The Charlie Kirk Show - The REAL Way to Dismantle the Deep State, with Curtis Yarvin

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today on Charlie Kirk Show, a wide-ranging conversation with Curtis Yarvin.

00:00:04.000 Super smart.

00:00:05.000 We talk about a lot of different stuff, and you get a history lesson here.

00:00:08.000 Listen to this, and I'd love your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

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00:00:29.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:30.000 Here we go.

00:00:31.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:32.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:35.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:38.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:41.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:42.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:43.000 His spirit is love of this country.

00:00:45.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

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00:01:29.000 I've been following this guy for a while.

00:01:30.000 He's extremely smart, and the media covers him a lot too.

00:01:34.000 And he's something.

00:01:36.000 It's Curtis Yarvin, also known by the pen name.

00:01:40.000 You're going to have to pronounce the first word for me.

00:01:42.000 Minches Moldbug.

00:01:43.000 Very, very prolific.

00:01:45.000 That's one way to say it.

00:01:46.000 And he has thought-provoking ideas that I just love.

00:01:49.000 I don't agree with them all, but it's just, it pushes boundaries and makes you reconsider things.

00:01:52.000 Curtis, welcome to the show.

00:01:53.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:01:54.000 It's a pleasure to be on.

00:01:55.000 So, Curtis, how about a brief introduction?

00:01:57.000 How'd you get into this?

00:01:58.000 You have a unique approach to how you think about some of the problems the country faces.

00:02:02.000 Yeah, so I started blogging about this stuff about 15 years ago, and I sort of grew up as a very normal kind of blue state American, really.

00:02:11.000 Actually, my dad was in the Foreign Service, which is kind of the elite of the deep state.

00:02:15.000 So you might say that I grew up inside the deep state, and after a while, I sort of stopped believing in it.

00:02:20.000 And then I kind of tried to believe in some of these alternatives to it.

00:02:25.000 And it's sort of, I came to the conclusion that there's really a lot of fakeness there on both sides.

00:02:31.000 And maybe to a certain extent, you're watching the Harlem Globetrotters against the Washington Generals.

00:02:37.000 And so what do we do about the Washington Generals is the most important question, I think, in the world today.

00:02:43.000 So who's which side is which?

00:02:46.000 The generals would be the Republicans.

00:02:48.000 Oh, is that right?

00:02:49.000 That is right.

00:02:50.000 And the Harlem Globetrotters are the Democrats.

00:02:52.000 That's right.

00:02:53.000 So you write analytically, and I just want to make sure I give credit where credit's due.

00:02:58.000 You said a line in one of your writings where you said, every time the bad guys say democracy, just replace it with oligarchy.

00:03:05.000 That's right.

00:03:06.000 Because what they're talking about there, sometimes you'll see like the Soros people use the phrase civil society.

00:03:06.000 That's right.

00:03:12.000 That means oligarchy.

00:03:14.000 And what you mean, what oligarchy means is the rule of the administrators, the rule of the experts, the rule of the Fauci's.

00:03:21.000 That's the sort of, you know, Fauci is more invulnerable.

00:03:25.000 He retired recently, but, you know, his job tenure was considerably safer than George III's.

00:03:32.000 And, you know, if somebody passed a law saying we're not going to have gain of function research and Fauci and his friends want gain of function research, that's not going to stick.

00:03:41.000 And so you're looking at absolute power here.

00:03:45.000 It's very important to sort of recognize the power of all governments is absolute.

00:03:50.000 They can do anything they want.

00:03:51.000 The question is how power is spread around that oligarchy.

00:03:56.000 And what you have is these little pieces of absolute power in the hands of the Fauci's.

00:04:02.000 And sort of for every kind of policy area, there's someone like Fauci, there's someone in the academic community, someone in the New York Times who basically has a lock on that policy.

00:04:15.000 And what we've seen is that those policies get more and more deranged until we had this incredible pandemic that they basically literally went out and invented to basically get more grants.

00:04:28.000 And realizing the sort of just one example of the rule of these people and how sort of Soviet it's become, COVID was like Chernobyl, but like killing 100,000 more people times as many people. 0.81

00:04:47.000 And I guess one of the positives is that people now have a face and a name where they can now see the face of the quote-unquote deep state Fauci.

00:04:57.000 But the point you're making is there's hundreds of these operatives.

00:04:59.000 There's hundreds of these operatives, and it's the structure that they're in that is actually often people sort of think that it's these people's ideology that is sort of the cause of just the craziness of their decisions.

00:05:15.000 I would say that actually the structure is the cause of the ideology.

00:05:20.000 That progressivism is something that you're going to get inherently out of any system of oligarchical rule.

00:05:26.000 Is the design of the American system, does it lend itself to inevitable oligarchy?

00:05:32.000 There have been many American systems historically.

00:05:35.000 When you look at, there's something they do in France where they number the republics.

00:05:39.000 They have the first, second, third, you know, around the Fifth Republic, I think.

00:05:43.000 In the U.S., basically, we see the present system of government really dates to Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.

00:05:52.000 And whatever happened before that is basically ancient history.

00:05:55.000 So that's interesting.

00:05:56.000 You don't would you say Woodrow Wilson started that cause set in motion?

00:06:00.000 I mean, I give at least the Claremont Hillsdale people would put a lot of blame or credit on the Wilsonian historicists.

00:06:12.000 Sure, I think that the Claremont people tend to place a little more attention on ideas and maybe on personalities than I do.

00:06:23.000 And I'm sort of more interested in the kind of structure of historical movements.

00:06:28.000 That's interesting.

00:06:29.000 But, you know, certainly Wilson and FDR come out of the same early American progress.

00:06:32.000 But you would say FDR created the actual architecture of the modern administrative state.

00:06:36.000 That's right.

00:06:37.000 Okay, so let's dive into that.

00:06:38.000 There's so many topics.

00:06:39.000 By the way, you're super well read, and this is so interesting.

00:06:41.000 So FDR was the longest serving president, served a long period of time during a quote-unquote depression that lasted significantly on.

00:06:49.000 But did he knowingly build an administrative state for decades and centuries of power?

00:06:56.000 Or you don't really care?

00:06:58.000 What we have, what we call the administrative state, as academics say, or deep state, as we like to say on TV, is essentially FDR's personal administration without its head.

00:07:10.000 So FDR was really operating, not quite as a dictator, but really almost as a dictator.

00:07:15.000 He was certainly a dictator in foreign policy.

00:07:17.000 Confiscated.

00:07:18.000 In gold.

00:07:18.000 Yeah, in domestic policy, you know, he, there were some areas of resistance to him.

00:07:24.000 He wasn't Stalin exactly.

00:07:26.000 He couldn't order people shot.

00:07:27.000 But he was basically in charge of the federal government.

00:07:30.000 And essentially, and the way he was in charge of the federal government, he created many, many new agencies in DC, the so-called alphabet soup.

00:07:40.000 He used every lever he could, many of them very informal levers, to take over the old agencies.

00:07:47.000 And then when he dies, he's replaced by Harry Truman, who's basically a nobody.

00:07:52.000 And what happens is all the power that he'd held in his hands sort of goes down into this administrative state that he created.

00:08:00.000 That's an interesting, I've never heard that theory before.

00:08:02.000 So you're saying that it was almost a fracturing and it went down all these separate tributaries.

00:08:07.000 And so when FDR broke, the power center decentralized within the B.

00:08:11.000 And it never has been able to consolidate.

00:08:13.000 It never has been able to consolidate because nobody, especially, I think personally, the theory and it's impossible to prove is that FDR, certainly in 44 when he runs for election, knows he's dying.

00:08:24.000 The American people don't even know he's in a wheelchair.

00:08:26.000 He knows he's dying.

00:08:27.000 And so as his successor, he picks this literal nobody from Missouri.

00:08:31.000 From Missouri, you know, who's a machine politician from Missouri, not even a New Dealer. 0.92

00:08:35.000 And people are like, why did he pick this nobody?

00:08:38.000 And the answer is that nobody will ever have that much power.

00:08:41.000 So he almost, you can't prove it, but your speculation is that the succession plan was that my power will be broken to a million pieces.

00:08:47.000 Exactly, and therefore it will never be destroyed.

00:08:50.000 And the thing is that it's amazing.

00:08:52.000 And, you know, this guy really did conquer the world, right?

00:08:53.000 It's like Voldemort from a Harry Potter reference.

00:08:55.000 Like, I will scatter my power.

00:08:57.000 Exactly.

00:08:58.000 Exactly.

00:08:58.000 And, you know, this guy really did conquer the world.

00:09:01.000 You know, at the time that he dies, he really thinks Stalin is working for him.

00:09:05.000 And so he doesn't quite realize that the Cold War is about to break out.

00:09:09.000 He still thinks Stalin is his guy.

00:09:11.000 He's conquered the world.

00:09:13.000 And the thing is, you've got to understand, as you go back in D.C., in time in D.C., it becomes more and more monarchical.

00:09:19.000 Things go more from the top down.

00:09:21.000 It works more like a company, less like a bureaucracy.

00:09:25.000 And the people are actually really good.

00:09:27.000 These really are the best and the brightest in D.C. in the 30s.

00:09:30.000 Now, they have a lot of bad ideas, but they're very, very capable.

00:09:35.000 Yeah, they are that idea of a civil servant.

00:09:37.000 They have families.

00:09:38.000 They're invested in the country.

00:09:40.000 They're not overly ideological.

00:09:41.000 They're all the best Americans.

00:09:42.000 And so if you're looking at the business.

00:09:44.000 If you're looking for people with the Scandinavian model of American people.

00:09:47.000 If you're looking for people with that level of talent today, you're mostly not going to find them in the government.

00:09:51.000 You're going to find them in Silicon Valley.

00:09:53.000 You're going to find them in various areas of finance.

00:09:55.000 But people that good can't stand working in Washington today.

00:09:59.000 Do you think that they gravitated towards D.C. in the 30s out of duty or honor or the prestige of working for the government?

00:10:05.000 Or is it just because the country was a better country?

00:10:08.000 All of those.

00:10:08.000 It was an incredible experience.

00:10:10.000 You know, it's like the experience of being like, here's one way to convey the experience of being in FDR's early New Deal.

00:10:17.000 It's like you graduated from Harvard with his degree in this new field of economics.

00:10:22.000 Somebody, you know, you know somebody who knows somebody who knows Felix Frankfurt or something.

00:10:25.000 You get a phone call.

00:10:26.000 Your friend is like, hey, why don't you come to D.C.?

00:10:28.000 You're like, what would I be doing?

00:10:30.000 You're like, he's like, I have no idea.

00:10:31.000 You know, just come.

00:10:32.000 You show up.

00:10:33.000 They give you a desk, an office.

00:10:34.000 You're like, here's $6 million.

00:10:36.000 Go electrify Arkansas. 0.73

00:10:38.000 That is not the experience of a young man coming to D.C. today.

00:10:41.000 Or yeah, here's a thing called the TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority.

00:10:44.000 Good luck.

00:10:46.000 And they go.

00:10:47.000 It's kind of empowering.

00:10:48.000 It's incredibly empowering.

00:10:50.000 And they go out and they do this stuff.

00:10:52.000 Yes.

00:10:53.000 And they have like...

00:10:54.000 Super authority.

00:10:55.000 Super authority.

00:10:56.000 And, you know, the thing that really, you know, in all of my like historical research is one of the things that struck me most is there's a classic book called The Making the President 1960 by T.E. White, T.H. White, T.H. White, I think.

00:11:10.000 And he's talking to someone who, you know, is part of the Kennedy machine.

00:11:15.000 And we remember Kennedy as this era of like the new frontier, this bright optimism.

00:11:19.000 We're going to do everything.

00:11:20.000 At least Libbs remember Kennedy that way.

00:11:22.000 And he's talking to one of these people, and then he talks to like a New Dealer. 0.61

00:11:27.000 And the New Dealer is just like after the New Deal, like everything is bland, everything is boring, everything is dead, right?

00:11:32.000 You know, and like the distance from the new frontier to now, if you're working and you're like, like you had all these people come in in the Obama era who'd all like watch the West Wing and they all wanted to like West Wing it.

00:11:43.000 Yeah, they were LARPing as West wingers.

00:11:46.000 So Curtis, the only other president I would ask you about that tried to combine the distillation of power was Nixon.

00:11:52.000 Did he get close or not?

00:11:53.000 Or was it a good question?

00:11:55.000 That's an excellent question because I think that, you know, no, he didn't get close.

00:11:59.000 And a distant second?

00:12:01.000 Well, Nixon, you know, Nixon, of course, is coming from the right rather than from the left, you know, which is obviously very important.

00:12:09.000 And Nixon's theory, Nixon was probably, I'd say, in terms of IQ, maybe the smartest president of the century.

00:12:16.000 Maybe it was Nixon, maybe it was Wilson.

00:12:18.000 You know, this is a really smart, capable guy.

00:12:21.000 You know, comes from sort of deep America.

00:12:23.000 He's a California Quaker. 0.93

00:12:25.000 And Nixon's idea is that he's going to come in.

00:12:28.000 He's going to be the president of the silent majority.

00:12:32.000 He's going to take all this like crazy, hippie stuff, and he's going to show Americans how a government that works works.

00:12:39.000 He's going to take over Washington, run it like a grown-up, and do all this grown-up stuff.

00:12:45.000 The problem is that in order to take over Washington and run it like a grown-up, basically, you know, so Nixon, for example, in 68, Cronkite declares the Vietnam War is lost.

00:12:55.000 The Tet Offensive is won.

00:12:56.000 Nixon's like, you know what?

00:12:58.000 I can come in and I can run the government so well, I can both win the Vietnam War and pull American troops out of Vietnam. 0.90

00:13:05.000 And he does.

00:13:06.000 The Viet Cong are completely defeated by 72, 73.

00:13:10.000 This has been sort of retconned out of history.

00:13:12.000 He beats Ho Chi Minh. 0.50

00:13:14.000 He creates the South Vietnam that basically relies only on American funding and American air power. 0.90

00:13:20.000 Congress is like, okay, you think you won the war.

00:13:23.000 We're just going to pull, you know, the funding and the air power.

00:13:26.000 And then North Vietnam is going to conquer South Vietnam in a massive conventional ground invasion.

00:13:31.000 Wow, we basically won't even sell the South Vietnamese bullets.

00:13:34.000 And then we're going to retcon this so that everybody thinks Walter Cronkite was right in 1968.

00:13:42.000 And that's how most people think the Vietnam War.

00:13:44.000 That's amazing.

00:13:45.000 Isn't that just an amazing level of power?

00:13:45.000 Isn't that amazing?

00:13:47.000 And so he's going in there.

00:13:48.000 And I was at a seminar recently, like new discoveries on Watergate.

00:13:53.000 And I actually talked to some old Nixon aides, you know, Dwight Chapin and Jeff Shepard.

00:14:00.000 Amazing guys in their 80s, still sharp as tacks, and basically really reflecting.

00:14:05.000 I mean, the whole Watergate thing was really the start of Lawfare.

00:14:09.000 I don't want to go too deeply into this, but it was like Lawfare 1.0.

00:14:12.000 Yes.

00:14:13.000 And basically, Nixon acts as if, you know, he'll make these great speeches.

00:14:18.000 He'll be like, the enemy is the professors.

00:14:20.000 The enemy is the journalists, like really base stuff, right?

00:14:22.000 And then he'll go out and behave as if the enemy is Ho Chi Minh. 0.80

00:14:26.000 That's amazing.

00:14:26.000 And so, I mean, and Nixon, in some ways, was a geek of the administrator.

00:14:32.000 Exactly right.

00:14:33.000 Exactly right.

00:14:34.000 But even he was not able to bring back these pieces.

00:14:41.000 Bring back these pieces.

00:14:42.000 Shatter it.

00:14:44.000 Pull the cables together.

00:14:46.000 So the other, the only other, I know this is from the right, but the only other person that attempted that was the closest thing was Dick Cheney in Bush.

00:14:54.000 Is this not maybe over some pieces of the national security state?

00:14:58.000 Yeah, over some pieces of the national security state.

00:15:01.000 And so you see sort of the national security state, definitely like the Iraq War and that stuff was sort of the last gasp of a DOD that thought differently from the State Department.

00:15:13.000 Nowadays, it's all state all the time.

00:15:15.000 You know, I mean, state didn't want the Iraq invasion, right?

00:15:18.000 You know, and so you see, like, when you look at people who survive from sort of the Nixon period with the Nixon mindset into today, into the Trump administration, you're looking at guys like John Bolton or William Barr.

00:15:34.000 Right.

00:15:34.000 And the thing is, you know, Barr, you know, it's a pity because these are very capable people.

00:15:39.000 But the thing is, they're still, and they know these systems very well, but they're still operating on this kind of Nixon theory.

00:15:46.000 Yes.

00:15:46.000 So Barr comes in, and basically he's like, we're going to stop this Russiagate stuff.

00:15:51.000 But he's not like, oh, wow, like, you know, Andrew Weissman's 15 guys all deleted their cell phones.

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00:17:03.000 So Barr said, we're not going to go after Weissman.

00:17:03.000 Finish that thought.

00:17:06.000 Yeah, Barr is not like, we're going to clean out DOJ, you know, can't basically like clean out DOJ and basically sort of stop this incredible kind of lawfare against the executive branch from the executive branch.

00:17:19.000 He's just like, okay, we're not going to do this anymore and we're going to make DOJ work on behalf of the American people.

00:17:25.000 And like the time for that is really over.

00:17:28.000 Like you just can't like you can't imagine doing that.

00:17:31.000 You know, you don't have the power to do that in so many ways.

00:17:35.000 And you're not, you're basically not doing what the American people asked you to do when they elected Trump.

00:17:41.000 So I want to get to this other baseline conversation, then we can get to the more current.

00:17:46.000 Can you explain to our audience then who calls the shots, who's in charge?

00:17:51.000 This is a question I get a lot.

00:17:53.000 And my experience is that it's kind of unclear.

00:17:58.000 It's kind of a culture almost.

00:18:00.000 The question is almost an error.

00:18:00.000 Yeah.

00:18:02.000 The question is almost an error because you're basically looking for like who's in charge.

00:18:07.000 And the closer you get to like talking to the center, talking to the people who really matter, they're just like, oh my God, no one is in charge.

00:18:16.000 Well, so that's what's important because I'm not faulting anyone that believes this because there's some truth to it.

00:18:21.000 But there is this Wizard of Oz type belief that there's someone just calling shots.

00:18:26.000 Yeah.

00:18:27.000 And it's Barack Obama from Martha's Vineyard and says, investigate, indict.

00:18:32.000 Yeah, and there are pieces of that, I'm sure.

00:18:34.000 But the bureaucracy operates completely differently than that.

00:18:37.000 It operates completely differently from that because the whole thing, the bureaucracy is like, basically, the fundamental problem, if I had to say one thing to your audience of patriots, like that I wanted them to remember that, you know, it's not when they say democracy, they mean oligarchy.

00:18:54.000 That's really, really important.

00:18:56.000 People should really get that.

00:18:57.000 The second thing to say, and I love going around to saying this, people that are really in the loop and in deep in DC, because I've never heard anyone disagree with this.

00:19:06.000 We don't have an executive branch.

00:19:09.000 We have a legislative branch.

00:19:12.000 It's almost like a legislative judicial branch in some ways.

00:19:15.000 And the way, because when you look at the so-called executive branch, what you see is that the personnel, the policy, and the budget of this are set by the Congress, which is a completely non-democratic and non-political, you know, the Congress is a buffer against politicizing the deep state, which means democratizing the deep state.

00:19:39.000 And so if you look at the influence that the president has on the executive branch, basically, what is an executive order?

00:19:47.000 It's basically a tweet.

00:19:48.000 There's really not terribly big difference between an EO and a tweet.

00:19:53.000 And the ability to, like, you know, even by, you know, you have this org chart that looks like the org chart of a private company in which basically control flows from the top down, but it's completely illusory.

00:20:07.000 And if you stack that whole system with like patriotic Americans, and you support, which unfortunately was not really done in the last administration, but there's something called the plumb book, do you know the Trump plumb?

00:20:20.000 Of course, the 5,000 positions and the 5,000 positions that Trump gets to appoint, right?

00:20:27.000 And you basically put 5,000, I don't know where you'd find these people, but you put 5,000 really, really capable, you know, people who really see the world the way you do, Charlie.

00:20:38.000 And want to work for the federal government.

00:20:39.000 And you want to work for the federal government.

00:20:41.000 If you take these imaginary people and put them in and make them exist somehow and put them, you know, my friend Sir Rob Sharma is trying very hard to do.

00:20:49.000 No, he's doing a great job.

00:20:50.000 He's doing a great job.

00:20:51.000 But the thing is, you know, here's what's going to happen.

00:20:53.000 They are basically going to parachute in there.

00:20:56.000 They're going to find that they have no way to constrain the permanent staff who nominally work for them.

00:21:04.000 And every one of these people is going to be offered a choice.

00:21:07.000 First of all, either you turn coat immediately, you become a traitor, or we are going to destroy your professional life.

00:21:15.000 We are going to saddle you with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills because this lawfare industry that we're seeing is just ramping up.

00:21:22.000 We're going to saddle you with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills.

00:21:25.000 You will never have a career in this space at all again.

00:21:31.000 And like, we're going to do everything to destroy you personally, but certainly professionally.

00:21:36.000 Or you can just turn coat and maybe after four years, we'll trust you and you can get some jobs.

00:21:41.000 You can kind of burrow into the bureaucracy.

00:21:42.000 I have heard this story hundreds of times of people that go into the bureaucracy and they are confronted.

00:21:50.000 And if they choose incorrectly, within a month, hell is unleashed upon them.

00:21:56.000 And I can tell you, whether it be in housing and urban development or whether it be in the Department of Interior, it is systemic across the board, right?

00:22:04.000 There is not an inch of turf that they will concede, not anywhere.

00:22:09.000 And it was as bad, Curtis, and I want to get into this.

00:22:13.000 Trump would say, I want to do A, and the bureaucrats would say, huh?

00:22:17.000 Yeah.

00:22:18.000 And they would just throw away the order.

00:22:20.000 It would take four, five, six, sometimes eight follow-ups, months, until you could even get 1% of what the order would say.

00:22:28.000 There was daily subversion.

00:22:30.000 And by the way, this is a huge challenge.

00:22:31.000 What can you even do about that?

00:22:33.000 What can we even do about that?

00:22:35.000 Well, I have an answer, but you may not like it.

00:22:38.000 Okay.

00:22:39.000 And your audience might not like it.

00:22:40.000 No, we want the truth.

00:22:42.000 Yeah, the truth, the truth, the truth.

00:22:45.000 And I think that I feel like Americans are really like one of the things that conservatism, American conservatism sort of may not be quite there yet, but like it's waking up a lot.

00:22:56.000 I call it the great melting.

00:22:58.000 It's finally this ice age of these old ideas are melting away.

00:23:01.000 It's not there, but you can start to see these new things.

00:23:04.000 And you're just starting to see DC for what it really is.

00:23:07.000 Like most, you go like in your 11th grade civics class and you like read about how a bill becomes a law or whatever.

00:23:13.000 It's so ideal.

00:23:14.000 And then there's a budget.

00:23:15.000 And then you, you know, like even the freaking omnibus bills, like, you know, it's so, it has no resemblance to, you know, Congress isn't even a parliamentary body.

00:23:26.000 Like it's not, you know, it's not a talking shop.

00:23:29.000 People don't actually like debate there.

00:23:30.000 It's this bizarre system of committees, right?

00:23:34.000 You know, and so, you know, the idea that like you're, you know, like if you could bring the founders back and basically show them DC as it is today, they would just be like, what does this even have to do with the thing we created?

00:23:48.000 Like, how are you basically using these 18th century documents to justify this?

00:23:53.000 Well, that's the tragedy, is that they don't need to rewrite the Constitution.

00:23:58.000 They've just ignored it.

00:23:59.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:24:00.000 Just kind of built their own.

00:24:01.000 They've made it a dead letter.

00:24:03.000 And the thing is, you know, you know what else is a dead letter?

00:24:05.000 The Articles of Confederation.

00:24:07.000 Yes.

00:24:07.000 Nobody ever abolished the Articles of Confederation.

00:24:09.000 They just said, well, you know, this isn't a thing anymore.

00:24:12.000 And they essentially sort of abolished the Constitution within sort of, well, nominally adhering to it.

00:24:12.000 This is not working out.

00:24:20.000 You know, of course, about Chris Caldwell and I did a whole show on MLK.

00:24:24.000 I'm a believer that we actually have two American foundings.

00:24:27.000 The second was in the 1960s, and MLK is the George Washington of the Constitution.

00:24:31.000 Sure, sure.

00:24:32.000 I don't want to get too far down.

00:24:33.000 I would say that that was a minor founding compared to the founding of the 1930s.

00:24:37.000 But the modern elites honor that one more than 1776 or 1786 is sort of unrecognizable from this world.

00:24:50.000 And so, you know, like, I guess I would say that, you know, stepping way, way back and looking at kind of the grand sweep of American history, I would say one of the most brilliant things, you know, actually, like, you know, the founding generation is sort of very different from the abstractions that people see.

00:25:12.000 These are real people with real flaws and real, you know, in a real situation.

00:25:17.000 And yet, you know, they were brilliant.

00:25:21.000 They were in the real world.

00:25:22.000 They were doing real things.

00:25:24.000 And one of the things they did in the Constitution that was kind of a work of genius that I think we can really learn from is they never specified which of the three branches is in charge.

00:25:36.000 And so...

00:25:37.000 But wasn't that part of the brilliance?

00:25:39.000 That was part of the brilliance.

00:25:40.000 I'm not questioning their wisdom.

00:25:42.000 That was part of the brilliance because basically what that allowed to have happen, you know, as Aristotle described, you know, 2,500 years ago, there are three sort of forms of government and modes of power.

00:25:56.000 These are democracy, the rule of the many, oligarchy, the rule of the few, and monarchy, the rule of the one.

00:26:03.000 And what we see in American history is about every 75 or 80 years, sort of like the San Andreas Fault, you basically get a presidential government.

00:26:14.000 Your government goes from being, you know, sort of the rule of the many is pretty hard to pull off these days.

00:26:21.000 The rule of the few is pretty normal in this system.

00:26:24.000 That breaks down and you get a president like Washington or Lincoln or FDR who is really personally in charge of the federal government in the way that Elon Musk is in charge of SpaceX.

00:26:40.000 That's a great analogy because I'm reading the Walter Isaacson book on Elon.

00:26:44.000 He is the closest thing to, and I don't mean this pejoratively, he is a dictator over those companies.

00:26:50.000 He is a monarch.

00:26:50.000 He is a king.

00:26:51.000 He is a CEO.

00:26:52.000 What he says goes, and he is the arbiter of what success is and what is not.

00:26:57.000 And when you look at how everything that works in our world works, whether it's a restaurant with a chef, whether it's a movie with a director, whether it's a company with a CEO, you see this pattern sort of repeated everywhere where you basically put one person in charge, you make him or her accountable, but you don't let anyone micromanage that.

00:27:20.000 And basically, authorities flows from the top down.

00:27:24.000 So in Washington, there's a saying that personnel is policy.

00:27:28.000 And so, you know, whereas so if you want some policy to run, get the right people in charge.

00:27:34.000 That's not how SpaceX works.

00:27:39.000 Hey, everyone, Charlie Kirk here.

00:27:40.000 For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless provider.

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00:28:42.000 That's not how SpaceX works.

00:28:45.000 Great example is the first, the Falcon rocket that Elon Musk sent out, did it with a ragtag team of 500 people on the fourth attempt to the competitor, NASA, or even Boeing's division that was working with NASA, 50,000 employees, and they couldn't get it.

00:28:58.000 That's right.

00:28:58.000 Because basically, NASA is full.

00:29:01.000 When you look at an oligarchic system at a bureaucracy, the way it works is by process.

00:29:06.000 Everything has a process.

00:29:08.000 Nothing is left to individual discretion.

00:29:11.000 And if there is individual discretion, like, you know, Fauci has some individual discretion.

00:29:16.000 The way he uses that is by ganking the process.

00:29:19.000 He manipulates procedural outcomes.

00:29:21.000 He's like, I want this procedure to let my friends do gain of function research and get more grants.

00:29:26.000 So how can I make this come out to say, oh, my friends and, you know, a Duke in China are going to go and find all the bad coronaviruses and mutate them to make them more dangerous. 0.84

00:29:36.000 And that's literally how we got COVID, right?

00:29:38.000 You know, and so you have all of these process-based systems. 0.98

00:29:42.000 Everyone is covering their ass at all times. 0.90

00:29:45.000 There's no accountability in a process-based system. 0.99

00:29:48.000 No one can ever be held personally accountable.

00:29:50.000 Who's been held personally accountable for COVID?

00:29:52.000 And no one will be.

00:29:52.000 No one.

00:29:53.000 No one will be.

00:29:54.000 And that's a bitter.

00:29:55.000 That's a black pill. 0.88

00:29:56.000 That's a black pill. 0.83

00:29:57.000 That's a bitter pill to swallow, right?

00:29:59.000 And so, but the thing is, here's the important thing.

00:30:01.000 When you're a libertarian, you basically think of this like, oh, you know, the private sector, which is operating on libertarian principles, is good.

00:30:10.000 The public sector is bad.

00:30:12.000 This is why SpaceX operates better than NASA.

00:30:15.000 Well, if you go all the way back to the Apollo project or the Manhattan Project, we just saw Oppenheimer, right?

00:30:22.000 Pretty good movie.

00:30:23.000 Portrays the, you know, Oppenheimer is a bit more of a communist than that movie portrays.

00:30:27.000 Otherwise, pretty accurate, and it portrays the scene pretty well.

00:30:30.000 And the thing is, you know, you look at the Manhattan Project, that's the most successful engineering project of all time.

00:30:37.000 It's a government project.

00:30:39.000 It's pretty much carried out almost exclusively by progressives, or as some people say, communists.

00:30:46.000 You know, communists is just a euphemism for progressive, you know, and vice versa.

00:30:51.000 And my grandparents were American communists.

00:30:53.000 They always said progressive.

00:30:54.000 Always that way.

00:30:55.000 Yeah, back to the 30s.

00:30:57.000 The meaning of the word has never changed.

00:30:59.000 And in the 20s, it meant something different.

00:31:02.000 In the teens, maybe, not since the 30s.

00:31:04.000 And so, you know, you have this system where you're just like, wait a second, whether it's public or private isn't the determining factor.

00:31:14.000 Whether people are libertarians or communists isn't the determining factor.

00:31:18.000 What is the factor that makes the Manhattan Project work?

00:31:21.000 And can you imagine trying to do a Manhattan project with the way like government-funded science works today?

00:31:26.000 The way NASA works today, it'd be impossible.

00:31:28.000 It would take 100 years.

00:31:29.000 And it is, again, I love the Elon Musk analogy because it's illuminating.

00:31:33.000 And it is kind of the buried lead of the Walter Isaacson book, which is, he doesn't acknowledge.

00:31:37.000 Walter Eichen's a lefty, right?

00:31:38.000 He's even kind of attacked Elon in the interview subsequent from the book.

00:31:41.000 But the buried lead is, oh my goodness, how did he get it done?

00:31:44.000 Oh my goodness, he also had Tesla.

00:31:46.000 And the buried lead is because he went in, he had full, complete authority and control.

00:31:51.000 Absolutely.

00:31:52.000 It so happens he's a genius.

00:31:53.000 No joke.

00:31:54.000 And he also has his own demons and all that.

00:31:56.000 But imagine Elon having to work through a committee.

00:32:00.000 There is no Tesla.

00:32:00.000 Yeah.

00:32:01.000 There is no Tesla.

00:32:02.000 There's no SpaceX.

00:32:03.000 It got so bad that there is a chapter in the Walter Isaacson book on Elon.

00:32:06.000 It was Christmas Eve.

00:32:07.000 SpaceX was bankrupt.

00:32:08.000 Tesla was bankrupt.

00:32:09.000 He put all of his own money in.

00:32:11.000 He was calling bankers.

00:32:12.000 He was throwing up.

00:32:13.000 He was nauseous.

00:32:14.000 He hadn't eaten for two weeks.

00:32:15.000 Literally, true story.

00:32:16.000 He had five kids that he wasn't even able to see.

00:32:18.000 He was going through a divorce.

00:32:19.000 And he had this like Churchillian grit where he had to all of a sudden be the guy that birthed it.

00:32:27.000 It wasn't democracy.

00:32:27.000 It wasn't a committee.

00:32:29.000 It wasn't democracy.

00:32:30.000 It wasn't Superman.

00:32:32.000 They didn't take a vote of all the SpaceX engineers to say, what are we going to do?

00:32:36.000 There's one guy on Christmas Eve that took out a $20 million non-secured loan.

00:32:40.000 And if you look at basically everything around you, like look at everything in this studio.

00:32:47.000 It was made by a monarchy.

00:32:49.000 Your computer there, Apple, made by a monarchy. 1.00

00:32:51.000 Steve Jobs is a jerk. 1.00

00:32:53.000 I was going to use other language. 1.00

00:32:55.000 He is a completely.

00:32:55.000 He and Elon have the same sort of Caesar-ism.

00:32:58.000 I'm in charge.

00:32:59.000 You're not.

00:33:00.000 These are not like, these are not good people.

00:33:00.000 Here's the thing.

00:33:02.000 They are not nice people.

00:33:04.000 They are not people you want to be around.

00:33:06.000 They are useful people.

00:33:08.000 They are useful people.

00:33:09.000 Think of them as tools.

00:33:10.000 Don't be jealous of them. 1.00

00:33:12.000 Don't hate them for being like narcissistic jerks. 1.00

00:33:15.000 Yeah, they're narcissistic jerks. 1.00

00:33:17.000 But you know what? 1.00

00:33:18.000 Basically, if it wasn't for Steve Jobs, you wouldn't have that laptop.

00:33:21.000 No, I mean, so here's your historical genius. 0.98

00:33:25.000 And is history defined by a small group of mostly men, sometimes women, of quote-unquote useful jerks that assume power and do the impossible? 0.99

00:33:36.000 There's a lot of that. 0.99

00:33:37.000 The end of history, as Hegel would call them, right?

00:33:39.000 Yeah, there's a lot of that.

00:33:40.000 And the thing is, and when you're looking for, I wouldn't say the, you know, enormous power has come out of collectives in various ways.

00:33:48.000 Enormous power has come out of the masses.

00:33:52.000 The problem is the masses, like, and this sort of goes back to this sort of essential kind of thing, there's a kind of rock, scissors, paper thing going on with democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy.

00:34:03.000 And one of the things that we have to cope with in the real world today, if you go back to the 18th century and you look at sort of why America became a democracy, then you're looking at, you know, this nation, especially in like Massachusetts where all this kicks off, you're looking at this nation of incredibly virtuous people.

00:34:22.000 Well, that's right.

00:34:23.000 They're Anabaptists. 1.00

00:34:25.000 Yeah, they're incredibly godly.

00:34:27.000 They're incredibly.

00:34:28.000 By the way, the state-based laws are like the most based, like no homosexuality.

00:34:32.000 Oh, yeah.

00:34:33.000 And they organize, they organize instantly.

00:34:36.000 They form these committees of correspondence.

00:34:38.000 They form the Sons of Liberty.

00:34:40.000 Like, these are, you know, this is a world in which, I mean, even more than 1776, America, did you know that there was a color revolution in America in 1689?

00:34:49.000 There was, really?

00:34:50.000 That was before the CIA.

00:34:52.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:34:53.000 That was the original idea.

00:34:55.000 Tell me about it.

00:34:55.000 When James II is overthrown by a Dutch invasion in England, James II, who, of course, is basically, he's not quite a Catholic.

00:35:04.000 Well, he is a Catholic, actually, but he's not governing as a Catholic.

00:35:08.000 But, you know, he's on the cavalier side of the roundhead-cavalier divide.

00:35:12.000 And of course, Massachusetts is this kind of like roundhead, you know, colony, right?

00:35:18.000 And so he creates this thing called the Dominion of New England, where they're, you know, they're going to put bishops in America or whatever.

00:35:23.000 He's overthrown by this like Dutch invasion. 0.99

00:35:26.000 As soon as they hear the news about it in Boston, they just arrest the government instantly and restore their old kind of religious dictatorship form of. 0.60

00:35:36.000 And the thing is, basically, the important lesson for today is a lot of people think, if you remember the Tea Party, do you remember the Tea Party?

00:35:45.000 I was part of it.

00:35:46.000 What did it accomplish?

00:35:48.000 The best spin is it might have paved the ideological for Trump.

00:35:51.000 It might have.

00:35:52.000 That's the best thing.

00:35:52.000 It might have.

00:35:53.000 And it might have.

00:35:53.000 Legislatively, nothing, politically next to nothing.

00:35:55.000 We maybe got a couple good senators, maybe.

00:35:58.000 But it did open people's eyes to challenge paradigms that gave us Trump.

00:36:02.000 It made Trump possible.

00:36:02.000 Yeah, it basically.

00:36:03.000 That's my theory.

00:36:04.000 It made show.

00:36:05.000 I can go with that theory a little bit.

00:36:06.000 Okay.

00:36:07.000 Because basically what it did was, you know, the Tea Party was people are like, this is America.

00:36:13.000 If the people, the good salt of the earth, patriotic people in America just like all get tired of their government at the same time, something's going to happen.

00:36:23.000 And what they discovered is that nothing happens.

00:36:23.000 Yeah.

00:36:25.000 And that's a really important lesson is that if you get a lot of people together, nothing happens.

00:36:30.000 Whereas if you look at people in Massachusetts in 1689, these are like, from today's perspective, not only are they incredibly virtuous and civic, they're also incredibly violent and energetic.

00:36:44.000 And that is a weird combination that doesn't exist today at all.

00:36:48.000 No, it doesn't.

00:36:49.000 So Curtis, I want to isolate on this because I'm obsessed with this, which is why I'm consuming the Elon book from a different approach.

00:36:57.000 Because people read it like as a business book, I said, no, no, you're missing.

00:37:00.000 You're missing.

00:37:00.000 This is the administration of power.

00:37:02.000 This is a guy that has built trillions of dollars of value worth $250 billion and literally has done quote-unquote the impossible, right?

00:37:09.000 You love him or hate him.

00:37:10.000 And isn't that the question that is in front of us as a society, which is who gets power, who's in charge, and who's going to lead us out of this mess?

00:37:17.000 And I guess the options in front of us is, well, we keep on doing what we're doing.

00:37:22.000 Are you suggesting an Elon Musk-ish character as president?

00:37:26.000 I think there's no, I think there's sort of two ways.

00:37:31.000 Yes, definitely.

00:37:32.000 But I think there's two ways that that can roll.

00:37:35.000 I think, you know, we're, of course, in the situation that we're in, and we're not looking at anything but Trump versus Biden in 2025.

00:37:45.000 And I'm very conflicted, actually, about this election because having Biden in the White House, you know, this sort of shambling husk of a man, really, like, and my God, think about how much he's going to degenerate over the next four years.

00:37:59.000 Like, it's painful.

00:38:00.000 Like, you know, like, I mean, in 2020, I was talking to someone who had worked for Biden, and his feeling was that Biden in 2020 was too old.

00:38:10.000 And now he can't even walk off stage.

00:38:12.000 Jill has to lead him off stage.

00:38:13.000 It's incredible.

00:38:14.000 And so, like, seeing that is actually great for America and Americans because they should see what their government really is.

00:38:22.000 They should see.

00:38:23.000 And the reality is Washington doesn't need the White House.

00:38:27.000 You could have no White House at all, no president at all.

00:38:30.000 The executive branch would work even better.

00:38:33.000 Sometimes it's true it sort of sends like decisions up and they land on the president's desk and they give him three boxes to check and he's supposed to check the middle one and he checks the middle one, right?

00:38:43.000 That's not what Elon Musk does.

00:38:45.000 Elon Musk is proactive.

00:38:46.000 No, no, no, no.

00:38:47.000 This whole system is reactive.

00:38:48.000 He's going to stick on the floor of a gigafactory to make sure the battery is two millimeters lower on a car and suspend production.

00:38:56.000 And he'll go right down into all of those details, right?

00:39:00.000 That's what a real manager does.

00:39:02.000 What I would recommend, honestly, for Donald Trump, who is, is he 80 yet?

00:39:06.000 Is he almost 80?

00:39:07.000 Yes, but to be clear, his health, he's got gusto.

00:39:10.000 He's got gusto.

00:39:11.000 And the thing is, what I would recommend for Donald Trump is I don't think Donald Trump really, you know, like when he was a CEO in the private sector, the Trump organization was never bigger than like 20 or 30 people.

00:39:23.000 It was a brand license.

00:39:24.000 It was a family office.

00:39:25.000 It was a family office and it was a license, a brand licensing organization, and they licensed that brand.

00:39:31.000 Trump has so many sort of attributes of kingliness.

00:39:35.000 He's like, has he has this quality in Arabic that's called Baraka, like the quality of a king, right?

00:39:41.000 What Trump is not good at is drilling down detailed management, like going, staying on top of things, having a long attention span, being Elon Musk.

00:39:53.000 He's not Elon Musk.

00:39:55.000 The right job for Donald Trump is not CEO of the government, it's chairman of the board.

00:40:00.000 Yes.

00:40:01.000 And if he was able to see himself as chairman of the board and to basically go out and say, hey, I'm going to go wherever you find these Elon Musks of today, I'm going to go and basically say, you know what?

00:40:16.000 Hey, you know, someone, I'm not going to mention any names, but I'm sure there's 100 people in Silicon Valley that could do this job and basically say, you're going to basically shut down this fake executive branch that we have and create a new government.

00:40:30.000 That's the level of.

00:40:32.000 And I will take credit for it.

00:40:33.000 And I will take credit for it because I'm Donald Trump.

00:40:35.000 No, that's okay.

00:40:35.000 Yeah, that's totally okay.

00:40:36.000 Right.

00:40:37.000 Actually, like, the best managers, like, you know, they don't, they don't want to be on TV. 0.89

00:40:41.000 You know, there's an easy way to know that, you know, the White House is fake and lame. 0.88

00:40:49.000 The easiest way to know that the White House is fake and lame. 0.80

00:40:52.000 I'm sorry, I'm from Berkeley. 0.94

00:40:53.000 I have to say fake and lame.

00:40:54.000 No, there was another word we could use. 0.94

00:40:55.000 Yeah, yeah, it's fake and fae.

00:40:57.000 I like the word fae. 0.99

00:40:58.000 And, you know, is that the president spends like half of his time doing photo ops.

00:41:05.000 Do you think Elon Musk spends half of his time doing photo ops?

00:41:05.000 That's correct.

00:41:08.000 Right.

00:41:09.000 And, you know, and so, you know, the thing is, and like you have all of these patriotic Americans out there, and they're voting sort of based on this emotional belief.

00:41:19.000 They really think they're electing the CEO of America.

00:41:22.000 They talk as if they're electing the CEO of America.

00:41:24.000 So I want to add something.

00:41:26.000 If there is an opportunity to get this done, it's the only vector to get it done is through Trump.

00:41:31.000 When you look at the current plans that are being made for the next Trump administration, they're sort of, you know, I know some of these people.

00:41:40.000 They're really good people.

00:41:42.000 It's just, it's simply, it's not radical enough and it can't be radical enough.

00:41:46.000 And let's get some ideas then, okay?

00:41:48.000 It's going to run.

00:41:49.000 It's a different idea factory.

00:41:50.000 So let's say at a chief of staff or VP level, we get that Elon Musk guy that doesn't want to be on the headlines, okay?

00:41:56.000 But he is a vicious 20-hour a day operator.

00:42:00.000 And let's say that role gets filled, okay?

00:42:03.000 Just for argument's sake.

00:42:04.000 What else?

00:42:05.000 Because you have a whole laundry list of creative ideas.

00:42:08.000 So basically, you know, when you're filling that role, you have to, you know, understand and you have to tell the American people very straightforwardly and honestly, ideally before the election, although FDR didn't do it before the election.

00:42:21.000 FDR did it after the election, but it was a different world.

00:42:25.000 You have to tell the American people before the election, hey, look, if you're going to vote for me, you got to understand that as president, I'm just going to run the country for the next four years.

00:42:37.000 And I'm going to treat the other two branches of government as advisory because this is the only way to restore the executive branch from its present Babylonian captivity.

00:42:49.000 So basically.

00:42:51.000 I will be King Cyrus.

00:42:52.000 I will be King Cyrus and we'll have another election in four years.

00:42:55.000 I'm still going to be accountable.

00:42:57.000 And that election is going to be held in a totally different country.

00:43:01.000 Because when you see real regime change in this world, think about East Germany turning into modern Germany. 0.56

00:43:08.000 You know, if you're in East Germany in like 1988 versus East Germany in 1992, your life changed.

00:43:16.000 Everything's different.

00:43:17.000 Everything's different.

00:43:17.000 Everything changes.

00:43:18.000 And, you know, I have a funny story, which is when Trump was originally elected, I was like, oh my God, this is happening, but it's just way too soon.

00:43:24.000 We're not ready.

00:43:25.000 And you were kind of right.

00:43:27.000 I was kind of right, but it was just way too soon.

00:43:29.000 And, you know, at the time, my kids were six and eight, and they're going to this progressive Mandarin immersion school in San Francisco.

00:43:37.000 And I tried not to talk about politics with my kids at all.

00:43:41.000 Absolutely the best thing to do, especially if you're raising your kids there.

00:43:44.000 But they, of course, were coming to me with all these questions. 0.99

00:43:47.000 You're like, Trump is going to kill all the Muslims. 1.00

00:43:49.000 You know, he's going to, whatever, whatever. 1.00

00:43:50.000 You know how kids like, amplify whatever they hear from their parents and take it to an.

00:43:54.000 And my son comes to me and he has a very specific question about the, the Trump world.

00:44:00.000 He's like, how are we going to be able to go to the beach?

00:44:03.000 What, how are we going to?

00:44:05.000 I'm like Henry.

00:44:06.000 I heard you the first time.

00:44:08.000 You're not making any sense.

00:44:09.000 He's like Pop.

00:44:10.000 When Trump builds a wall around the country, how are we going to be able to go to the beach?

00:44:14.000 And I, you know, I'm just like Henry.

00:44:16.000 If you see anything besides political science change as a result of this election, I'll be very, very surprised.

00:44:23.000 In a crisis that's a little different.

00:44:25.000 I think a lot of the COVID calls mattered.

00:44:27.000 I think who was president mattered a lot, but in a normal like thing, it actually doesn't matter at all.

00:44:36.000 Traditional media is crumbling.

00:44:38.000 Because they're hiding something, something big.

00:44:38.000 Why?

00:44:41.000 People are realizing they're being lied to left and right, even by institutions they thought they could trust.

00:44:46.000 But you, you've known the truth all along.

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00:45:35.000 You said that we need to pitch to the American people.

00:45:39.000 Regime change.

00:45:41.000 Yes, they need to.

00:45:41.000 Basically, and the only way that, as as Machiavelli says in his great work you know discourses.

00:45:47.000 I studied it with Anton this summer.

00:45:49.000 Oh, amazing as me.

00:45:50.000 Amazing as as Machiavelli says in his discourses on Livy and you know it was a long time ago.

00:45:54.000 But really tell me, you know more about political science than Machiavelli.

00:45:57.000 By the way, no one has surpassed Machiavelli's wisdom.

00:46:01.000 Yes, I don't close.

00:46:02.000 No, he's amazing, and he was not just, and you're understanding the classics, but he was a political animal.

00:46:06.000 He was an animal and, like he actually, he did that job, he worked in that space and he was trying to get a better one.

00:46:12.000 That's what he had.

00:46:13.000 Yeah, he had a job application.

00:46:14.000 It was a job application to Zara Borgia, you know and like hey, here's all the stuff I know, here's all the stuff I know right, you know and and, and.

00:46:21.000 So the thing is that basically, here's the key, in a way, is that when people vote in a presidential election, they're sort of thinking themselves in this kind of Norman Rockwell sense, like I care about this issue, I care about that issue and i'm like hiring this guy and he's gonna work for me in this office, and to realize that basically no, you have to do something much more daring than that.

00:46:46.000 You have to basically, for your vote to be powerful, you have to give away all of that power and you have to say, when I vote for president in this 2024 election, basically i'm voting for whoever wins, for my guy to have all the power.

00:47:04.000 I don't want to be like, you know, i'm voting for you to do this and voting for you to do that, i'm voting for you to close the border.

00:47:10.000 Are we ready for that as a country?

00:47:11.000 And should we be?

00:47:12.000 I mean because I mean part of me, i'll be honest is like, but don't we have separation of power.

00:47:16.000 I know, I know, I know you want to basically like To cling to sort of all of these things, but the thing is, all of these things are basically, these are things, frankly, Charlie, the Democrats don't believe in any of these things at all.

00:47:28.000 They don't believe in the rule of law.

00:47:30.000 Are we held prisoner by our ideals?

00:47:32.000 We're held prisoner by our ideals.

00:47:34.000 And the thing is, basically, the problem has come, the point has come where we have to choose between these old and very beautiful ideas and our country.

00:47:45.000 And if we choose the ideals over our country, our country is going to cease to exist.

00:47:49.000 Because here's what's going to happen.

00:47:51.000 Can I describe what's going to happen, where we're going to be if we go continue on this course in 2050?

00:47:57.000 We now have about 5 million people a year pouring over the border.

00:48:01.000 We have everyone who is part of America's governing class, you know, believing, you'll see it written all over the place in San Francisco, nun gunda persones eligal.

00:48:11.000 No human being is illegal.

00:48:13.000 You know, and like it's really hard, if you think about it, to defend the idea that your human rights as a human being should depend on the GPS coordinates where your mother squeezed you out.

00:48:24.000 That's a pretty tough position to defend at Harvard or Yale or whatever.

00:48:29.000 It's only a matter of time before we see basically an American, we already have seen it de facto, essentially an American Edict of Caracalla, where it's basically decided that everyone in the world is an American.

00:48:41.000 And once everyone is in the world is an American. 0.77

00:48:44.000 Nobody is.

00:48:45.000 Nobody is.

00:48:46.000 And you're not going to see 5 million people coming over the border every year.

00:48:49.000 You're going to see 50 million people.

00:48:52.000 You're going to see basically, you know, I mean, if you did a census in Africa and you said how many Africans would like to come to the U.S., you're looking at a numbers that are more like 500 million.

00:49:04.000 And basically, once that happens, the country you know no longer exists.

00:49:08.000 And the country that you live in is a country that looks a lot like South Africa today.

00:49:12.000 Been to South Africa lately?

00:49:14.000 Never will.

00:49:14.000 Wouldn't recommend it.

00:49:17.000 And so, you know, the thing is that basically, if you're choosing between that and your separation of powers and your, you know, all of these things that were basically long ago captured by these progressives and have been worn as basically a skin suit by them for many, many years.

00:49:38.000 Y'all are familiar with the skin suit technique.

00:49:39.000 I do, but tell us what it reminds us.

00:49:41.000 So basically, it's a beautiful analogy.

00:49:44.000 You take over, you capture this institution and then wear the skin, and you're just like, you know, basically a wolf in sheep's clothing.

00:49:52.000 And, you know, you sound like you're making these ba noises, but all you're saying is come here and get eaten.

00:49:58.000 And so the thing is to recognize that that happened, and it didn't happen recently.

00:50:02.000 That's the whole 20th century is this happening.

00:50:06.000 It's really the whole 20th century is this movement of basically elites recapturing the state from politicians.

00:50:14.000 That is the story of 20th century America.

00:50:18.000 And so when you try to roll that back and say, okay, we're going to give the power back to the people, you basically have to recognize the truth of what John Adams said when he said, our Constitution For a moral and religious is made only for a morally inadequate person.

00:50:35.000 It's wholly inadequate for any other, and power will go through it like a whale through a net.

00:50:40.000 And so the problem, the whale analogy, basically, if you go back to your sort of triangle of democracy, oligarchy, monarchy.

00:50:47.000 If those are the three trials.

00:50:48.000 If those are the three trials.

00:50:49.000 Aristotle was right.

00:50:50.000 If Aristotle was right.

00:50:51.000 Which he probably was.

00:50:51.000 He probably was.

00:50:52.000 What you basically see is that patriotic Americans are a little bit stuck because they're basically trying to put the whale back in the net.

00:50:59.000 The problem is the net has grown a lot weaker.

00:51:03.000 And so the stock of popular energy, of popular virtue, civic virtue, you know, we sort of saw on January 6th this like, I'm not saying January 6th was this great act of evil or anything, but it was also, I mean, I think it was kind of a joke in a way because we saw basically that was what happens when you try to do 18th century politics with the 21st century population.

00:51:26.000 And, you know, they got to the Senate floor and then did they organize, reorganize the Senate and start issuing decrees and taking over the military.

00:51:35.000 And no, he had a guy with quarantines in his helmet, right?

00:51:38.000 You know, but like when you picture what people in like the 17th century and like 1689 in Boston that would do, it would be over right there.

00:51:45.000 Right.

00:51:46.000 And so the thing is when you're trying to organize that popular energy into sort of the people acting over the government, you've got to realize that the strength just isn't there.

00:51:57.000 And that's why essentially all of these attempts to sort of use democracy to fight oligarchy without going the other direction on the clock and saying, no, what you essentially need to do is you need to use all of the power that you have left in democracy in one moment, at one time, in one direction, to kick the thing back over into monarchy.

00:52:21.000 And, you know, you basically say, and you just, this whole idea on the American right of like, we're going to start by restoring the virtue of the American people.

00:52:32.000 And first we're going to make a virtuous people, and then the virtuous people are going to be, you know, strike back.

00:52:37.000 Meanwhile, you're basically being outnumbered by the entire population of Nigeria while you're trying to create these virtues, right? 0.99

00:52:43.000 You know, and it's just, it's just impossible.

00:52:46.000 It's never going to work.

00:52:47.000 And so the thing is, basically, that's the terrible choice facing Americans.

00:52:52.000 You have to basically lay down all of these ideals that have been stolen and been corrupted and say, no, actually, it was an amazing experiment.

00:53:01.000 We tried it.

00:53:02.000 It kind of worked for a while.

00:53:03.000 Now we're going to go back to some version of the form of government that 99% of human beings have been governed by for 99% of history.

00:53:13.000 Does that frighten you at all?

00:53:15.000 Of course.

00:53:16.000 You know, it's like, but it frightens me in a way.

00:53:16.000 Of course.

00:53:19.000 If someone told me that I needed cancer surgery, God forbid, that would frighten me too.

00:53:24.000 But it wouldn't frighten me out of having the surgery.

00:53:26.000 Yeah, chemotherapy sounds terrible.

00:53:27.000 Chemotherapy sounds terrible.

00:53:29.000 And the thing is, the problem is basically, you know, what the political scene is right now is like there's a patient going to the doctor.

00:53:35.000 He goes to the, you know, the Democratic doctor.

00:53:38.000 He's like, I keep getting thinner.

00:53:39.000 Why am I so thin?

00:53:40.000 The doctor is like, great, I've never seen you look better.

00:53:43.000 You're so thin.

00:53:44.000 You're in such good shape.

00:53:45.000 Keep it up.

00:53:46.000 And then he goes to the Republican doctor.

00:53:47.000 And the Republican doctor is like, yeah, you know, you have cancer and you're losing weight because of sarcopenia and you're going to die.

00:53:56.000 Fortunately, I have this pill right here that will cure you.

00:53:59.000 It's called aspirin.

00:54:00.000 There's no side effects.

00:54:01.000 Just take it and you'll feel better.

00:54:03.000 And that'll be $100,000.

00:54:05.000 And it's hard to decide which of these things is worse.

00:54:10.000 Because basically, sort of the Republicans are telling you the truth, but they're also telling you that this thing that is not going to come within three or four orders of magnitude of working is going to work.

00:54:23.000 And so in a way, they're still kind of lulling you to sleep about how bad the situation is and what has to be done.

00:54:31.000 Here's the other thing, is that when people think about dramatic changes in power, they think about violence.

00:54:38.000 Because in the 20th century, you saw a lot of political violence.

00:54:41.000 The Russian Revolution.

00:54:42.000 This is not a violent nation.

00:54:44.000 This is a nation of men who have never been in a fist fight.

00:54:47.000 That's very historically unusual.

00:54:50.000 And so when you think about liquidating the executive branch, you're not watching people march to pits being shot in the back of the neck.

00:54:58.000 No, it's just like a company going out of business.

00:55:00.000 It's like FTX going out of business.

00:55:02.000 Maybe it's like Elon reorganizing Twitter.

00:55:04.000 He doesn't have to shoot anyone.

00:55:05.000 He just has to carry the kitchen sink in the front door, right?

00:55:08.000 And so it's actually just this like, it's, you know, all of this, you'll see these Democratic caricatures of what, you know, the Democrats are always telling, you know, basically they're saying you're going to do the things you're not going to do.

00:55:25.000 And they basically get you to promise to do the things you're not going to do, but you should do.

00:55:30.000 And so there's sort of all of these fantasies about Trump becoming a dictator or whatever.

00:55:36.000 And they're just cartoonish and sort of completely off base.

00:55:39.000 And I'll tell you one other thing that you may not really like either.

00:55:43.000 If someone does this, he can't do it on behalf of only one side of the American people.

00:55:49.000 He has to say to the blue state people too, hey, I'm going to govern you in a way that suits you.

00:55:55.000 You're actually going to like this.

00:55:56.000 Like your life is actually going to become more progressive out there just at the same time as all those red state people, you know, don't have to worry about the schools turning their kids trans.

00:56:08.000 Yeah, go have your kids go trans. 1.00

00:56:10.000 Have them do blue hair. 1.00

00:56:11.000 That's what you want.

00:56:13.000 But, you know, we can't basically fight for these institutions at all.

00:56:18.000 There has to be a sort of, you know, at a cultural level, there has to be a kind of institutional divorce.

00:56:23.000 And that divorce can be a peaceful, friendly kind of divorce within the same nation.

00:56:29.000 So to use first principles, and then I want to just challenge a couple of the other things you said, is you say, if we don't embrace this, right, go towards some form of a monarchy, then we're going to have 50 million people coming in.

00:56:45.000 Can you strengthen how certain you are?

00:56:48.000 Build out why you're so certain about that.

00:56:50.000 Because that is a prediction.

00:56:52.000 And I get what you're saying, right?

00:56:53.000 Total collapse, civilization over.

00:56:55.000 And by the way, I find it hard to disagree.

00:56:57.000 I just want to make sure, because that's what some people would say.

00:56:59.000 Come on, stop with the dooming, stop with the blackpilling.

00:57:02.000 Sure.

00:57:03.000 That's a big statement.

00:57:03.000 If you went back to Americans of 1950 and you showed them the America of today, they'd be like, oh my God, how did we get here?

00:57:11.000 And the reality is that you don't have these decisions already the decision to basically sort of tolerate this massive illegality.

00:57:23.000 I mean, Charlie, for example, when you're going around passing laws, did you know that RICO explicitly applies to facilitating illegal immigration?

00:57:33.000 You could have RICO prosecutions like the size of God.

00:57:37.000 Like, you know, you could prosecute all of these like Volags, all the people that are, you know, certainly all the people, you know, at ICE that are, you know, basically breaking the law, you know, but you don't have the infrastructure to do that. 0.99

00:57:50.000 Who's going to run those prosecutions?

00:57:51.000 What judges are you going to put that in front of?

00:57:54.000 And so the thing is that it's actually really straightforward for people to make these decisions.

00:57:59.000 Right now, you know, as you know, the state of Texas is asking the Supreme Court to basically force Texas to not protect its state border.

00:58:07.000 Like, again, like, this is really just getting started.

00:58:10.000 So I guess I'm totally on board with the energetic executive, someone who runs the country like Tesla or SpaceX.

00:58:20.000 Are we really?

00:58:21.000 And I just, I'm not there.

00:58:23.000 We're just going to go Mohammed bin Salman.

00:58:26.000 Well, you know, it's a different country.

00:58:28.000 It runs in a different way.

00:58:30.000 I don't think anyone needs to be hung up by their heels in the Ritz.

00:58:34.000 You know, I would say actually the leader, you know, I did a funny thing about a year ago is that I went on the Young Turks, if you know the Young Turks, with Jenk Uger, and had a very friendly conversation in a way because we talked about Ataturk, who is the basically, you know, the man who created modern Turkey.

00:58:53.000 And Ataturk, you know, who is not, didn't have any death camps or anything like that, not a violent guy.

00:58:59.000 Ataturk had so much power, he changed the alphabet that Turks used. 0.95

00:59:05.000 He changed the clothes that they wore.

00:59:07.000 He basically dragged the modern empire, the Ottoman Empire, into the modern world. 0.97

00:59:13.000 And by the way, Cenk, who's a huge progressive, obviously is all about Ataturk.

00:59:18.000 FDR didn't quite have the level of power that we're talking about, but close.

00:59:24.000 American progressives are all about FDR.

00:59:27.000 You say to them, we're going to have another FDR.

00:59:29.000 We're going to have another New Deal.

00:59:30.000 How do they say no to that?

00:59:32.000 So I guess the fear I would have, and I just love the Elon analogy, I want to acknowledge that.

00:59:38.000 Is if we cast aside all principles.

00:59:44.000 Does that concern?

00:59:46.000 I think that, you know, when you're ultimately looking at systems that are sort of monarchical, you really have to rest, you have to put your sort of moral confidence in one person.

00:59:58.000 And if you think about it, you know, think about like the Fortune 500.

01:00:01.000 That's a huge ask for a country that our myth, our story, is rebelling against.

01:00:06.000 It's a huge, it's a huge ask, and yet, you know, we live in the most ironic America in history.

01:00:12.000 We live in an America that is actually sort of ready to like break frames and rebel against old ideas.

01:00:19.000 And the thing is, you know, there's, you know, Charlie, there's 500 companies in the Fortune 500.

01:00:24.000 They're all run by a CEO.

01:00:25.000 Well, some, yes.

01:00:27.000 Yeah, some, less, not.

01:00:28.000 Some are more like the CDC at times.

01:00:30.000 I mean, some are, some are Coca-Cola's like.

01:00:32.000 Yeah, Coca-Cola is a little more like Coca-Cola's.

01:00:35.000 That's machine politics.

01:00:36.000 Coca-Cola is still a lot closer to Elon Musk than it is to the CDC, but it's definitely a specialist.

01:00:41.000 Just give me a little bit, right?

01:00:42.000 I'll give you a little bit.

01:00:43.000 There's definitely a spectrum there.

01:00:44.000 But the thing is, you know, the idea, you know, of like, we're going to basically put our trust in this one person instead of this horrific machine that is doing these just obviously insane things.

01:00:57.000 It's really, it's a scary call, a little bit, but it's not as scary as keeping with what we're doing.

01:01:03.000 So that, just to kind of make sure I understand the argument, the binary that you've put forward is current trajectory is more of the same, even worse.

01:01:12.000 You know, hell on earth.

01:01:14.000 Yes.

01:01:15.000 Even if you elect Republicans to the White House and try to have them take control of it.

01:01:19.000 And then you say, therefore, we need to embrace the greatest of all ironies and become the thing we originally rebelled against.

01:01:27.000 I'm not saying that sarcastically.

01:01:28.000 I'm not even trying to say that.

01:01:29.000 Yeah, and let me make this, let me sort of ground this in American history a little bit because, you know, there are really two American revolutions.

01:01:36.000 There's one in 1775 and 1776, and there's another one in 1789.

01:01:43.000 There's actually the Constitution is a reactionary coup against the Articles of Confederation.

01:01:50.000 And if you ask anyone, even educated people about the Articles of Confederation period, the only thing they know is that it existed.

01:01:57.000 They don't know anything about the personalities, the events, whatever.

01:02:01.000 It's been almost entirely airbrushed out of history. 1.00

01:02:04.000 It's been airbrushed out of history because it was, if I can use this word on your show, a shit show. 1.00

01:02:09.000 And basically, it was a shit show. 1.00

01:02:11.000 And then people are like, why don't we take the commanding general of the army and make him king? 1.00

01:02:16.000 And Washington was offered that.

01:02:19.000 That was what after basically seeing like, you know, 12 years of like turbulent Massachusetts style like Tea Party 1.0, tarring and feathering mob politics without even the British to be opposed to.

01:02:33.000 They're like, we need a king.

01:02:35.000 And Washington did something amazing.

01:02:37.000 The founding, you know, the sort of, you know, the true like founding of this republic was like, we're going to create something that's really, I think, the ideal form of government, which is an accountable monarchy.

01:02:49.000 Which is also the way these companies work.

01:02:52.000 Elon has a board.

01:02:53.000 Steve Jobs had a board.

01:02:55.000 Ideally, the board does absolutely nothing.

01:02:57.000 The board does nothing to govern SpaceX.

01:03:00.000 But if Elon's drug problem gets too bad, if he starts doing really crazy stuff, like, yeah, that board is going to step in.

01:03:07.000 And so you have that kind of safety backup level.

01:03:10.000 And in the constitutional system as it was originally designed, the Electoral College was supposed to be that board.

01:03:18.000 And it just didn't work.

01:03:20.000 So I guess I'm sure this is an objection you receive a lot.

01:03:23.000 And it's one I share.

01:03:24.000 I want to be honest.

01:03:24.000 Please.

01:03:25.000 So you get a Lincoln or you get a Washington, a great man.

01:03:30.000 And then Marcus Aurelius has commodus.

01:03:32.000 Yeah, and so what you need is basically a system that will really actually preserve that accountable monarchy for the long term.

01:03:41.000 You know, Marcus Aurelius has commodus, and before then, there's this period of the five good emperors.

01:03:46.000 Five monarchs.

01:03:47.000 Five good emperors, and they're all selected through adoption.

01:03:50.000 I have a little pet theory about that.

01:03:52.000 I think it was actually a long-running homosexual insider ring. 0.61

01:03:56.000 Could be.

01:03:57.000 I don't know.

01:03:58.000 But in any case, Marcus Aurelius breaks the mold and he picks his son.

01:04:02.000 He breaks the mold and he picks his son and we've all seen that movie.

01:04:05.000 Right.

01:04:06.000 Commodus is a good thing. 1.00

01:04:07.000 Joaquin Phoenix.

01:04:08.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:04:09.000 Joaquin Phoenix.

01:04:11.000 And so you have to establish something that basically I think you can learn a lot from the corporate model, which sort of works so well as a model of the accountable king.

01:04:22.000 Board of directors.

01:04:23.000 You need some kind of board-like thing.

01:04:25.000 It's a little harder to do at the sovereign level.

01:04:28.000 I have some designs for that, but I don't want to dive way, way too deep into utter nerdery here.

01:04:34.000 Yeah, so is it the system that the found, so is one of your hypotheses being, since Adams and others would say you need the raw material of moral and religious people, therefore the Constitution, since we do not have a moral and religious people and we kind of have this mishmash of different everything, therefore it's very hard to keep the Constitutional.

01:04:57.000 I would say even more than that.

01:04:59.000 I would say that, you know, there's a great line.

01:05:03.000 I urge everyone to go and read the last 10 paragraphs of FDR's first inaugural because to say that it is based, it's not even based.

01:05:11.000 It's metal.

01:05:12.000 It's pure metal.

01:05:13.000 And one of the things that FDR says is he says, our Constitution is such a good document that basically we can change the way it's interpreted and we can get anywhere with that.

01:05:24.000 And so when you look at the Constitution and you note that it says the president is the chief executive of the executive branch, it doesn't say the legislative branch should be running the executive branch.

01:05:35.000 It doesn't say the judiciary branch should be running the executive branch.

01:05:39.000 It kind of leaves all of that hanging.

01:05:41.000 And because it leaves all of that hanging, you can look at this document, the Constitution, and you can say, we're just applying this in a slightly different way.

01:05:49.000 And we're taking this branch that has become effectively subordinate.

01:05:53.000 And we're applying, I forget which is the Federalist paper where Alexander Hamilton talks about...

01:05:58.000 All Men Are Angels? 0.96

01:06:00.000 Well, but no, where he talks about executive power.

01:06:02.000 Is it 89?

01:06:03.000 I have no idea.

01:06:04.000 All men are angels is 51 or something. 0.86

01:06:05.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:06:07.000 And like, you know, and so you just sort of need to kind of rotate the Constitution a little bit, and you're still interpreting it sort of very, very clearly, but you're putting the president back in charge of the federal government.

01:06:20.000 I want to be on the record.

01:06:21.000 I hope you're wrong.

01:06:22.000 I hope, I hope you're wrong.

01:06:23.000 I would love to be wrong.

01:06:24.000 No, and so talk about that.

01:06:25.000 Do you hope that the Constitution has staying power and that Americans aren't as depraved as they seem?

01:06:31.000 Meaning that the structure can be a little bit revived and that we don't have, because you know, once you go in this direction, it's not going back.

01:06:40.000 It's just there's so many other you're going to a different place.

01:06:44.000 Because, for example, you know, in the book Good to Great, which is all about corporate turning around, you know, five million copies sold, they talk about, look, as soon as an energetic, charismatic, visionary genius CEO leaves, there was this Florida-based competitor to Walgreens that were pharmacies.

01:07:00.000 He ran for the governor.

01:07:01.000 What's his name?

01:07:01.000 I can't remember.

01:07:02.000 And it was Walgreen versus this.

01:07:04.000 And he was amazing when he was CEO.

01:07:05.000 He leaves and the company collapses in 15 years.

01:07:08.000 And so it's just, it's really.

01:07:09.000 You've got to solve that succession problem.

01:07:12.000 That's the most innocent thing.

01:07:13.000 And that's like that.

01:07:13.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:07:15.000 You absolutely have to solve that succession problem.

01:07:17.000 I believe. 0.96

01:07:18.000 Or that he just becomes a madman. 0.93

01:07:19.000 I mean, that's.

01:07:20.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:07:21.000 And that's another people get brain tumors.

01:07:24.000 It happens, right?

01:07:25.000 And so the thing is, you need the accountability part of that accountable monarchy.

01:07:29.000 But the thing is, when you're in the process of performing that transition, it's so delicate that you basically say, I have to trust this one person and I have to trust this one person to establish that accountability system and to make that work.

01:07:44.000 However, is basically, I mean, a presidential election is a form of that kind of accountability.

01:07:51.000 And so you need something that, you know, the idea that basically, you know, the founders were sort of building a machine of government that would last for the ages and govern this incredible continent for the ages.

01:08:04.000 I don't believe that dream is dead at all.

01:08:07.000 So let me ask you, you alluded to this, and you said every 80 years, we kind of have this super president.

01:08:12.000 It's like the San Andreas fault breaking.

01:08:15.000 So then is it a question, is basically what you're saying is that it's either the right or the left that's going to claim that.

01:08:21.000 I think that it's very hard for the left because the thing is the left has a sort of crabs in a bucket thing where it sort of pulls apart like, you know, to be a leftist, you know, means you're friends with all the little Fauci or whatever.

01:08:35.000 So to kind of stab them in the, I mean, it would take a really, really amazing crisis for that to happen.

01:08:40.000 Whereas, you know, like a Gavin Newsom.

01:08:42.000 Yeah, I don't think, I don't think he could do it.

01:08:45.000 I think that Barack Obama even, there were little places where Barack Obama like differed from, you know, the blob, as his guys called it, in the State Department.

01:08:55.000 Barack Obama, who, you know, has no ideological conflicts with these people, you know, couldn't really direct them to do his will.

01:09:03.000 So the traditional pushback that you'll receive is, hey, we need the courts to disassemble the deep state.

01:09:08.000 What is flawed with that argument?

01:09:10.000 What is flawed with that argument is that the courts are, you can't, first of all, you can't create a vacuum of power.

01:09:15.000 And so to say the courts will disassemble the deep state.

01:09:19.000 Let Marshall send his army to the state.

01:09:20.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:09:21.000 You know, okay, are you going to have the Supreme Court having an army to do this?

01:09:26.000 No, you're not.

01:09:27.000 And so you basically see these sort of little conservative judgments.

01:09:31.000 You just saw one on affirmative action in colleges, right?

01:09:34.000 The court is like, no, actually, you shouldn't do this.

01:09:37.000 Well, how is that going to be followed up?

01:09:39.000 Is that going to be followed up by a giant army of lawsuits ensuring that basically Harvard doesn't have its thumb on the scale for one race or its thumb against another?

01:09:49.000 They'll keep doing it with minor adjustments, and they'll say, oops, sorry.

01:09:52.000 Or they'll say, oops, sorry.

01:09:53.000 They get caught.

01:09:53.000 They'll say, oops, sorry if they get caught.

01:09:55.000 You know, and we've already seen this in California.

01:09:55.000 Right.

01:09:58.000 We went through the whole thing.

01:09:59.000 They just don't follow the law.

01:10:00.000 They just don't follow the law.

01:10:01.000 And so the thing is, basically, when the law is a dead letter, you have to realize that, okay, rule of law is great.

01:10:08.000 We don't have it.

01:10:09.000 So the question of how we get back to having it, like pretending that we have it, that's not a good way to get something you don't have, is to pretend that you have it.

01:10:18.000 And so, you know, when you look at especially like all of this lawfare, I mean, I was just reading this amazing Twitter thread where, you know, the Democrats, if they sort of lost the count, I don't want to say lost the election because it's a count.

01:10:31.000 If they lost the count in 2020, they were going to do all of the things times 10 that Trump tried to do a little bit and now everyone is getting prosecuted for.

01:10:44.000 They were going to do all those things with the masses in the streets, lawfare, alternate electors.

01:10:49.000 They were going to do it all.

01:10:51.000 And so when you have a court system that is fundamentally that deeply politicized, again, I love these black robes.

01:10:59.000 I love, you know, you have great picture, you know, Clarence Thomas up there, beautiful robe.

01:11:03.000 Love the guy, amazing American.

01:11:05.000 They're like, America is actually not short of virtue or talent.

01:11:10.000 Or talent.

01:11:11.000 We just don't have it in large numbers.

01:11:14.000 Or in the right places.

01:11:15.000 Or the right places. 0.96

01:11:16.000 We don't even have enough of it to make an oligarchy.

01:11:19.000 But do we have enough of it to make a monarchy?

01:11:21.000 Are there a thousand people that could do the job that we just talked about?

01:11:25.000 Hell yes.

01:11:27.000 So then the other part of institutional pushback that I'm sure that you'll receive is you're being over-reactionary, neo-reactionary.

01:11:36.000 What is your response to that?

01:11:36.000 Neo-reactionary.

01:11:38.000 You know, well, you know, if you take reactionary as a political slur, which I sort of used it like gay people use queer, I'm like, I'm going to come out and say I'm a reactionary.

01:11:47.000 And I'm a neoreactionary really because I don't actually have a heritage of like, I'm not a traditional American.

01:11:54.000 I'm basically an American Jewish communist, essentially.

01:11:57.000 And so I don't have any cultural ties at all to the American right.

01:12:03.000 And so I'm just, I'm a traitor to my class, right?

01:12:06.000 I'm just like, I'm like, I'm defecting against these, like, this horrible thing that like rule by people like me has become.

01:12:12.000 You know, it's worse than you think.

01:12:14.000 Like, you know, and so the thing is that basically I would say something, you know, that a great political leader from about 100 years ago once said that, you know, the task of the statesman is to take what is good about the past and learn from it and help to use and help to use build the future with it.

01:12:36.000 We can't go back to the past.

01:12:37.000 We can't return to the past.

01:12:38.000 That's completely impossible.

01:12:40.000 We can't turn back the clock and be Massachusetts in 1689.

01:12:43.000 Those people don't exist.

01:12:45.000 You know, we can be like our best selves.

01:12:48.000 And the thing is, I'm really confident that with a government that isn't trying to destroy the country, like it's an embarrassment, frankly, that we have trouble competing with China. 0.78

01:12:58.000 The West has never had trouble competing with the East before, except when the West is really deeply sick. 0.72

01:13:05.000 You know, this country with a government that works is going to blow China out of the water.

01:13:10.000 What gives you hope?

01:13:12.000 The number of amazing Americans that still exist in this country.

01:13:15.000 You know, when you basically, they just need the right structure.

01:13:19.000 And what gives me hope also is that basically, you know, Americans have been getting much less violent and virtuous over time.

01:13:27.000 And so, you know, political systems that rely on them to be like virtuous and violent at the same time, that's a concept that people can't even really parse today.

01:13:36.000 But Americans have also been getting more sophisticated, more ironic.

01:13:41.000 You know, every movie you see, every like Super Bowl commercial is a joke, whatever.

01:13:46.000 And so they're very, very good at breaking out of mental frames.

01:13:51.000 They're very, very good at like breaking their assumptions, at breaking out of Plato's cave, at saying, wow, what if this system was all a joke?

01:13:59.000 What if these ideals don't mean anything?

01:14:01.000 What if all these institutions I was taught to respect and love are just like basically really bad people wearing a skin suit? 0.99

01:14:08.000 That's more accessible to Americans than it ever has been.

01:14:12.000 And that's what we need.

01:14:13.000 Are you seeing that in other countries?

01:14:13.000 Is that uniquely?

01:14:15.000 Yeah, it's modern.

01:14:16.000 It's moderny.

01:14:17.000 Are they saying, you know, our tradition of altering human biology needs to start?

01:14:22.000 Well, you know, Germany, Germany's traditions got pretty thoroughly rewritten in 1945.

01:14:28.000 They're like a caricature of Berkeley.

01:14:30.000 They worship chemists.

01:14:31.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:14:33.000 There's national culture still there.

01:14:35.000 But the no, I think that, you know, this is definitely, it's an effect of technology.

01:14:41.000 It's an effect of affluence.

01:14:43.000 It's an effect of many, many things.

01:14:45.000 But like the tool that Americans need to basically sort of, you know, see the world as it actually is is irony.

01:14:55.000 It is.

01:14:56.000 Do you think irony is our superpower?

01:14:57.000 Irony is our superpower.

01:14:59.000 Finding the things that don't fit.

01:15:00.000 Irony is in finding the things that don't fit and being okay with it.

01:15:03.000 And being okay with that.

01:15:04.000 And there's, I mean, how ironic is Donald Trump?

01:15:07.000 He's tremendously, his powers of irony are immense.

01:15:10.000 And that's the thing that he has that Ron DeSanctimonious doesn't have, you know, and like he has, you know, and that feeling of like he's simultaneously incredibly ironic and incredibly sincere.

01:15:23.000 And that's the kind of flavor that it takes to sort of get P to get people to realize that they can do what needs to be done.

01:15:31.000 Final thought.

01:15:32.000 What books would you recommend for the audience?

01:15:34.000 One or two where they could just, as jumping off points?

01:15:37.000 Good question.

01:15:38.000 I really like the Chris Caldwell Age of Entitlement book.

01:15:40.000 That's sort of fairly solid.

01:15:42.000 It's a favorite.

01:15:42.000 For deeper political theory, but still very, very readable.

01:15:46.000 I love, there's a book by James Burnham called The Machiavelli.

01:15:51.000 Not Suicide of the West, not the Managerial Revolution.

01:15:54.000 Those are both fine books, but his masterpiece is called The Machiavellians, and it was written in 1940.

01:16:00.000 And it's amazing because what the Machiavellians is all about is basically casting aside these illusions and sort of doing what Confucius said, which is to call everything by its true name.

01:16:13.000 And if you can call everything by its true name, you can realize that we don't have an executive branch.

01:16:18.000 We have a legislative branch.

01:16:20.000 And from there, the problem actually starts to look really straightforward and obvious.

01:16:24.000 So any final thoughts, the way people can follow your work, your writings?

01:16:29.000 Subscribe to my substack at graymirror.substack.com.

01:16:32.000 That's gray with an A, the American way. 0.78

01:16:34.000 You certainly have a talent for pushing the Overton window.

01:16:38.000 Thank you, Charlie.

01:16:39.000 And you've been doing this for a couple of years?

01:16:41.000 I have.

01:16:42.000 I agree with some of it.

01:16:44.000 I disagree with some of it.

01:16:45.000 What I really love is this idea, first and foremost, of challenging our presumptions, but this idea of an energetic executive, I really love.

01:16:54.000 I'm still going to be the stickler for the U.S. Constitution.

01:16:56.000 Call me an idealist.

01:16:57.000 So I hope you're wrong.

01:16:59.000 We'll see.

01:17:00.000 Curtis, thanks so much.

01:17:00.000 Charlie, thanks so much.

01:17:01.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

01:17:02.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

01:17:05.000 Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

01:17:09.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - January 17, 2024

The REAL Way to Dismantle the Deep State, with Curtis Yarvin

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