The Charlie Kirk Show - Real Education vs. The Department of Education

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 My conversation with the president of America's greatest college, Hillsdale College, Dr. Larry Arnn.

00:00:06.000 Check out charlieforhillsdale.com.

00:00:08.000 That is C-H-A-R-L-I-E for Hillsdale.com.

00:00:12.000 charlieforhillsdale.com.

00:00:13.000 We talk about Churchill, education, the Department of Education, and more.

00:00:17.000 This is a conversation worth listening to and sending to your friends.

00:00:21.000 Again, it is America's greatest college.

00:00:24.000 CharlieForHillsdale.com.

00:00:26.000 CharlieForHillsdale.com.

00:00:27.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:27.000 Here we go.

00:00:28.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:30.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:32.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:35.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:39.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:40.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:41.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:00:43.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:00:58.000 That's why we are here.

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00:01:18.000 That is noblegoldinvestments.com.

00:01:20.000 It's where I buy all of my gold.

00:01:22.000 Go to noblegoldinvestments.com.

00:01:27.000 Okay, everybody, we are here with one of my mentors and teachers, Dr. Larry Arnn.

00:01:33.000 Proud to be here with such a fine student.

00:01:35.000 Well, thank you, and I take learning seriously.

00:01:38.000 Hillsdale College, I say every day on this program, it is America's greatest college.

00:01:44.000 Yeah, well, it could almost be damning with faint praise, but it is very good, and it has a very powerful sense of itself.

00:01:52.000 It knows what it is for 180 years.

00:01:55.000 And everybody there is committed to that.

00:01:57.000 That's why it's great.

00:01:59.000 It's great for many reasons, also thanks to your leadership.

00:02:03.000 But speak about the, is it the bylaws or the constitution of the college is rather short.

00:02:09.000 It's not a big administrative document.

00:02:11.000 No, it's from 1844. The people who started Hillsdale College were preachers on the frontier from New England, and they were classically educated.

00:02:22.000 You had to know Latin and Greek to enter the college in 1844, and they were patriotic, learned Americans.

00:02:34.000 So the document begins, the nomination of Christians known as Free Will Baptist, along with other friends of education grateful to God for the prevalence in the land of civil and religious freedom and intelligent piety.

00:02:49.000 Believing sound learning is necessary to preserve these, hereby endow it.

00:02:54.000 So we exist to provide sound learning in support of civil and religious freedom, which is America's gift to the world, by the way, and God's gift to America and America's gift to the world, and intelligent piety.

00:03:07.000 Those are the purposes of Hillsdale College.

00:03:10.000 What makes your college different than just the everyday college?

00:03:14.000 If you were to walk around Hillsdale, which I have, I sense it, I feel it.

00:03:19.000 How do you do this in practice differently?

00:03:22.000 Well, first of all, it's not part of the national maw of a system today.

00:03:30.000 We don't take the money from the government, which money carries several hundred pages of rules that are impenetrable and difficult to even follow, even understand.

00:03:39.000 So we don't have that.

00:03:41.000 And then what that liberates us to do is to form a college.

00:03:45.000 It's a word that means partnership.

00:03:48.000 The reason Hillsdale gets on and proceeds is because to come to Hillsdale College in any capacity, you must make a commitment to the founding mission of the college.

00:03:59.000 You must believe, you must agree that the college has a right to pursue the mission, and you will help it.

00:04:07.000 Doesn't mean you can't argue with it.

00:04:08.000 You can argue about anything at Hillsdale College.

00:04:10.000 But you agree that the institution is formed for these purposes.

00:04:16.000 And that is not to be obstructed.

00:04:18.000 And so that means that we, you know, the first line of Aristotle's politics is, every community is formed for the sake of some good, right?

00:04:27.000 Well, we have a good that we're formed for, and we follow it.

00:04:31.000 And that means we can cooperate.

00:04:32.000 We can be a college.

00:04:35.000 And, you know, college is a certain kind of thing, a very beautiful kind of thing.

00:04:40.000 And it's not for everybody, but for people.

00:04:45.000 Who are prepared to suffer to learn the best things.

00:04:49.000 It's great.

00:04:51.000 You are such a person, by the way, I've discovered.

00:04:54.000 It's the reason I get on with you.

00:04:57.000 That, you know, it takes work.

00:05:00.000 You have to change your mental weather.

00:05:03.000 You have to forget about yourself to learn the best things.

00:05:09.000 Now I'm going to read this book.

00:05:12.000 And the question on my mind is not, what do I think about it yet?

00:05:16.000 The question on my mind is not, do I agree with it yet?

00:05:20.000 The question is, what does this say?

00:05:23.000 And what does it mean?

00:05:25.000 And then that's first.

00:05:27.000 And then after that, is it true?

00:05:29.000 Is it good?

00:05:30.000 So that's college, right?

00:05:32.000 And you learn to do that.

00:05:33.000 You learn to do that in the humanities and in the natural sciences.

00:05:37.000 And it's a wonderful activity, and it's difficult.

00:05:42.000 What is education?

00:05:44.000 It comes from a Latin word that means to lead forth.

00:05:46.000 And that means education is the process of our helping the young go forward in the way that they are made to go.

00:05:55.000 The Bible says, train up the child in the ways he's meant to go.

00:05:59.000 And he will not forget.

00:06:01.000 That's what it means.

00:06:03.000 And you learn, we're freedom guys, you and me, and the truth of human freedom is profoundly revealed.

00:06:11.000 In college, in the daily operations in every class, by this fact, you can't learn for them.

00:06:20.000 You can only help them.

00:06:22.000 They have to want to.

00:06:25.000 And so, you know, the first test, when we, you know, take every human achievement, like you have built Turning Point.

00:06:32.000 I've walked around it today for the first time.

00:06:34.000 It's very impressive.

00:06:35.000 And it is the product of...

00:06:40.000 Two things that are the cause of every human achievement.

00:06:45.000 You are able, and you are willing.

00:06:48.000 And you urgently want to do it, and you can do it.

00:06:53.000 And this is your thing, right?

00:06:55.000 Now, everybody I've met here, and some dozens, are also willing and able.

00:07:03.000 Everybody's a volunteer.

00:07:04.000 That's why it works.

00:07:06.000 So, now that we've defined what education is, and we could talk at length about how incredible Hillsdale is, let's talk about the Department of Education.

00:07:15.000 Should that even exist?

00:07:17.000 No, it's a bad idea.

00:07:19.000 Why?

00:07:20.000 Well, first of all, there are many reasons, but the first starts with the nature of education.

00:07:28.000 Now, I'll start with the constitutional reason first, because it's actually very important, but it's not the most important.

00:07:34.000 The Constitution of the United States, Well, it says general welfare.

00:07:49.000 That's what they're always...

00:07:50.000 Sorry, go ahead.

00:07:51.000 Well, not there.

00:07:52.000 It doesn't.

00:07:53.000 Well, it does, actually, at the beginning of Article I, Section 8. But if the general welfare clause meant that, then the rest of Article I, Section 8 would be redundant.

00:08:05.000 Right.

00:08:06.000 So, yet, in the summer that they were writing the Constitution of the United States, they were passing the Northwest Ordinance, which is one of the four organic laws of the United States, and it gave one 64th of the western lands in the Northwest Territory, reserved for only one public purpose, education in each township.

00:08:32.000 Now, that meant that the federal government and the biggest asset it ever owned supported education through the states.

00:08:41.000 That's the constitutional arrangement.

00:08:43.000 It's not that education is not important.

00:08:45.000 It's vital.

00:08:46.000 It's just that it is not a federal authority for profound reasons.

00:08:51.000 The second thing about education is it is inherently as local as a thing can possibly be because the learning is in each student.

00:09:02.000 And they need others around to help them.

00:09:06.000 They need to be nearby.

00:09:08.000 So that, I'm just reading the Constitutional.

00:09:11.000 So these are the 17 things that you're talking, is that correct?

00:09:14.000 Yeah.

00:09:15.000 And as they are enumerated here.

00:09:17.000 So then how is it that the Department of Education withstood any legal challenge?

00:09:23.000 How did we get to a place where we accepted that the federal government should have such a role?

00:09:28.000 You know, it was actually first formed in 1867. And it was called, at the outset, the Department of Education.

00:09:38.000 And there was enormous pushback.

00:09:41.000 And so they downgraded it to a part of the Department of the Interior called the Bureau of Education.

00:09:49.000 And it was to be a clearinghouse of information among the states.

00:09:56.000 No regulatory power.

00:09:58.000 Just gather up facts and make them available.

00:10:01.000 And it's defended on that ground for decades.

00:10:06.000 And then in 1979, Jimmy Carter, who I read has a deal with the Teachers Union, elevates it to a department.

00:10:18.000 And it actually goes into operation two months before Ronald Reagan was elected president.

00:10:24.000 And every Republican since Reagan has promised to get rid of it.

00:10:28.000 I think it's very possible that we've elected the one who will do it now.

00:10:32.000 And it should be done because here's the numbers, right?

00:10:37.000 First of all, it's a microcosm of what afflicts the most serious affliction in America.

00:10:44.000 There are 23 million, round numbers, permanent civilian employees of the government, state, local, and federal.

00:10:53.000 11 million are in education.

00:10:57.000 Is that right?

00:10:58.000 Yeah.

00:10:59.000 Public education.

00:11:00.000 So it's almost half.

00:11:02.000 Yeah.

00:11:02.000 And of the 11, 6.7 million, which is more than half, are neither teachers nor teachers' assistants.

00:11:14.000 So it's top-heavy.

00:11:16.000 You're trying to tell me 7 out of 11 million.

00:11:23.000 6.7, yeah.

00:11:25.000 The non-teachers outnumber the teachers in public education.

00:11:29.000 And, you know, Hillsdale College starts charter schools, about 100 of them now.

00:11:33.000 It's just incredible.

00:11:33.000 It's like the ratio is like 8 to 1 in favor of teachers.

00:11:38.000 Because you don't need all that, right?

00:11:40.000 And a lot of that is driven by funding from the Department of Education.

00:11:48.000 Which directs a lot of the state spending because it demands that they do certain things and spend their own money on it, too.

00:11:55.000 And hire people to manage it, see?

00:11:57.000 So you need to decentralize.

00:11:59.000 The whole government of the United States is radically top-heavy and expensive.

00:12:05.000 And so education is a great place to start in reforming that because of the nature of education itself, which is you don't need a lot of bureaucracy to run it.

00:12:16.000 You need focus on the classroom.

00:12:18.000 I'm just thinking, I messaged my team, just so you know, as I said, commit this to memory, what Dr. Arne just said.

00:12:25.000 That might be the most powerful statistic I've heard in a long time.

00:12:29.000 I've heard a lot of numbers.

00:12:32.000 That's 7 out of 11 million of the people in education.

00:12:35.000 6.7 out of 11. 6.7, okay.

00:12:38.000 We'll be very precise.

00:12:40.000 Last time I looked.

00:12:41.000 But what are they?

00:12:43.000 What do these people do?

00:12:44.000 What are their jobs?

00:12:46.000 Well, they, you know.

00:12:48.000 Shuffle paper.

00:12:49.000 They make rules.

00:12:54.000 You have to understand that the...

00:12:56.000 You do understand.

00:12:57.000 The bureaucratic state is a different kind of government from constitutional rules.

00:13:04.000 This is one of the most important things I learned from Hillsdale.

00:13:06.000 And it proceeds in a different way.

00:13:12.000 I have 850 employees, it turns out.

00:13:16.000 I hate rules.

00:13:19.000 Me too.

00:13:20.000 Because what rules do is they try to, you know, something goes wrong, pass a rule so it doesn't go wrong again.

00:13:27.000 Next thing you know, you've got a thousand rules.

00:13:30.000 The right way is goals.

00:13:33.000 What will we achieve together?

00:13:36.000 Now, go do that.

00:13:38.000 And the only rules that work are rules your mother told you.

00:13:42.000 Don't lie, you know.

00:13:44.000 Don't steal.

00:13:45.000 Or even the Ten Commandments.

00:13:46.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:13:47.000 Be nice.

00:13:49.000 Stuff like that.

00:13:50.000 And so in a free society, things work from the bottom up and people are responsible for themselves because you have to locate authority and responsibility together.

00:14:02.000 And so if you move authority to a central place, people lose responsibility for their lives.

00:14:09.000 If you return authority to them, They must accept responsibility for their lives, and then they can live as free people.

00:14:18.000 So education is exactly like that.

00:14:21.000 And from my understanding of what you've taught me and Hillsdale online courses have taught me, which people should check out, charlieforhillsdale.com, there was an inflection point.

00:14:30.000 Woodrow Wilson, who was a historicist, we don't have to go too far in that direction, but this was all happening simultaneously with John Dewey and the change of our view of education.

00:14:40.000 Can you speak to how The administrative state was born in practice during that period of time, and we're almost now fighting the 110-year hangover war in 2025. But that simultaneously was happening as we got derailed of what education actually is as well.

00:15:00.000 Those two things are tied together.

00:15:02.000 Well, first of all, the progressives who did all this were educators, and they had adopted...

00:15:11.000 A tendency in modern philosophy.

00:15:15.000 The purpose of learning or knowledge or reason is not to know, but to make.

00:15:23.000 And so we're going to remake the society.

00:15:27.000 When he's president at Princeton, Woodrow Wilson said that his object was to make the young men, his men back then, of Princeton as little like their fathers as possible.

00:15:39.000 So we're going to remake the society.

00:15:42.000 And that means that now, all of a sudden, higher education is an exercise not in discovery or truth, but in power.

00:15:51.000 And that's the key to the progressive era.

00:15:53.000 They substitute the pursuit of truth for the pursuit of truth of power.

00:15:59.000 And that means the federal government becomes an engine of power.

00:16:04.000 And it does – the administrative state looks upon us as objects to shape, not as citizens to represent.

00:16:16.000 And that's why there's, I mean, these crazy things that the Doge is discovering.

00:16:23.000 That's why they're there.

00:16:24.000 And they're not crazy if your purpose is to remake everything in the society.

00:16:31.000 See?

00:16:32.000 I walked around your place, right?

00:16:35.000 And what I saw was...

00:16:38.000 There's a sort of pattern.

00:16:39.000 There's rooms, a lot of people in them.

00:16:41.000 They're mostly young and attractive.

00:16:43.000 They smile a lot.

00:16:44.000 And there's not somebody, there's not rules all over the wall.

00:16:49.000 There's not people watching everything they do, right?

00:16:55.000 That's why they come and work here, and that's why they stay.

00:16:58.000 Fun, you know?

00:16:59.000 That's right.

00:17:00.000 It's self-governance, too.

00:17:01.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:17:03.000 What's our goal?

00:17:05.000 And, you know, after that, It's just an interesting discussion about how you'd go about it, but they're going to have to figure that out.

00:17:12.000 That's free people, see?

00:17:14.000 Whereas, just, you know, I was told when I went to work at Hillsdale College, we don't take the money from the government so we don't have to find the sign or abide by the various federal titles.

00:17:24.000 And I asked a lawyer, education lawyer, I said, why don't you send me Title IV of the Higher Education Act?

00:17:33.000 I was curious, you know, what is it we escape by not taking this money?

00:17:38.000 And he said, well, there's no use.

00:17:40.000 He said, you won't be able to read it.

00:17:42.000 And I said, you know, I'm pretty smart.

00:17:45.000 What are you, a lawyer?

00:17:46.000 And he said, no, I can't read it either.

00:17:48.000 He said, only a specialist can read it.

00:17:52.000 See, Madison says, if the laws be so voluminous and changing that no one can tell what they say, even...

00:18:02.000 If they are made by the right process, they are not laws.

00:18:06.000 See?

00:18:07.000 So that's what we got now, right?

00:18:09.000 We're trying to shape and control the society in detail.

00:18:13.000 And that spirit is the spirit of historicism from which progressivism arises.

00:18:20.000 And it's the spirit of early progressivism.

00:18:23.000 And it's the reason why now they're taking people's kids away from them and doing surgery on them.

00:18:30.000 Because we have to remake the thing.

00:18:32.000 Yeah.

00:18:33.000 I've learned an interesting argument lately that I didn't know as much about.

00:18:37.000 There's this man, Karl Popper, and he wrote the book The Open Society, and George Soros has founded the Open Society Foundation.

00:18:48.000 And what is the Open Society?

00:18:51.000 The Open Society is a society where all of our natural attachments are diminished.

00:19:01.000 Family, love.

00:19:03.000 We're open borders, tribes, government by consent.

00:19:13.000 We have to be open to the whole world.

00:19:17.000 The other night, the Secretary of State, Mr. Rubio, was questioned by a CNN journalist.

00:19:28.000 But it was freedom of speech that led to the Nazis.

00:19:33.000 And Rubio, who turns out is a pretty smart guy, read a little history, unlike this woman. 1.00

00:19:39.000 Margaret Brennan was her name.

00:19:42.000 I do not choose to remember her name.

00:19:44.000 But she didn't know that the Nazis suppressed freedom of speech.

00:19:50.000 And of course they did.

00:19:52.000 It's what tyrants do. 0.97

00:19:53.000 I have an online course on that right now.

00:19:55.000 Excellent.

00:19:56.000 And see...

00:19:57.000 That's straight out of Karl Popper.

00:20:00.000 See, attachment to freedom causes war and Nazism. 0.77

00:20:10.000 See, and apparently that's all she knows.

00:20:15.000 She didn't read a book and find out whether that's actually true or not.

00:20:18.000 And that, how did I learn that?

00:20:25.000 I read some really good art.

00:20:27.000 I haven't read Karl Popper.

00:20:29.000 My education is incomplete, or maybe it's more complete.

00:20:32.000 I think it's more complete.

00:20:33.000 But I read a long article by a highly intelligent man about him the other day, and I said, oh yeah, I see.

00:20:42.000 That's what N.C. Soros, that's what he's doing to our country.

00:20:47.000 He's going to undermine our attachments.

00:20:52.000 And that means the worst thing in the world is for somebody to get elected president on the ground that he's going to work on his country first.

00:21:01.000 See?

00:21:02.000 Because we're not supposed to have a country.

00:21:04.000 Because then we'll have wars, you know.

00:21:07.000 But the purpose of the country, by the way, is to protect us.

00:21:14.000 A lot of the next generation is drowning in student loan debt, and you guys very well might be one of them.

00:21:18.000 If you have private student loan debt, listen carefully.

00:21:20.000 Why ReFi is not a debt settlement organization or company, but they work with each borrower individually, tailoring each loan to each specific situation.

00:21:28.000 Private student loan debt in the U.S. has totaled over $300 billion.

00:21:31.000 About $45 billion of that is labeled as distressed.

00:21:34.000 Why ReFi refinances distressed or even defaulted private student loans that others won't dare to touch.

00:21:39.000 Can you imagine being debt-free and not living under this burden anymore?

00:21:43.000 Do you want to be unburdened by what has been?

00:21:44.000 If you are a student loan borrower, Go to YREFI.com.

00:21:48.000 You've got to check it out right now.

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00:21:51.000 They're huge supporters of our campus tour, for example, of AmericaFest.

00:21:56.000 That's Y-R-E-F-Y.com.

00:21:58.000 YREFI.com.

00:22:02.000 So I want to ask, just briefly, the unexpected development of Doge, empowered by President Trump, to go after the administrative state.

00:22:11.000 In your career, you've been talking about the administrative state, deep state, shadow government, whatever you want to call it.

00:22:16.000 For 50 years.

00:22:17.000 That's right.

00:22:18.000 Have we ever seen anything like this, this Doge thing? 0.99

00:22:23.000 I can't think of a single movement in politics that I have seen that is as important or skillful.

00:22:32.000 And even the skillful part, I mean, first of all, to make it the center, you know, Donald Trump, first of all, I met Donald Trump for the first time in...

00:22:45.000 Early 2015. Astonished myself by deciding to take him seriously.

00:22:54.000 Because before, you know, I thought what everybody thought about him.

00:22:57.000 Interesting guy, you know, show pony.

00:22:59.000 But what was he saying?

00:23:02.000 He was saying, America first, drain the swamp.

00:23:08.000 And, you know, America is for us.

00:23:14.000 We the people in the United States, in order to secure the blessings of our liberty for ourselves and our posterity, right?

00:23:20.000 America first!

00:23:25.000 And drain the swamp.

00:23:26.000 That's what the Doge is about.

00:23:28.000 Because we have built this administrative class and it consumes, one way or another, half the gross domestic product of the country.

00:23:36.000 It's got us $37 trillion in debt.

00:23:39.000 And equally bad to the waist.

00:23:43.000 Is it the things that we used to be good at?

00:23:46.000 We're not very good at them anymore, right?

00:23:48.000 We can't teach a kid to read to save our lives.

00:23:53.000 We can't get equipment back from Afghanistan, most of which equipment ought not to have been there anyway.

00:23:59.000 That's right.

00:24:00.000 And so, I mean, you know, it was a very good idea to go over there and kill those guys who did the 9-11.

00:24:06.000 And we did that.

00:24:07.000 And the plan, I happen to know at the time, Because I knew Don Rumsfeld very well and admired him very much, was to go over there and get them, light force, use their enemies against each other, kill them and get out.

00:24:23.000 Go back somewhere safe.

00:24:25.000 And, you know, I happen, I believe, I happen to know that because Rumsfeld told me that.

00:24:31.000 That's what they thought they were going to go do.

00:24:33.000 And what, by the way, they did do that.

00:24:35.000 They got that done.

00:24:38.000 But then to stay and build a democracy there and in Iraq, I believe, what information I've learned, that they decided that after the fact, right?

00:24:50.000 Which means they don't quite understand how politics works or how democracy is built, in my opinion.

00:24:57.000 Yeah, so, but, you know, that's one reason why it's good for a person, if he's going to be a citizen in a free country, To be a student and learn a bunch of stuff.

00:25:10.000 Because, you know, you need to know.

00:25:15.000 Yeah, but the ignorance of that woman, Brennan, who questioned Marco Rubio, she was actually silenced.

00:25:24.000 Which means probably she was astonished by the point that everybody was afraid to say anything in Nazi Germany.

00:25:34.000 So, Dr. Arnn, you are...

00:25:36.000 Probably the greatest living historian on Churchill.

00:25:39.000 Yeah.

00:25:39.000 Is that fair to say?

00:25:40.000 Well, no.

00:25:42.000 I'm pretty good.

00:25:43.000 I know a lot about it.

00:25:44.000 We have a picture there of Churchill on the wall.

00:25:46.000 I don't know if you saw that or not.

00:25:47.000 Good one.

00:25:48.000 Do you know what that is?

00:25:49.000 He looks like he's doing a radio broadcast.

00:25:53.000 1930s.

00:25:54.000 1930s?

00:25:54.000 Yeah.

00:25:55.000 Is that him on BBC? Yeah.

00:25:58.000 There was only BBC. Oh, is that right?

00:26:00.000 Yeah.

00:26:01.000 So he's doing some sort of radio broadcast.

00:26:03.000 Yeah.

00:26:03.000 Who knows what.

00:26:05.000 Can Churchill teach us about foreign policy?

00:26:09.000 Well, you know, we've gotten a lot of things wrong about Churchill in both directions.

00:26:14.000 We think that Churchill is for war and Churchill is for winning war but avoiding it at possible and winning it at the most economical possible cost.

00:26:27.000 And now we think that some people are arguing Churchill caused the Second World War.

00:26:34.000 And dragged us into it.

00:26:36.000 And that just turns out not to be true.

00:26:40.000 And not even very hard to look up.

00:26:42.000 And so that means that we've now made both mistakes.

00:26:46.000 We thought Winston Churchill, you know, I happen to know that people in power thought that Winston Churchill was their example for building democracy in Iraq.

00:27:02.000 It's just a factual point that he was, in fact, in charge of Iraq at the end of the First World War and for three years, and that his plan was to cut the cost of being there and get out of there as quick as he could.

00:27:18.000 That's what he did.

00:27:20.000 And he did not want Iraq, and he did want a place, a ruler, acceptable to the people.

00:27:31.000 But that's pretty broad range.

00:27:35.000 What do they want, right?

00:27:37.000 But he also said that this is not a central interest of Great Britain and we're not going to stay here.

00:27:45.000 And so that means that's got something wrong, right?

00:27:51.000 Something, by the way, that is not difficult to look up.

00:27:54.000 And then now we get another thing wrong, the opposite thing wrong.

00:27:59.000 Now we think he was You know, a crazy warmonger, and we've got to stop being that.

00:28:04.000 What he was was closer to the truth about these things than anybody else I know.

00:28:11.000 War is very dangerous.

00:28:14.000 The only way to prevent it, and there's no perfect way, is to be in a position to win it at the cheapest possible cost.

00:28:23.000 And the reason for that is only a fool, no classic philosopher.

00:28:30.000 Thinks that the purpose of politics is to win war.

00:28:35.000 They all think, and the founders of America thought, and every sensible person thinks, that the purpose of war is to preserve freedom and peace in politics.

00:28:45.000 And that means you do as little of it as you must.

00:28:48.000 And you spend as little on it as you have to.

00:28:51.000 And that means you need to be efficient about it.

00:28:54.000 And you may have to spend a very great deal.

00:28:57.000 But if you do...

00:28:59.000 You regret it and look for a way to stop.

00:29:02.000 And that whole thing that, you know, there's a national greatness movement.

00:29:08.000 Winston Churchill would not be a good leader of such a movement because he thought the greatness of Britain was in its protection of its people.

00:29:17.000 And so, yeah, so I argued those things.

00:29:21.000 I've written a book to argue those things.

00:29:23.000 And, you know, there is a tendency.

00:29:28.000 And, you know, I'm not immune to it either, probably, except that I've just made a series of propositions and I think I can prove them, have labored to prove them.

00:29:38.000 There's a tendency to use all kinds of information, including about things in the past, for a purpose alien to them.

00:29:48.000 And that's because, and all humans have that, of course we have that.

00:29:54.000 But how do you conquer that?

00:29:56.000 One way is to learn to be a student.

00:29:58.000 That is, take yourself out of it and look at the thing, which is what a student does.

00:30:05.000 You're going to look at a book, and it will change you if you listen to it.

00:30:11.000 And I think we have to get better at that in America, because we're making a lot of mistakes.

00:30:18.000 When it comes to Churchill and Russia-Ukraine, how would he think about this?

00:30:25.000 Well, I've been taught not to answer questions.

00:30:28.000 What would he do?

00:30:29.000 Okay, well, what principles can we apply to that situation?

00:30:36.000 I have looked through the Churchill corpus, and there's almost no mention of Ukraine.

00:30:44.000 It is a breadbasket contended between Germany and Russia.

00:30:50.000 As an independent thing, it hardly comes up.

00:30:55.000 I can find a parallel kind of thing.

00:31:00.000 And remember, this is very...

00:31:03.000 To figure out what to do about Ukraine, first of all, there's a current situation.

00:31:09.000 And the current situation would have to include not just Russian aggression, which is real.

00:31:18.000 It would have to include history.

00:31:20.000 It would have to include our strength or weakness.

00:31:24.000 It would have to include China and its strength or weakness.

00:31:28.000 It would have to include Iran and its strength or weakness. 0.97

00:31:33.000 And how whatever we do in Ukraine affects all that.

00:31:40.000 So that the net result you're after is the protection of our country.

00:31:44.000 If you happen to be elected in our country.

00:31:47.000 So that's the way you think about it.

00:31:49.000 And so I can describe to you in some detail.

00:31:51.000 Places where Churchill made judgments like that.

00:31:56.000 In 1938, Churchill wanted Britain to be prepared to go to war to save Czechoslovakia from Hitler.

00:32:05.000 Czechoslovakia had a big defense industry and a big army, and he thought, now's the time.

00:32:14.000 Neville Chamberlain did the opposite.

00:32:21.000 1939, a year later, Hitler has violated his word in Czechoslovakia and taken all the rest of it that he promised not to take. 0.55

00:32:31.000 And so then Neville Chamberlain gives a guarantee to Poland, which is farther away from Western Europe and weaker than Czechoslovakia.

00:32:42.000 And Churchill was not in the government on either occasion, but he thought, wow.

00:32:48.000 That's a big step.

00:32:50.000 So when the war broke out, the Second World War actually broke out over German and Soviet invasion of Poland, and Britain declared war on September 3, 1939, because of that thing.

00:33:06.000 And then they took no step, no serious step anyway, to actually defend Poland, because they couldn't even get there.

00:33:14.000 And the Soviets and the Germans and the Nazis carved up Poland.

00:33:19.000 And now there's a Polish government in exile in London.

00:33:23.000 It's a long story, sorry.

00:33:25.000 And Churchill becomes prime minister.

00:33:28.000 And now he's dealing with the Soviet government in exile.

00:33:31.000 And Britain has gone into war over Poland.

00:33:35.000 And so he has hours of conversations with him.

00:33:38.000 I turn out to be the man who edited those conversations and published them in the document volumes to the official biography.

00:33:45.000 And the Polish leaders say, look, we have to confront these Russians before they get after the Battle of Stalingrad.

00:33:52.000 Everybody knows the Russians are coming and they're strong, really strong.

00:33:56.000 And they say, you've got major forces with Americans in Europe.

00:34:01.000 We've got to confront the Russians, the Soviets, not let them take Poland. 0.99

00:34:08.000 Churchill says, it would be lunacy to think.

00:34:14.000 That we will fight the Soviets over Poland. 0.71

00:34:19.000 What he was for instead was you should give Russia territory in the east and we will give you territory from the Germans in the west and then maybe Stalin will not gobble up Poland.

00:34:36.000 They never made that deal.

00:34:38.000 It's very odd how it worked out.

00:34:40.000 And both Yalta and Potsdam, the two...

00:34:42.000 Final conferences of the Second World War.

00:34:45.000 There was no deal, but Stalin gave, offered, gave guarantees of the free elections with independent international observers in Poland at both those conferences.

00:34:58.000 The Potsdam conference was in July 1945, and then the war's over, and in August of 1945, one month over later, he arrested all the Polish leaders and closed Poland.

00:35:13.000 And Churchill was not prepared to go to war over that.

00:35:19.000 Probably could not have.

00:35:21.000 Even with us, because the Soviet Army was very big, and we were busy bringing ours home. 0.98

00:35:26.000 So the point is, that's not exactly opposite.

00:35:30.000 But, you know, it's in the middle of Europe.

00:35:34.000 Churchill favored the peripheral strategy, you know, we got a big navy, we can reach the edges of everything.

00:35:40.000 If you look at a map of the British Empire, it rings Eurasia, and some in South America, Canada, you know, important place where nobody lives.

00:35:49.000 And so, yeah, what would he do?

00:35:55.000 I don't know, but I am confident.

00:36:00.000 When the Ukraine war started, I was concerned.

00:36:05.000 I mean, first of all, the Russians said they guaranteed the independence of Ukraine, and then they invaded it. 0.64

00:36:12.000 That's bad.

00:36:13.000 They shouldn't do that.

00:36:18.000 Against that, Crimea has been a Russian and Soviet naval base since the 18th century.

00:36:26.000 I'd be astonished if we ever got them out of there.

00:36:32.000 So the re-invasion of Crimea, they never really left it. 0.72

00:36:40.000 And then there's the fact that we are weak.

00:36:47.000 We're running out of bullets.

00:36:49.000 The Chinese have a bigger navy than we, and they're building much faster than we are.

00:36:57.000 Is this the place?

00:37:00.000 To fight the war?

00:37:02.000 I can see why there'd be big doubts about it.

00:37:04.000 I've had them from the beginning.

00:37:06.000 And then the effect, you know, China looks to me like a more serious problem than Russia. 0.87

00:37:15.000 Hard to make the judgment, but I think so.

00:37:17.000 And we're driving them together.

00:37:22.000 And you can see that in these negotiations, I don't know how any of this is going to come off.

00:37:27.000 And remember...

00:37:29.000 What would I do?

00:37:32.000 I'm not in charge.

00:37:34.000 I have been doubtful about us drawing a complete line in Ukraine from the beginning.

00:37:43.000 There are some who think, and I don't know the story as well as they, that we could have made a deal with Russia about Ukraine a long time ago if we gave them the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, and that seems to be roughly what Trump is offering.

00:38:00.000 So, there you go.

00:38:01.000 That's what I think.

00:38:02.000 I do not think, by the way...

00:38:05.000 Oh, here's a...

00:38:06.000 Let's talk about Lincoln.

00:38:10.000 There's a man named Kassuth.

00:38:11.000 He was a Hungarian revolutionary.

00:38:13.000 There's a statue of him, a nice one, in Washington, D.C. And he went around America giving speeches about Hungarian independence.

00:38:20.000 And he got Kassuth resolutions passed in many places.

00:38:25.000 And one of the places is Springfield, Illinois.

00:38:28.000 And so he gave a talk to the Republican Club, and then the committee retired, and they came back with a resolution.

00:38:36.000 And it's rather different than most of them.

00:38:39.000 It says, the United States has no right to intervene in any country by nature.

00:38:50.000 I'm paraphrasing, there are three.

00:38:52.000 The second one is, if a country attacks us, we can.

00:38:58.000 And the third one is, if a third country attacks another country, we may intervene if we find it in our interest.

00:39:10.000 You see, signed, A. Lincoln.

00:39:17.000 I thought that's something of a guide about how to think about it.

00:39:19.000 Is it in our interest?

00:39:21.000 It's very simple.

00:39:22.000 Yeah.

00:39:23.000 Well, Dr. Arnn, thank you for your time as always.

00:39:25.000 Everyone should check out charlieforhillsdale.com to take the online courses and thank you for everything.

00:39:29.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:39:30.000 Talk to you soon, guys.

00:39:31.000 Thank you.

00:39:32.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:39:33.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:39:36.000 Thanks so much for listening and God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - February 23, 2025

Real Education vs. The Department of Education

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