Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk discuss family, faith, metaphysics, and the idea that there is something bigger than you, and that you are not the only person in charge in the world. They also discuss the difference between being a Christian and an Atheist.
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk show, Tucker Carlson and I have a rather important conversation about family, about faith, about metaphysics, about atheism.
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00:01:00.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:08.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:43.000You've got the Earth's volume knob in your life.
00:01:45.000You and I were talking about this at lunch about how you have to resist the temptation of just total Stalinistic power when you're in charge.
00:01:52.000When you give speeches, especially, you come to the inevitable conclusion, usually toward the end of the speech, that you are Jesus.
00:02:01.000And that is probably the worst conclusion a man can come to.
00:02:06.000And I mentioned, and for our audience's sake, that neuroscience tells us that noreperephine, dopamine, endorphins, just off the charts when you speak publicly.
00:02:19.000I mean, this is this, I've decided, well, I've decided I don't really understand a lot of what's happening in the world right now, which is a good thing, I think, to conclude.
00:02:29.000But I've also decided that the main motivator for people in charge is to feel like God.
00:02:36.000I mean, I guess it's all very obvious, but this is coming to me late in life.
00:02:39.000And the feeling that, you know, I run things, I make the big decisions.
00:02:46.000I'm in charge of life itself, when it begins, when it ends.
00:02:50.000This is like the highest high people can get.
00:02:54.000And it makes smoking crack seem like nothing.
00:02:57.000And it motivates, I think, a lot of really bad behavior.
00:03:01.000In an increasingly secular society, it's the only thing that they can get to for a pinnacle or a zenith of feeling that way.
00:03:35.000And for you, and the point is that it's less theological in the sense, I mean, I have a very specific theological view of the historical Jesus, but do you at least believe in the concept that there's something bigger than you?
00:03:49.000Which would be fine, by the way, if you were, but we're not, actually.
00:03:54.000And, You know, as my father always said to me when I was a child, the root, and he used a word I'm not going to repeat, it was a bad word, but it was an evocative word.
00:04:02.000But he always said the root of all wisdom is knowing what a flawed person you are, effectively, you know, and seeing yourself realistically, which is someone who can't see beyond like the next 20 minutes.
00:04:14.000If that person whose judgment is often clouded by desires and silly things like that, and basically a person who's imperfect.
00:04:24.000Once you understand that and really internalize it, you're in a better place to make good decisions.
00:05:57.000What percentage of our ruling class believes that?
00:06:01.000Look, if you knew who you were in the scope of things, if you spent like 20 minutes staring up at night on a cloudless night and looking at the stars, I mean, you know, I'm not sure you would achieve enlightenment, but you would achieve perspective and you would recognize your place in the cosmos, which is infinitesimally small and totally forgettable in the scope of things.
00:06:27.000I mean, we don't want it to be true, but it is true.
00:06:29.000And so knowing that, you probably wouldn't imagine, you probably wouldn't convince yourself you could restore permanent peace to the world by putting a fake democracy in a rock, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:06:44.000That you couldn't, you know, affecting regime change in Russia would fix everything.
00:06:48.000You would know there are limits to your predictive power as a person.
00:06:51.000And maybe you should scale back your ambitions a little bit, consistent with your abilities, which is pretty limited, actually.
00:06:57.000The same people that wanted to bomb Baghdad now want to blitzkrieg a female's body to change their nature from female to male.
00:08:25.000The best book I've read in the last, I don't know, many years is a book by Matthias Dismet, who's a Belgian psychologist, professor, written about COVID, but it's not really about COVID.
00:08:36.000It's called The Psychology of Totalitarianism.
00:08:39.000And in it, he makes many points about science.
00:08:42.000It's a book that actually changed the way I see the world.
00:08:45.000But one of the points he makes is that we never go to anyone who speaks literally or in formulas or in ones and zeros to find out what the truth is.
00:08:58.000We always go to people who speak metaphorically.
00:09:00.000We always go to poets or the entire New Testament is like indecipherable if you're a literal person.
00:10:19.000Like AI will never get to that, okay, ever.
00:10:23.000And so, in place of literal descriptions and in place of math, we seek metaphor and poetry and, you know, indistinct, imprecise expressions of this thing or this reality that we all sense, but can't, again, quite sum up in words or numbers.
00:10:44.000Almost every culture or civilization had their own way of doing that or communicating it.
00:10:49.000And now we're ruled by a group of people that think 84% of the religious people on the planet are wrong.
00:10:58.000They don't have the balls to say that, of course.
00:11:01.000But if you look at it across the scope of known history, it's like how many civilizations at scale, big civilizations, have been secular that we know of ever.
00:11:11.000And by secular, I mean don't acknowledge in kind of hiring everyday conversation.
00:11:18.000Yeah, exactly, the existence of something bigger and more powerful than our temporal leadership.
00:11:49.000I don't think it necessarily points to Jesus.
00:11:52.000It hasn't over time pointed to Jesus for a lot of people.
00:11:54.000They may be wrong or right or whatever, but every person is born knowing, obviously, that people are not kind of the final word on everything.
00:12:06.000I mean, we're born with an intuitive moral sense, a sense of justice.
00:12:18.000And to not acknowledge that is a recipe for... for disaster, the disaster we're living through.
00:12:26.000Look, you need to acknowledge the inherent mystery in life.
00:12:29.000You need to say out loud, we just had lunch and at lunch you kept using this phrase, the spoken truth, which I thought was such a cool, maybe a common Christian phrase.
00:12:38.000And I've never lived in a Christian world, so I don't really know, but I love that phrase.
00:12:42.000Because it's not enough to know the truth.
00:12:44.000The act of speaking it, articulating it, putting it into language makes it real.
00:12:49.000Yeah, it is a Christian phrase because in the book of John, the first verse is, in the beginning was the word and the word was God and the word was with God and the word became flesh.
00:15:08.000But the idea that there are people who are completely certain as a matter of religious faith that there's no God, I just find it hilarious and like so childish.
00:18:36.000You get a vibe off someone, it's real.
00:18:38.000If you feel some sort of like churning volatility inside someone and you can absolutely feel it, it doesn't take a lot of training to feel it.
00:18:49.000If you feel like someone's got a big hidden secret, he does.
00:18:54.000If the Warren Commission seems ridiculous, it is.
00:18:57.000Like, you know, these kinds of things.
00:18:59.000Like, don't lie to yourself about what you feel because you're right.
00:19:03.000If you see three guys walking toward you at night and they cross over to your side of the street and seem menacing, they're going to hurt you.
00:19:11.000Don't talk yourself out of what your senses tell you, what your animal senses tell you.
00:20:29.000I could give you a long list of factors that I think played a role.
00:20:32.000I'm sure all of them are true, but it doesn't add up to a really coherent story in my mind anyway.
00:20:37.000So at this point, and this is, I think, the 17th of December 2022, the only thing I've concluded is I'm not good at predicting the outcomes of things.
00:20:48.000I should stand back and appreciate the majesty of the unexplained, unknowable mysteries of life.
00:20:54.000Okay, that's kind of what I've concluded.
00:20:56.000And I should be as honest as I possibly can be about what I don't know, about what I can't know, about what I'm guessing at.
00:21:04.000And I should make a distinction between those things and the things that I'm certain of.
00:21:08.000Like, I think that's incumbent on me as someone who talks in public and as a father and a husband and a friend and all that.
00:21:16.000As someone with the power of speech, I should be more fully honest about what I know and what I don't know.
00:21:22.000And I'll admit, I hate, and I mean it, and I don't want to feel this way, but I actually hate this neoliberal movement or whatever this is, this anti-human movement that's sweeping the West right now.
00:21:34.000I think it's a threat to everything that I believe in.
00:21:37.000It's a threat to the well-being of my family.
00:22:45.000It's like your job is to represent your voters, and the guy who makes life better for the biggest number of voters or convinces them their life is getting better wins.
00:22:57.000And like conventional politics in Washington for my whole lifetime, I'm 53, was always like Republicans would be mad because of earmarks and they're building bridges to nowhere in some congressional district in some state.
00:24:24.000And so I'm like looking at this and I'm thinking, again, even if I agreed with it, which I don't, but even if I did, I'd be like, I don't really think you can get elected on that.
00:24:34.000Because the core promise is a chicken in every pot.
00:27:58.000You said neoliberalism is hurting a lot of people, but also benefiting only a few.
00:28:04.000Yeah, I mean, and the benefits are not simply material.
00:28:08.000I mean, people have, I mean, this has been gone over at great length by people smarter than me, but, you know, people have a need to feel like they're doing the right thing, to feel virtuous.
00:28:20.000I mean, clearly, that's a basic human need.
00:29:32.000You know, this is when Joe Biden gets up there and tells you that racial justice and reparations and equity and trans rights and all this stuff.
00:29:42.000I mean, okay, these are the concerns of a group I know very well.
00:29:48.000You know, these are the ladies waiting in the lift line in Jackson Hole right now, the sort of unhappy 45-year-old wives of private equity moguls.
00:30:30.000But right after the midterms, we were so far out on a limb with like, you know, Washington State's going to elect a right where, you know, and meet Joe Kenny.
00:30:40.000He's going to be Speaker of the House.
00:30:41.000And I was just like, so, I was softing my own gas.
00:35:07.000And so, again, I'm not, without even getting into all that, I will just say it is the iron rule of life that your victories are your losses and your losses are your victories.
00:35:17.000And let me just lay it down here, my one, another one of my stupid theories, which happens to be true.
00:35:22.000We're going to look back at the midterms and say, man, if that hadn't happened, we would have been even dumber than we are.
00:36:06.000It's the opposite of what you would do to your own kids.
00:36:08.000If you treated your own kids like this, if you told them they were helpless victims, they'd be in rehab.
00:36:14.000If you gave them access to drugs, if you let them order meth on the internet called Adderall, which they can because it's now legal after COVID, you would turn them into drug addicts.
00:36:26.000If you gave them porn and video games and then forced them into four years of pointlessness in the prime of life in college, took away any meaning or duty, any struggle, if you poisoned the relationship between boys and girls and men and women and made them suspicious of one another and hate each other, you would spike the suicide rate to the levels we see it now.
00:36:47.000You would destroy an entire generation.
00:36:50.000I would say, and I don't have a ton of contact with young people, but I have a bunch on my staff and I have four of mine.
00:36:59.000And I'm amazed by the resilience, by the wisdom, by the cleverness.
00:37:06.000You are seeing young people just like intuitively know.
00:37:11.000This is a tough time and it's a time to get ready.
00:37:14.000It's a time to prepare physically, emotionally, intellectually.
00:37:19.000I mean, I have young people that I come into contact with, some of whom I'm related to, who are reading things.
00:37:24.000When I was, you know, I was reading Evelyn Waugh's comic novels, okay, when I was 20, which I love and I would still recommend them to everybody.
00:37:37.000But like the young people I talk to are reading like Aeschylus or, you know, they're like really trying to, they're very serious about what they read.
00:37:47.000I think most people don't read at all.
00:38:43.000I'm saying for me, when I have it easy, when I've got, you know, it doesn't happen often, but if I've got nothing to do all day, I mean, that never happens because I won't allow it to happen.
00:38:52.000But if it were ever to happen, if I had to sit, you know, outside at a Sandals Beach Resort for a week with an open tab, I don't know what I would do.
00:40:33.000But if some menacing force shows up at your house, he will beat them to death with a two by four if he has to, because that's his job.
00:40:42.000There's a crisis and he's responding to it.
00:40:44.000And so if you're organizing a society that you want to be healthy and successful and you want to harness that energy, that male energy, which is like the driver of civilization, that's why we have office buildings, you need to think through like, how do we get the most out of young men?
00:40:59.000And if, by contrast, you wanted to destroy young men, you would do what we're doing now, obviously.
00:42:31.000I tried to get off Advil last year and I have.
00:42:34.000But anyway, leaving Advil, I've got a bunch of Advil theories, that and under Om deodorant, which I'm not going to share with you or your viewers.
00:42:41.000When you're at the moment of least hope and maximum confusion, when you're like, not only are we going in the wrong direction, I don't even know what that direction is.