00:39:44.000But if we're honest with ourselves, we have leveraged the labor and the totality of our citizenry, which mostly has benefited the economic elite, but severely harmed the everyday citizen.
00:40:01.000We have lived beyond our capable means as a society, going $26 trillion in debt and devaluing our currency and getting people addicted to government programs.
00:40:10.000And we have grown the size of government, the second reason, so tremendously and increased taxes because of it.
00:40:16.000And so I think we must be very honest with ourselves: if we want to prevent these totalitarian autocrats from taking power, BLM Inc. and Nicole Hanna-Jones, the new hostile takeover of the New York Times,
00:40:30.000if we are worried about these resentful, deceitful, and arrogant totalitarians from taking power, we must get very serious that if we don't address the economics and we don't convince the 42-year-old right now in Lakeland,
00:40:47.000Florida, who has not seen their wages go up and they're $38,000 in debt, if we don't communicate to them and convince them truly, not just through messaging and persuasion, that yes, America is actually improving for you, which it was mostly during the Trump economy, but those days are gone because of the lockdowns that will go down as some of the worst mistakes in American history, not just because of the virus, but because of how we reacted to the virus.
00:41:10.000If we are not able to convince them of this, then the socialists will win.
00:41:36.000But in Venezuela, they had a very rich country that respected private property rights.
00:41:42.000And unfortunately, because of corruption and using government regulation to their favor, nine families basically controlled everything in Venezuela, which led the way to a communist revolution.
00:41:53.000So all four examples in Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and China is a commonality that when people don't own anything, or even worse, as we have it in America, when people owe more than they own, which was the case in Russia in the post-war order because there was so much structural debt that was poured upon Russia, people are going to overturn the tables.
00:42:13.000People are going to say, I don't have to live like this.
00:42:18.000I don't think this is functional or healthy, and I don't think it's sustainable.
00:42:22.000And so I think this is a huge lesson from the Trump era.
00:42:26.000Because if we think that the middle-class revolt is only going to be pointed in the direction of the totalitarians and the socialists, we're fooling ourselves.
00:42:36.000I think a couple years from now, what I'm saying right now will be tragically true.
00:42:40.000When a charismatic, pro-worker, pro-middle-class, and non-culturally insane socialist starts to communicate about what I am saying and the decline of the middle class, they're going to have a lot of support in middle America if we don't get this right.
00:42:56.000And it's more than just corporate tax cuts.
00:42:59.000And it's definitely not DACA amnesty deals that is going to be able to improve the lives of the middle-income worker in Tennessee.
00:43:09.000The three things that the socialists always have in common, always, is a utopian vision.
00:43:17.000They are willing to say that anyone that has more than you got it by stealing, almost communicating to the cane-like aspect of our psyche.
00:43:28.000And Jordan Peterson talks about this brilliantly.
00:43:31.000And also, they are willing to destroy everything and anything till you get what you want.
00:43:41.000Nihilism, which is the belief in nothing, coupled with Marxism, occurs and sets in when people lose faith that their actions, good decisions, make little difference to their own life and society as a whole.
00:43:58.000It becomes even more accelerated when you see your rulers continually live lavishly while you toil incessantly just to go further into debt.
00:44:11.000When Gavin Newsom keeps the winery that he's a co-owner or partner with, if he keeps that open in California but keeps everything else closed, that brings in a form of cynicism, if not nihilism.
00:44:24.000Especially when you are working just to survive and your rulers get bailout money when they don't need it.
00:44:31.000When Amazon's market share increases so dramatically and you've had to go into debt in this shutdown and this lockdown, you start to ask yourself the question, does this work for me?
00:44:46.000And you pair all of that with the non-stop cultural assault from the 1619 project and the decline of our schools.
00:44:55.000You have the foundational aspects and the introductory ingredients for exactly what Castro was able to parachute into because Batista was such an awful leader and people were widespread, illiterate.
00:45:11.000He didn't take care of the Cuban middle class and Castro capitalized on it.
00:45:16.000It's why Lenin took power post-Romanovs.
00:45:19.000It's why Chavez took power in Venezuela.
00:45:22.000And it's why Mao was able to hypnotize an entire country using his little red book.
00:45:28.000I think we as conservatives have a misplaced obsession on just the cultural side.
00:45:35.000And mind you, my whole organization is focused on winning the American culture war, on being able to make persuasive arguments, on making sure that people love their country.
00:45:48.000But if you have a middle-class worker in Minnesota that believes America is the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world, but they really truly believe cynically that the country is rigged against them economically and materially, how is that sustainable as a country?
00:46:10.000And every example I point to is a mixture of culturally charismatic, pathological tyrants that are able to insert themselves into a moment of time when the middle class is so economically depressed and depleted, they take advantage of it.
00:46:29.000And that's what you see on the left today.
00:46:32.000There's a beautiful parable in the Bible of the parable of the sower.
00:46:36.000And Christ talks about where it's the inverse of the parable, and it's incredibly applicable.
00:46:43.000Where Christ says certain people will hear the message and they will decide to ignore it.
00:46:49.000Some people will hear the message and decide to grow with it.
00:46:51.000And that's the seeds that are planted in the soil.
00:46:56.000And part of the parable is seeds that are basically thrown onto dirt or to rock and they are not able to grow.
00:47:04.000And essentially, no plant is able to flourish.
00:47:08.000That was Marxism and communism in the 1970s.
00:47:12.000The seed being communism and Marxism, something bad, not something good in the parable of Christ.
00:47:18.000And the seed of Marxism basically was thrown on rock because most of the people it was being thrown on my father's generation in the 70s and 80s, when they heard these ideas and they entered the workforce, they kind of just ignored it.
00:47:33.000And they said, yeah, I kind of have a good job and I like this country and I found someone I want to marry and I have kids and that was all a bunch of nonsense and let's not do that.
00:47:40.000And the ideas kind of just stayed to 10 to 15% of the American population of people that were relentlessly bitter and resentful.
00:47:48.000But now you have those very same Marxist seeds that are being thrown down and they're being thrown down on very rich soil.
00:47:55.000Because now you have a 28-year-old that is $60,000 in debt with little to no job opportunities because they studied something silly at some left-wing coastal university that taught them to hate the country.
00:48:08.000There may be a barista, and you see their parents are not doing well either.
00:48:12.000So they are almost in cultural and economic harmony with the generation prior to them because their parents are probably very far in debt.
00:48:20.000And all of a sudden, those rants and those raves and the Castro speeches that they were forced to copy verbatim and almost the modern-day equivalent of the little red book is white fragility, where I don't think, I think the modern-day equivalent of the little red book is the 1619 project, where they're going to stop you on a college campus and make you recite the 267 incantations of Mao, which is now the incantations in Nicole Hanna-Jones.
00:48:47.000And now, all of a sudden, that nonsense that was downloaded and uploaded into a young person's brain, when they are economically hopeless, they then take action on all those bad ideas.
00:49:00.000Those seeds, as Christ told us in the parable of the sower, are now finding rich soil.
00:49:07.000And that rich soil is 30 million people of my generation that own nothing.
00:49:15.000They can't engage in capitalism because they have no capital.
00:49:21.000And so don't be surprised when all of a sudden they're the ones that have these Bernie Sanders signs.
00:49:27.000And as a way to make themselves more culturally cohesive and as if they fit nicer into the broader tapestry of American life, they've rejected God and they find their religion in movements like BLM or the environmentalist movement or the anti-gun movement.
00:49:45.000Human beings operate in awfully predictable patterns.
00:49:48.000You're never going to remove the need or the desire for a connection to a greater power or a greater purpose.
00:49:58.000Just because you have destroyed the Episcopalian and Presbyterian and Baptist church in New York City, all but destroyed it, basically.
00:50:06.000That doesn't mean all of a sudden that that left-wing activist who lives in Brooklyn who is $80,000 in debt and is barely getting by being a bartender and a cocktail waitress like Alexandria Casio-Cortez, nothing demeaning or wrong with that.
00:50:20.000It doesn't mean that just because they're not going to the Baptist church on Sunday doesn't mean that they're not going to go somewhere to find meaning.
00:50:26.000Instead, they're going to go to some BLM protest meetup once a week to find common values and goals and objectives, what the church used to do and actually did behind absolute truth.
00:50:37.000Now they find that meaning in some sort of social revisionist history seminar.
00:50:46.000And this all sows the seeds to end the analogy for a jungle of socialism that is growing in Seattle, Portland, New York, San Francisco, that is incredibly dangerous.
00:51:01.000And so, yes, it is our cultural institutions that have abdicated their role in the public arena.
00:51:06.000It absolutely is The propaganda arm of the Democrat Party, which is Netflix and Hulu and Google and all these other companies that give preference to these ideas, but those ideas would fall flat and those ideas would not be able to flourish or grow if they were communicating to a generation of young people that were flourishing.
00:51:32.000Those ideas wouldn't really have any sort of resonance or traction if they were talking to a generation of young people that were saving money.
00:51:43.000And you have a generation that is eternally indebted.
00:52:15.000Now, mind you, it's not every single person that is in this category, but this is very generally true.
00:52:20.000And even if these people have a decent job, even if my generation is able to get a little ahead of the curve economically, they're not even able to keep pace enough to pay their skyrocketing debt and housing expense.
00:52:35.000When you don't own anything, you have no stake in your country.
00:52:41.000And then all of a sudden, someone like Vladimir Lenin or Alexandria Casio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders starts to resonate with you.
00:52:50.000And then more and more start to feel disenfranchised.
00:52:54.000And you couple that with a propaganda machine that teaches you to feel victimized.
00:53:01.000And if you feel that you can't afford a family, which essentially is a critical part of our Declaration of Independence, literally it says for our posterity.
00:53:11.000Our declaration was written for future generations.
00:53:13.000It was written for an intergenerational compact of liberty and freedom and for an investment in the future.
00:53:19.000If you feel like you can't even financially afford a family, then you definitely don't have an investment in the country at all.
00:53:27.000And that's why so many people are silent when 1619 starts to take over the country.
00:53:33.000If you were flourishing economically, BLM and 1619, it would fall flat.
00:53:40.000And so when you are taught to be a victim and then you're so far into debt because of some decisions that you might have made or some decisions that were made around you, and again, I'm not, it's very avoidable.
00:53:52.000And I'm a big believer in individual agency and action.
00:53:57.000I handicap that less because so many young people and so many parents have been sold this idea that you must go to college to succeed and you must get yourself out of debt very quickly to get that piece of paper and then you'll be able to flourish.
00:54:09.000And I value that so much less today than ever before.
00:54:16.000But if we do not come up with a set of policies that are either rooted in free market capitalism or rooted in holding corporate America accountable or whatever it might look like and definitely not around the ideas of Warren and Sanders and Biden and all those incredibly dangerous, malevolent exploitationists.
00:54:34.000But if we do not have an agenda to get the middle part of our country reinvigorated, we're done.
00:54:41.000All of a sudden, you are going to see either a Chinese, Russian, Cuban, Venezuelan-style Marxist revolution come take our country because the precedent for all of those is a middle-class decline.
00:54:52.000When you don't own anything and you are just meandering around society in debt, barely surviving, you are ripe for a revolution, which is exactly what we're living through today.
00:55:05.000And this is probably one of the most structurally dangerous trends that I see in our country.
00:55:24.000Middle class wages were going up and they're not going up anymore.
00:55:28.000A lot of middle-class families are not even in the marketplace anymore.
00:55:32.000Millions and millions of people out of work.
00:55:34.000Price of goods are going to go up because we have decided to create $5 trillion.
00:55:39.000And we are going to do an episode either this week or next week called Inflation is Coming, How the Central Bank's Creation of Money Out of Thin Air Actually Hurts the Middle Class and Lower Class the Most.
00:55:49.000Because when you don't own anything, when you are not invested in the society and you are just renting, then when you just create a bunch of money, you are going to get hurt the most.
00:55:59.000When you don't own property, when you don't own securities, you're the one that's going to get priced out of the system when all of a sudden you have 7% inflation.
00:56:08.000I mean, if you wanted to destroy the country, you would take these sequence of steps.
00:56:12.000If you wanted a socialist revolution, you would destroy the American middle class.
00:56:17.000And I'm talking about someone who just earns $70,000 a year, has three kids, wants what is best for them, wants to take one vacation a year, wants to take weekends off, enjoy their favorite sports team, will never commit a crime, go to church on Sunday, save a little bit for themselves and their kids, and go retire nicely when they hit 60 or 70.
00:56:39.000That should be built into the American Compact right now economically.
00:56:44.000And just being kind of deferential and saying, oh, that doesn't matter and people have to make it for themselves.
00:56:49.000I mean, that probably is true in an absolute extreme individual initiative argument.
00:56:55.000But my broader argument is that's not sustainable.
00:56:59.000That if you lose that promise, if you lose that guarantee, then all of a sudden the people that we as conservatives fear the most will assuredly take power.
00:57:11.000That you will get a Vladimir Lenin in our country sooner rather than later.
00:57:18.000So in a future episode, maybe this week or next week, I am going to go through a middle-class compact of some material things that I think we can do to improve the American middle class.
00:57:29.000Because we have now talked about the problem.
00:57:31.000We've identified how the destruction of the American middle class from a debt standpoint and from an income standpoint has led to this current status quo and why BLM Inc. and the 1619 project and why all this has great resonance.
00:57:46.000So please email me your suggestions, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com, your recommendations and your suggestions as to certain policy ideas that you think that we can have a promise for the American middle class.
00:57:59.000In fact, we might do that episode tomorrow.
00:58:00.000I think that would be a fun episode to do.
00:58:02.000A compact or a contract with the American middle class because we've diagnosed the problem and then we want to be a solution-based show.
00:58:09.000Please consider supporting our show at charliekirk.com slash support, charliekirk.com slash support.
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00:58:26.000Please email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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00:58:57.000Stay tuned tomorrow for a compact and contract with the American middle class so that we can solve this decline of the backbone of our country.