00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today at Charlie Kirk Show, Yoram Hazoni joins us for a full hour to talk about conservatism, a rediscovery, the Bible, the Torah, Davos, World Economic Forum, and more.
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00:00:42.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:48.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:49.000And this is just so perfect to have you in town to be able to have this conversation, all the way from Israel, I should say, because of what's happening right now in Davos and in Switzerland.
00:02:00.000We've been talking a lot about the World Economic Forum.
00:02:03.000And it's interesting because Yalval Noah Harari, who's the senior advisor to Klaus Schwab, there are several pieces of tape where he's talking about kind of remaking Genesis, where he says that God created human beings and now we need to do the same.
00:02:18.000And so all this ties perfectly into our conversation.
00:02:20.000So first, why don't you introduce yourself to the audience and we can go from there?
00:02:26.000I live in Jerusalem, married, nine children, at this point, three grandchildren, God willing, expecting some more.
00:02:34.000And recent years, I've been involved with, I'm the chairman of an outfit called the Edmund Burke Foundation, which runs the National Conservatism Conferences, which we've been doing for a few years, pretty much every year in the United States and in Europe.
00:03:44.000Well, look, World War II, World War I, I mean, these are incredibly traumatic experiences for Europe and for America, for other countries as well.
00:03:57.000And in the wake of the two world wars, there is this big push, both by Marxists and by liberals, to say, you know, what caused this is the inheritance of the past.
00:04:11.000What caused this is religion and traditional ideologies and especially the nation.
00:04:18.000You know, because Hitler called himself a nationalist.
00:04:45.000He's completely against the idea of independent nations.
00:04:48.000An independent nation for him is, you know, it's this kind of Jewish Christian concoction where different nations get their freedom.
00:04:58.000And Hitler says, no, if, you know, we the Germans, we're going to be, Germany's going to be the mistress of the globe.
00:05:05.000We're going to be the lords of the earth.
00:05:06.000And so there aren't going to be any independent nations.
00:05:09.000And so it's bizarre that after the Second World War, we get all of these very well-intentioned, well-meaning liberals who say, yeah, it's national independence that caused the Holocaust.
00:05:21.000And that is kind of the shadow that is cascading over our politics now.
00:05:27.000It intensifies until it reaches a kind of, I would say, a crescendo with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
00:05:36.000After the fall of the Berlin Wall, you get this euphoric kind of utopianism.
00:05:43.000Both Democrats and Republicans, Labor and the Tories, across Europe, all the major political parties start talking about the New World Order, what George H.W. Bush calls the New World Order.
00:05:57.000And he says, for 100 generations, mankind has struggled to try to replace the law of the jungle with the rule of law.
00:06:06.000And what he means by the rule of law is a single legal system that's going to wrap the entire globe, and America is going to be the policeman of the world.
00:06:16.000So I can't help but ask now your opinion as a religious Jew about how that ties into, because we've actually been walking through together a little informally as I'm going through the study myself of the first 11 books of Genesis, which I find to be so profound and beautiful, how the teaching of the city of Babel, how that ties into some of these globalist aims and ambitions.
00:06:40.000And I use the word city because we call the Tower of Babel, but really they wanted to build a city.
00:06:45.000The Tower is just one component of that.
00:06:47.000So the Tower of Babel story is kind of the opening shot in a theme that you have throughout the Old Testament, throughout the Hebrew Bible.
00:07:00.000And this theme is that human beings want to solve all the world's problems.
00:07:06.000And no, seriously, Pharaoh, we think of Pharaoh as such a bad guy as the Babylonian Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Persian Empire.
00:07:14.000But they didn't think they were the bad guys.
00:07:17.000In their mind, no, seriously, they thought...
00:07:19.000Well, no, but that's Aristotle's opening line.
00:07:21.000Every art, every inquiry points towards some good.
00:07:26.000And when you dig up their clay tablets, there's always some God that's sending the king of Egypt or Babylonia or Assyria to conquer the four corners of the earth.
00:08:21.000In Deuteronomy, it says that you're not going to take an inch of the neighbor's territories because they have their own freedom and their own path to God.
00:08:34.000This is the beginning of the idea of the independent nation.
00:08:38.000Israel and then Armenia become ancient, these ancient Middle Eastern peoples, they become independent nations that are against universal empire.
00:08:48.000And the whole history of the West is this seesaw between, you know, and Americans have this too.
00:09:48.000And they chose the eagle, which of course, you know, that's a Roman imperial symbol.
00:09:53.000It's a symbol of freedom, but it's a completely different kind of freedom.
00:09:58.000So the seesaw is there, but I don't think you can miss in the American founding the fact that they think in terms of nations and especially the Federalist Party, Washington's Party, which wrote the Constitution and was responsible for creating one nation out of the 13 colonies.
00:10:37.000This is a serious piece of literature here, and it will bless you.
00:10:40.000So I asked the question previously, and I'd love your thoughts on this.
00:10:45.000What percentage of the leaders and the attendees at the World Economic Forum and Davos believe that the eyes of God are upon them, judging their every action?
00:10:54.000Well, look, I would hope that there's more than it looks like.
00:11:17.000Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari and all their friends, they've been bitten by the bug.
00:11:24.000They think that they know the answer for how all of mankind should live.
00:11:30.000And this is the same old imperial story, is that the God of the Bible understands there are many different nations, and each one has to find its own path.
00:11:42.000Each one has its own traditions, its own way of looking at things.
00:11:47.000And these guys have completely forgotten this.
00:11:51.000I mean, I'm a little bit embarrassed listening to Harari.
00:11:54.000I don't think I've ever heard a Jew talk like the way he talks about we're going to produce two things.
00:12:21.000As you know, in Judaism, every human being is in the image of God.
00:12:27.000And this kind of easy dismissal of the majority of mankind because you think you've got the answers, it's really a terrible, it's intellectual folly, but morally it's a sin, I think, to think of this.
00:13:10.000The next big projects of humankind will be to overcome old age and death, to find the keys, the secret to happiness, and to basically upgrade humans into gods.
00:13:26.000And I don't mean it as a kind of literary metaphor.
00:13:36.000Yeah, so I think in the literal sense, this is the exact opposite of scripture, where, you know, Judaism comes into the world with one basic idea, which is that, you know, these God-kings, I mean, it was common to think that Pharaoh is a god, that the kings of these empires are gods.
00:14:02.000And that was, they said literally, they meant it literally, that there were gods.
00:14:07.000And scripture takes this opposite approach.
00:14:11.000Moses and the prophets tell us that there's no such thing.
00:14:15.000You can't, you're not a god because you're a king.
00:14:18.000There's the God of gods, the king of kings, as God is described in the books of Moses.
00:14:28.000And the point is that human beings are limited, that there is no way to make them unlimited.
00:14:38.000We're limited in our ability to get to the truth.
00:14:42.000We're limited in every conceivable way.
00:14:45.000Now, that doesn't mean that human beings aren't something that can be magnificent, but there's a big difference between being a magnificent human being who is working to advance the cause, God's cause, the cause of a just and decent world, and somebody who says, no, I'm a God.
00:15:16.000I mean, this is, you know, he's basically saying, and again, it's very painful to hear a Jew saying this kind of thing, that, you know, all those thousands of years of human beings trying to come into a proper relationship with God and with justice, which is about recognizing your own limitations.
00:15:35.000And he says, no, we don't need to do that anymore.
00:15:38.000The Yuval Harari line of thinking, he is just more forceful and more blunt than most.
00:15:45.000But that kind of idea that we will be gods and that we will become a god completely goes against the distinction that the Torah says in just the first couple books, distinction between God and man.
00:15:58.000Paganism and polytheism actually predated the Torah.
00:16:02.000The Torah was largely written to refute that.
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00:17:11.000So you were making a point about Thomas Aquinas, which always gets my attention.
00:17:15.000Well, no, I was invited by some good professors at the University of Dallas in a couple of months to come and give a Berkeyan response to the natural law theory of Thomas Aquinas.
00:17:34.000And so I've been, you know, look, he's extremely smart and teaches you all sorts of things.
00:17:43.000One of the interesting things that I hadn't seen is that he says that Friday, night, and Saturday is the day of rest, and Sunday is the Lord's Day.
00:18:51.000When you've got 24, 26 hours where, you know, business and the news and the world is shut out to the exclusion of your family, your neighbors, worship, and Torah study.
00:19:09.000I think we should bring back blue laws.
00:19:10.000I think America became less free as we repealed blue laws.
00:19:14.000And if you don't know what blue laws are, that's where everything used to shut down.
00:19:18.000Well, you know, I grew up in New Jersey.
00:19:21.000You know, so I'm a little bit older probably than a lot of the listeners, but in New Jersey in the 1970s and 80s, there were blue laws.
00:20:24.000Why is it that the stores should be open?
00:20:26.000Because I feel like shopping on Sunday.
00:20:29.000And the question is: are you, as an individual, happier?
00:20:35.000Are you happier if there are guidelines that help you point towards the traditions of what used to be healthy and what used to make people happy?
00:20:46.000Or are you better off if you do all the thinking yourself?
00:20:49.000So I know a lot of people say, no, I'm better off if I do all the thinking myself.
00:20:54.000But I don't mean to insult anybody, but it's kind of the way teenagers think is that they don't understand what their parents have to do in order to finance the family, in order to build the home, in order to educate children.
00:21:14.000So the teenagers don't understand, and they get all this strength and they want to be free.
00:21:20.000And so they get kind of arrogant, many of them, and they want to overthrow their parents.
00:21:25.000But when they get older, they start, you know, they have children of their own.
00:21:28.000They start to realize that life's not so simple.
00:21:31.000And they very often, most cases, they start to swing back to understanding the things that, you know, the way their parents saw things.
00:21:39.000And the question about religion is exactly that question: is do we inherit anything, guidelines, rules that are designed and tried over thousands of years to make us healthy and happy?
00:21:56.000I think the Jews and Christians have those kinds of rules.
00:21:59.000You said something fascinating where you said, I think I want to go shop or all that.
00:22:04.000It goes back to this, I think, I believe, I should say, because I'm about to push back against that diction, that word choice, is as soon as Rene Descartes wrote, I think, therefore I am, this idea of your own personal thinking is elevated over what might come before you.
00:22:23.000And this set off a strain, a pattern of Enlightenment thinkers, where the idea of piety, or one of my favorite words, duty, was kind of put aside.
00:22:51.000I mean, the first step in his method is recognizing that the texts inherited from the past have been inflated.
00:22:58.000They don't really have anything to teach you.
00:23:00.000And so every individual, he says, has to start from scratch, at least once in his life, has to say, I'm going to just reject everything and I'm going to begin from the beginning.
00:23:23.000Yeah, I mean, even if you isolate the time period to say 30 years, we are becoming more suicidal, miserable, far less joyful, less children being born than ever before.
00:23:35.000And the answer is not more benzodiazepan, Zoloft, Prozac, or any other kind of pharmaceutical or pharmacologions.
00:23:42.000You and I would both argue that this has been a spiritual and a political derailment from the ties that bind us together.
00:23:51.000Or, I mean, and you know it far better than I do, as Edmund Burke would say, the three-tied knot of what is to come, what has been, and what is.
00:23:58.000Yeah, I know a lot of people don't, you know, this is we're talking about within living memory.
00:24:05.000As I write in the book, my wife and I met when we were, you know, we were in college, and both of us came from a background that, you know, where we were already suffering from a lot of these ailments that you're talking about.
00:24:19.000And we wanted to, we had caught a glimpse.
00:24:24.000I had lived for a year in Israel where I had spent the Sabbaths with my Orthodox aunt and uncle.
00:24:32.000And we wanted to see whether it isn't possible for young people to join a community where those traditions are still the life of conservation and transmission, of handing down wisdom, of handing down guidelines, whether it wasn't possible to rejoin that.
00:24:58.000I mean, it takes work, but even if you're starting from close to zero, you can join a community where you go to the community and you see that the people are happier, the people are healthier.
00:25:21.000All of us make mistakes and all of us sin.
00:25:24.000But as a community, the effort is we together are trying to lead a good life and to hand down the wisdom of our ancestors.
00:25:35.000So if we were to, in private with a lie detector test, let's say theoretically, we can give a truth serum to all the World Economic Forum people, Yuval Harari, Klaus Schwab, and all of them.
00:25:46.000And we ask them, do you think human beings are naturally good or naturally bad?
00:25:52.000What do you think their answer would be?
00:25:54.000They're going to say we can make them good.
00:27:07.000It's a little bit, maybe a little bit less dramatic because it's an academic discipline.
00:27:12.000But yeah, but what is the replication crisis?
00:27:15.000The replication crisis is that you can be going to university courses and studying things that are supposedly scientific facts, except it turns out that if somebody, If an academic psychologist goes and tries to replicate the experiments 30 years later, you can't replicate them.
00:27:36.000And there's an awful lot of what's being called science, which is like that.
00:27:42.000You know, the fact that we can fly airplanes doesn't mean that the drug that you're taking actually does what it claims that it can do.
00:27:49.000Yeah, and there is this kind of, and I see this, I grew up in upper-middle-class suburban society, and it's baked into the given of upper-middle-class American suburban life, which is the advance of the modernity can never be challenged.
00:28:04.000And since Advil or Motrin or Tylenol can help you with your headache, therefore all these other things must be true.
00:28:14.000Therefore, there's no way that staring at your screen all day long can be bad for you.
00:28:18.000Therefore, you must take the mRNA vaccine or whatever the kind of in-vogue thing is.
00:28:25.000And I mean, Woodrow Wilson really was one of the more forceful American presidents to say, look, we have the steam-powered engine, we have automatic machine guns, we're going to figure out how to fly across the nation.
00:28:39.000There is this temptation to disregard the past in favor of the modern, or in our case, the postmodern, because things can move faster, 30 seconds.
00:29:10.000Yeah, I mean, look, it's that old phrase, the more I know, the more I realize how little I knew when I knew it all, or something like that.
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00:31:00.000I think I'd put it a little earlier, but whatever the year, whatever your year is, you need to put the thing back on the path that it was on back then.
00:31:10.000Now, that's obviously it's not, you know, you can't actually literally do it in every way.
00:31:15.000But, you know, but things can be restored.
00:31:19.000I mean, the Supreme Court in Dobbs is restoring a piece of the earlier American Constitution.
00:31:28.000And so, you know, there aren't many examples like that, recent examples, but that is an example.
00:31:36.000And in my book, I write about the American Constitution.
00:31:40.000People don't necessarily remember that Washington and his party, when they wrote the Constitution, their restorationists, there already was an American Constitution, right?
00:32:05.000It's bringing back a British tradition for how you create a strong central government, which the Americans thought they were going to do without.
00:32:13.000Look, restoration is possible, but it begins at home.
00:33:23.000You're not going to make that decision.
00:33:25.000So we don't know if America is Sdom and it's going to be destroyed because it's so evil or if it's Ninve and it's evil, but God's going to forgive it because people are going to repent.