00:00:00.000Hey, everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show, conversation with my friend Matt Peterson, one of the smartest minds out there from the American Mind, AmericanMind.org.
00:00:08.000How do we replace wise men with experts?
00:01:01.000If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, you could do so at tpusa.com, where we play offense with a sense of urgency to win the American Culture Award.
00:01:09.000If you are a student listening to this, start a high school chapter.
00:01:12.000Start a college chapter today at tpusa.com.
00:01:45.000His 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.
00:01:53.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:52.000So there's a lot I want to explore with you.
00:02:54.000You really caught my attention in a podcast that you were doing, the American Mind podcast, that I don't plug a lot of podcasts, but I encourage people to check out.
00:03:02.000It's wonderful, where you were talking about how we have replaced kind of this idea of a wise or complete man with a subject matter expert.
00:03:12.000And then you went into great detail on how even in the, even when using math to its greatest purpose, it's an approximation.
00:03:21.000Can you kind of recount that couple minute commentary you gave?
00:03:25.000I thought it was so wise and it opened up my eyes to a lot.
00:03:29.000Well, first, thank you for plugging the American Mind podcast.
00:03:33.000I always wonder doing podcasts, why do people listen to this, Steph?
00:03:36.000But every once in a while, maybe we say something valuable as we pontificate all day, right?
00:03:41.000So we're blessed to have that composition.
00:03:43.000So what I was trying to say was in regard to Afghanistan.
00:03:47.000I think you see this example, but you see this happening all throughout the regime.
00:03:52.000And really what happened over the last hundred years is that people began to think that wisdom could be replaced by the social sciences, that you could take mathematics, you could break up problems into parts and really treat the problem of human nature as if it was kind of a statistical problem.
00:04:14.000And the rise of the social sciences, you know, behavioral science, replaced prudence or the old school virtue of trying to figure out what the best thing to do in the circumstances is.
00:04:25.000And you see over and over again the failure now of this approach to trying to solve for the problem of human nature.
00:04:34.000And the truth of the matter is that human beings, wisdom in human beings takes into account all kinds of knowledge, right?
00:04:43.000Into the whole of what it means to be human.
00:04:46.000And the wise person is ultimately the standard by which you judge and not this idea that there's some mystical algorithm or formula out there where if we break things down into so many widgets, we can make policy decisions about what should happen in Afghanistan.
00:05:02.000And the problem is that you have a group of people that are not wise, but they're credentialed.
00:05:08.000And they think that there's some sort of formula that they can implement either in Afghanistan or in public health.
00:05:14.000And so you said something that was super interesting as well.
00:05:16.000And I've been, I stole it the last couple of days.
00:05:19.000And it's that the boomer Facebook people, like, you know, the 65-year-old guy on Facebook has actually been wiser when it comes to the Afghanistan issue or public health or masks or any of this than the experts because they're actually using what we would call common sense or practical knowledge or practical wisdom, where our own leaders almost reject that.
00:05:39.000And they say, no, if it doesn't fit in a very tight formula, then it can't be possibly right.
00:05:48.000I mean, look, the credentials, as I think your audience well knows, are completely bogus at this point.
00:05:55.000I mean, when you credential someone, ultimately, you know, it's just a judgment of a few other people who set up a system and say, you're good to go or you're not.
00:06:18.000You can't create a perfect numerical scale and then put everyone into it.
00:06:23.000And if you've ever been on the other side where you grade people, you realize, well, this person actually showed up to class, but didn't really understand the concept.
00:06:30.000This person didn't show up to class, but did understand the concept.
00:06:52.000And ultimately, if the judgment of those people is good, then the credential is good.
00:06:57.000But if those people have problems and they're actually fools and idiots and don't understand what's going on, then the credentialing is worthless.
00:07:03.000Well, and so they all say they have PhDs that was given based on, they say it's O objective, but there was some subjectivity to it.
00:07:11.000At some point, somebody said your dissertation was worthy of credentialing you into the club.
00:07:18.000And so they hide behind this kind of formulaic supremacy when in reality, they themselves were let into the cool kids club by somebody saying, oh, yeah, this is a good argument or a bad argument or this makes some sense.
00:07:32.000And so this goes kind of back to what's been generally wrong with education, which is this idea that we can program human beings, that we can fit them into kind of this mathematic formula from the top down.
00:07:47.000Can you talk a little about that of how the decline of higher education has participated directly to this and kind of the German historicist model that, you know, with the rise of science, then we can also program human beings?
00:08:00.000Yeah, look, the idea was in an older, really more elite kind of view of education was, you know, say history and political science or politics.
00:08:11.000That was part of politics like the founders did.
00:08:13.000And you would think about principles and human nature in kind of a broad-based way.
00:08:18.000You had a sense of virtues or habits that would make you good or able to see clearly about what ought to be done.
00:08:24.000And you'd study human nature in kind of this broad-based way, more like the great books programs that are few and far between, but still exist today.
00:08:31.000What happens after the Civil War in America is that the universities and graduate degrees start to appear for the first time.
00:08:39.000Before then, like Abraham Lincoln, he could just apprentice to become a lawyer.
00:08:43.000He didn't have to go to law school and get the credential from a bunch of people who handed them out.
00:08:47.000He could just work with a lawyer in town and get to the point where the judgment of his peers, like he's good.
00:08:55.000When we established the grad schools, we all of a sudden created this credentialing system.
00:08:59.000And the problem is we base the very idea of the universities here on this German historicist model, which worshiped social science and statistics and pretended that there's no such thing as morality isn't part of science.
00:09:13.000There's a separation between facts and morality and human nature.
00:09:18.000And basically all of philosophy is just a bunch of garbage and the old stuff is a bunch of garbage.
00:09:24.000We base everything on stats and experimentation.
00:09:27.000And of course, there's some truth to that when you, it's very successful when you think about technologically where we've come, right?
00:09:34.000We learned a lot about how to manipulate nature.
00:09:38.000But what we lost and what we really purposely lost, we jettisoned a long time ago, is the idea that you can reason about morality or politics in a broad, kind of commonsensical way.
00:09:52.000Leo Strauss pointed this out after the Second World War.
00:09:55.000Even if you're a scientist, you still rely on common sense.
00:09:59.000So you can lie to yourself that all of a sudden that stuff doesn't matter and you can somehow make an equation out of everything.
00:10:05.000But in reality, like we all rely on common sense.
00:10:08.000What's dangerous is when we have people who are credentialed who think they're doing very fancy, discreet breaking up of problems into quote unquote science when the problem is something like, how do we leave Afghanistan?
00:10:23.000Did you know that if you shop at Nike, they turn around and give your hard-earned dollars to pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood and the Population Council?
00:10:32.000Did you know that Airbnb gave $500,000 to the Marxist BLM incorporated organization?
00:10:40.000Your first vote is at the ballot box, but that isn't enough to defend our traditional Judeo-Christian values.
00:10:47.000Left-wing corporations who are woke are subverting our nation and our republic by taking money from conservative customers and giving it to radical organizations that support abortion, gun control, and critical race theory.
00:11:03.000You have another vote, a second vote at the checkout line, which is why there's a massively important organization called Second Vote that comes in.
00:12:51.000And so now I want to kind of segue into the conservative movement.
00:12:54.000Then I want to talk about the Biden regime, which I do think is falling apart because they've been so ideological.
00:13:00.000If they were just a little less ideological, I think they actually would have been able to navigate some of these things and not harm themselves politically.
00:13:07.000But let's just talk about the conservative movement.
00:13:09.000It seems that the conservative movement I grew up in was very, very focused on almost the social science emphasis, which is charts and graphs, GDP growth, you know, consumer price index, and almost lost what you and I would think is a more prudent approach of, well, is this really good for the country?
00:13:27.000And can everything be explained in X, Y axis?
00:13:30.000And in some ways, Donald Trump kind of blew that all up because he's like, yeah, I don't really care about your charts and graphs.
00:13:34.000I know instinctively by talking to the welder and talking to the plumber and talking to my waiter at Mar-a-Lago, the country's going to hell and I'm going to fix it.
00:13:41.000And so as we ask ourselves from a conservative movement standpoint, you know, kind of post-Trump or in between Trump, regardless if he's going to run, again, you know, how do we kind of de-emphasize the social science obsession and kind of get back to this more holistic approach of how to, how to govern ourselves?
00:13:58.000Yeah, so I'm so glad you mentioned this.
00:14:01.000I mean, what Trump did is bring back in a very simple way politics, I mean, which is the pursuit of justice, as the federalist papers, as Hamilton says, right?
00:15:29.000And what I have to do when I travel sometimes to some of these audiences that are more secular in nature, but call themselves conservatives, is retrain them that we can make moral claims.
00:15:39.000And now religious groups actually don't mind this as much because they really are used to, you know, differentiating good from evil or truth from lies.
00:15:48.000But can you talk about where we went wrong in this in this regard?
00:15:53.000Because when I spoke at a secular group recently, and again, I'm not saying secular is a pejorative, it's just how they were.
00:16:00.000And they said, Charlie, everything sounds great, but who are you to say that some things are objectively good and objectively bad?
00:16:10.000Okay, so this is the great psyop of the last 150 years in higher education.
00:16:16.000And what it was was to basically teach all of American elites that you can't reason about morality, that there's no rational basis for claims about what's good and bad.
00:16:27.000And I know that we all think this because we're all moderns.
00:16:30.000We've all been educated in this great, you know, American psyop, which, and it's, it's all lies.
00:16:35.000The entire founding generation, even the most modern of them, thought that you could reason about morality.
00:16:40.000Of course, people disagree about what's good and bad.
00:17:46.000And there are objective goods for society and for people.
00:17:50.000And so what happens, Matt, is then even if I can get people to agree on that, they say, well, that doesn't mean we should use state power in pursuit of those means, is that we should be able to call balls and strikes, but we need to be indifferent, non-interventionists, which I find hilarious because they also are regularly very aggressive about bombing other countries.
00:18:06.000But anyway, it's kind of this domestic libertarianism, right?
00:18:09.000Like we can proclaim our truth from our churches, but don't dare try to legislate morality, which of course I've lost patience with that argument.
00:18:18.000Because you just did a wonderful job articulating the psyop, but I'm sure you run across this all the time, right?
00:18:22.000The David French is like, oh, yeah, yeah, you know, I don't like drag queen story hour.
00:18:26.000I think drag between story hour is awful, but I would represent the drag queen in court because that's what freedom of speech is all about.
00:20:15.000Even the like medieval scholar, you know, say Thomas Aquinas would not say that all laws, we should have laws about every, you know, everything under the sun.
00:20:24.000But the key is law, by its nature, legislates morality because it establishes certain kinds of habits for human beings.
00:20:33.000And you can't make the determination about what should be legal and what should not without making a moral claim.
00:20:40.000And what's so promising is I finally find conservatives being open to accept this.
00:20:46.000And I'll be honest, Matt, four years ago, I would have all my alarm bells would have gone off and I would have been like, road to serfdom, F.A. Hayek, you know, this is tyranny talk.
00:20:57.000That if you don't make these moral claims in a limited yet strong government, then all of a sudden you will get tyranny.
00:21:03.000That's that's the that's the great irony is that if you don't get basic things right, human life is valuable, children should be protected, right?
00:21:10.000I mean, just kind of this balance between the ancient and some of the fruits of the Enlightenment, which is free, you know, discourse and dialogue, then you're going to be stuck in some sort of a tyrannical or authoritarian government.
00:21:24.000And this is the founders, I mean, over and over again, they knew that licentiousness or freedom gone wrong would always lead to tyranny.
00:21:33.000And so if you pretend that laws don't legislate morality, they're just neutral, what you'll get is the worst actors will change your law, just as happened in the last 30, 40 years in America.
00:21:43.000The left will come in and change the law because you don't make moral claims and you pretend it's neutral.
00:21:48.000And then they will create a situation in which people go, you know, the freedom gone wrong leads inevitably to tyranny.
00:21:58.000And it's a commonplace of Western political philosophy that if, you know, if you don't have good laws and people just become enslaved to their own desires, the next thing that happens is a tyrant takes over.
00:22:11.000So I want everyone to check out AmericanMind.org.
00:22:14.000And I'm also going to plug new founding and your super PAC because this is really where the conservative movement, you can call it the new right, whatever, this is the best intellectual defense amongst other websites.
00:22:26.000I'm not trying to outrank them, but I got to tell you, just some of the articles recently, Angelo Cotavilla's Graveyard of Narratives, I think that was on your website.
00:22:53.000What if I told you PeerTalk uses the exact same network as one of those carriers, same towers, same exact coverage, but it literally costs you half?
00:24:33.000Yeah, so I think, first off, you're right.
00:24:35.000I mean, it wasn't surprising to any of us, right, that they went in and they had all kinds of plans and they were ready to implement all kinds of crazy things that are terrible for America and the world.
00:24:44.000And of course, this is because the left is organized and is, as we were just saying, that they know what they want to accomplish.
00:24:51.000They don't have to pretend it's neutral.
00:24:54.000But I do think a funny thing happened along the way to the kind of tyranny they wanted to enact.
00:24:59.000And that is their own incompetence caught up with them, right?
00:25:03.000You want an old doddering guy to be in charge, and you also want your technocrats to come in who have all the fancy degrees and whatever.
00:25:12.000You know, they're not able to govern in an effective way anymore because of their own incompetence.
00:25:17.000So yes, they're doing terrible things every day.
00:25:21.000But what's going on is in real time in front of the American people, it's becoming increasingly apparent in every sector, right?
00:25:27.000Whether it's whether we're talking about the virus and the virus restrictions and mandates, et cetera, that things don't make logical sense anymore, right?
00:25:36.000Whether you're talking about Afghanistan and the insane way in which we tried to withdraw, I mean, agree that we should get out, but the way it happened, right?
00:25:44.000I mean, when you look at that, you can't hide it anymore.
00:25:46.000And then you look at the unpopularity of Harris and the, you know, the doddering nature of Biden as he struts about the scene, totters about the scene.
00:25:55.000And it's just, it's becoming harder to hide.
00:25:58.000And I think that the reaction to that is real.
00:26:03.000And you see people now, right, who are sort of in the middle if such a thing exists, who don't pay attention to what's going on, but they're aware that something isn't right.
00:26:14.000And I think more and more people are essentially radicalized, right?
00:26:17.000They're thinking, wait a minute, you're really going to make me get this vaccine or I lose my job?
00:26:45.000They're seeming indifferent to normal checks and balances.
00:26:49.000A normal president would kind of compensate a little bit, right?
00:26:52.000Would not maybe hedge or how do there's two ways to process it, right?
00:26:56.000Either they just don't care and it's like, we're going to run this thing out, or they have some sort of plan up their sleeves that's pretty insidious.
00:27:04.000And I don't even want to guess what that is.
00:27:08.000I mean, I think that the problem is that they don't regard themselves as living in a full-fledged democracy.
00:27:16.000They regard themselves as deserving, being deserving of the throne, and that anyone who opposes them is illegitimate, right?
00:27:24.000And this is why Trump, he was illegitimate.
00:27:26.000He was not a legitimate president because they have the divine right of kings in their minds.
00:27:31.000They have the mandate of heaven in their minds.
00:27:36.000And so there's a certain sense in which they don't care.
00:27:39.000And by the way, look at what's happened over the last 20 years.
00:27:41.000I mean, whether you're talking about, you know, California, say, the Prop A voting against gay marriage and the courts say, no, it doesn't matter what the people think.
00:27:49.000Right now, the recall in California is a good example.
00:27:52.000Will it matter that there's a recall election when it's going to be fortified?
00:27:56.000That election is going to be fortified like crazy with a month for mail-in ballots and Gavin Newsom's political machines.
00:28:01.000There's a sense in which these people think that they have transcended the democratic form of governance and they control the media, they control the technology.
00:28:12.000And so you can just see them, they don't care.
00:28:17.000And they're pushing everything to 11, right?
00:28:20.000They're using cultural and commercial capital, all of it.
00:28:24.000They're putting all of it on the line and just moving forward and leaving democracy behind.
00:28:32.000And so then how do we as conservatives, and we have a lot of listeners to this program that run companies and give money generously to many different causes, how do we then counter move against that?
00:28:45.000I mean, for example, the Department of Education just came out today and they said that if you have anti-mandatory mask mandates, you're in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
00:28:54.000I mean, and by the way, all I have to say is Christopher Caldwell was right.
00:29:15.000If I have to listen to one more podcast of you telling me that we're living through a blitzkrieg, how do I fight back?
00:29:20.000Yeah, so there's, look, in general, I have to say, asking the question is the first step, because once you get to the point where you realize voting is not enough, you know, just listening to podcasts isn't enough.
00:29:35.000And that's what, you know, thank God there's groups like yours bringing people in so they can actually be become activists.
00:29:42.000And so, look, a lot of it is that you have to find other, what I say is find other people, surround yourself with other people who also want to take action.
00:29:56.000And this is why I realize we need a cultural and commercial movement that ultimately points in the different direction from the woke borg.
00:30:05.000And that's where new founding comes in.
00:30:07.000We've created a company called New Founding that will newfounding.com.
00:30:11.000You can sign up for our newsletter, which is about not buying products and services, not using services and buying products from people who hate you.
00:30:21.000And that's not like one company trying to dominate them all.
00:30:24.000We want to just be the flagship of a movement where medium-sized businesses who really have no one to represent them start joining alliances, creating new associations that move in a different direction.
00:30:36.000We have all kinds of people who are talented who are ready to leave their jobs at fancy blue chip firms and organizations and blue cities because they're being persecuted.
00:30:46.000They want to join with investors and other people to create new companies that look just point in a different direction, that are non-discriminatory, that really want to move people towards a way of life that's very different than the ugliness you see on the covers of lifestyle publications today.
00:31:03.000And so we need to band together as a cultural and commercial movement to actually do business together and start to make informed choices about where we spend our money.
00:31:13.000And I think everyone wants to do this.
00:31:15.000There's a lot of other people we're working with do this.
00:31:18.000We're taking a step at newfounding.com to just go out there and get after it.
00:31:22.000But we need as many people as possible to start solving some of these problems.
00:31:27.000And I'll say, the will is there, right?
00:31:30.000We're going to need some of you who are listening to this to step up and lead that idea that you have that for X, Y, and Z. You need to go out on a limb and start asking people for advice and get funding for it and just charging forward.
00:33:09.000So to react to that, it can't be, oh, well, I'm a Republican and you're a Democrat and we have different policies.
00:33:16.000You have to react in a much more serious way.
00:33:18.000Essentially, like what I just described was half the country needs to and wants to act more like Mormons and Jews when it comes traditionally have acted when it comes to economics, right?
00:33:30.000I mean, to keep their traditions alive, they have banded together against outside forces.
00:33:36.000And I think Christians need to understand that that's the model now.
00:33:42.000And people who just aren't, whether they're not religious or not, who just aren't down with the woke religion need to realize we have to band together in a serious way to take action against the other side.
00:33:53.000So I absolutely think that's the case.
00:33:55.000And that leads me to one of the other projects we're engaged in, AmericanFirebrand.com, which is a digital media super PAC that fights to win.
00:34:09.000It's just, it's going to be launching in the next month, over the next month or so.
00:34:12.000And AmericanFirebrand.com, I mean, Firebrand is about fighting to win and attacking the enemy and saying the things that Republicans generally won't say and rewarding candidates who say the right thing and punishing those who do not.
00:34:28.000And I think, you know, the people need a voice and Firebrand will be that voice.
00:34:35.000We need these voices who start saying, calling out the reality that we're in and, you know, attacking the right people and rewarding those who are actually moving this forward, who understand what time it is, who know that we're in a kind of political cold war that's turning hot.
00:34:54.000No matter how you're feeling about getting back out there, there's no denying it's an adjustment.
00:34:58.000When the world gets too loud, something I love to do is create my own soundtrack by popping in Raycon wireless earbuds.
00:35:04.000Sometimes you need upbeat music to pump you up before you see people or stay calm with some guided meditation.
00:35:10.000Let me tell you right now, Raycons are the best way to listen.
00:35:12.000Raycon have a 32-hour battery life and they start at half the price of the other premium audio brands, but they sound just as good.
00:35:19.000At Raycon, they come with a 45-day happiness guarantee.
00:36:14.000And it's about time that we start using power as well.
00:36:17.000Isn't that the message that we also need to send to our activists to give clear marching orders to their leaders to actually be able to use political power?
00:37:00.000The Republican Party needs to resolve to actually represent, defend, and defend its own people.
00:37:07.000And the only way it's going to do that is if we stand up and tell them exactly what we want them to say and exactly what we want them to do.
00:37:15.000So for instance, even our firebrand project, I mean, the whole idea of the super PAC is you start showing them what's actually popular with the base, right?
00:37:24.000If a video is popular, then they know that that is something that they should be saying.
00:38:09.000Defending people who are being ill-treated.
00:38:12.000Look, January 6th, if people went out and committed crimes, they should be prosecuted for their crimes.
00:38:18.000But on the other hand, is this a fair process, right?
00:38:22.000If it's not a fair process, then why are we afraid to say, like the ACLU used to say, hey, even if you don't like what they did, they deserve a fair process like everyone else.
00:38:32.000Why is that so hard for Republican politicians to make that distinction?
00:39:22.000I think that the fruit of the homeschooling movement can finally then bear out, kind of hopefully conservatives having six kids per family and them having no kids.
00:39:30.000Like maybe then we could start to see things, but it seems that we just kind of want it now and we want it quickly.
00:39:36.000And that's something that people don't always want to hear and kind of want to act on.
00:39:42.000So in closing, Matt, I'm going to go through the websites again, newfounding.org or come.
00:40:34.000I am full of hope because of how much energy is now being expended since the election by people who are just done taking orders from losers.
00:40:45.000I think there's a lot of us who have woken up, have evolved in the last few years.
00:40:50.000We see what needs to be done and we're going out there.
00:40:52.000We're building new things and we're making connections to do it.
00:40:55.000If there's anything, it's like almost, if there's any downside to this, it's like there's confusion because so many people are trying to organize to build a new cultural, commercial, and political movement.
00:41:05.000And so if you're out there and you feel alone and, you know, depressed, you need to realize there are people out there who are trying to make a difference, who are building new things, who see the same things you do.
00:41:16.000And if you get with them, you will build the future.
00:41:47.000Who are some of the specific people that you really see are moving the dial?
00:41:51.000Well, I mean, just in terms of politicians, I like JD Vance, Blake Masters, Joe Kent, Anthony Sabatini, who is with us at the Lincoln Fellowship.
00:42:01.000I mean, these are bright lights who are saying very, you know, very bold, belligerent things as they run for office.
00:42:08.000In terms of organizations, I mean, I like our Friends at American Moment.
00:42:13.000I think there's organizations like that that are new, that are trying to move in interesting directions.
00:42:20.000And I guess I would just have to say that the thing that energizes me most, Charlie, is actually not some of the main names or big organizations.
00:42:32.000Although, you know, you're all doing good work.
00:42:35.000It's the people, and you have this experience as well.
00:42:37.000So people you meet who are in business, who are quietly behind the scenes, who are starting to organize new businesses, new cultural and media movements.