The Charlie Kirk Show - The Great, Conservative, American Betrayal with Chris Buskirk

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00:00:08.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:09.000 This episode I sit down with the editor-in-chief of American Greatness, and we explore some very big and provocative ideas.

00:00:15.000 You're going to really enjoy this conversation.

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00:01:13.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:01:15.000 Chris Buzzkirk is in the studio.

00:01:17.000 Here we go.

00:01:18.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:01:20.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:01:22.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:25.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:29.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:01:30.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:01:31.000 His 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.

00:01:39.000 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.

00:01:48.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:52.000 Chris, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:53.000 Thanks.

00:01:54.000 I can't believe that it's already my second time on the show.

00:01:57.000 It seems like a blink, but it's six weeks, seven days since, and a lot's happening in our country.

00:02:05.000 I was joking with somebody today, Charlie.

00:02:07.000 I said, you know, there was this brief moment in March when everything was starting to shut down.

00:02:11.000 I thought, like, we're going to get a little breathing space here.

00:02:14.000 Things are going to slow down.

00:02:15.000 And in fact, what happens is everything sped up.

00:02:17.000 Yeah.

00:02:17.000 So since, let's just recap.

00:02:19.000 When we last met, it was still the Washington Redskins.

00:02:22.000 Right.

00:02:23.000 Right.

00:02:23.000 So we did not have Google or YouTube, of which we are streaming live on, putting $100 million to BLM incorporated causes.

00:02:33.000 It just seems that a lot has changed very quickly.

00:02:36.000 What do you make of all this?

00:02:38.000 You know, I guess there's this sort of famous phrase, like Hemingway said, you know, that's kind of the way you go bankrupt really slowly and then all at once.

00:02:46.000 Yeah, it's gradually then suddenly.

00:02:47.000 Yeah, and that sort of, it's gradually and then suddenly with this too.

00:02:51.000 I mean, you say, well, this kind of came out of nowhere.

00:02:54.000 Not really.

00:02:54.000 I mean, this has been building for a while and it's like, yeah, these particular things happened.

00:03:00.000 The big donations you're talking about from Google, the tearing down of storage, statues, the revoking of the names.

00:03:07.000 Well, people have been agitating to have the Redskins change their names for 20 years, at least.

00:03:13.000 And I guess one of my quick takeaways on this is that it does actually show what persistence does.

00:03:23.000 Like if you have a dedicated group of people who want to accomplish something, it is possible to accomplish really big things.

00:03:31.000 And that's something that I know that conservatives, people on the right broadly, kind of look at the last 50 or 60 years, maybe more, and look at having lost every major institution in the country and say, okay, can you ever do anything about that?

00:03:52.000 You know, because we lost all we you know, even the military, I mean, when you look at the uh when you look at sort of the field-grade officers, you know, sort of colonels and above, they're interchangeable with the board of directors of a Fortune 100 country, right?

00:04:08.000 I mean, they they sort of went to the same schools, they subscribed to the same cultural beliefs and doctrines.

00:04:15.000 And I look back at that and or look not back, but I look at that and say, yeah, okay, we did lose these things, but there are people who are dedicated to this country, first of all, and to the ideas upon which it was founded, which made this a great country.

00:04:34.000 And we need to get to work and not just say, okay, well, we lost, let's retreat.

00:04:39.000 It's like, let's actually take a little bit of heart and say that actually human action and human agency matters.

00:04:47.000 And if we're dedicated and we're smart and we work hard, we actually can build things that matter and that change the trajectory, not just at the margins, not just fiddling with little things, but we have to change the trajectory, and that's actually possible.

00:05:00.000 Yes, I wrote a piece for your website, didn't it?

00:05:03.000 Think big, essentially.

00:05:05.000 And that was one thing you mentioned in either one of our private conversations or on the podcast where you said one of the big problems is the conservative movement is not thinking big enough.

00:05:13.000 Right, absolutely right.

00:05:15.000 Sorry, go ahead.

00:05:16.000 Well, yeah, I mean, this is a persistent theme that I, and I try and come back to this a lot, which is there's conservatives are, you know, I just am temperamentally sort of conservative, politically, obviously, on the right.

00:05:30.000 And conservatives, there's a sense in which we don't want to think too big because there's a lot of risk and we think, well, what are the unintended consequences?

00:05:43.000 Like, this is one of the sort of political principles.

00:05:45.000 It's kind of the Hippocratic oath.

00:05:48.000 Like, you know, first do no harm.

00:05:50.000 And I think that's right.

00:05:53.000 However, there are times when you really need to think big.

00:05:58.000 It's not enough to say, you know, wouldn't it be great if the marginal tax rate was 3% lower?

00:06:04.000 Like, I mean, I guess.

00:06:05.000 If you're an accountant for some probably anti-American corporation that has already disenfranchised our country, I guess that's important.

00:06:13.000 Right.

00:06:14.000 I mean, I guess like anybody else, I prefer to pay less taxes than more, but is that really going to solve the biggest issues that are facing this country?

00:06:22.000 And then you kind of take it out and people start to say, okay, you're right.

00:06:22.000 No.

00:06:25.000 Well, what's the next thing? 1.00

00:06:26.000 Let's solve immigration. 0.99

00:06:26.000 Well, I don't know. 0.99

00:06:27.000 That's really important, too.

00:06:28.000 I agree.

00:06:29.000 And that should be a component of anything that we're thinking about.

00:06:33.000 But think bigger again and say, how do we build institutions?

00:06:38.000 Like, what does the country we want look like?

00:06:41.000 Not what we think we can get in the next five years or 10 years, but what is the country that we want and how do we get there?

00:06:48.000 And I think it's necessary, actually.

00:06:49.000 I think it's not just a nice thing.

00:06:51.000 I think if a country lacks direction or a spirit of achievement, you're going to deteriorate.

00:06:57.000 And I think that in certain inflection moments of our country's history, we kind of found it by mistake, accidentally, or intentionally through making ourselves think big.

00:07:07.000 I mean, Thomas Jefferson, literally acquiring the western part of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase, was, by definition, thinking big.

00:07:13.000 Teddy Roosevelt, by commissioning the national parks, which is something that conservatives, for whatever reason, don't want to talk about.

00:07:21.000 And I think it's actually one of the coolest things that a Republican president ever did was preserving Yelso National Park with Ramsey Johnson.

00:07:28.000 It's one of the great legacies of any president, but especially a Republican.

00:07:31.000 And being a Republican.

00:07:32.000 It's being a conservative, by definition, is conserving what you love.

00:07:36.000 Or winning World War II was obviously thinking very, very big.

00:07:42.000 And going to the moon, JFK, or defeating the Soviet Union, I think when we lose a pioneer spirit or frontier spirit, or what does success look like, I think societies tend to meander.

00:07:52.000 And they will inevitably meander to leftism.

00:07:57.000 Yeah, this is, there's actually a lot there.

00:08:00.000 I mean, you think about the founding of this country.

00:08:03.000 I don't know.

00:08:04.000 Founding a new country is pretty big, right?

00:08:06.000 I mean, this is...

00:08:07.000 It was actually probably the first time a country was founded with thought and intentionality to that date.

00:08:12.000 I mean, other civilizations are almost, they fell backwards into it.

00:08:16.000 Like, we're kind of the people regionally here, and this is like, we're going to start something new.

00:08:20.000 Yeah, right.

00:08:21.000 I mean, you have these different moments in history, sort of Athens, Rome, that they're, in a way, they're foreshocks as to what America would be and could be, because there was an element of thoughtfulness and intentionality there.

00:08:38.000 But still, then you look at 1776 and 1789, and that's quite a unique moment in history.

00:08:45.000 And it struck me as an irony that conservatives, the people who revere the founding most in this country, are in some ways the least like the founders.

00:08:57.000 The founders thought, I don't like the way this is working out with the king.

00:09:03.000 We have these systems of government that are already here.

00:09:06.000 We have legislatures and whatnot.

00:09:08.000 So we have sort of a mixed regime where we have local rule that's semi-autonomous, but we're still ultimately colonies of the crown.

00:09:18.000 And they said, you know, actually, we can do this better, and we want to do it better.

00:09:22.000 So we're going to just, we're going to found our own country.

00:09:25.000 And then you fast forward 200 years and like sort of 20th and 21st century conservatives revere the founding itself and the documents and the ideas.

00:09:34.000 And the symbology of it, sort of.

00:09:37.000 Yeah, but yeah, but how many conservatives that you know, I've done, you don't have to name any names, but how many can you think of right now, these sort of household brand conservatives, can you think of that would get behind founding a new country?

00:09:54.000 None.

00:09:55.000 None, right.

00:09:55.000 I mean, maybe there's a couple, but I don't know who they are.

00:09:59.000 But that's my point, is that it's sort of that the phrase from the Declaration, when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to exolve ties.

00:10:08.000 It becomes necessary.

00:10:08.000 Right.

00:10:09.000 And so that's a huge statement.

00:10:11.000 It is a hugely, it is a statement that's pregnant with all these implications.

00:10:16.000 And that's the sort of big thinking that a lot of Americans need to be doing.

00:10:25.000 And, you know, and I reflect on that period of the founding.

00:10:28.000 You know, Jefferson reflected a certain stream in American political thought at that point.

00:10:35.000 And then you sort of have the Hamiltonians and you have sort of the people gathered around John Witherspoon, who had a more maybe a more distinctly Christian view of what they were doing.

00:10:51.000 I've spent some time recently reading sermons from that era, which were very influential.

00:10:56.000 He had activist pastors back then.

00:10:58.000 Boy, to say the least.

00:11:01.000 You didn't have a pastor that wasn't involved in the public square.

00:11:03.000 Yeah, that's...

00:11:04.000 It was the rarity.

00:11:05.000 Yeah, it was the rarity.

00:11:06.000 It was interesting because I've read because there was some back and forth between pastors who didn't think they had the right to preach from the pulpit.

00:11:14.000 I think that's 100%.

00:11:17.000 Yeah.

00:11:17.000 I mean, there's like this whole dispute about what's the appropriate role.

00:11:21.000 There's this Protestant resistance theory.

00:11:25.000 The country was very Episcopalian at the time. 0.62

00:11:28.000 Yeah, and particularly in Tidewater, Virginia, In New England, it was Congregationalist, trending Unitarian, which ultimately had pretty bad effects on the country. 0.86

00:11:41.000 But, you know, on the, I guess my point here was you go back to sort of the Jefferson Hamilton, and then I'm just sort of using Witherspoon as a stand-in for sort of the Christian sensibility among the founders.

00:11:55.000 There was a broad spectrum, and yet they were all thinking about a new country.

00:11:59.000 That's my point, is that you had a broad spectrum of political opinion, and yet they were all pretty united ultimately on this one thing, which is we're going to build a country here on this, like the eastern shore of this continent, and we don't even know how far west this continent goes, really, but we're going to build a country here.

00:12:18.000 What you're saying is that the founders were not thinking about how they could lower the marginal tax rate with King George.

00:12:24.000 They just want to lower the T-tax rate.

00:12:25.000 That's what I'm saying.

00:12:26.000 But their spirit was not, how do we manage this awful circumstance?

00:12:32.000 I'm not saying that's a perfectly applicable example.

00:12:34.000 Yeah, no, that's right.

00:12:35.000 They were thinking about how do we build something new?

00:12:37.000 How do we build something?

00:12:38.000 It wasn't even just big.

00:12:39.000 It was the biggest thinking a group of people could do.

00:12:42.000 That's right.

00:12:43.000 I mean, as in political terms, when you're talking about regime-level politics, what is this regime?

00:12:50.000 That's it.

00:12:51.000 I mean, that is the most fundamental sort of thinking and acting that you can do.

00:12:57.000 And so, you know, when I think about sort of 21st century conservatives, people on the right now, they need to be thinking in those terms, not in the sense necessarily of founding a brand new country, but in regime-level politics, what is the regime that we want?

00:13:15.000 Because it will help us to sustain the type of life we want for ourselves and for our families.

00:13:21.000 Well, and I have, without saying any names, there are some conservatives that in the last couple of weeks, to say I've been disappointed would be an understatement, have said America is 400 years old, and they run some of the biggest organizations out there.

00:13:35.000 And I've privately sent messages to these people.

00:13:37.000 I said, we are not 400 years old.

00:13:39.000 We had a very distinct separation of the tyranny that pre-existed us.

00:13:44.000 That's a 1619 New York Times talking point, by the way, that it's 1619 that's our founding, not 1776.

00:13:51.000 And that might seem somewhat inconsequential.

00:13:54.000 I think it's incredibly important, actually.

00:13:56.000 Yeah, it's so the 1619 thing, obviously, I disagree with.

00:14:01.000 I think I have a little bit of a different frame on this.

00:14:06.000 I wrote something about this recently, and I think that you can, there's, I agree with you in the sense that the United States of America came into existence in 1776.

00:14:19.000 But there's a part of our history that's important that goes to 1607, not to 1619.

00:14:25.000 So you have the settlements in Virginia, and you have the first written law in North America by colonists.

00:14:34.000 So you have Dale's Law written in Virginia, then in 1620, you have the Mayflower Compact.

00:14:42.000 And when you go back and look at, and by the way, these are super short documents.

00:14:47.000 So I'm about to say, when you go back and read these, it's an assignment.

00:14:50.000 If you read both of them, it's like a 10-minute assignment, totally, to read it.

00:14:54.000 It's not like reading Hegel.

00:14:56.000 No, it's not.

00:14:56.000 I mean, it's very, right.

00:14:58.000 It's extremely straightforward, and yet, which, by the way, the law should be.

00:15:03.000 It's very straightforward.

00:15:06.000 And that way people understand it.

00:15:07.000 They know what their obligations are to the law.

00:15:10.000 More laws, less justice.

00:15:11.000 Yeah.

00:15:12.000 With Cicero, you say.

00:15:14.000 But when you look at them, there was a very distinctly American sensibility in those first legal documents.

00:15:24.000 And you can see that develop then into what became the documents in 1776 and 1789.

00:15:32.000 So like the 1619 thing is an intentional perversion of that.

00:15:36.000 Yeah, no, right.

00:15:37.000 This is a family show, so I'll say nonsense. 0.89

00:15:39.000 It's nonsense.

00:15:40.000 But I do think it's important to look at those original documents.

00:15:47.000 Yeah, I mean, and look at like who were those people that really did come here and settle?

00:15:52.000 Why did they do it?

00:15:53.000 Because they said it right in their documents.

00:15:55.000 It was no secret.

00:15:56.000 You know, what were the things that they thought were important?

00:15:58.000 When they were forming these very small societies, in the case of the Plymouth colony, you're talking about sort of 200-ish people, right?

00:16:11.000 What were they trying to accomplish?

00:16:12.000 Well, and they lay it out.

00:16:14.000 And those things stand the test of time because the law has to have goal.

00:16:19.000 Well, they obviously want to restrain evil of the normal kinds, murder and theft and those sorts of things.

00:16:26.000 But there are other laws where what they're trying to do is they want to make sure that the people are secure and that family and worship, the ability for those people to worship in their churches, that those things are protected so that because those are the sort of the three institutions in life are family, church, government.

00:16:50.000 And government exists to allow those two to function in their worlds.

00:16:54.000 Now, obviously, not everybody worships, and we think that that's their right to do it or not do it.

00:17:00.000 But for the people who do, the fact that they are able to do so and that the church is able to operate in its fear is absolutely critical.

00:17:10.000 And for the family, too, that's a natural pre-political institution.

00:17:14.000 And it exists before government.

00:17:18.000 And in that sense, government exists in order to benefit the family.

00:17:23.000 Like families and people come together in political arrangements to protect each other and to protect themselves.

00:17:32.000 And so that's, and all those things were really clear in those 17th century documents in the early 1600s.

00:17:40.000 And then it's even when you, again, you get back to you get back to the language in the Declaration, the Constitution, saying, you know, we're going to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.

00:17:52.000 And so that's us and our kids.

00:17:54.000 Yeah, I was thinking beyond just themselves, multi-generational.

00:17:57.000 Exactly.

00:17:57.000 Yeah, no, that's exactly right.

00:17:59.000 And that's, I think, what we really need to be thinking of in very concrete terms when we're thinking about politics is what's the end result?

00:18:09.000 You know, does it benefit these parts of society so that they can do what they naturally do, imperfectly, of course, but what they naturally do?

00:18:19.000 Or are we doing what we as conservatives often accuse the left of doing, which is being utopian?

00:18:26.000 Like, are we just making things so abstract that it doesn't even matter what the results on the ground are because, hey, we got to say that we're free markets or something.

00:18:39.000 Like, I like free markets too, but you pursue these things.

00:18:43.000 Well, it's almost the idolatry of ideologues, right?

00:18:46.000 So it's right.

00:18:48.000 They make an idol out of something that is, in its sense, I think, ideologically in the right direction, right?

00:18:56.000 I think that it's Marxism, right?

00:18:58.000 But I also think it's, first of all, I think it's not always applicable.

00:19:03.000 And I also think that a country can, I don't think, can sustain itself if you do not have a very clear direction of the type of country that you either want to preserve or the type of country that you want to try to aspire to.

00:19:19.000 I don't.

00:19:19.000 I don't think that saying that we want to lower the corporate tax rate is inspiring enough to be able to keep a society going.

00:19:28.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:19:28.000 I just don't.

00:19:29.000 And so what would be some of your applications of what the conservative movement is doing terribly wrong right now?

00:19:37.000 What can course correct?

00:19:38.000 What kind of conservative movement should we have?

00:19:40.000 I think what we want to do is reduce our use of abstractions because I find that they tend to be, they have become, I'll say it that way, they've become like a coping mechanism for the inability to actually impact policy, to change conditions on the ground.

00:20:07.000 And so we sort of come up with these slogans, which, you know, the slogans themselves may be perfectly true in theory, right?

00:20:18.000 I agree with that.

00:20:19.000 Okay, great.

00:20:22.000 But it's not a political program.

00:20:26.000 And so I think about it, like, what do we, I think about it in these terms, like going back to what I was saying, what do we want the country to look like?

00:20:34.000 Well, it's pretty simple.

00:20:35.000 Like, and it should be, these things should be measurable. 0.81

00:20:37.000 Well, we should be secure from foreign enemies in our own country.

00:20:42.000 That would be nice. 1.00

00:20:43.000 That would be good.

00:20:43.000 Yeah, that's a good place to start.

00:20:45.000 Our people should be secure in their homes and in their property.

00:20:49.000 Like, you should not be afraid to walk down the street.

00:20:52.000 You shouldn't be afraid of people stealing from you, including the government, by the way, or oppressing you in some way.

00:20:58.000 Also, again, including the government.

00:21:01.000 But those are sort of, I kind of view those as, that's like the outlines of the box inside which the society lives.

00:21:09.000 Like, you've got to have physical security.

00:21:11.000 So when you have that stability, you totally take it for granted.

00:21:13.000 Yeah, exactly right.

00:21:14.000 Like, everybody likes to talk about privilege right now.

00:21:18.000 A friend of mine wrote a piece for us at American Greatness about, and we might want to actually talk about this, about the lessons that we could learn from what happened in Russia in the 90s.

00:21:30.000 And it's not what people expect.

00:21:33.000 That's when Putin first took over, right?

00:21:35.000 He took over in 2000s.

00:21:36.000 Okay.

00:21:37.000 But we'll come back to that because it's a totally fascinating subject.

00:21:42.000 And I've got a book recommendation on it, too.

00:21:44.000 But you have to have physical security first of all, but then once you have that, then what?

00:21:53.000 And I would say that the metrics that we should be using are, you know, I'm open to others, but how about this for starters?

00:22:02.000 Family formation is growing.

00:22:06.000 It's easy to form families.

00:22:09.000 That's not currently happening, right?

00:22:11.000 It's occurring for people later in life.

00:22:13.000 It's growing.

00:22:14.000 And it's demographically different, right? 0.99

00:22:16.000 100%.

00:22:17.000 Yeah.

00:22:17.000 Families should be getting together, you know, people should be getting together, forming families.

00:22:21.000 Those families should be stable, and they should be having children enough to, at a minimum, sustain the population of the country, preferably to be growing the population of the country.

00:22:32.000 Those people should be able to buy a house and afford a house.

00:22:35.000 And here's the one that I've actually inexplicably have gotten pushback on this one.

00:22:43.000 What a great country it would be if you could buy a house and support a family of four in a middle-class lifestyle on a single income.

00:22:54.000 Why is that controversial? 1.00

00:22:57.000 Do the feminists oppose that? 1.00

00:23:00.000 The conservatives oppose that. 1.00

00:23:01.000 Like everyone should be working.

00:23:03.000 Both, actually.

00:23:04.000 Really? 1.00

00:23:04.000 Yeah, like the libertarians don't like it and the feminists don't like it. 1.00

00:23:07.000 That's a strange intersection. 1.00

00:23:09.000 It's totally weird. 1.00

00:23:10.000 The feminists don't like it and say, well, you're anti-woman. 1.00

00:23:12.000 You don't want women in the workplace. 1.00

00:23:14.000 Well, that's not what I'm saying. 1.00

00:23:16.000 I don't, you know, if women are working. 1.00

00:23:18.000 If women want to work, God bless, work.

00:23:20.000 I'm just saying it should be a choice, not a necessity. 1.00

00:23:25.000 If women want to go to work whether they're married or not, more power to them. 0.52

00:23:30.000 But if women want to stay home and be able to have kids, they should be able to do that too while their husband's working and not have to go to work just to stay in the middle class. 1.00

00:23:40.000 Not because you want to be rich, but because you want to be able to afford to buy a house. 1.00

00:23:46.000 You want to be able to feed your kids.

00:23:48.000 You want to be able to give them health insurance and put them through school and all those things.

00:23:52.000 And what we've found is, and I'll give credit where credit's due here, a friend of mine, Oren Cass, who's a very smart economist.

00:23:59.000 He's terrific.

00:24:00.000 I think I may have actually mentioned this the last time we were together, but I plug it all the time because Oren did such terrific work on this.

00:24:08.000 He came up with this thing called the Cost of Thriving Index.

00:24:10.000 And what he found is that in 1985, the median male wage earner in this country could support a family of four, basically a middle-class life on 30 weeks of work.

00:24:25.000 He said now it's 53 weeks.

00:24:29.000 You go into debt.

00:24:30.000 Yeah, and so as Oren likes to point out very dryly, with a dry sense of humor, he says, problem being 53 weeks, well, 52 weeks in the year.

00:24:40.000 And so what happens is either you fall down the socioeconomic ladder distribution or you have to have two wage earners.

00:24:49.000 And basically that's what happens.

00:24:51.000 And there's all kinds of things that happen then.

00:24:55.000 Either you delay having kids, you don't have kids, you have fewer kids, the kids don't have as much time with either parent, as it turns out.

00:25:03.000 And there's a bunch of polling on this that shows basically most women want to be able to be with their kids, especially when they're young.

00:25:13.000 They may want to.

00:25:14.000 Yeah, they want to be able to probably go back to work later, but they want to be able to spend those key years, and that's sort of a moving target as to what that is, but call it 10 or 12 years or so, kind of get them into school and then be able to go back to work.

00:25:31.000 But what happens is that it's really hard economically to be able to do that where we are right now as a country.

00:25:40.000 And so you say, well, what should we want?

00:25:43.000 Well, that's one of the things is to be able to make that possible.

00:25:46.000 I think the numbers we use are all wrong.

00:25:49.000 Not all wrong, almost all wrong.

00:25:50.000 I mean, GDP is used as the predominant number as to societal success.

00:25:56.000 And I just reject it in a lot of different ways.

00:25:59.000 Agreed.

00:25:59.000 I'm not saying it's completely wrong.

00:26:01.000 I'm just saying it's mostly wrong and it's totally incomplete.

00:26:04.000 I mean, other numbers are, how about a suicide rate that doesn't skyrocket and actually goes down over 30 years?

00:26:11.000 How about opioid addiction or middle-class wages?

00:26:15.000 How about do you make the stuff that you consume in your country?

00:26:19.000 Right.

00:26:20.000 And these sorts of things matter.

00:26:22.000 And so as a side note, I want to ask you about this, though.

00:26:25.000 Do you think that since 85, we have valued physical labor less and cognitive ability more?

00:26:33.000 And do you think that's out of whack?

00:26:38.000 So the first part, 100%, yes.

00:26:41.000 We've definitely diminished, I mean, to the point basically of belittling sort of physical labor, artisanal type of labor, and we've fetishized office work, not even something that's, you know, very, that requires like sort of high cognitive aptitude.

00:27:01.000 Like it's not that we have fetishized like neurosurgery or mathematics or people who are mathematicians.

00:27:09.000 I mean, those people, of course, get the respect that is their due, I think.

00:27:15.000 But there's somehow a sense that's, by the way, very much reinforced by the education system and has been sort of pushed out to parents, which is you want to work in an office, like that's respectable white-collar work.

00:27:30.000 But if you are somehow working in a traditional like blue-collar field with your hands or whatever, that's like somehow you're in a lower class in a way.

00:27:42.000 And it's absurd.

00:27:43.000 I mean, it's it's you know, there's the old joke, like when the toilet's overflowing, who's the most valuable person in your role decks?

00:27:50.000 It's the plumber, right?

00:27:51.000 It's not your lawyer.

00:27:52.000 Yeah, the story I have, I was speaking in Winnetka, Illinois.

00:27:55.000 You might be familiar.

00:27:56.000 Yeah.

00:27:56.000 Winnetka, for people watching, is a very high income.

00:28:00.000 It's like Highland Park, Dallas, you know, Highland Park, Texas, or La Jolla, you know, Palo Alto.

00:28:06.000 And so I was speaking there, and the audience is agreeing with everything I was saying.

00:28:10.000 I was saying that we need less kids to go to college.

00:28:12.000 We need more people to work with their hands, and everyone was there.

00:28:15.000 And I started to get a little bit angry inside because I knew that they were just virtue signaling their support.

00:28:21.000 I said, okay, how many of you want your kids to be plumbers?

00:28:24.000 And the room started laughing.

00:28:27.000 And I said, no, no, no, seriously.

00:28:28.000 How many of you would be okay if your kid became a plumber?

00:28:30.000 Room of 300 people and that one hand went up.

00:28:33.000 I said, well, if you want your kid to do well, maybe you should say maybe I'm okay with it.

00:28:38.000 There's actually dignity in that.

00:28:40.000 But I said, so you guys would be okay with a higher likelihood of them going to a college to borrow money they don't have, to study things that don't matter, to find jobs that don't exist, where we know we need plumbers, especially in Winnetka.

00:28:51.000 They actually do pretty well.

00:28:53.000 They do really?

00:28:53.000 All of you have like 45 bathrooms in your room, in your house.

00:28:56.000 Look, I had right before Thanksgiving, I've told a couple of people this story.

00:29:00.000 Right before Thanksgiving, I needed to have, we had a short in two rooms in our house, an electrical short.

00:29:08.000 The lights wouldn't go on.

00:29:09.000 It was weird.

00:29:10.000 And it was not just a breaker.

00:29:12.000 So we got an electrician who was referred by a friend.

00:29:16.000 The electrician comes out and a super nice guy.

00:29:19.000 He owns the company, smallish company.

00:29:20.000 I think he had like five guys who worked for him or whatever.

00:29:23.000 And he happened to be working on a job close to my house.

00:29:26.000 So he just ran over and fixed everything in an hour or two.

00:29:30.000 And I was just talking with him.

00:29:31.000 And like I say, it's like super nice, like chatty guy.

00:29:36.000 And he's just talking about like, oh, yeah, like I like, do you know so-and-so?

00:29:40.000 Well, no, no.

00:29:41.000 He's like, oh, yeah, well, he lives by, he kind of lives by me.

00:29:44.000 And he tells me where he lives.

00:29:46.000 And like, I know the street very well.

00:29:49.000 There's not, you can't buy a house on that street for less than $2 million.

00:29:53.000 I'm like, you can do very well being a contractor, right?

00:29:57.000 Well, it's because there's a labor shortage in that.

00:29:59.000 Right.

00:29:59.000 And it's a valuable skill.

00:30:01.000 And by the way, more power to these guys.

00:30:03.000 No, right.

00:30:04.000 I mean, I really needed the electrician that day.

00:30:08.000 The lights wouldn't go on.

00:30:09.000 I wasn't going to fix it.

00:30:09.000 I was going to kill myself if I tried to fix something.

00:30:12.000 But the point is that somehow that's not as good as, in a lot of people's minds, that's not as good as being like the assistant vice president of your pencil sharpener and working in.

00:30:23.000 But for some company that probably is funding BLM anyway.

00:30:25.000 Correct.

00:30:26.000 But I think some of it, Chris, is I think the SAT standardized testing contributed to this negatively, which does not measure for any sort of trajectory of success in the trades of HVAC or plumbing or electrician or auto mechanic or maybe just the problem solver entrepreneur.

00:30:46.000 SAT doesn't measure any of that potential at all whatsoever.

00:30:50.000 And I think we have stigmatized those professions in such a unrealistic box where it's like, oh, those people are the lessons, right?

00:30:59.000 Yeah.

00:30:59.000 And here's the thing is it's not only those professions.

00:31:03.000 It's definitely that.

00:31:04.000 But you find out also that people go through sort of primary, secondary education.

00:31:10.000 They think if you want to be something, you have to go to college.

00:31:13.000 And it turns out there's a college requirement that makes no sense for a lot of jobs.

00:31:21.000 I mean, I did this, I guess it was at the end of last year now, but I went on like monster.com and ladders and some of the hiring websites.

00:31:30.000 I just wanted to see, because I was thinking about this exact issue, I was they wanted to see like what jobs require a college degree?

00:31:38.000 Like what employers require it.

00:31:40.000 And it's pretty much a standard requirement.

00:31:43.000 It's like it's just, I know they don't even think about it.

00:31:46.000 There's like you need to know this and that and the other thing, and you have to have a college degree.

00:31:51.000 And you look at these jobs and it's like entry-level sales for it doesn't matter what, you know, whatever the whatever the product is, like, why?

00:32:02.000 Right.

00:32:04.000 There's no point to that.

00:32:05.000 There's not some specialized knowledge that somebody gets going to XYZ university and then goes and gets this sort of entry-level job.

00:32:16.000 It's just a job.

00:32:17.000 It's like, you know what I mean?

00:32:18.000 It's not, they didn't become a doctor.

00:32:20.000 They didn't become a rocket scientist.

00:32:23.000 Yeah, they didn't pass the bar.

00:32:24.000 They didn't do any of those things.

00:32:26.000 And there's really no, there's no reason for it other than the sense that, oh, you went to college, that tells me something about you.

00:32:36.000 But actually, it doesn't anymore.

00:32:38.000 You know, I think there was definitely a time when it did, but that was a long time ago now when very few people went to college.

00:32:45.000 And those people went into the professions basically, you know, sort of go back to the early mid-20th century.

00:32:52.000 If you went to college, you know, probably you were going to become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer.

00:32:58.000 Okay, go to college.

00:32:59.000 All for it.

00:33:00.000 I mean, maybe not the lawyers, but everybody else.

00:33:03.000 We got enough of those.

00:33:04.000 Right, we got more than enough.

00:33:06.000 But then I think about a friend of mine who is in the venture capitalist business, has been for years.

00:33:14.000 I was talking to him a couple years ago about what he looked for when he was because he had built a software company and sold, and then he got into the venture world.

00:33:28.000 I said, well, what was the type of thing that you were looking for when you were hiring programmers, coders?

00:33:34.000 I said, you know, are there certain schools that have really good CS programs?

00:33:39.000 He said, yeah, kind of.

00:33:40.000 He said, but really, we never cared about that, and really nobody does.

00:33:44.000 He said, the great coders just code.

00:33:47.000 And they have been doing it since they were 12.

00:33:50.000 He says, I don't care.

00:33:51.000 I would hire them if they were 12 and they were really good.

00:33:53.000 I don't care if they went to school, didn't go to school.

00:33:55.000 It's very, very performance-based.

00:33:58.000 And in those fields, like the, I mean, look at Zuckerberg, right?

00:34:03.000 He's a good example.

00:34:04.000 Now he goes to Harvard, of course, and drops out, but because he was a genius coder, I mean, he's obviously super high IQ and very good and very good technically, but this is somebody who could have done a lot regardless of going to Harvard or not.

00:34:20.000 Think about somebody like Palmer Lucky.

00:34:22.000 You know, Palmer goes by Facebook.

00:34:28.000 Right, you know, right, exactly.

00:34:29.000 Starts Oculus.

00:34:32.000 I think he was, what, 18 or 19 when he started?

00:34:36.000 Yeah, then goes and sells it because he just went and did something.

00:34:40.000 And I tell people this all the time.

00:34:41.000 I actually say it on my Twitter feed quite often.

00:34:45.000 You know, there are experts and then there's expertise.

00:34:49.000 And what people call experts typically is somebody who's been credentialed, and that's very different than expertise.

00:34:56.000 And I think we've seen that a lot lately, right?

00:34:59.000 You know, what did the experts say?

00:35:01.000 It turns out the experts actually don't know.

00:35:03.000 I think it's a hypnotic technique.

00:35:05.000 I mean, they say the experts say, who?

00:35:07.000 Yeah, right.

00:35:08.000 There are people from Berkeley that have been wrong professionally about everything.

00:35:12.000 There's no price if they're wrong, by the way.

00:35:14.000 There's no cost, I should say, to them.

00:35:16.000 If they're wrong, they get promoted.

00:35:18.000 Yeah, if they get wrong, they get called again by the New York Times to be a subject matter expert on some bizarre thing.

00:35:24.000 Experts say that we're all going to die eventually.

00:35:27.000 Because I've got the cartel behind me, right?

00:35:30.000 I have this credential.

00:35:32.000 The people who make these decisions have this credential.

00:35:34.000 And so we have to protect the value of this credential.

00:35:37.000 So everybody circles the wagons on the credentialing racket.

00:35:42.000 And it is totally a racket.

00:35:44.000 So it's interesting.

00:35:46.000 I think this would be a fun place to take the conversation because you say we as conservatives don't think big enough of where we want to take the country.

00:35:54.000 I think you and I are beginning that, but it's just not happening enough.

00:35:57.000 It just isn't.

00:35:58.000 And even the conservatives that say they stand for the founding principles and they pass out their pocket constitutions, when there's actually a call to rebel tyranny, authoritarianism, they're nowhere to be found.

00:36:08.000 But I think the left made a decision in the late 90s.

00:36:11.000 And I don't know if they did it consciously or if they did it accidentally or they did it.

00:36:16.000 I don't think it's relevant, but they just did it, where they decided, you know, these middle-class workers, we're going to kind of take them for granted a little bit. 0.97

00:36:23.000 We don't really need them. 0.87

00:36:24.000 We want to become the party of the super rich and the poor.

00:36:28.000 And you kind of see that the Democrats throughout the mid-2000s and early 2010 and 2011, the Democrats decided that we are going to represent the ruling class and also the people that we're going to convince are oppressed.

00:36:41.000 And Republicans, through Donald Trump, like backward backed themselves into saying, I guess we represent the working class now.

00:36:47.000 What does that even mean?

00:36:48.000 And Donald Trump did a great service to this.

00:36:51.000 But the Democrats have a very clear vision of the country that they want to create.

00:36:54.000 They want to create a country that is really, really good for a very, very small set of people that are in the country club, if you will, that are in the prescribed group.

00:37:02.000 And everyone else is struggling to barely get by.

00:37:06.000 And they have so I guess the question is when it comes to the left and the country they want to create, how does that even differentiate with some of what the establishment Republicans want?

00:37:19.000 Does it?

00:37:19.000 Yeah, that's the question.

00:37:21.000 I think it's somewhat.

00:37:25.000 There are some differences, but there's unfortunately more similarities.

00:37:31.000 I mean, there's more similarities than I think a lot of establishment Republicans or sort of conservative ink type conservatives would like to admit.

00:37:41.000 I guess let me start with the Democrats.

00:37:44.000 The formulation I've got, which is very, very similar to what you've got, is the way that one way to frame the political divide in this country right now is that Democrats, like I had one little wrinkle to the way you have it.

00:37:56.000 So Democrats are the party of true elites plus elite aspirants, people who want to be elites, but you might call them the professional managerial class, plus the permanent underclass, what Marx would have called the lumpen proletariat.

00:38:13.000 And they are allied against the middle class and the working class, which are sort of in America, you know, that's like in America, you might just call it the broad middle class.

00:38:22.000 It's called the Christian working middle class, mostly in the Midwest of our country.

00:38:26.000 That was previously industrialized.

00:38:28.000 Yeah, there's a big geographic element to it as well.

00:38:31.000 But it's, I mean, the really perverse thing about this for the left is that it incentivizes them to increase the size of the underclass.

00:38:41.000 The more people you impoverish, the more people that you convince that they are part of some intersectionally oppressed group, you can use those people against your class enemies, against the middle class, against the working class.

00:38:58.000 But all of the spoils of that go to the top. 0.53

00:39:02.000 So they use the underclass basically as stormtroopers against the middle class. 0.92

00:39:10.000 That's very well put. 0.85

00:39:12.000 And that is, that's why, you know, it's an interesting frame when you start to think about a lot of the sort of woke politics.

00:39:20.000 Like, in a way, there's a strand of that where that is, a lot of that is an intra-left struggle.

00:39:29.000 Now, when you get to the level of obviously a lot of things that spill out into the open, it affects everybody.

00:39:34.000 And it goes into schools and to HR departments, it affects everybody.

00:39:38.000 But there is an element of that where what you have going on is the woke politics is that I talked about those elite aspirins, what I call PMCs, the professional managerial class.

00:39:51.000 I did not make up the term, by the way.

00:39:54.000 It's well put.

00:39:54.000 It's the top 100 people at Deloitte.

00:39:56.000 Yeah, right.

00:39:57.000 It's McKinsey.

00:40:00.000 Even in media or academia, a lot of people in media, for instance, on MSNBC, you can be a contributor there.

00:40:08.000 You're actually not paid that well.

00:40:11.000 Basically, you get paid in status.

00:40:13.000 You don't get indicted when you should be.

00:40:15.000 Well, that too.

00:40:16.000 Yeah, you get paid and get out of jail for your cards.

00:40:19.000 It's literally happening.

00:40:20.000 Right.

00:40:22.000 But a lot of that, a lot of like the, a lot of the woke stuff is being used by those people to jockey within their competitive set.

00:40:32.000 So that's why you see all this like left-on-left violence, so to speak.

00:40:36.000 You know, it's like they're trying to get people fired.

00:40:40.000 And yeah, they definitely want conservative scalps, but they want the liberal scalps too, because that means that this person gets to take that person's spot.

00:40:51.000 And so that's sort of an interesting element about it.

00:40:54.000 I guess one thing I wonder about is is there a circumstance in which that makes that tears them apart because they turn on each other?

00:41:04.000 And I think the real struggle there is the people that actually believe the Marxist nonsense versus the people that say they believe the Marxist nonsense, they just want to be the top of the hierarchy.

00:41:04.000 It has to be.

00:41:14.000 Using Marxist nonsense.

00:41:15.000 Yeah, right.

00:41:16.000 No, agreed.

00:41:17.000 No, agreed hardly.

00:41:18.000 And that is the dividing line, right?

00:41:20.000 The dividing line is the Noam Chomsky's that actually do believe in this bizarro Rousseauian world where we go back to primitive and infancy, if you will, which will not happen because it goes so against human nature.

00:41:35.000 There has to be so much destruction to get anywhere near it.

00:41:37.000 Where there's the people that just kind of wink and nod at it, but they're going to use it as a way to climb up the ladder so that they can be king.

00:41:44.000 Well, let me give you a good example of that.

00:41:45.000 And you've seen it.

00:41:47.000 Every single person who's watching right now has seen this in the past six weeks.

00:41:53.000 Every corporation that you have ever done business with has been emailing you in these troubled times, please know that we stand with fill in the blank and we're doing this, fill in the blank, and we're doing that.

00:42:07.000 And look, aren't we good people?

00:42:09.000 And please, could you give us a corporate social responsibility brownie point?

00:42:15.000 My inbox has been flooded with this stuff for.

00:42:18.000 Every company I've ever dealt with, Postmates, Nords, Uber Eats.

00:42:22.000 In fact, it's so bad, it was like, we're only going to have like black restaurateurs or something like that.

00:42:27.000 It's a violation of the Civil Rights Act.

00:42:27.000 Yeah, no Uber Eats.

00:42:29.000 You would think.

00:42:30.000 You would think.

00:42:31.000 Could you imagine if it was the opposite?

00:42:33.000 Yeah, right.

00:42:34.000 It's like the DOJ would indict you in like a week.

00:42:38.000 That's the one thing that you can actually get the DOJ to do quickly.

00:42:41.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:42:42.000 No, the DOJ sends 15 FBI agents to go for a hanger on of a garage for NASCAR.

00:42:42.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:42:50.000 Right. 1.00

00:42:50.000 But God forbid they go arrest the arsenists. 1.00

00:42:53.000 But complete the point, because you're talking about the corporate... 0.89

00:42:55.000 Basically, there's if you are one of the people who sort of is a true believer in like systemic racism and you see this movement and you're very pleased because you think that this is a very, this is like this moral outpouring.

00:43:11.000 Okay, so I want to take that person who's just operating in good faith.

00:43:15.000 I hope that those people are out there.

00:43:18.000 Within a nanosecond, it just becomes a commercial for the Fortune 500.

00:43:24.000 Bingo.

00:43:25.000 Right.

00:43:25.000 And that's all it is.

00:43:26.000 It's just a commercial.

00:43:27.000 It's just, hey.

00:43:28.000 It's Nike maximizing their profits.

00:43:30.000 Yeah, hey by JP Morgan keeping retention.

00:43:32.000 Right.

00:43:33.000 Exactly.

00:43:33.000 Everything they abhor.

00:43:35.000 I think that's a really interesting point because if you point that out to the Marxists and you say, you do realize that these corporate megatrons that you hate, they're using your movement to actually maximize their profits.

00:43:46.000 Don't you hate that?

00:43:48.000 And I know a couple people on the left who are very serious about their Marxism and they hate it.

00:43:57.000 And I give them 100% credit for it.

00:44:00.000 But they are loathed by the left.

00:44:03.000 The Marxists or the corporatists?

00:44:05.000 No, no, no.

00:44:08.000 The Marxists who don't even go there because they'd say, nope, that's not us.

00:44:15.000 That's a whole different thing.

00:44:16.000 And there's all this intro.

00:44:18.000 We would have done it different.

00:44:19.000 Yeah, right.

00:44:20.000 But these are the people who are.

00:44:21.000 We were more Menshevek than both.

00:44:23.000 And they'll tell you why.

00:44:24.000 No, that's right.

00:44:25.000 They'll go down to the year, right?

00:44:26.000 But there's some very, I think, people of, it's obviously a very small set of people, but they say exactly this, and they say, this is like just corporate power co-opting a movement for profit in order to exploit.

00:44:43.000 And this is a point where I would say people who are conservative would say, yeah, it is.

00:44:48.000 Like, we can agree with that.

00:44:50.000 Like, we're not Marxists, obviously, but I can also see that what's happening here is that, you know, the Fortune 500 is just saying, this is a great chance for a commercial, and we can maybe drive wages down for the middle class because we don't like those people anyway.

00:45:05.000 And it's like one of these weird moments where there's people here and here who can actually see what's going on in here.

00:45:14.000 They're like, no, this is.

00:45:15.000 And I would add a wrinkle to it.

00:45:16.000 And I don't think it's contradictory.

00:45:18.000 I also think part of it is they just don't want to be boycotted next and they don't want to have to be the attention on them.

00:45:24.000 I think there's a part of that.

00:45:26.000 Yeah, no, no, 100%.

00:45:28.000 Part of it is there might not be huge profit upside.

00:45:31.000 And I'm talking more about front-facing businesses than back-facing businesses, restaurants in particular, where they're like, oh, no, no, no, we're with you 100%.

00:45:39.000 Just keep buying our cheeseburgers. 0.99

00:45:41.000 Totally, BLM. 1.00

00:45:43.000 They're just trying to signal it so that they don't become victim to whatever mob exists out there.

00:45:50.000 So I think that's partially true, but you also think about who populates the upper echelons of these corporations.

00:45:57.000 Do you think it's strictly profit motive?

00:45:59.000 I think it's partially that.

00:46:00.000 But I do think that they're, you know, you think about the people who are in their HR departments.

00:46:04.000 You think about sort of the upper echelon of a lot of these corporations.

00:46:10.000 I mean, what do they want most?

00:46:11.000 To make money.

00:46:12.000 Yeah, I mean, I get it.

00:46:13.000 That's fine.

00:46:13.000 That's what corporations are there to do.

00:46:16.000 But I also think a lot of these people were educated in these sort of very elite left-wing schools.

00:46:22.000 And their sensibility in all things is with the left.

00:46:28.000 And so maybe they're not on board, like deep down in their heart of hearts, maybe they're not on board 100%, but they're definitely sympathetic, right?

00:46:35.000 I mean, that's, and this is what, to go back to the original question, you guys, well, how different are conservatives on some of these things?

00:46:43.000 This is what this is what sort of the I'll say maybe sort of the people who are professionally conservative, people who somehow jobs in, you know, in media or politics or whatever, and they are conservatives.

00:46:59.000 This is what a lot of those people don't get.

00:47:01.000 And it is less true with the rank and file.

00:47:04.000 It's still somewhat true.

00:47:05.000 They don't understand that corporate America is 100% against us.

00:47:10.000 I mean, it is a rare company that is on the side of conservative values, conservative people, the people that fly overstates.

00:47:20.000 This has been such an eye-opener for me the more I've looked into it.

00:47:23.000 It's just unbelievable.

00:47:25.000 I mean, people say, well, yeah, I get it.

00:47:26.000 Like, I don't know, Google and Twitter, sure.

00:47:29.000 But, like, what about Chipotle?

00:47:32.000 Chipotle.

00:47:33.000 No, them too.

00:47:33.000 Yep.

00:47:34.000 What about like, one was like Brooks Brothers, right?

00:47:37.000 Brooks Brothers.

00:47:37.000 I got an email from them.

00:47:38.000 Yeah, no, I got it too.

00:47:40.000 It's funny, when that email came out, which was probably three weeks ago now, I had like 10 people email it to me because Brooks Brothers is like an American institution.

00:47:50.000 It's an American institution.

00:47:51.000 It should be in the Pan Am guide.

00:47:54.000 Their dress uniform is like anything from Brooks Brothers.

00:47:56.000 That's literally what the Pan Am employee guide was.

00:47:59.000 Brooks Brothers dressed every American president from the founding of the company in 1818 until the present.

00:48:08.000 I mean, there's, you can go online and see, there's like, there's pictures. 1.00

00:48:12.000 It's all BLM nonsense. 1.00

00:48:14.000 No, it's right. 1.00

00:48:14.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:48:15.000 That's right.

00:48:16.000 And they, here's the, here's the, here's why I choose Brooks Brothers is because it's like their clothing, you know, dress clothing is super American, super traditional.

00:48:29.000 Like every young Republicans meeting has like 75% of the guys there is wearing like a Brooks Brothers tie or shirt or blazer or maybe all three or the khakis or whatever.

00:48:40.000 And so like this is why I got so many people emailing this to me is because every Republican is on their list.

00:48:47.000 And they so, but nonetheless, they just sign up along with whatever the latest is. 0.97

00:48:54.000 I also think there's a third wrinkle to it though, Chris, which is that they think we're stupid and they don't think we'll actually act or shop morally. 0.98

00:49:04.000 I think they take conservative purchasing for granted. 0.99

00:49:07.000 But no doubt.

00:49:09.000 No doubt.

00:49:10.000 They're going to keep buying our products.

00:49:11.000 They're going to keep they either have no options or they're too distracted or not morally convicted enough to stop purchasing from us.

00:49:21.000 Yes, and they're right.

00:49:23.000 And that's not a criticism of conservatives.

00:49:25.000 Like it's very hard to conservatives aren't great at boycotts in general.

00:49:31.000 It's kind of not who we are.

00:49:33.000 Though there was a time in the 80s, I know conservatives did a lot of boycotts pretty successfully, boycotted, a famous one was boycotting 7-Eleven to get them to stop selling porn magazines.

00:49:46.000 That was maybe the last successful conservative right-wing boycott of anything.

00:49:51.000 But what these large companies know is that actually you don't have that many other choices because the consolidation that's occurred in almost every industry means that, yeah, you don't like it.

00:50:07.000 Oh, you're mad at Google?

00:50:07.000 Sorry.

00:50:09.000 Fine.

00:50:11.000 Go use like go use DuckDuckGo.

00:50:15.000 Well, look, my heart is with DuckDuckGo, but the search isn't actually that great.

00:50:22.000 Ask Jeeves or whatever, right?

00:50:23.000 Yeah, right.

00:50:24.000 And so Google's like, yeah, you know, pound sand.

00:50:27.000 But it turns out that that actually applies to a lot of products.

00:50:32.000 Like if you, I mean, you think about all the different brands.

00:50:35.000 Airlines.

00:50:35.000 Like, good luck.

00:50:36.000 Oh, yeah.

00:50:37.000 You don't like. 1.00

00:50:38.000 I hate you, American. 0.99

00:50:39.000 You know what they always say? 1.00

00:50:40.000 Have a nice day.

00:50:41.000 We'll see you next month.

00:50:42.000 Right.

00:50:43.000 Oh, that's 100% right because you say, well, well, there's also Delta and there's Southwest.

00:50:47.000 And there's no fly there.

00:50:48.000 Time consolidation.

00:50:50.000 Because the way that the airline industry operates is that basically every city is a hub and spoke.

00:50:58.000 So if you're in an American city, it's an American city.

00:51:00.000 If you're in a United City, it's United States.

00:51:02.000 Chicago United.

00:51:03.000 Yeah, theoretically, I could.

00:51:04.000 Phoenix, America.

00:51:05.000 We're in Phoenix, right?

00:51:06.000 This is an American airlines city.

00:51:08.000 If I want to go to New York, yeah, I could take United if I want to fly to L.A. first and then go to New York.

00:51:14.000 Or I could take Delta.

00:51:15.000 Right.

00:51:15.000 I could take Delta if I want to go to Salt Lake City and then.

00:51:19.000 And by the way, it's not like they're any better.

00:51:21.000 It's not like, oh, yeah, this other corporation is going to be a lot of fun.

00:51:23.000 All of them fund BLM, all three of them.

00:51:26.000 Right.

00:51:27.000 That has been such an eye-opener for me, and I think the chamber has played a part of this.

00:51:31.000 But we were somehow convinced, and of course, I'm biased to this because of what we do at Turning Point USA and the campus work that we do.

00:51:37.000 We were somehow convinced we as the general, we as a country, that somehow what was happening on college campuses wasn't going to metastasize into corporate America. 0.86

00:51:47.000 And this was so foolish when you look at it over the last couple of decades. 0.72

00:51:50.000 Oh, yeah, their little radicalism, their hatred of our country. 0.99

00:51:54.000 It's just kind of like a nuclear waste spill.

00:51:56.000 We'll just wall it off and we'll keep it in New Haven.

00:51:59.000 No, it's a virus.

00:52:01.000 No, it's a virus.

00:52:02.000 And it spreads and it actually manifests and it's contagious.

00:52:06.000 And then next thing you know.

00:52:07.000 And even if you wear a mask, it's still spreading.

00:52:09.000 Exactly.

00:52:10.000 And next thing you know, you have MetLife, you have Anheuser-Busch, you have the biggest companies.

00:52:17.000 You just take the Dow, right?

00:52:18.000 The biggest 30 companies publicly traded.

00:52:21.000 Every single one.

00:52:22.000 I did this the other day.

00:52:22.000 I said, who's on the Dow?

00:52:23.000 The 30 biggest companies. 0.73

00:52:25.000 Every single one had a BLM racial diversity statement.

00:52:28.000 Every single ExxonMobil had a racial diversity statement.

00:52:33.000 What are you doing?

00:52:34.000 Because one evil cop did something evil in Minneapolis.

00:52:38.000 You're trying to tell me that's the reason why the top 30 companies in the Dow have to pay penance and pay tribute.

00:52:45.000 That's what it is.

00:52:46.000 I mean, it's, you know, it's basically a Dane Geld, right?

00:52:50.000 It's a way you pay to be left alone.

00:52:53.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:52:54.000 And so that's a very difficult concept for a lot of conservatives, though, to understand because traditionally, I don't know if it was as true in the 70s, 80s, or 90s.

00:53:04.000 Corporate America used to be somewhat center-right-ish, or at least somewhat pro-America.

00:53:09.000 And this goes to a point we were talking off camera.

00:53:11.000 I'd love to get your thoughts on it.

00:53:12.000 I think that the American trajectory right now is not sustainable for a variety of reasons.

00:53:18.000 One of the primary being we have an elite class, a ruling class, that actually hates the country that they are the elite of.

00:53:27.000 I don't know if that's sustainable.

00:53:28.000 I don't.

00:53:29.000 I don't think a country can continue that way because you will either have an uprising or the elites will just let the country go to total wreck, just complete and total ruin.

00:53:38.000 Yeah, I mean, it's there's a reason that Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters deplorable, right?

00:53:47.000 That's what she thinks.

00:53:49.000 And you'd this is, you know, you think about all the hatred and vitriol that's pointed at Trump.

00:53:58.000 It's not Trump they hate, it's the people who support him.

00:54:02.000 Yes.

00:54:02.000 Right.

00:54:03.000 He just is a convenient target.

00:54:05.000 He is, he basically is just the avatar of all of those people that they despise.

00:54:12.000 And they don't like people who are from flyover country, who don't, who haven't learned the jargon of intersectionality or whatever.

00:54:24.000 And, you know, this is like, it's the weirdest thing.

00:54:27.000 This is why people go to college, they learn this jargon, and then they go back to wherever they're from.

00:54:33.000 And it's not even like it has to be Wichita.

00:54:35.000 It could just be, you know, Orange County, California, or Riverside or something.

00:54:39.000 And they start talking in this jargon, and you find out people look at you like you're insane because they have no idea what you're talking about.

00:54:46.000 Until they populate those areas.

00:54:48.000 Until they populate those areas.

00:54:49.000 And it is, this is actually, I know this is what you're asking, but I actually think this is an opportunity for conservatives to sort of expand our base.

00:55:00.000 And this is why I think it's more useful to talk about sort of concrete issues than about like sort of theory and ideology.

00:55:09.000 Because a lot of people don't like having those things forced down their throat.

00:55:18.000 In most people's daily life, their experience isn't, oh, America's super racist and everybody's at each other's throats.

00:55:26.000 It's, you know, no, I mean, like, my kids play Little League and there's people of all different like races and religions and then we go for pizzas with all the families afterwards.

00:55:36.000 That's the way most people live.

00:55:38.000 But you would never know it if you went on Twitter.

00:55:40.000 Right.

00:55:41.000 You would think that it was constant like battles in the streets.

00:55:45.000 And if you go and sort of talk to people more directly and say, like, these people are not your friends.

00:55:52.000 Like, they're trying to weaponize you in the service of their personal advancement.

00:55:58.000 But, you know, we just want to see families stay together.

00:56:00.000 We want people to be able to buy a house.

00:56:02.000 We want people to make more money.

00:56:05.000 We want to make sure that manufacturing plant doesn't close.

00:56:07.000 Right, exactly.

00:56:09.000 Then I think that's really, I think that's very powerful.

00:56:14.000 But, you know, conservatives, or I won't say conservatives, Republicans still have this cognitive dissonance.

00:56:21.000 We think that to be in favor of free enterprise and private property and innovation or all those things or America, we think all those things mean, well, we have to be aligned with the Fortune 500.

00:56:34.000 Deloitte.

00:56:35.000 And those things are actually in tension.

00:56:39.000 That's the biggest takeaway from this conversation, though, that people have to have.

00:56:43.000 Yeah.

00:56:43.000 Because that wasn't.

00:56:44.000 But our think tanks tell us that they're in harmony, though.

00:56:48.000 Right.

00:56:48.000 And that there are, I mean, who are they getting money from, right?

00:56:52.000 And where, and have they gone outside of Washington, D.C. or New York lately?

00:56:58.000 Because, yeah, guess what?

00:56:59.000 Life is great in D.C. if you have one of these jobs where you can never get fired at a think tank.

00:57:04.000 And the house you bought 10 years ago for, I don't know, whatever, $300,000 is now worth $700,000 because property values in Washington, D.C. actually do only go straight up because the main employer there is never going out of business.

00:57:17.000 In fact, it's built in to grow at 7% a year.

00:57:20.000 Guaranteed.

00:57:21.000 Yeah, right.

00:57:21.000 And people come from all over the world to try and seek favors and things from it.

00:57:26.000 So, yeah, everything's great.

00:57:27.000 But for everybody else, maybe not as much.

00:57:31.000 Like, we wish the plant in Toledo closed and people got thrown out of work.

00:57:36.000 Boy, I wish the quote-in quotes plant in Washington, D.C. might close.

00:57:40.000 No kidding.

00:57:40.000 It might close some of its operations.

00:57:42.000 Republicans are on the wrong side of this issue.

00:57:45.000 And they will be.

00:57:46.000 I want to get into that.

00:57:46.000 But just to close the point on the elites, you look at people like Jackie Robinson, John Wayne.

00:57:52.000 They were the elite, right?

00:57:54.000 They were the elite of sports.

00:57:55.000 Even Michael Jordan was terrific on this.

00:57:58.000 He was so deliberately apolitical, even when he was pressured to get into politics, specifically in the North Carolina Senate race.

00:58:05.000 And they loved their country.

00:58:06.000 They always had very good things to say about America.

00:58:08.000 And yet now you see that there's a difference here.

00:58:11.000 I don't think we've seen this in American history before, though, where you have the tycoons of every single vertical of industry that outwardly want the demise of that country.

00:58:21.000 And it can go one of two ways.

00:58:23.000 The people completely reject those people and you create new elites because that's just not naming elites, but authors and figures that replace those, right?

00:58:34.000 Or they get what they wish, right?

00:58:37.000 They get what they want, and they do rule over almost a Brazilian model country where you have to, you have complete and total anarchy in the streets and you have a perpetual underclass and get used to it. 0.79

00:58:47.000 Right.

00:58:47.000 And so you've talked about this, though, about having better elites of the better ruling cause.

00:58:53.000 I don't want to tempt the audience too much with this, but I'm super fascinated with it because I think that's one of the more troubling signs of where we are in our country.

00:59:01.000 Yeah, I mean, look, one of the biggest lies that liberalism tells people is the lie of egalitarianism.

00:59:10.000 And the truth of egalitarianism is that we're all created in God's image, and that has important implications for politics.

00:59:20.000 It means just for life.

00:59:22.000 This is why you can't kill somebody else.

00:59:24.000 That's why it's murder.

00:59:25.000 That's why you can't steal other people's things.

00:59:28.000 You know, those sorts of things, because we all have that same moral equality.

00:59:35.000 What the lie that liberalism tells is that there is and should be an absolute political equality.

00:59:44.000 But that doesn't, first of all, it can't happen.

00:59:47.000 And they know it.

00:59:49.000 They want to have a hierarchy, right?

00:59:51.000 I mean, even you look at any sort of socialist or communist country, there's always a hierarchy.

00:59:56.000 There's always a pull-up bureaucrat.

00:59:57.000 There has to be somebody who's in charge of things, right? 0.63

00:59:59.000 That's just the way it works.

01:00:01.000 The state isn't going to work.

01:00:03.000 Even in Chaz, there was someone that was in charge of things. 0.99

01:00:05.000 Yeah, right, exactly right. 0.68

01:00:07.000 I mean, Chaz had its warlord. 0.87

01:00:08.000 Yeah. 0.86

01:00:09.000 That's going to happen.

01:00:11.000 There was an absolute hierarchy there.

01:00:13.000 So the question isn't how do we achieve this state of like this sort of radical political egalitarianism.

01:00:20.000 What we want to do is recognize the moral equality of people, but also recognize something else that we learn.

01:00:28.000 You see it in the Bible.

01:00:29.000 You see it, I think, just in human nature.

01:00:31.000 It's knowable just by reason, but also by revelation, which is that there are hierarchies and that that establishes an order that's good for people.

01:00:40.000 So you see it in, you know, you see really clearly in honor your father and mother.

01:00:47.000 Why?

01:00:48.000 Because they're there for your good.

01:00:50.000 Obviously, there are parents who do bad things, but in general, your parents are there to nurture you, to help you grow up, and to protect you when you're young and all those sorts of things.

01:00:59.000 Well, that's a model for the way hierarchies should be, right?

01:01:03.000 There's a responsibility that goes from superior to inferior in the hierarchy.

01:01:10.000 And again, when I use the term superior and inferior, I don't ever want people taking me out of context.

01:01:15.000 I don't mean that in a moral sense, but I mean that in the way that things are ordered.

01:01:18.000 Your parents are in charge of you.

01:01:20.000 They don't have a moral superiority to you.

01:01:23.000 It's not like it's okay for them to steal from you.

01:01:25.000 It's not.

01:01:27.000 But it is all right for them to order your life for your good.

01:01:32.000 And so the question is, how do you recognize that truth in the political sphere?

01:01:37.000 How do you create those hierarchies that benefit everybody, that recognize the moral equality on the one hand, and then sort of promote things that promote people being able to achieve sort of their best version of their life and then leaving it up to those people to go out and live their lives.

01:02:03.000 And that's the thing that we need to recognize that when we're thinking about elites, we want elites that recognize that order.

01:02:11.000 You don't pay lip service to a sort of a phony egalitarianism.

01:02:18.000 You talk about the real moral equalities and you also talk about how in the political sphere, for instance, you want government that is able to do the things that it does really well for the benefit of the country and for the people.

01:02:36.000 And in the sort of the other elite institutions, I'll call them, whether it be schools or media or whatever, you want them, there's a responsibility of all of those institutions to everybody else, right?

01:02:47.000 And that's something, I guess I would look at this and they say, you know, that maybe the big change that has sort of activated a lot of what we see that has harmed the country is when that sense of responsibility went away.

01:03:04.000 When it became, and I think this comes out of like this radical individualistic idea that I'm just out here to like self-actualize.

01:03:14.000 I'm here.

01:03:14.000 I just want to get liberated.

01:03:16.000 And all of a sudden you don't have responsibilities to anybody else.

01:03:19.000 That's not right.

01:03:20.000 I mean, we do have those responsibilities.

01:03:23.000 And the greater the authority you have, the greater those responsibilities are actually to others.

01:03:31.000 You know, it's this idea of like servant leadership.

01:03:35.000 You know, this was, I mean, this was like the idea in feudal systems of noblesse oblige, right?

01:03:42.000 There's a sense that if you are the feudal lord, you're obligated to make sure that everybody's fed in a sort of self-governing system.

01:03:52.000 We choose our leaders, but then they have to act on our behalf.

01:03:57.000 But that even applies to private companies.

01:04:01.000 Yes, they want to seek their own profit, but they also have an obligation to do right by their customers and by their country.

01:04:08.000 And regaining that sense of responsibility, I think, is absolutely crucial to having a healthy elite.

01:04:18.000 And the elites don't have that responsibility right now.

01:04:21.000 No, no, no, absolutely not.

01:04:22.000 I mean, this is like, you know, like sort of the, I guess sort of the right-of-center version of this is that sort of libertarianism, you know, the kind of the Ayn Rand version is like, no, you absolutely don't.

01:04:36.000 Like, just go and like, it's all about you.

01:04:39.000 Indulge yourself infinitely.

01:04:41.000 Right.

01:04:42.000 And by the way, you know, before the libertarians get mad at me, like, I loved reading Ayn Rand too.

01:04:47.000 It was like a great book, but I wouldn't advocate.

01:04:51.000 You wouldn't create a governing philosophy.

01:04:54.000 I wouldn't advocate running my life or let alone a country around some of the stuff I read in the book.

01:04:59.000 Yeah, and I think that you look at people that Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Ben, Brin, people that have amassed incredible amounts of wealth, okay, but they fund, they speak, they act completely contrary to any sort of social responsibility of America, of what we stand for, our history.

01:05:20.000 And you look at the robber barons that were supposed to be horrible in the 1900s.

01:05:24.000 And Tucker Carlson talks about this a lot, where you have Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan Chase, all these individuals, they actually loved the country and they knew they were in charge.

01:05:37.000 They said, yes, we have the money, we have the resources, you guys can hate us or love us, but we do have a responsibility.

01:05:45.000 Now, I actually think the robber baron description is a little bit overdone.

01:05:50.000 I do agree with the action that Teddy Roosevelt took, and this is disagreed upon in fundamentalist circles, but whatever. 0.91

01:05:57.000 But I think that if you allow that to continue itself, how will it be any different than eventually we're just ruled by the Romanovs? 0.67

01:06:07.000 Yeah, look, I mean, you think about the concentration of corporate power that led to sort of trust-busting in the early 20th century, you know, with concentration of power in banking and railroads and oil. 0.95

01:06:24.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:06:25.000 Tell me how different that is than banking right now.

01:06:28.000 Tell me how different that is in a number of industries.

01:06:32.000 There's this huge concentration.

01:06:35.000 There's this huge concentration of power, which is bad for the country.

01:06:41.000 It's bad for us as consumers.

01:06:41.000 Yeah.

01:06:44.000 There's been some interesting things, I'll just use this as one example.

01:06:47.000 People, like libertarians, love to say things like, well, you know, if like you're in, I don't know, whatever, a chemical engineer or something, you can just, like, and you don't like the conditions at your company, you're going to disagree with them, just go get a new job.

01:07:03.000 Well, actually, as it turns out, that if you know, you have this, you're in a particular field, that's where your skill set is.

01:07:10.000 There maybe is only two or three or four companies that do that, number one.

01:07:17.000 So the set of companies that you can work for is quite small.

01:07:22.000 And then they're geographically dominant, kind of like the discussion we were having about the airlines.

01:07:27.000 And so maybe if you could get a job, that means uprooting your family and moving from Minneapolis to Memphis.

01:07:34.000 And that puts a strain on the family because now families get, extended families get spread out.

01:07:41.000 And that has all kinds of bad social consequences, right?

01:07:44.000 And economic, too.

01:07:45.000 And economic, too.

01:07:46.000 No, right.

01:07:47.000 Absolutely.

01:07:49.000 And so it's not like the market will solve everything theory just doesn't actually hold out because there's all these hold up because there's all these other externalities.

01:08:01.000 And it never, and you know, economic externalities, number one.

01:08:04.000 But number two is that there's like social externalities that like that the that a lot of economists just don't take into account at all anyway.

01:08:12.000 So how much of what's happening, and this is something that conservatives have just rejected.

01:08:17.000 How much of the decline of the fabric of our country do you attribute to be economic versus moral and cultural?

01:08:26.000 So the conservatives would always heavyweight the moral cultural.

01:08:29.000 And I'm not discounting that.

01:08:30.000 Do you think there's an economic reality?

01:08:32.000 100%.

01:08:33.000 Yeah.

01:08:33.000 I mean, how to you know, how to weight that I think is really hard.

01:08:37.000 I think that the important recognition is that there is a significant economic component to it.

01:08:44.000 Is it 30%? 0.73

01:08:45.000 Is it 51%?

01:08:46.000 I don't know hard, but when I see the fact that it's real and it's big is important.

01:08:51.000 I get asked all the time, hey, Charlie, how could young people believe in socialism?

01:08:55.000 I say, well, hold on, let's put yourself in a 23-year-old shoes.

01:09:01.000 They were told to go to college.

01:09:03.000 They learned all these crappy, crummy ideas, and then they can't find any job of meaning.

01:09:07.000 They can't buy a home, let alone a car, let alone start a family or sustain their kids.

01:09:13.000 And what might have been a prosperous economic climate if certain decisions weren't made to deindustrialize our entire country and with it bring in limitless cheap labor that disenfranchises our own workers, maybe they wouldn't be picking up the Bernie Sanders sign.

01:09:31.000 I mean, and just to say that economics play no role at all in this, I think it's ridiculous.

01:09:37.000 Yeah, no, it's and I don't know the numbers.

01:09:39.000 I mean, I don't think it's like 10%.

01:09:42.000 I don't think it's 80%.

01:09:43.000 I think that, of course, there's a cultural side to it.

01:09:45.000 For sure.

01:09:46.000 But I think when you take a factory out of Wichita, Kansas, that will create miserable people.

01:09:52.000 Yeah.

01:09:53.000 I mean, you think about, I mean, like, there's tons of social science on this.

01:09:57.000 For instance, when there's all kinds of bad things that happen in people's lives that happen after they lose a job, okay, and when the income goes down, divorces go up, substance abuse goes up, suicides go up.

01:10:15.000 All of these things are tied to jobs.

01:10:17.000 Fatherlessness, drug usage, alcoholism, all of it.

01:10:21.000 All of these things increase as a result.

01:10:26.000 And so you can't say, well, I don't know, like, you should have better character or you should go to church.

01:10:34.000 Like, okay, yes, I agree.

01:10:37.000 But let's recognize that people that we are, like, we're not Gnostics.

01:10:42.000 We're not just, so we don't think everybody is just a spirit.

01:10:44.000 We have bodies too, and we have to support those bodies, and we have to be able to eat, and we need a place to live, and we need it.

01:10:50.000 And by the way, we're also made to work, right?

01:10:53.000 Jesus was a carpenter.

01:10:54.000 He went to work.

01:10:55.000 He went to work.

01:10:56.000 Paul was a tent maker.

01:10:57.000 Luke was a doctor.

01:10:59.000 These people all, people in the Bible all worked.

01:11:02.000 We're told very clearly that, you know, we're made in God's image.

01:11:04.000 God is creative.

01:11:05.000 So when we're working, we're in a sense emulating God.

01:11:10.000 We're not creating ex nilo, but we're...

01:11:12.000 Out of nothing.

01:11:13.000 Right, out of nothing, but we are making things out of what's been given to us.

01:11:17.000 And we find satisfaction in doing that.

01:11:23.000 And so there's that other part of it, which is when people aren't working, there's an emptiness there because people naturally want to be.

01:11:33.000 You don't always have the job you want, but you want to be doing something.

01:11:36.000 And something meaningful.

01:11:37.000 And something absolutely right.

01:11:38.000 And one of the, and again, I've really woken up to this in the last year and a half and two years, which traditionally I would have said, oh, just they lose a job, pick up your stuff and go move to a big city.

01:11:49.000 And now I think, that's awful.

01:11:51.000 No.

01:11:53.000 That was not our country, nor does that actually create a productive and happy country.

01:11:58.000 I'm going to make up a word here, the metropolitanization.

01:12:01.000 Is that a word?

01:12:02.000 Why not?

01:12:02.000 It is now.

01:12:03.000 You know what I'm saying by it, though.

01:12:04.000 But the overemphasis on metropolitan America, I think it's actually a disaster.

01:12:09.000 And where you just rent, you don't own and buy property.

01:12:11.000 You know, I talked about height restrictions last time we were on the podcast.

01:12:13.000 I'm still a huge advocate of it.

01:12:14.000 I like it.

01:12:15.000 Nationwide height restrictions.

01:12:16.000 And I think Phoenix is a testament to that, where you can have your own piece of property.

01:12:20.000 This is my home.

01:12:21.000 I'm taking care of this place.

01:12:23.000 I have a family.

01:12:24.000 I think if you just are kind of sequestered to a 900-foot apartment in Brooklyn to raise a family, I think that makes you less likely to raise a family, actually.

01:12:33.000 Of course.

01:12:34.000 That's harder.

01:12:35.000 And I think that that is actually one of the most meaningful things a human being can do.

01:12:39.000 And so I think the argument then necessitates itself by saying, well, then what kind of public policy are we creating to at least make it less hard to do that?

01:12:50.000 I mean, easy would be fine.

01:12:53.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:12:54.000 But let's pretend we can't get to easier, at least less hard.

01:12:57.000 Right.

01:12:58.000 And I think right now it is you have created these 12 or 13 metropolitan areas that are incredibly leftist and liberal where almost everyone who lives in those areas are high in debt, very miserable, low in church-going rates, low birth rates, low fertility rates, and they vote incredibly Democrat, right?

01:13:17.000 I'm talking about Atlanta.

01:13:18.000 I'm talking about Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Chicago.

01:13:21.000 You know what?

01:13:22.000 And I think the more we concentrate power and wealth and people in those areas and we get away from any form of, let's just say, horizontal expansion, I think that it's actually very troublesome for the country.

01:13:36.000 Yeah, it is.

01:13:38.000 No, it absolutely is.

01:13:39.000 I mean, it'll be interesting to see sort of what impact COVID has on all that.

01:13:45.000 Like, I mean, you know, New York has been shut down for months.

01:13:51.000 You know, I've got a bunch of friends who work in the city, but they live in New Jersey or Connecticut or whatever.

01:14:00.000 With, I mean, none of them have been in the city more than a couple times since March.

01:14:06.000 I know people who have already sold their properties in the city.

01:14:11.000 So, you know, does this change something about sort of that concentration?

01:14:15.000 Yeah, I do too, in those top 10, 15 cities.

01:14:18.000 Well, and I'm not convinced that everyone who lives there for a long period of time enjoys it.

01:14:23.000 And I have a fun story.

01:14:24.000 In Los Angeles, our producer talked about it all the time.

01:14:26.000 People have these parties of how long they've been in LA as if they're like surviving a hostage situation.

01:14:31.000 Like, I've been here for six years.

01:14:33.000 Like, do you enjoy it?

01:14:34.000 Or are you like celebrating your survival?

01:14:39.000 It's okay.

01:14:41.000 So I'm going to diverge a little bit here, but I think you're going to appreciate it.

01:14:45.000 So thinking about California, because California was basically, it was in the sort of, I don't know, middle 20th century, it was like the apex of the American dream.

01:14:58.000 Yes, especially Southern California.

01:15:00.000 They didn't ask where you were from.

01:15:00.000 Yeah, definitely.

01:15:01.000 They said, what do you do?

01:15:03.000 Right.

01:15:03.000 Yeah, no, and it was, and it was great.

01:15:05.000 I mean, California, in a lot of ways, California is still unique just because the geography and topography there is very unique and the weather is very unique.

01:15:14.000 And there's still a lot of good things about California, though fewer and fewer in a lot of ways all the time.

01:15:20.000 But it was sort of everybody in America somehow aspired to be like California.

01:15:29.000 A lot of people moved there.

01:15:31.000 And everybody from all over the world aspired to that too.

01:15:34.000 We're harmonic with that, right?

01:15:36.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:15:37.000 Dreaming, graduate. 0.95

01:15:39.000 A lot of our movies were pointing towards an ass bugsy, pointing towards a glorification of right.

01:15:44.000 Disneyland was open there. 0.65

01:15:46.000 So it was all this sort of canned.

01:15:48.000 We started movie production there all day.

01:15:50.000 And remember, the defense industry had a huge presence in Los Angeles.

01:15:54.000 I mean, that was LA's main industry.

01:15:57.000 And then there were baseball teams there.

01:15:58.000 I mean, it was the whole movement towards California.

01:16:01.000 Yeah.

01:16:02.000 And so.

01:16:03.000 Okay, it's very interesting about the defense team.

01:16:04.000 Yeah.

01:16:05.000 So there's a I'm not sure where to start on this.

01:16:12.000 So there was a high school in Sacramento called La Sierra High School.

01:16:20.000 And La Sierra, the athletic director La Sierra developed a program and a fitness program for the students.

01:16:28.000 He thought it was important.

01:16:30.000 He thought the students would benefit from it like mentally and physically.

01:16:35.000 And so there's a point here.

01:16:37.000 It became very famous.

01:16:38.000 So he implements it in the very early 60s, like 60 or 61, I think, is when he first implemented it.

01:16:44.000 And what happened is that within one year of doing it, discipline problems effectively disappear.

01:16:52.000 They're down like 85%, all the discipline issues in the school.

01:16:56.000 Testing scores go up.

01:16:59.000 All the academic attainment in the school goes up by every metric.

01:17:03.000 Everybody's happy.

01:17:04.000 And there's a ton of video.

01:17:06.000 It's on YouTube if you want to see it.

01:17:08.000 There's a ton of video of it.

01:17:10.000 And you see all these kids doing this thing, and they do it 55 minutes every morning as a school.

01:17:17.000 And so it's just massive group exercise.

01:17:21.000 These kids are like ridiculously fit.

01:17:24.000 Okay.

01:17:25.000 And they're all like 16, 17.

01:17:27.000 Some of them are 18 years old.

01:17:29.000 And they look like they're all fitness models.

01:17:31.000 But it's all of them.

01:17:32.000 Like some of them more than others, obviously.

01:17:35.000 But they're all like crazy fit.

01:17:37.000 I'm bringing this up for a point.

01:17:39.000 By the way, there's a documentary on this that's available on Amazon called The Motivation Factor.

01:17:44.000 I'm like, I should be getting a commission.

01:17:46.000 I've told so many people to watch this.

01:17:48.000 I'm going to have to check it out.

01:17:50.000 But what happens is in 1962, JFK gets wind of this.

01:17:53.000 And JFK, and there's a great video of JFK too, talking about it.

01:17:58.000 And he's like, this is how we're basically going to make America great again.

01:18:02.000 Like, this is great.

01:18:04.000 Excuse me.

01:18:05.000 So JFK says we're going to roll this out to all of the high schools in the country.

01:18:12.000 It ultimately gets rolled out to like 4,000 high schools.

01:18:15.000 Nobody really implements it as well as the original high school did, but it had a big impact.

01:18:21.000 Sorry.

01:18:22.000 And I bring it up because they interviewed in the documentary, they interviewed all these kids who had been kids in the early 60s.

01:18:30.000 They're all in their 70s now.

01:18:32.000 They're ridiculously fit 60 years later, right?

01:18:36.000 It stayed with them for their whole lives.

01:18:38.000 Wow.

01:18:39.000 Oh, gosh.

01:18:42.000 And the point is, is that there was this sort of can-do aspect to what we could achieve as a country, what we could achieve together.

01:18:52.000 And it was sort of a holistic.

01:18:54.000 Yeah, it was sort of a holistic approach.

01:18:56.000 It wasn't just we're going to make more money or we're going to even start a company, which I think is good or whatever.

01:19:03.000 It's let's all like live our lives in a way that is sort of mutually responsible and where we support one another.

01:19:12.000 And that's why I thought it was interesting that it was like group exercise.

01:19:16.000 It wasn't like, hey, everybody.

01:19:18.000 Go run their own.

01:19:21.000 And even though it was competitive, it was also sort of like, in a way, it was like SEAL training because it was like you were really encouraged to help each other achieve whatever the next goal was.

01:19:35.000 And these kids stayed fit their whole life.

01:19:36.000 Stayed fit their whole lives.

01:19:38.000 A lot of them achieved all kinds of different things.

01:19:42.000 And it makes me, when I start to think about the elites question, I think about like, how different is it today?

01:19:50.000 You know, we have JFK, a Democrat, right, who is implementing this versus, say, a Gavin Newsom, governor of California now.

01:20:03.000 And his response isn't, for instance, to COVID, isn't like, how do we build treatments?

01:20:09.000 How do we, like, there's going to be people getting sick.

01:20:11.000 How do we increase the capacity to treat those people?

01:20:14.000 It's everybody stop moving.

01:20:16.000 Let's not do anything. 0.95

01:20:18.000 Like, that's, like, that's a very un-American.

01:20:21.000 It's a very draconian medieval.

01:20:24.000 Yeah, it's like, let's not build a solution.

01:20:27.000 Let's just not do anything and hope the storm blows over.

01:20:30.000 But even more than that, like on the specific issue, like, of, of, of childhood and fitness, like, they've basically ended PE in California on Newsom's orders.

01:20:43.000 Why?

01:20:44.000 Because it's fat shaming. 0.97

01:20:46.000 Because it's trans shaming. 0.87

01:20:46.000 Why? 0.87

01:20:49.000 So you go in the peer, in the, in basically on our two generations, you would call it.

01:20:49.000 Right.

01:20:55.000 You go from this thing of how we can all achieve health, fitness, which also led to higher academic attainment, which led to less disciplined problems, which led to more camaraderie among the students.

01:21:10.000 You go from that to, actually, let's not do anything.

01:21:15.000 Let's not even have PE at all because somebody's going to not feel good about themselves, which I think is specious anyway.

01:21:22.000 But it's just such a shift in the way elites think about anything.

01:21:28.000 It's not how do we build.

01:21:31.000 How do we control?

01:21:32.000 How do we, it's like they don't know what to do or don't want to do it.

01:21:37.000 In a lot of ways, it's very confusing as to why.

01:21:40.000 A lot of them are probably afraid of other elite institutions judging them unfavorably because of an oppression Olympic that was created, as you mentioned.

01:21:47.000 Yeah, an oppression Olympic.

01:21:48.000 That's good.

01:21:49.000 And also, you have, in a lot of different ways, I think, metastasized down, and Newsom is a byproduct of this.

01:21:56.000 I just don't think he could even pale in comparison to some of the leaders that we had multi-decades ago.

01:22:02.000 Right.

01:22:02.000 I think that we now reward political, I'm trying to think of a nice way to say this, but political creatures that have very little talent, probably low IQs, and they look nice, and they are narcissists.

01:22:15.000 They love looking at themselves.

01:22:16.000 They love hearing themselves talk.

01:22:18.000 Where, I mean, you look at someone who the Republican Party, if we were smart, we would tell the story of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

01:22:25.000 He might be one of the greatest presidents in American history and gets no credit for it at all.

01:22:29.000 I mean, he's probably the most forgotten president.

01:22:31.000 If there was a fifth person to put on Mount Rushmore, it should be Dwight D. Eisenhower.

01:22:34.000 I think.

01:22:36.000 For a variety of different reasons.

01:22:37.000 And the least of which being he spent the 1957 summer White House at the South Dakota Game Lodge, literally 35 minutes down the road from Mount Rushmore.

01:22:45.000 However, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a lot of different ways, I can't really remember where I was going.

01:22:49.000 Oh, yeah.

01:22:49.000 You put Dwight D. Eisenhower up against Gavin Newsom.

01:22:52.000 I don't even think that's even in the same categorical, right?

01:22:55.000 But I think there's something to that, though.

01:22:57.000 Where Eisenhower had direction, he had patriotism.

01:23:00.000 He couldn't care less what people thought of him.

01:23:02.000 His motives were pure and true, which goes to the point I really want to end with, which is a long point, which I think that one of the reasons why we get Gavin Newsom's and why we get Andrew Cuomo's and why we get the weak Republicans that we get, and I think it's structural,

01:23:18.000 is that the way that we finance our political leaders and the way that someone gets to the top is their capacity to be able to trade favors, keep special corporate interests happy, and play the kind of fiddle of the donor up to the top just long enough until they're able to get elected to the highest office.

01:23:34.000 And I don't think that was the case, though, in the 50s.

01:23:37.000 It wasn't actually the case.

01:23:39.000 In fact, Eisenhower, there wasn't really much campaign finance at all back then.

01:23:44.000 And I'm not saying that there should be no contributions or anything.

01:23:48.000 I'm not really even putting forth a policy prescription here.

01:23:51.000 I'm saying it's a big problem because we have incredibly unqualified and honestly foolish people that become leaders because they're good at just basically providing favors to a subset of the population that doesn't want with the rest of the country, but best for their bottom line.

01:24:06.000 And so the issue that I think is the one that we as conservatives and Republicans need to zero in on is how we finance our elections.

01:24:16.000 And how we influence public policy through that.

01:24:19.000 Yeah, I let me say one thing about Eisenhower first, and I'll say something about that.

01:24:26.000 The 1956, so there's a presidential election here.

01:24:31.000 Richard Nixon running as VP.

01:24:32.000 Yeah, so the 1956 Republican platform, go read the section on labor, okay?

01:24:39.000 And it is exactly the sort of thing that you and I have been talking about here.

01:24:45.000 And it was basically that all of the things that Eisenhower was talking about and doing in the 50s were purged out of Republican orthodoxy in the late 60s, 70s, early 80s.

01:25:00.000 And if you go back and look at that, you say, you know what, Eisenhower was ridiculously popular.

01:25:05.000 He was ridiculously successful.

01:25:07.000 And that was part of why.

01:25:09.000 So let's like.

01:25:10.000 But it was George Romney and Rockefeller that were the ones that were the architects of the deconstruction of that Republican agenda.

01:25:17.000 Hmm Romney, huh? 0.95

01:25:20.000 George Romney was governor of Michigan, and he was a ruling class Sikka fan. 0.99

01:25:25.000 Yeah, it's like in the DNA, I think. 1.00

01:25:28.000 Whatever is the wrong side for the country, that's where the Romneys are. 1.00

01:25:31.000 Always, always and forever. 1.00

01:25:34.000 So, yeah, so on the campaign finance thing, yeah, it's, I mean, that's such a hard question.

01:25:39.000 I'm kind of with you on this.

01:25:40.000 Like, it seems like the incentive structures are all wrong.

01:25:43.000 But what I'm saying is what's the better way to do it?

01:25:46.000 It creates a magnet for really bad people to get involved.

01:25:50.000 Not just bad, but just people that shouldn't be in elected office.

01:25:53.000 They're just really willing to kind of sell themselves out to get into power.

01:25:59.000 And then also, this is why I think we just can't get anything meaningfully done.

01:26:03.000 I really can't, is the incredible power of the lobbyist class and the corporate interests.

01:26:09.000 It creates just impossible movement.

01:26:14.000 And I think Republicans are so wrong on this. 0.88

01:26:16.000 And I'll be honest with you, when I read, you know, I sign up for all these ridiculous left-wing newsletters.

01:26:21.000 So I get this newsletter from this website called Our Revolution, right? 0.94

01:26:26.000 It's Alexandria Kazi-Cortez and Elon Omar and Rashida Talib, a bunch of nonsense.

01:26:30.000 And I read all of it, and I go down to the bottom, right?

01:26:32.000 And on the bottom, there's a disclosure.

01:26:34.000 Okay, this is interesting.

01:26:34.000 Disclosure.

01:26:35.000 It says, we do not take money from registered lobbyists.

01:26:38.000 We don't take money for anyone that has ever been registered to lobby for a foreign government.

01:26:43.000 And I'm reading this thing.

01:26:44.000 I agree with all of it, except the fossil fuel thing.

01:26:46.000 I don't like it.

01:26:47.000 But I'm like, why are they better on the campaign finance?

01:26:49.000 Why don't our people say we won't take money from lobbyists?

01:26:52.000 It's a good question.

01:26:53.000 I mean, this is a place where a lot of where I'll just say Democrats in general have been way better than this than Republicans, which is to motivate a lot of small dollar donors.

01:27:08.000 Or even just reject the corporate money.

01:27:11.000 Yeah, I think those two things go hand in hand, not just because of financial necessity, but because it represents an ethic of who you're responsible to.

01:27:18.000 I think that's interesting.

01:27:19.000 Yeah.

01:27:20.000 But I think the small dollars will come if you actually stand for something.

01:27:23.000 Yes, I agree.

01:27:24.000 But you have to go out.

01:27:27.000 Look at the way AOC does, handles her social media.

01:27:31.000 She's very charismatic in a lot of ways, but she's on it all the time.

01:27:37.000 And there are a handful of Republican congressmen who I think are pretty good.

01:27:42.000 Matt Gates is good.

01:27:44.000 Matt's very good.

01:27:45.000 Andy Biggs is very good.

01:27:47.000 Jim Jordan.

01:27:50.000 But there are exceptions.

01:27:51.000 Now, AOC is an exception for Democrats, too.

01:27:53.000 But that's the direction of their party.

01:27:56.000 And what I'm trying to conjecture, though, and predict, we're going to get rolled on this issue because they're going to play the moral high ground and say, we don't take money from corporate interests.

01:28:07.000 Yeah, they do that in the super PACs.

01:28:08.000 No, I know that.

01:28:10.000 But yes, but they are not.

01:28:10.000 But if that purity actually does exist at any point, I think it's very hard to win against that.

01:28:17.000 Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right.

01:28:19.000 And this is where Republicans need to, I think, be smarter and more aggressive, which is building out the base, getting our people really much more involved.

01:28:34.000 And it can be something as simple as, like, Bernie was great at this.

01:28:37.000 Bernie's average contributors, I think, was something like $27.

01:28:41.000 That was in 2016, but in 2019, 20, it was something like that.

01:28:46.000 I mean, he had a lot of people giving him small amounts of money, and people would sign up and they'd give him $10 a month, but it would be like an auto renew, and they just hit the credit card every year.

01:28:56.000 And that it's not just the money there.

01:29:01.000 Those people, the money is...

01:29:04.000 It's almost like shareholders.

01:29:06.000 Yeah, right, exactly.

01:29:06.000 They have a sense of ownership.

01:29:08.000 That's a signifier of what their commitment level is.

01:29:11.000 And so people, everybody knows this who's in politics.

01:29:14.000 If somebody gives you money, they're definitely voting for you, right?

01:29:17.000 And they're also going to tell people about you because they're psychologically, mentally invested besides being financially invested.

01:29:25.000 And there's, because campaigns are expensive, there obviously is an incentive to go and get the max donors, the people who give you $2,700.

01:29:38.000 But it is way more powerful if you have a lot of people giving you a little bit because those people, they get their family members to go to the polls and vote for you.

01:29:49.000 They get their friends to do it.

01:29:51.000 They're there for you.

01:29:52.000 Well, and I'm just not convinced.

01:29:54.000 I think that you could win an election with, and I know this because we're in organizing.

01:29:58.000 This is what we do.

01:29:59.000 And I listen to the constituents.

01:30:01.000 I'm convinced you could win an election with half the money and a better message saying I don't take corporate money in this climate that we're in right now.

01:30:09.000 And that goes to where I think things are headed.

01:30:11.000 And I want to build this out to you as we close, which is I see not necessarily this election, because I don't think this election is anything we've seen before.

01:30:18.000 I think it's going to be off the wall.

01:30:19.000 I don't really know how it's going to end.

01:30:21.000 Obviously, I hope the president wins.

01:30:22.000 But the direction is there's going to be a revolt against this ruling class.

01:30:26.000 And I think that Donald Trump election 16 was the beginning of.

01:30:29.000 I don't think it was a one-off thing.

01:30:31.000 I think that the repulsion that people have for the wine and dine Malibu Manhattan class is only going to grow.

01:30:38.000 And so it can become a socialist workers' revolution, which would be awful.

01:30:42.000 Right.

01:30:43.000 Really, really bad.

01:30:44.000 Or it could become a conservative workers' revolution or a renewal.

01:30:50.000 And that's the one of two ways I think it could go.

01:30:53.000 And if it goes to the left, I mean, it's unrecoverable, in my opinion.

01:30:58.000 So what do you think of that analysis?

01:31:00.000 100% right.

01:31:02.000 Whoever is going to win the next 30, 40, 50 years, it's going to be a populist party in some way.

01:31:11.000 If Republicans, or let me say it differently, if conservatives, the people on the right want to win, it has to be a people's party.

01:31:20.000 It's the only way it works.

01:31:23.000 You can get a broad base of support.

01:31:25.000 You can win elections handily.

01:31:28.000 I mean, what I like to say is we want to shoot for being a party that consistently gets 55% of the vote.

01:31:38.000 Do what FDR did in the 30s.

01:31:41.000 And he had a very big popular majority that cut across all the sort of class, race, religion.

01:31:54.000 He just had a very broad, he had a very broad base of support all across the country.

01:32:00.000 And that's what Republicans need to be shooting for.

01:32:03.000 Instead, the strategists like to parse all the demographic data and say, we need to get more of the evangelical vote or whatever. 0.99

01:32:14.000 That may be true, and that's great.

01:32:16.000 They're human beings.

01:32:18.000 Right.

01:32:19.000 Like, we don't do well with this group.

01:32:20.000 We do well with that group.

01:32:21.000 And yes, the bulkization of American politics.

01:32:24.000 Yeah, and you don't win long-term that way.

01:32:28.000 You don't build a movement that can change the trajectory of the country by doing that.

01:32:33.000 And that's what we need to do, is to change the trajectory.

01:32:36.000 Well, and what my fear is is that we are up against another FDR movement of a Democrat who is younger, pretty well qualified, speaks well, has the ideas of Bernie Sanders and can actually explain them, is right on the money and politics issue, doesn't spit in the eye of conservatives on cultural issues, but just enough to keep the left at bay, doesn't outwardly hate the country, we would be in a political minority for a very long time.

01:33:04.000 That combination.

01:33:05.000 That maybe is Gavin Newsom.

01:33:07.000 He may not be all of those things, but I mean, think about a Newsom in 2024.

01:33:11.000 He's good looking.

01:33:12.000 He's articulate.

01:33:13.000 He won't say tear down Mount Rushmore.

01:33:15.000 Right.

01:33:16.000 No, exactly right.

01:33:17.000 He won't say good things about Vladimir Lenin.

01:33:18.000 Yeah.

01:33:19.000 Right.

01:33:19.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:33:20.000 But he'll keep the Leninites happy.

01:33:22.000 That's an incredibly dangerous proposition because the fact we're running up against Joe Biden, I mean, it's a gift, I really believe.

01:33:30.000 I mean, it could have been a Democrat.

01:33:31.000 I don't know how that selection could have been, but it could have been a Democrat who was not one of the radicals, not losing his mind and or as corrupt as him.

01:33:40.000 Like a normal Democrat would have been very different.

01:33:42.000 I think we could beat Joe Biden.

01:33:43.000 I think we should beat Joe Biden.

01:33:45.000 But in the years to come, better beat Joe Biden.

01:33:48.000 Yeah.

01:33:48.000 So what do you think it's going to take for Trump to do that?

01:33:51.000 Yeah, I think it's a good question.

01:33:53.000 I mean, I think he needs to go back to basics.

01:33:57.000 The things that got him elected in 2016, those things will get him elected again.

01:34:03.000 I think that I mean the one the one place that I think the one issue that I think is somewhat less potent, still equally as important is immigration, but politically it's less potent this year.

01:34:13.000 Though I think it is every bit as important.

01:34:18.000 It's the issue.

01:34:19.000 Yeah, but let me so I just want to add that caveat, but in terms of what is going to drive those people to vote for him that he needs to get to vote for him, you know, he's still got to win those same six to eight states and he needs to go back to things like getting people back to work, what we're talking about.

01:34:37.000 How do you buy a house?

01:34:38.000 How do you make more money?

01:34:39.000 How do you be able to for how do you be able to have kids and afford them?

01:34:44.000 You know, it's what he was talking about when he said, you know, we want to bring manufacturing back.

01:34:48.000 You know, and I love the way his formulation is always like, oh, we have the most beautiful coal miners in the world.

01:34:54.000 I love our coal miners.

01:34:55.000 You know, those type of things, that's really important to the people who vote and the people that he needs to get to vote.

01:35:04.000 And I think he needs to go back to those things, to those themes.

01:35:07.000 And I've told you this before, like we've done, you know, we've done a bunch of polling.

01:35:13.000 In fact, we're in the field right now in Pennsylvania and Ohio polling those states.

01:35:18.000 We'll have stuff out Friday.

01:35:21.000 But one of the questions we ask is, would you be more or less likely to vote for a candidate who had a plan to make America self-sufficient in food, energy, and health care?

01:35:34.000 It's an 80% winner, right?

01:35:36.000 And talk about those things.

01:35:38.000 It's a sense of being protected, of the country being strong, of being secure.

01:35:44.000 You start talking about those things, people get up.

01:35:48.000 And people light up.

01:35:49.000 And people who maybe you would think are not natural Trump voters, they hear that in a way that makes them more amenable to a Trump vote, too.

01:36:00.000 And so on the issues, I think it's those sorts of things.

01:36:04.000 On I guess I would say two things just on the sort of the practical politics of it.

01:36:10.000 Number one, and hopefully the president watches this podcast.

01:36:15.000 So I would say this to him.

01:36:17.000 There is exactly one political advisor he should be listening to, and it's Donald J. Trump because he has exemplary political instincts.

01:36:27.000 Like he knows how to run his campaign and what it takes to win better than anybody else.

01:36:32.000 So he should trust his instincts on those things.

01:36:35.000 And the other thing is, is he needs to be out more.

01:36:38.000 He needs to be out there.

01:36:39.000 I agree to people.

01:36:40.000 He needs to be trapped.

01:36:40.000 I mean, I threw out the idea he should have done a 50-state tour this summer.

01:36:45.000 Every state.

01:36:46.000 Yeah.

01:36:47.000 I mean, that would be amazing.

01:36:48.000 He's the best as a hyperactive president, in my opinion.

01:36:51.000 He likes it.

01:36:52.000 I mean, it just, you know, at the event that you guys threw here in Phoenix a couple weeks ago, I mean, it is, you know, it's so evident that he enjoys it, and he has such a great rapport with the crowd.

01:37:05.000 And for, you know, I had never been to a Trump rally before, and you don't get a sense of it by watching, even by watching the whole, you know, two hours or whatever on television.

01:37:19.000 There really is a connection between him and the crowd.

01:37:23.000 He likes it.

01:37:24.000 Some of the subtleties about the way he looks at people or talks to people, it doesn't come through on the video.

01:37:30.000 And I guess I say it this way.

01:37:34.000 There's two types of candidates.

01:37:36.000 There are candidates who get energy from campaigning.

01:37:39.000 There's candidates who give energy to campaigning.

01:37:41.000 And the president so obviously gets it.

01:37:44.000 So it's like he creates his own virtuous cycle the more he's out with people.

01:37:48.000 And I think he needs to do a lot of that.

01:37:50.000 And not every candidate or president is like that.

01:37:52.000 In fact, I think he gets turbocharged by doing more events.

01:37:55.000 Yeah.

01:37:55.000 I think he finds the message better by doing more events and all that.

01:37:59.000 Okay, so here's my one more thing that I think that he should do.

01:38:02.000 He should go on Joe Rogan for two hours.

01:38:04.000 Oh, I think that would be a great idea.

01:38:06.000 Right, and it does two things.

01:38:07.000 First of all, it would be like just a riot.

01:38:11.000 And I think he could handle it.

01:38:12.000 He could definitely handle it.

01:38:13.000 By the way, I don't think he does enough combative media like that.

01:38:16.000 Not the liberal media.

01:38:17.000 Screw that.

01:38:17.000 I'm talking about the curious media.

01:38:19.000 I'm talking about someone like Joe who will be fair.

01:38:21.000 Rogan.

01:38:22.000 He'll be like, dude, why do you do this?

01:38:24.000 Right, right.

01:38:24.000 Exactly.

01:38:25.000 Like, they would get into it.

01:38:27.000 That would be good, but you know what else it would do?

01:38:29.000 So it would.

01:38:30.000 That's a very good idea.

01:38:31.000 The other part of it is it would be great, but you know who wouldn't, who would then have pressure to do Rogan?

01:38:37.000 Biden.

01:38:38.000 Biden.

01:38:40.000 That's a good point.

01:38:41.000 He couldn't do it.

01:38:42.000 There's no way.

01:38:43.000 There's no way.

01:38:44.000 So it's like a win-win.

01:38:47.000 So that's my, Mr. President, you shouldn't do it.

01:38:50.000 President Trump is amazing in that format, though.

01:38:52.000 Yeah.

01:38:52.000 He can defend himself better than anyone else, right?

01:38:55.000 Yeah.

01:38:55.000 And I love that idea.

01:38:57.000 Yeah.

01:38:58.000 Yeah.

01:38:59.000 So that's it.

01:38:59.000 All right, everybody.

01:39:00.000 Please subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show.

01:39:02.000 Type in Charlie Kirk Show to your podcast provider.

01:39:04.000 We got the link there.

01:39:05.000 Chris, this is great.

01:39:06.000 Amgreatness.com, right?

01:39:07.000 Yep.

01:39:07.000 AM Greatness.

01:39:08.000 I think I have a piece that's still up there.

01:39:10.000 You sure do.

01:39:10.000 You got a couple of them.

01:39:11.000 Yeah, it's awesome.

01:39:12.000 Thanks, guys.

01:39:12.000 We'll see you soon.

01:39:15.000 What a great conversation that was with Chris Buzzkirk.

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The Charlie Kirk Show - July 25, 2020

The Great, Conservative, American Betrayal with Chris Buskirk

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