The Charlie Kirk Show - Portland on Fire, The Death of the Middle Class, and the Slow Creep of Socialism in America

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00:00:08.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:09.000 Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, we ask the question, how is it that civilizations are ripe for a revolution?

00:00:16.000 We talk about Portland, Seattle, China, Venezuela, Cuba, and Russia.

00:00:20.000 We tie it all together on a historically important foundational episode here on the Charlie Kirk Show.

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00:01:12.000 Super fun episode here.

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00:01:15.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

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00:01:25.000 I want to thank Charlie.

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00:02:38.000 Portland and Seattle are in a state of chaos.

00:02:42.000 Now look, Portland and Seattle are some of the most left-wing, Marxist, quasi-totalitarian cities in the entire country.

00:02:50.000 And 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.

00:02:59.000 But there's a deeper lesson at play here.

00:03:01.000 I want to dive deep into this episode of exactly what can we learn from what is happening in Portland and Seattle?

00:03:08.000 And 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.

00:03:18.000 I also want to ask the question, how do you get socialism in your country?

00:03:22.000 We 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.

00:03:43.000 And so let's first focus in on what's happening in Seattle and Portland, and especially Portland.

00:03:48.000 The main controversy happening right now is the deployment of federal troops on the streets of Portland to quell rioting and, quote, peaceful protests.

00:03:56.000 Rioting that has been holding that city hostage and innocent business owners and bystanders for over 40 days.

00:04:04.000 The 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.

00:04:20.000 Now, what exactly is the federal government responding to?

00:04:24.000 Well, 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.

00:04:33.000 The federal building in downtown Portland was also attacked when rioters tearing down barricades that were constructed to prevent the mob from overwhelming the facility.

00:04:41.000 In 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.

00:04:51.000 You don't ask when your police association building's on fire and when people are destroying federal property.

00:04:57.000 Now, the move follows a similar announcement in Chicago.

00:05:00.000 The Department of Homeland Security, DHS, is sending 150 federal agents to Chicago this week.

00:05:06.000 Good for President Trump for doing this.

00:05:08.000 The Homeland Security Investigations, HSI, agents are set to assist other federal law enforcement and Chicago police in crime fighting efforts.

00:05:17.000 This is the type of movement that we need to restore order. 0.92

00:05:20.000 Now, mind you, this is all after the creation of Chaz and CHOP in our country. 0.96

00:05:26.000 This is all after statues, police departments set on fire, businesses in total flames.

00:05:34.000 We're supposed to believe this is all because of the unjust killing and murder of George Floyd, of course.

00:05:41.000 This all begs the question: how does something like this happen in America?

00:05:46.000 How do you get a population that so willingly sacrifices the gift we have been given to live in this beautiful country?

00:05:53.000 How does it make them ripe for a revolution?

00:05:56.000 How do you get socialism?

00:05:58.000 How do you get this very dangerous intersection of Marxist communism and nihilism?

00:06:05.000 Let's dive deep.

00:06:06.000 It's not just because of the cultural institutions that are teaching our kids to hate America.

00:06:11.000 That plays a huge role.

00:06:13.000 We talk frequently here at Turning Point USA.

00:06:15.000 Whatever happens on college campuses will soon happen in corporate boardrooms, in the halls of Congress, and in the entire American culture.

00:06:23.000 It's not just because of the media companies and the activist media and social media and Hollywood propagandizing a public to hate America.

00:06:32.000 All of that has actually been happening for a couple decades.

00:06:35.000 Now, mind you, it's much worse today than it was in the 1970s and 80s.

00:06:40.000 But 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.

00:06:57.000 In 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.

00:07:07.000 There are many other figures and many other statistics to show this, one of which is by an economist by the name of Oren Cass.

00:07:15.000 This was written up in the Washington Post and many other public media publications.

00:07:20.000 And I'm not a fan of the Washington Post, but this study is completely true.

00:07:25.000 It went to show this, that in 2020, you need to work 66 weeks in order to fulfill major household expenditures.

00:07:32.000 And in it are the price of college, transportation, health insurance, and housing.

00:07:36.000 Now, there's two parts to this metric.

00:07:37.000 I don't think as many people need to go to college that are going to college.

00:07:40.000 I think that health, insurance, and health care are going up dramatically because of government intervention, and we'll go into that.

00:07:46.000 But 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.

00:07:55.000 Now you have to work 53 weeks in order to provide for one wage earner.

00:08:02.000 Some people say that, well, the middle class is not disappearing.

00:08:06.000 We have nicer things now.

00:08:07.000 We also have entirely new categories of goods, iPhones, laptops, multiple TVs in the home.

00:08:12.000 And then we have creative destruction.

00:08:13.000 I think some of that is true.

00:08:14.000 I think we definitely have nicer things.

00:08:17.000 And for example, Kodak has gone out of business, but all of us have a supercomputer smartphone camera in our right-hand pocket.

00:08:24.000 But 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.

00:08:34.000 I really believe that the socialists intentionally use distraction issues such as the bathroom issue or things like pronouns, which I think are important.

00:08:44.000 And 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.

00:08:54.000 The middle class, or as Aristotle called the golden mean, has almost evaporated.

00:08:59.000 And it is not because all of them got into the upper middle class.

00:09:03.000 It just isn't.

00:09:05.000 I encourage you to listen to our sister episode with Ben Shapiro, where I think we very politely disagree on this issue.

00:09:11.000 I 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.

00:09:24.000 In fact, we almost have a permanent underclass that in one way or the other is dependent on the federal government and endlessly in debt.

00:09:31.000 And then you have part of the 5% of America that has an incredible amount of wealth and income.

00:09:37.000 And 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.

00:10:01.000 It's a serious problem.

00:10:03.000 Now, 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.

00:10:14.000 Now, if you disagree the American middle class is evaporating, I just, it's a non-starter for me.

00:10:20.000 Now, why it's evaporating, that's where we'll disagree with the left.

00:10:24.000 I 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.

00:10:33.000 I 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.

00:10:42.000 But 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.

00:10:52.000 So 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.

00:11:01.000 We 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.

00:11:14.000 What happens when you leave rural America behind?

00:11:17.000 And Detroit really exemplifies this trend.

00:11:20.000 According 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.

00:11:34.000 Make 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.

00:11:45.000 Let's look at some real examples.

00:11:47.000 How about Cuba?

00:11:49.000 Cuba is a communist country.

00:11:52.000 We shouldn't discount, though, the history of how it became a communist country.

00:11:56.000 We'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.

00:12:08.000 So start with Cuba.

00:12:09.000 It's obviously in the northern part of the Caribbean.

00:12:12.000 It's the pearl of the Antilles, if you will.

00:12:15.000 In May of 1902, Cuba was granted independence from the United States of America.

00:12:20.000 Fast forward in 1940, it created a new constitution, and someone with a very fun-sounding name, Flugencio Batista.

00:12:29.000 Flugencio Patista.

00:12:31.000 He ruled through a series of different power struggles, but his most famous rule was from 1952 to 1959.

00:12:38.000 Now, mind you, Cuba was plagued with massive illiteracy.

00:12:42.000 The middle class had very little to any purchasing power.

00:12:46.000 And business owners did not believe that their kids' life would be better than their life.

00:12:50.000 This unfortunately led the way to a wannabe autocrat, a tyrant.

00:12:55.000 One 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.

00:13:04.000 Fidel Castro was locked up due to trying to rebel against Batista in the early 1950s.

00:13:09.000 He fled to Mexico City.

00:13:11.000 He met the anti-gay Marxist activist Che Guevara.

00:13:15.000 They joined forces, and Che Guevara, alongside Fidel Castro, helped assume power in Cuba in 1959.

00:13:22.000 Now, a lot of it was because the citizenry of Cuba lost faith in the very system that they were living in.

00:13:28.000 A 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.

00:13:47.000 Endless utopian socialist promises prey on the failures of a pre-existing ruling class.

00:13:54.000 And some of those failures are very legitimate.

00:13:57.000 I mean, Batista was not serving the best interests of the Cuban people.

00:14:01.000 Castro did worse.

00:14:02.000 But Batista was a failed leader.

00:14:05.000 And 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.

00:14:13.000 That's still debated in a lot of different circles.

00:14:16.000 So you have Castro, you have this tyrant, because the middle class of Cuba no longer felt invested in the status quo.

00:14:24.000 It led to a perfect gateway to communism and socialism.

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00:15:08.000 How about in China?

00:15:10.000 We obviously see the Chinese Communist Party today.

00:15:13.000 But 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.

00:15:26.000 And Mao then took power in 1949, and he slowly but steadily implemented communist ideas.

00:15:32.000 But in May 16th, 1966, Mao did something very different than most other communist leaders, and it was even different than Fidel Castro.

00:15:41.000 He went on the most ambitious revolution, not economically, but tried to have a revolution in people's thinking.

00:15:49.000 Mao 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.

00:16:06.000 But 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.

00:16:20.000 He created something called the Red Guard. 0.71

00:16:22.000 The Red Guard were mostly young people.

00:16:24.000 They traveled the country, destroying statues, burning books, and abolishing Chinese history. 0.83

00:16:30.000 Sound familiar?

00:16:31.000 Over 16 million dissidents were sent to death camps and labor camps.

00:16:37.000 Throughout this decade of the Cultural Revolution, Mao broke the back of the Chinese middle class.

00:16:44.000 In fact, there is not a worker in China that was allowed to report to work that did not have Mao's, quote, little red book.

00:16:53.000 I encourage all of you to check out Mao's little red book.

00:16:56.000 And by the way, I talk to so many college students about this.

00:16:59.000 They know nothing about Mao's little red book.

00:17:01.000 Do you know what Mao's little red book was?

00:17:03.000 It was literally a little red book.

00:17:05.000 It was a little red book that was all 267 of the most famous quotations from Mao Sedong.

00:17:12.000 In 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?

00:17:22.000 And if they didn't, they can go to prison.

00:17:23.000 It was total top-down indoctrination.

00:17:26.000 All loyal citizens were required to have a little red book.

00:17:30.000 Now, 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.

00:17:40.000 You allow incredibly evil people like Mao to take power when a majority of your country does not own anything.

00:17:48.000 If 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.

00:18:00.000 All of a sudden, someone like Mao actually, tragically, becomes very, very popular.

00:18:07.000 And the same could be said for the transition in Russia.

00:18:10.000 Now, for all intents and purposes, the Soviets could be considered as the world's first Marxists.

00:18:17.000 Now, mind you, Marx was a mid-1800s author that theorized and complained about the mass industrialization happening in European cities.

00:18:29.000 Marx made many different observations.

00:18:31.000 Marx was a huge opponent to private property. 0.95

00:18:35.000 Marx thought that work was inherently alienating, which is, of course, rubbish.

00:18:40.000 He thought that modern work was insecure.

00:18:43.000 He thought that workers get paid too little while their owners get rich and it's a primitive accumulation of wealth.

00:18:50.000 That's a direct quote from the Communist Manifesto.

00:18:52.000 He thought profit was theft.

00:18:53.000 Well, how are you supposed to have a market?

00:18:55.000 Well, how are you going to make anything without profit?

00:18:56.000 That's such nonsense.

00:18:58.000 He thought that capitalism was inherently very unstable.

00:19:02.000 And he thought that capitalism is actually bad for capitalists.

00:19:05.000 He argued that marriage is a business relationship.

00:19:09.000 It was a commodity fetishism. 0.97

00:19:11.000 And in fact, that's how we actually got a lot of the quasi-intersectional caucus between the radical feminists and the Marxists.

00:19:18.000 And he wanted free public education and he wanted no private property at all whatsoever.

00:19:23.000 And so Marx's ideas were really not taken very seriously at all during his time.

00:19:28.000 It wasn't until a radical by the name of Vladimir Lenin were these ideas actually taken seriously.

00:19:34.000 Vladimir Lenin was actually in prison.

00:19:36.000 He was imprisoned for trying to cause a revolution against the Romanov dynasty in Russia and he was sent into a prison in Austria.

00:19:44.000 As 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.

00:19:57.000 And 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.

00:20:05.000 Now, Russia and the Russians were essentially the first Marxists.

00:20:08.000 And you have to understand that the aristocracy all across Europe was crumbling. 0.68

00:20:13.000 But what was really important is that in Russia, there was no middle class.

00:20:17.000 There was resentment.

00:20:18.000 It was a depressed society.

00:20:21.000 And 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.

00:20:32.000 You combine those three, you're in a lot of trouble.

00:20:35.000 Now, post-Lenin, you had Joseph Stalin.

00:20:40.000 Joseph Stalin employed the worst possible tactics of a totalitarian.

00:20:46.000 But 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.

00:20:55.000 It was more than just making persuasive arguments.

00:20:58.000 It was more than just people not going to church.

00:21:01.000 It was that people materially felt that their labor and their time and their dreams and their ambitions meant nothing.

00:21:10.000 Stalin, for lack of a better term, was the gold standard of dictatorship.

00:21:15.000 It was probably the most power you could possibly accumulate.

00:21:19.000 He ruled for over 30 years. 0.77

00:21:22.000 I mean, by comparison, Adolf Hitler only ruled for about 12 years. 0.81

00:21:28.000 Stalin almost three times as long. 0.82

00:21:31.000 He first instituted a series of edicts called collectivization.

00:21:38.000 This 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.

00:21:53.000 In 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.

00:22:08.000 He thought that Marxism was the transcendence of capitalism.

00:22:11.000 Now, 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.

00:22:19.000 He hated the idea of God.

00:22:21.000 He famously, before he died, shook his fist up to the heavens and said, I will finally get you, God, or something of that variation.

00:22:29.000 Stalin was a committed Marxist.

00:22:31.000 Don't let the revisionist history college professors tell you in a different way.

00:22:35.000 They said, well, there is no such thing, there were no Marxists.

00:22:37.000 Communism has ever tried.

00:22:38.000 Stalin was a disciple of Marxist-Leninism.

00:22:42.000 He wanted to eradicate capitalism at all costs.

00:22:44.000 And here's one example of it.

00:22:46.000 Stalin very well could have allowed capitalism to continue in the countryside.

00:22:52.000 Stalin was assuming the first experiment in communism.

00:22:55.000 Understand, the Romanovs ruled from 1613 to 1917 in Russia, basically 300 years. 0.69

00:23:02.000 So people knew a status quo for 300 years.

00:23:05.000 And 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. 0.79

00:23:23.000 The Bolsheviks had an answer: industrialization is awful.

00:23:26.000 We must embrace communism and that the state should run the economy. 0.77

00:23:30.000 Well, 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.

00:23:42.000 They owned nothing.

00:23:44.000 It was post-World War I.

00:23:45.000 I mean, everyone was impoverished.

00:23:47.000 And 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.

00:23:58.000 But Stalin was not, Stalin was not happy enough with just socialism in the cities, capitalism in the countryside.

00:24:06.000 See, there are 120 million peasants, and capitalism in the countryside was actually working.

00:24:12.000 Their ideology superseded the reality.

00:24:15.000 You see, Stalin wanted communism so badly, he wasn't going to allow capitalism to continue in the countryside.

00:24:22.000 He wanted Marxism everywhere.

00:24:23.000 He was a true ideologue.

00:24:25.000 Sound familiar?

00:24:27.000 See, the ideologues in America, they don't care what works.

00:24:30.000 They just want themselves to be right.

00:24:32.000 They want to be right more than what is good.

00:24:35.000 The underlying, almost suicidal destruction of capitalism in the countryside resulted in the greatest famine that we know in human history. 1.00

00:24:47.000 So he led a revolution against the kulaks. 0.98

00:24:50.000 We'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. 0.89

00:24:59.000 Stalin challenged his fellow ideologues whether they actually believed in Marxism.

00:25:05.000 Because some of his fellow inner circles said, Joseph, don't actually go after the countryside. 0.88

00:25:10.000 It's working.

00:25:10.000 Our entire country is being fed.

00:25:13.000 You can kind of do a little bit of things on the edges, but let the peasants live as they were. 0.95

00:25:17.000 We'll have socialism in the cities. 0.51

00:25:20.000 Stalin wasn't okay with that.

00:25:22.000 You see, the left, collectivists, or the Democrat Party in America today, they're never okay with just dominating their one little sphere of influence.

00:25:31.000 They want control over everything. 0.74

00:25:34.000 It's a very important lesson that we can derive from Joseph Stalin. 0.71

00:25:38.000 See, Stalin sent urban activists, mostly hyper-educated young people, to the countryside. 0.79

00:25:46.000 The Kulak revolution was total and complete class warfare. 0.87

00:25:50.000 Go after the rich peasants is what he commanded. 0.97

00:25:53.000 And in part, collectivization.

00:25:56.000 The commune was just an instrument.

00:25:58.000 De facto peasant ownership was outlawed.

00:26:03.000 So the collectivization process was implemented. 0.98

00:26:05.000 So in 1929 and 1930, they were very lucky.

00:26:08.000 They had a good harvest.

00:26:09.000 In 1931 to 1932, Stalin was less lucky.

00:26:13.000 In fact, he had no luck at all.

00:26:15.000 It was the worst famine on record.

00:26:18.000 Now, mind you, if there was privatization and not collectivization, the market would have compensated to have some resources be saved, some be stored away.

00:26:29.000 A price system would have been enacted.

00:26:31.000 And the market would have disallowed, basically, for mass famine, mass starvation to occur.

00:26:38.000 Instead, five to seven million Ukrainians died.

00:26:42.000 Just think about that.

00:26:43.000 Five to seven million people died of starvation.

00:26:46.000 Do you understand how painful it is to die of starvation?

00:26:49.000 You basically scream yourself to death.

00:26:52.000 You're just screaming and asking for food.

00:26:54.000 Five to seven million people died because of Stalin's ideology.

00:26:59.000 The Pulit Bureau, the people around Joseph Stalin, they insisted and they said, why don't you go back to privatization?

00:27:06.000 He said, no.

00:27:08.000 Basically, it was the Machiavellian term.

00:27:10.000 The ends justify the means.

00:27:12.000 One-fifth of his regime died in 1932 because the starvation continued.

00:27:18.000 And of the ethnic Kazakh population, one-third of them died.

00:27:23.000 It was starvation, the likes of which the world has never seen.

00:27:26.000 Not because the weather was worse, not because it was the worst uncontrollable disaster. 0.72

00:27:33.000 This was the worst planned famine because of an ideologue named Joseph Stalin. 0.76

00:27:39.000 Because prior to that, the Romanovs, they were unable to manage and produce a Russian middle class.

00:27:48.000 Stalin continued to have quotas with very little concessions.

00:27:52.000 And eventually, the entire peasant class was reduced from 120 million people to 80 million people.

00:27:59.000 And 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.

00:28:11.000 Mao probably killed anywhere between 60 to 100 million people.

00:28:15.000 But Joseph Stalin then went on one of the most pathological, bloody campaigns in human history.

00:28:23.000 You see, Stalin was committed and ideologically possessed to destroy capitalism.

00:28:29.000 So was Mao Zedong.

00:28:31.000 But then Mao in 1936 started on what was called the Great Terror.

00:28:36.000 On the Great Terror between 1936 and 1938, get this number.

00:28:40.000 He executed 830,000 people.

00:28:44.000 One to two million people on top of that were arrested and sent to gulags or work camps.

00:28:50.000 What's even more puzzling is that Stalin went after every single person in his inner circle, almost every single person.

00:28:58.000 He purged his inner ranks.

00:29:00.000 He wanted to almost break the will of his inner circle.

00:29:04.000 Interestingly enough, if you study also Leon Trotsky, who is more popular in the West than in Russia, Leon Trotsky, they almost hated each other.

00:29:14.000 They helped create the Leninist Russian Revolution and they ended up hating each other.

00:29:18.000 Trotsky hated Stalin.

00:29:20.000 In fact, he wrote against Stalin in the West and Spain and in Mexico and all across, even in New York City.

00:29:26.000 And Trotsky actually was very positively impressed by American capitalism, despite himself being a committed Marxist.

00:29:35.000 But Trotsky warned against this.

00:29:37.000 He said that communism will eventually become abused by sociopathic tyrants like Joseph Stalin.

00:29:45.000 And as a lesson to us all, this is a lesson to the American ruling class, all of you out there that are leftists.

00:29:51.000 Some of you, it seems as if you guys are going through a perpetual competition of, I hope you eat me last.

00:29:57.000 Please eat me last.

00:29:58.000 Just remember, I was on your team.

00:30:00.000 But Tukhachevsky, General Tukhachevsky was more than just a general.

00:30:05.000 He was a marshal of the USSR.

00:30:09.000 He 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.

00:30:24.000 Joseph Stalin wanted the wholesale replacement of the elite and to make people confess for something they did not even commit.

00:30:32.000 Does that sound familiar? 0.78

00:30:34.000 And all of this was made possible.

00:30:36.000 This 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.

00:30:53.000 Of course, remember, Socrates taught Plato.

00:30:56.000 Plato taught Aristotle.

00:30:57.000 Aristotle taught Alexander the Great.

00:30:59.000 Aristotle differentiate.

00:31:00.000 Aristotle agreed with Plato on a lot of things.

00:31:02.000 He disagreed with Plato and other things.

00:31:04.000 Aristotle was so convinced that a middle class was necessary for a functioning society.

00:31:11.000 That 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.

00:31:20.000 That 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.

00:31:31.000 That in fact, those people will inevitably embrace the most malevolent ideas you could possibly imagine if they lose faith.

00:31:40.000 You see, volatility is a precedent for authoritarian control.

00:31:46.000 Traditionally, the American middle class has always been immune to these Marxist totalitarian movements for a couple reasons.

00:31:56.000 The first of which was a faith in God is that it just, it didn't mix well.

00:32:01.000 The middle class and most of the country was a very religious country.

00:32:04.000 Believing 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.

00:32:16.000 As 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.

00:32:28.000 And they're going to grow.

00:32:29.000 Just like they grew in Stalin's Russia, where he was not okay with just socialism in the cities, capitalism in the countryside.

00:32:36.000 They're going to want socialism everywhere.

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00:34:04.000 And 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.

00:34:26.000 They believed that the more they worked, the harder that they worked, eventually their life was going to improve.

00:34:34.000 But 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.

00:34:45.000 And you look at credit card debt in particular, and student loan debt, which are, in essence, depreciating assets over time.

00:34:52.000 You're just paying to service the debt.

00:34:54.000 Credit card debt has a massive balance.

00:34:58.000 The average American has about $38,000 in personal debt, excluding home mortgages.

00:35:02.000 And that's up from $1,000 a year ago, according to Northwestern Mutual's 2018 planning and progress study.

00:35:08.000 Now, mind you, I'm not indulging in victimology politics, Elizabeth Warren style, and blaming the evil capitalist companies because of this.

00:35:15.000 I do think that corporations have to take more social responsibility for what they do.

00:35:19.000 I think they've done an awful job of that.

00:35:20.000 And 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.

00:35:28.000 But you just look at auto loans.

00:35:31.000 The average family in America has $27,978 in auto loans, which is by definition a depreciating asset.

00:35:39.000 You buy a car and you drive it.

00:35:41.000 It is not going to get more valuable.

00:35:44.000 Now, household debt is the only part of this, basically, if you're talking about mortgage debt, that I think is actually structurally okay.

00:35:51.000 But 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.

00:35:59.000 And 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.

00:36:05.000 And 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.

00:36:19.000 That doesn't count saving, by the way, at all.

00:36:21.000 And a lot of this also has to do with how we do our money supply.

00:36:25.000 Again, I blame government for most, if not all of this, but it's a real problem.

00:36:31.000 And to just ignore the economic aspect of this as being a gateway drug for socialism, I think is not looking at the full picture.

00:36:42.000 I think it's rather incomplete.

00:36:43.000 And of course, part of it is cultural.

00:36:45.000 Of course, part of it is the fact that we teach our kids to hate America.

00:36:51.000 However, I look at my parents' generation.

00:36:54.000 In some ways, these Marxist ideas were actually more fashionable in the 60s and 70s than they are now.

00:36:59.000 I 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.

00:37:10.000 You just look at the 60s and 70s protest war music.

00:37:13.000 A lot of it was pro-communist symbology.

00:37:17.000 A lot of it was about fighting the man and empowering voices such as Angela Davis and many others.

00:37:24.000 Why 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?

00:37:32.000 And they kind of just turned their back on the nonsense that they were taught by these radical professors.

00:37:37.000 And now, mind you, I'm not for a second saying that the radical infiltration of our cultural institutions has not worsened since the 1970s.

00:37:46.000 I'm not saying that.

00:37:48.000 I'm just saying that it was there then and it's also here today to some extent.

00:37:52.000 And 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.

00:38:14.000 By the time they were 28 or 31 or 35, they saw their incomes going up.

00:38:20.000 They saw their wages increasing.

00:38:22.000 They saw their wealth increasing.

00:38:23.000 They were able to buy a home, buy a car, start a family.

00:38:26.000 And 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.

00:38:40.000 The question today, for someone who is 32 that graduated college a decade ago and is $75,000 in debt, the question is this.

00:38:51.000 Can you live a decent life without having to go into debt?

00:38:56.000 And 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.

00:39:06.000 A lot of it is because of government.

00:39:08.000 A lot of it is because of too high taxes and regulation and lack of social mobility and entrepreneurship.

00:39:13.000 And 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.

00:39:24.000 I think it's a mixture of both.

00:39:25.000 I don't think it's total and complete surrender to the free market God that we must act as if it's a religion.

00:39:32.000 And I definitely don't think it's a complete and total blame game on all things capitalist.

00:39:37.000 I think it's mostly because of government.

00:39:39.000 And I think capitalism and free enterprise is mostly the solution, absolutely.

00:39:44.000 But 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.

00:39:59.000 And here's two reasons why.

00:40:01.000 We 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.

00:40:10.000 And we have grown the size of government, the second reason, so tremendously and increased taxes because of it.

00:40:16.000 And 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,

00:40:30.000 if 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,

00:40:47.000 Florida, 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.

00:41:10.000 If we are not able to convince them of this, then the socialists will win.

00:41:16.000 They will.

00:41:17.000 And Ben Shapiro articulates this very well in our sister episode.

00:41:21.000 They are disintegrationists.

00:41:23.000 They are.

00:41:24.000 And the Marxists, they always want three things, always.

00:41:27.000 They wanted three things in China, in Cuba, and Russia.

00:41:31.000 And I forgot the fourth example, which was Venezuela.

00:41:34.000 And that example is used a lot.

00:41:36.000 But in Venezuela, they had a very rich country that respected private property rights.

00:41:42.000 And 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.

00:41:53.000 So 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.

00:42:13.000 People are going to say, I don't have to live like this.

00:42:16.000 I'm not going to live like this.

00:42:18.000 I don't think this is functional or healthy, and I don't think it's sustainable.

00:42:22.000 And so I think this is a huge lesson from the Trump era.

00:42:26.000 Because 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.

00:42:36.000 I think a couple years from now, what I'm saying right now will be tragically true.

00:42:40.000 When 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.

00:42:56.000 And it's more than just corporate tax cuts.

00:42:59.000 And it's definitely not DACA amnesty deals that is going to be able to improve the lives of the middle-income worker in Tennessee.

00:43:09.000 The three things that the socialists always have in common, always, is a utopian vision.

00:43:17.000 They 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.

00:43:28.000 And Jordan Peterson talks about this brilliantly. 0.99

00:43:31.000 And also, they are willing to destroy everything and anything till you get what you want.

00:43:41.000 Nihilism, 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.

00:43:58.000 It becomes even more accelerated when you see your rulers continually live lavishly while you toil incessantly just to go further into debt.

00:44:09.000 We've seen this so many times.

00:44:11.000 When 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.

00:44:24.000 Especially when you are working just to survive and your rulers get bailout money when they don't need it.

00:44:31.000 When 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?

00:44:43.000 And they say, it doesn't work for me.

00:44:46.000 And you pair all of that with the non-stop cultural assault from the 1619 project and the decline of our schools.

00:44:55.000 You 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. 0.65

00:45:11.000 He didn't take care of the Cuban middle class and Castro capitalized on it. 0.62

00:45:16.000 It's why Lenin took power post-Romanovs.

00:45:19.000 It's why Chavez took power in Venezuela.

00:45:22.000 And it's why Mao was able to hypnotize an entire country using his little red book.

00:45:28.000 I think we as conservatives have a misplaced obsession on just the cultural side.

00:45:35.000 And 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.

00:45:48.000 But 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?

00:46:10.000 And 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.

00:46:27.000 They are exploitationists.

00:46:29.000 And that's what you see on the left today.

00:46:32.000 There's a beautiful parable in the Bible of the parable of the sower.

00:46:36.000 And Christ talks about where it's the inverse of the parable, and it's incredibly applicable.

00:46:43.000 Where Christ says certain people will hear the message and they will decide to ignore it.

00:46:49.000 Some people will hear the message and decide to grow with it.

00:46:51.000 And that's the seeds that are planted in the soil.

00:46:56.000 And part of the parable is seeds that are basically thrown onto dirt or to rock and they are not able to grow.

00:47:04.000 And essentially, no plant is able to flourish.

00:47:08.000 That was Marxism and communism in the 1970s.

00:47:12.000 The seed being communism and Marxism, something bad, not something good in the parable of Christ.

00:47:18.000 And 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.

00:47:33.000 And 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.

00:47:40.000 And the ideas kind of just stayed to 10 to 15% of the American population of people that were relentlessly bitter and resentful.

00:47:48.000 But now you have those very same Marxist seeds that are being thrown down and they're being thrown down on very rich soil.

00:47:55.000 Because 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.

00:48:08.000 There may be a barista, and you see their parents are not doing well either.

00:48:12.000 So they are almost in cultural and economic harmony with the generation prior to them because their parents are probably very far in debt.

00:48:20.000 And 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.

00:48:45.000 It's eerily similar.

00:48:47.000 And 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.

00:49:00.000 Those seeds, as Christ told us in the parable of the sower, are now finding rich soil.

00:49:07.000 And that rich soil is 30 million people of my generation that own nothing.

00:49:15.000 They can't engage in capitalism because they have no capital.

00:49:19.000 They're just in debt.

00:49:21.000 And so don't be surprised when all of a sudden they're the ones that have these Bernie Sanders signs.

00:49:27.000 And 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.

00:49:45.000 Human beings operate in awfully predictable patterns.

00:49:48.000 You're never going to remove the need or the desire for a connection to a greater power or a greater purpose.

00:49:58.000 Just because you have destroyed the Episcopalian and Presbyterian and Baptist church in New York City, all but destroyed it, basically.

00:50:06.000 That 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.

00:50:19.000 It's just true.

00:50:20.000 It 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.

00:50:26.000 Instead, 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.

00:50:37.000 Now they find that meaning in some sort of social revisionist history seminar.

00:50:46.000 And 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.

00:51:01.000 And so, yes, it is our cultural institutions that have abdicated their role in the public arena.

00:51:06.000 It 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.

00:51:32.000 Those 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.

00:51:43.000 And you have a generation that is eternally indebted.

00:51:46.000 The average personal debt, $38,000.

00:51:49.000 Credit card debt is 25% of all debt.

00:51:52.000 Two in 10 Americans spend 50 to 100% of their monthly income on debt repayment.

00:51:57.000 Think about that.

00:51:58.000 20% of our country spends anywhere between half to all of their money on just paying old debt.

00:52:04.000 And so where's the money going?

00:52:06.000 Well, 15% is spent on dining or nightlife, which is definitely a depreciating X, definitely a depreciating asset.

00:52:12.000 Clothing is 13% and hobbies is 13%.

00:52:15.000 Now, mind you, it's not every single person that is in this category, but this is very generally true.

00:52:20.000 And 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.

00:52:35.000 When you don't own anything, you have no stake in your country.

00:52:41.000 And then all of a sudden, someone like Vladimir Lenin or Alexandria Casio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders starts to resonate with you.

00:52:50.000 And then more and more start to feel disenfranchised.

00:52:54.000 And you couple that with a propaganda machine that teaches you to feel victimized.

00:53:01.000 And 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.

00:53:11.000 Our declaration was written for future generations.

00:53:13.000 It was written for an intergenerational compact of liberty and freedom and for an investment in the future.

00:53:19.000 If you feel like you can't even financially afford a family, then you definitely don't have an investment in the country at all.

00:53:27.000 And that's why so many people are silent when 1619 starts to take over the country.

00:53:33.000 If you were flourishing economically, BLM and 1619, it would fall flat.

00:53:40.000 And 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.

00:53:52.000 And I'm a big believer in individual agency and action.

00:53:57.000 I 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.

00:54:09.000 And I value that so much less today than ever before.

00:54:14.000 And of course, this was avoidable.

00:54:16.000 But 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.

00:54:34.000 But if we do not have an agenda to get the middle part of our country reinvigorated, we're done.

00:54:41.000 All 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.

00:54:52.000 When 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.

00:55:05.000 And this is probably one of the most structurally dangerous trends that I see in our country.

00:55:10.000 I really do.

00:55:12.000 And the pandemic fueled a lot of these trends.

00:55:17.000 The pandemic only further pronounced almost all of these.

00:55:20.000 Debt has only increased.

00:55:22.000 Economic opportunity has gone down.

00:55:24.000 Middle class wages were going up and they're not going up anymore.

00:55:28.000 A lot of middle-class families are not even in the marketplace anymore.

00:55:32.000 Millions and millions of people out of work.

00:55:34.000 Price of goods are going to go up because we have decided to create $5 trillion.

00:55:39.000 And 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.

00:55:49.000 Because 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.

00:55:59.000 When 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.

00:56:08.000 I mean, if you wanted to destroy the country, you would take these sequence of steps.

00:56:12.000 If you wanted a socialist revolution, you would destroy the American middle class.

00:56:17.000 And 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.

00:56:39.000 That should be built into the American Compact right now economically.

00:56:44.000 And just being kind of deferential and saying, oh, that doesn't matter and people have to make it for themselves.

00:56:49.000 I mean, that probably is true in an absolute extreme individual initiative argument.

00:56:55.000 But my broader argument is that's not sustainable.

00:56:59.000 That 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.

00:57:11.000 That you will get a Vladimir Lenin in our country sooner rather than later.

00:57:18.000 So 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. 0.71

00:57:29.000 Because we have now talked about the problem.

00:57:31.000 We'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.

00:57:46.000 So 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.

00:57:59.000 In fact, we might do that episode tomorrow.

00:58:00.000 I think that would be a fun episode to do. 0.74

00:58:02.000 A 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. 0.58

00:58:09.000 Please consider supporting our show at charliekirk.com slash support, charliekirk.com slash support.

00:58:14.000 As you're listening to this episode, as it airs today, we have our first exclusive Skype call with our monthly supporters.

00:58:20.000 So you might have missed out because you could have been on it.

00:58:22.000 Exclusive, CharlieKirk.com slash support, CharlieKirk.com slash support.

00:58:26.000 Please email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:58:29.000 I'm about to go sign a bunch more copies of the MAGA Doctrine, M-A-G-A doctrine, the only ideas that will win the future.

00:58:35.000 Email me, you, subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:58:38.000 Type in Charlie Kirk Show, hit subscribe, give a five-star review, screenshot it, and email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:58:44.000 And also get involved with Turning Point USA, the nation's largest conservative student organization and over 2,000 high school and college campuses across the country.

00:58:52.000 tpusa.com tpusa.com.

00:58:56.000 Thank you guys so much. 0.53

00:58:57.000 Stay 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. 0.90

00:59:07.000 How do we solve it? 0.56

00:59:09.000 Through conservative, market-based, pro-American ideas.

00:59:14.000 Well, we'll get into that tomorrow and make sure to listen to our sister episode of Ben Shapiro.

00:59:18.000 It's terrific.

00:59:19.000 He wrote a great new book.

00:59:20.000 Check it out.

00:59:21.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:59:22.000 God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - July 21, 2020

Portland on Fire, The Death of the Middle Class, and the Slow Creep of Socialism in America

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