The Charlie Kirk Show - July 02, 2022


The Superiority of July 4th with Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College


Episode Stats


Length

40 minutes

Words per minute

159.97556

Word count

6,543

Sentence count

504

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Larry Arn, President of Hillsdale College, talks about July 4th and its historical significance. Dr. Arn also talks about the importance of charter schools and how they impact public education. He also discusses why he thinks charter schools should be legalized.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Charlie Kirk Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:01.000 Happy Saturday.
00:00:02.000 Conversation with the great Larry Arn, president of Hillsdale College, about July 4th and its historical significance.
00:00:09.000 Check out all things Hillsdale, charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:00:12.000 That's charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:00:14.000 Charlie4Hillsdale.com.
00:00:16.000 Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:19.000 Get involved with TurningPointUSA today at tpusa.com.
00:00:22.000 Sort of high school or college chapter today.
00:00:24.000 Support the Charlie Kirk Show at CharlieKirk.com slash support.
00:00:27.000 We also have Pedro Gonzalez joining us about neoliberalism.
00:00:31.000 I hope to see all of you at our student action summit, tpusa.com slash SAS.
00:00:38.000 That is tpusa.com slash SAS.
00:00:41.000 We have the biggest speakers in the entire movement that will be there.
00:00:45.000 It's incredible.
00:00:46.000 You got to check it out.
00:00:47.000 And so we have Kayleigh McInani, Ted Cruz, Laura Ingram, Josh Hawley, Greg Gutfeld, Donald Trump Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle, Kat Temp, Pete Hegseth, Byron Donalds, Ben Carson, Rick Scott, Lauren Boebert, Governor Kevin Stitt, Kat Kamack, Matt Gates, Jack Pesobic, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, Sean Foyt, and more.
00:01:05.000 And then we also have Turning Point Action hosting Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.
00:01:10.000 Go to tpusa.com/slash SAS.
00:01:13.000 If you've never been there before, it's an immersion experience unlike anything other, unlike anything else you'll ever go to.
00:01:20.000 tpusa.com slash sas that is tpusa.com slash sas.
00:01:26.000 If you're young, come.
00:01:27.000 If you're old, you got to go. 1.00
00:01:29.000 tpusa.com slash sas.
00:01:32.000 Buy your ticket today.
00:01:33.000 Get engaged.
00:01:34.000 Get involved.
00:01:35.000 tpusa.com slash sas.
00:01:40.000 It's going to be amazing.
00:01:41.000 Student action summit.
00:01:42.000 Do not miss it.
00:01:42.000 Tampa, Florida, 22nd, 23rd, 24th of July, tpusa.com/slash SAS.
00:01:51.000 And again, email me your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:01:53.000 Buckle up, everybody.
00:01:54.000 Here we go.
00:01:55.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:01:57.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
00:01:59.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:02:03.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:02:06.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:02:07.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:02:08.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:02:16.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:25.000 That's why we are here.
00:02:28.000 The president of the best college in America, Hillsdale College, Dr. Larry Arn.
00:02:32.000 Dr. Arn, welcome back to the program.
00:02:34.000 Good to be with you, Charlie.
00:02:35.000 And aren't you a phenomenon?
00:02:37.000 Well, thank you.
00:02:38.000 I appreciate that.
00:02:39.000 And I have now completed half of the Hillsdale online courses.
00:02:43.000 And the problem is you keep on adding to them.
00:02:46.000 So I have to keep on taking more to keep on saying that I'm at half.
00:02:51.000 So before we get started, how are things at Hillsdale College?
00:02:54.000 It seems as if it's just boomtown USA.
00:02:57.000 Can't open enough charter schools, can't let enough kids.
00:03:00.000 How are things at Hillsdale?
00:03:02.000 Yeah, they're thriving.
00:03:04.000 There's not a house to buy in Hillsdale, Michigan.
00:03:07.000 It's a land rush here now.
00:03:09.000 And people are trying to get away from these cities and these bad schools.
00:03:12.000 And a lot of people want to be around the college.
00:03:15.000 And we can't beat them off with the stick.
00:03:18.000 Applications have become so important that I did an event with Governor Lee of Tennessee.
00:03:26.000 And for the first time, I've been the victim of a hidden camera.
00:03:32.000 So they tried the James O'Keefe tactic, I guess you could say.
00:03:36.000 They did, yeah.
00:03:36.000 Yeah, and it just happened yesterday, so I don't really know.
00:03:41.000 I don't care.
00:03:42.000 But Kevin Williamson of the National Review said, you know, everything they quote him saying, he says that all the time in public.
00:03:54.000 And this is a mark of a, let's say, a wise man.
00:03:58.000 He's the same in private as he is in public.
00:04:00.000 And so not much to hide.
00:04:03.000 And I know you're opening a bunch of charter schools in Tennessee.
00:04:05.000 That's probably why they're so nervous.
00:04:06.000 The teachers.
00:04:07.000 Yeah, it attacks.
00:04:10.000 You know, if you just think, if you study politics, as you are doing now, avidly, you'll find out that politics can be understood.
00:04:18.000 It's a coherent thing.
00:04:20.000 It proceeds according to principles in every country, by the way, all through history.
00:04:26.000 And it has forms.
00:04:28.000 that are related to those principles.
00:04:30.000 And so we have the old principles and they give rise to the Constitution of the United States.
00:04:35.000 And I'll show today that that's even outlined in the Declaration of Independence.
00:04:41.000 But we have new principles and new forms.
00:04:44.000 And the new form is the bureaucratic form.
00:04:46.000 And that means experts make the rules in a central place.
00:04:52.000 And that activity concerns, consumes a large part of the gross domestic product of the country.
00:05:00.000 And education is the heart of it.
00:05:05.000 You know, more than half of every state's budget is in the public schools.
00:05:10.000 And that means, you know, and then the federal part is not very big as federal spending goes, but it's controlling it.
00:05:19.000 And so it's, you know, if you're a poor governor of a state where the people want the schools to get better, you've got to go through them.
00:05:28.000 And then they generate the teachers' union and other public employee unions are much the largest contributors to left-wing causes.
00:05:41.000 And so there you go.
00:05:43.000 You've got now a interest, a principle, that is to say, experts can rule better than ordinary people, even their own lives.
00:05:55.000 And you've got an institution.
00:05:57.000 You've got expertise.
00:06:00.000 Studies show.
00:06:01.000 Every time you read that, whatever follows is bound to be false.
00:06:07.000 And that's something that's interesting.
00:06:09.000 And then one of the online courses that I took for Hillsdale, actually several of them, talk about the progressive era and Woodrow Wilson, who tried to create almost this new founding and was almost criticizing the founding fathers.
00:06:22.000 Not almost, but was criticizing the founding fathers for not being as enlightened as Professor Wilson.
00:06:29.000 Let's talk about what the Founding Fathers argued.
00:06:31.000 And I want to just plug your book, The Founder's Key.
00:06:33.000 I was actually just rereading it the other night in anticipation of this.
00:06:37.000 And what I love about the book and the speeches you give about the book, the lectures, is that you're refuting a common talking point that has really is prevailing over academia, which is there were kind of two founding events.
00:06:50.000 And one was kind of more liberal in nature and one was more conservative.
00:06:54.000 And they're just separate.
00:06:56.000 And the Declaration, you know, it was just founding fathers saying that they don't want to be part of Britain anymore, but the Constitution fixed a lot of that.
00:07:03.000 And they were kind of these separate deals.
00:07:05.000 You make the argument that they're actually tied together, that they make claims about the universality of humanity.
00:07:12.000 Can you talk about that?
00:07:13.000 I find it to be so interesting.
00:07:15.000 Yeah, you know, there's a liberal scholarship 80 years old now.
00:07:22.000 And it says that the Constitution is a reaction against the radicalism of the Declaration of Independence.
00:07:29.000 And the Constitution is a different kind of thing from the Declaration.
00:07:35.000 It is.
00:07:36.000 It has to be, too, because in our lives, in your life and my life, we have purposes we want to accomplish.
00:07:45.000 That's one thing.
00:07:46.000 And we have ways of going about it.
00:07:48.000 And we try to adapt the ways to the purposes.
00:07:52.000 But the ways are different from the purposes.
00:07:54.000 You know, you're a burgeoning young conservative scholar and personality and influencer, but your show is cameras and microphones.
00:08:08.000 Anyway, so for there to be a founding and it to be coherent, all of that has to be covered.
00:08:14.000 And it actually gets covered in both documents, in the Declaration and the Constitution, although the weight is different between the two.
00:08:24.000 In the Declaration of Independence, there are three parts.
00:08:29.000 The first part is very beautiful and also emphatically universal.
00:08:34.000 And the middle part is 30 paragraphs, 29 paragraphs of details.
00:08:40.000 But if you just read those details backwards, if you just say all the stuff the king has done that justify the revolution, then you would need a constitution that forbids those things.
00:08:53.000 And the Constitution does forbid those things.
00:08:56.000 They group into the main features of the Constitution, which are representation, separation of powers, and limited government.
00:09:07.000 And those three things give the Constitution its structure.
00:09:12.000 And it's a very coherent document.
00:09:14.000 But the point is, absent such a Constitution, you would be justified in rebelling.
00:09:21.000 And that's what the Declaration says.
00:09:24.000 And, you know, the first part, I mean, like the best celebration you could make for the Declaration of Independence is to study it for an hour because it's an extremely interesting document.
00:09:38.000 It begins purely universally when in the course of human events, right, that means any time, it becomes necessary for one people, that means any people, to dissolve the political bands that have connected them with other and to assume among the powers of the earth a separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them.
00:10:02.000 Those laws are, if they exist at all, they are simply eternal and universal.
00:10:08.000 And it's the name of those that the document begins.
00:10:12.000 And then the next paragraph is about some self-evident truths that establish our right, any people's right, remember, not just ours, any people's right to choose the government, consent to it, and get rid of it if it goes bad.
00:10:31.000 And that's, you know, that's a, that's nothing to do in particular with the American people, any people, they say.
00:10:40.000 And then this middle part where they talk about the bad stuff the king has done, which condemnation supply the main structure of the later Constitution.
00:10:50.000 And then at the end, it's just gorgeous.
00:10:52.000 I mean, it's, and so you have to picture the situation.
00:10:58.000 Understanding history means being able to do that.
00:11:01.000 And this is 2 million people along the eastern seaboard.
00:11:06.000 They didn't have an army to speak of, right?
00:11:08.000 They were all, they found out they were all the army in a way, but it wasn't organized.
00:11:13.000 There was nobody in America who had ever moved a large body of troops from one place to another.
00:11:21.000 And that's one of the reasons why Washington lost lots of battles, especially early in the war.
00:11:26.000 They were just incompetent.
00:11:28.000 They never tried it before.
00:11:30.000 And so it's in that situation.
00:11:33.000 And they're writing to the king of England an act of explicit treason.
00:11:39.000 And they take that very seriously.
00:11:43.000 And it becomes, it's very universal right at the beginning.
00:11:47.000 But at the end, it's a mixture of the universal and the particular.
00:11:53.000 It mentions that they're appealing to the supreme judge of the world.
00:11:59.000 Supreme and judge are capitalized.
00:12:01.000 That means God, right?
00:12:03.000 It's one of four places where God appears in the Declaration of Independence.
00:12:06.000 That's him as the judge.
00:12:08.000 He also appears as the author of the laws of nature and nature's God.
00:12:12.000 He appears as divine providence, that's the executive branch.
00:12:17.000 And he appears as the creator, which is like a founder.
00:12:22.000 And then they make the particular declaration that is the act of treason.
00:12:30.000 We are and of right ought to be free and independent states.
00:12:36.000 And then they make a personal commitment, and that's in the last sentence.
00:12:40.000 And I always think that's just riveting.
00:12:42.000 You know, you can go to the room where they sat when they voted this, you know, and there were warrants out for their arrest already.
00:12:52.000 And the warrants were not to be served by a policeman.
00:12:56.000 They didn't have them.
00:12:58.000 There was a general with an army who was looking for them.
00:13:02.000 And if he had found any of these ones, and he did find many people, they were going to take them into custody in a military force and they were going to send them back to England, a trip of two months, and they were going to be tried by strangers for their lives, right?
00:13:20.000 And they know that when they're in the room and they write, and for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, the last mentioned of God, and the last universal statement, we mutually pledge to each other, to each other.
00:13:43.000 That means Thomas Jefferson is pledging to John Adams and vice versa.
00:13:51.000 And that means everybody who was there who signed that document placed their reputation in the hands of everybody else there.
00:14:01.000 Mutually pledged to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, which is all that a person's got to give.
00:14:08.000 And so step outside, you know, the debate about this thing today, because, you know, it's condemned, right?
00:14:20.000 Some of them were slaveholders.
00:14:21.000 That's a fact.
00:14:23.000 Every one of them who was a slaveholder condemned the practice of slavery.
00:14:28.000 And that means they were not hypocrites.
00:14:31.000 They were sinners, we all are, but they were not hypocrites.
00:14:35.000 And they inherited this institution and they got rid of it, 60% of the union, within 20 years.
00:14:43.000 And then it got stubborn, but that's a longer story.
00:14:46.000 A lot of people died to put an end to it.
00:14:49.000 So, yeah, this is a very beautiful document and it's worth studying.
00:14:56.000 And if you study it and see its greatness, then you can follow John Adams' advice about how to celebrate it.
00:15:06.000 On the 3rd of July, it took three days to get the Declaration of Independence ratified.
00:15:13.000 The second, third, and fourth.
00:15:15.000 You know, they had to agree on the first, and then they had to type it up and get it set in type.
00:15:23.000 And then they had to meet again and vote on it.
00:15:26.000 And then they had to meet a second time.
00:15:28.000 And they did that on the fourth.
00:15:30.000 And that's why we celebrate the fourth.
00:15:32.000 But Adams is anticipating.
00:15:36.000 On the 3rd of July, he wrote to his wonderful wife, you know, you and I, Charlie, both married above ourselves.
00:15:44.000 That's right.
00:15:45.000 So did John Adams.
00:15:46.000 He's writing to Abigail, he says.
00:15:50.000 I am apt to believe that it will be that the 2nd of July, turned out the 4th, will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.
00:16:02.000 It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.
00:16:09.000 It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, with games, with sports, with guns.
00:16:19.000 I think it says cannons too.
00:16:21.000 Yeah. 0.98
00:16:21.000 Yeah, with balls. 0.98
00:16:26.000 Can't read this, bonfires and illuminations from one end of the continent to the other from this time forward, forevermore. 0.98
00:16:35.000 Now, that's another testimony that they knew they were doing something wonderfully significant.
00:16:41.000 And you have to remember, they didn't have any idea how it was going to work out.
00:16:47.000 And, you know, the war was very hard and mostly it went badly.
00:16:52.000 And, you know, until, what, nine years later, they signed a peace.
00:16:58.000 But they, they, and, you know, they didn't know.
00:17:02.000 They're very ambitious.
00:17:04.000 You know, George Washington names his army the Continental Army.
00:17:09.000 But at that time, and until about 1870, when Lewis and Clark came back, at that in 1776, nobody had ever been across the continent back.
00:17:20.000 They were just guessing how big it was or what was even out there.
00:17:24.000 You know, and they and they thought, this is going to be a great republic of liberty, and it's going to be the biggest.
00:17:33.000 And they just wanted that.
00:17:35.000 And they thought, for good reason, that if it was big and strong, it could defend the liberties of the people who live in it.
00:17:42.000 So yeah, it's a and see, another thing is this can never happen again.
00:17:49.000 I mean, other people, of course, can adopt their Declaration of Independence.
00:17:54.000 Some have.
00:17:55.000 But there isn't any new world left.
00:18:01.000 And what happened in the founding of America is just one of the most significant things in history.
00:18:06.000 And I'm talking about by objective standards, right?
00:18:10.000 Nothing like this, right?
00:18:12.000 There was this migration from Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.
00:18:20.000 And the migration is a bunch of people who are mostly from Europe.
00:18:25.000 They're mostly Christians.
00:18:28.000 They bring with them Western civilization.
00:18:32.000 But they didn't bring anything else.
00:18:34.000 They didn't bring titles of nobility.
00:18:37.000 They didn't bring structures.
00:18:39.000 They had to figure all that out once they got here.
00:18:42.000 And the principles by which they did it were developed as they went.
00:18:47.000 The Declaration of Cyprus comes 150 years after the first English settlement.
00:18:52.000 And that means in that 150 years, they figured out a lot of things.
00:18:59.000 What they did, you know, when they like Jamestown and Plymouth Rock were early ones, and they were mostly Calvinist.
00:19:08.000 And they came here and they set up institutions of religious conformity.
00:19:13.000 They thought it's a bit enforced.
00:19:16.000 They thought it's a big old place.
00:19:18.000 And therefore, we can each have our community and we can all be in the same church.
00:19:23.000 And we can make everybody go.
00:19:25.000 But they found out after a while, that had never really been tried before.
00:19:29.000 They found out after a while, it doesn't matter how big it was, it wasn't big enough to make that work.
00:19:35.000 Because, as you know, Christians are like what Churchill said about the Jews. 0.84
00:19:41.000 Wherever there are three Jews, there are two prime ministers and one leader of the opposition.
00:19:49.000 So that's well said.
00:19:51.000 You know, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, who signed this document, very great man.
00:19:57.000 He is one of the innovators to say, look, come and worship as you wish, right?
00:20:03.000 And I think that's the reason why Christianity has thrived even up to the current day compared to the continent to Europe, that is.
00:20:12.000 And so that, you know, there's a bunch of marvels happening here.
00:20:18.000 And the point is, not only are they unprecedented, it's also true in this way they can never happen again.
00:20:25.000 And that's what gave rise to the saying that Jefferson said and Lincoln repeated: America is the last best hope of mankind on earth.
00:20:38.000 You know, I hope for a great revolution in China because there'll never be peace in the world while there are big tyrannies.
00:20:49.000 And we can't fix that by our own might and effort.
00:20:52.000 They have to fix it.
00:20:53.000 But I pray they do.
00:20:55.000 But they won't be like us, even if they do, because they're not starting from that.
00:21:01.000 They're very old.
00:21:02.000 They have all these structures.
00:21:05.000 And so there, you know, the 4th of July is the greatest American holiday.
00:21:12.000 And good reason for that.
00:21:14.000 You know, you said something once that really moved me where you said, the fact we have a birthday is a big deal.
00:21:20.000 What is China's birthday?
00:21:21.000 You could approximate somewhere within it, maybe a thousand years, Great Britain's, maybe within a couple hundred years.
00:21:27.000 But the fact we have a day where we didn't stumble into existence, but we were summoned into existence, that's a big deal.
00:21:34.000 So I want to ask you, and be respectful of your time, Dr. Arne.
00:21:38.000 What do you believe as a scholar of the Declaration of the Constitution are the lessons we now need to implement today?
00:21:44.000 We're in crisis.
00:21:45.000 Our country is more fragile than ever.
00:21:47.000 The latest poll shows that only 39% of Americans are proud of their country in its current form.
00:21:52.000 I'm definitely proud to be an American, but it's hard for me to be over the top excited about where we are currently.
00:21:58.000 What can we learn from the Declaration and apply it to our troubles and our difficulties today?
00:22:06.000 I focus more and more in these times on this.
00:22:10.000 There are two statements: one from Tocqueville and one from James Madison.
00:22:18.000 Tocqueville says that America is unique.
00:22:20.000 He comes in 1832.
00:22:21.000 He was a French aristocrat.
00:22:24.000 France was the first centralized nation state.
00:22:27.000 And he says there's more government in America than in France.
00:22:31.000 It's just different because it's mostly local and voluntary.
00:22:36.000 And that means, you know, in the management of Hillsdale College, I don't believe in rules.
00:22:43.000 I believe in goals.
00:22:45.000 And, you know, because goals, we all adopt them and then everybody can figure out how to serve them.
00:22:51.000 And the rules need to be very few and they need to be boilable down to be good.
00:22:59.000 And just think what bureaucratic government is like.
00:23:01.000 Think of the rules that govern the schools, for example.
00:23:04.000 Nobody can read them.
00:23:06.000 Nobody does.
00:23:07.000 But they can be used.
00:23:09.000 Whenever there's a dispute, the person who gets to interpret the rules.
00:23:12.000 Exactly right.
00:23:12.000 More laws, the less justice, as Cicero would say.
00:23:14.000 Madison said something similar, too.
00:23:17.000 The second thing is men are not angels, and angels do not govern men.
00:23:24.000 And that doesn't matter.
00:23:26.000 It doesn't matter then if Anthony Fauci, to name an example, has been there for 400 years and wrote the textbook on epidemiology, which he did.
00:23:35.000 Give him power.
00:23:37.000 He's just like the rest of us.
00:23:39.000 And therefore, there's no solution to the human problem from empowering experts.
00:23:46.000 Those two things, and those are the clearest examples of the prudence of the American Revolution.
00:23:54.000 And if we followed those two, we'd be on the road back.
00:23:59.000 That is very well said.
00:24:01.000 And they talked about things that are always true.
00:24:03.000 And I just want to make a final plug.
00:24:05.000 Everyone can go to charlie4hillsdale.com to go on the journey of discovery of what that means.
00:24:11.000 Take the online courses.
00:24:12.000 Take Dr. Arn's Aristotle course, the Constitution 101 course, the intro to the Constitution.
00:24:18.000 Some of the courses are pretty tough and it takes work.
00:24:20.000 You're not just going to breeze through them.
00:24:21.000 You got to take notes.
00:24:22.000 You got to take the quizzes, but it's worth it.
00:24:25.000 Any closing thoughts, Dr. Arne?
00:24:27.000 Yeah, you're a really great student.
00:24:29.000 He texts me every time he gets a certificate for completing.
00:24:32.000 Because I'm proud of it.
00:24:33.000 And I mean that because you feel like you're making progress in your intellectual and spiritual development.
00:24:39.000 So it's something that I'm proud of.
00:24:41.000 Proud of you, Charlie.
00:24:42.000 I've been watching you grow up for a while now.
00:24:45.000 Well, thank you.
00:24:46.000 And you continue to play a big role in that.
00:24:48.000 So, Dr. Arne, have a wonderful Independence Day and thanks for your comments.
00:24:51.000 Really appreciate it.
00:24:52.000 Thank you.
00:24:52.000 Very much.
00:24:52.000 Thank you.
00:24:56.000 Joining us right now is Pedro Gonzalez from Chronicles Magazine.
00:24:59.000 We have him on Fridays to say controversial things.
00:25:01.000 So people over the weekend have something to listen to.
00:25:03.000 Pedro, welcome back to the program.
00:25:04.000 Charlie, thanks for having me back.
00:25:06.000 They shouldn't be controversial, actually, when you think about it.
00:25:08.000 No.
00:25:09.000 No, not at all.
00:25:10.000 So I'm going to play a piece of tape here.
00:25:11.000 It's cut 148, and I want to get your response to it about the liberal world order, cut 148.
00:25:19.000 What do you say to those families who say, listen, we can't afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years.
00:25:19.000 Sustainable.
00:25:26.000 This is just not sustainable.
00:25:29.000 What we heard from the president today was a clear articulation of the stakes.
00:25:33.000 This is about the future of the liberal world order, and we have to stand firm.
00:25:37.000 Your thoughts, Pedro?
00:25:38.000 What is the liberal world order?
00:25:40.000 If I have to choose between the liberal world order and bread and the ability to feed my family, then I'm sorry that I'm going to have to incinerate a liberal world order if that's what's standing between me and being able to provide for and take care of my family.
00:25:56.000 But I think the funniest thing about that is it's a kind of admission that all of this is actually on purpose.
00:26:02.000 It's not a set of circumstances that the Biden administration, that the people in charge of this country just couldn't have foreseen or couldn't have predicted.
00:26:09.000 It's a kind of implicit admission that actually this is all controlled and you have to suffer through it because that's what it takes to preserve this abstraction, this liberal world order, whatever that means.
00:26:22.000 And I mean, in my mind, what comes to mind is the United States, the federal government of the United States subsidizing the rape of Afghan boys through our so-called allies over there, basically forcing American taxpayers to subsidize that, right? 0.87
00:26:36.000 I mean, name your atrocity that the federal government does without your knowledge, without your consent, with your money, and sometimes with your blood.
00:26:46.000 And that, in my mind, is the liberal world order.
00:26:50.000 And so it seems to go unchecked.
00:26:53.000 Let's play that Biden clip as well, but it's bipartisan as well, isn't it, though, Pedro?
00:26:57.000 That's what's interesting.
00:26:58.000 And I think we could change it as it's more kind of the neoliberal world order, was what they're talking about, which is open borders, no sovereignty, uniformed language, one currency.
00:27:08.000 It is really kind of this World Economic Forum, World Health Assembly against the idea of a sovereign nation.
00:27:15.000 Now let's play Joe Biden, who happened to be with John Kasich, by the way, on this very topic in 2017.
00:27:23.000 This breaking down of the international and national norms is the glue that holds the liberal world order together and holds together our system.
00:27:37.000 That is what is being attacked now.
00:27:40.000 And that's what's most dangerous.
00:27:42.000 That's him and John Kasich agreeing as John Kasich cuts lettuce.
00:27:46.000 When John Kasich talks, he's always cutting lettuce.
00:27:49.000 So let me ask you a question, Pedro.
00:27:52.000 Actually, let's go back into some history here.
00:27:54.000 Post-World War II, this kind of idea of a neoliberal world was created.
00:27:59.000 What is that?
00:28:00.000 What were the promises of neoliberalism?
00:28:02.000 And what were the catastrophic results?
00:28:05.000 Well, I think an important thing to understand is the unipolar moment, right?
00:28:09.000 So basically, and this is important because NATO is very prominent right now, right?
00:28:15.000 I mean, NATO is the thing, unfortunately, on everyone's mind right now because of this war between Russia and Ukraine that NATO seems to be provoking and benefiting from.
00:28:25.000 And of course, NATO is led by the United States.
00:28:27.000 So basically, NATO was created by Western nations and led from the beginning by the United States to do primarily one thing, which was act as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.
00:28:37.000 Yes.
00:28:38.000 And the Soviet Union, as an ideological nation, a nation that was premised on ideas, viewed every other government, every other non-communist government as an existential threat to itself.
00:28:51.000 Any state that did not share its ideas, its presuppositions, its beliefs, was a threat, right?
00:29:00.000 So it was on a kind of maximal war footing with the entire world constantly trying to replicate itself, to influence the world, to basically spread itself and reproduce itself all over, right?
00:29:14.000 So that, I mean, there's no debate that that is what the Soviet Union was.
00:29:19.000 But the problem was, or I should say the historical irony of this is that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States itself emerged as a kind of ideological nation itself.
00:29:29.000 In other words, the United States kind of became the thing that it was fighting.
00:29:34.000 It became a kind of version, a bizarre version of the Soviet Union that instead of Marxist-Leninism, it's promoting transgenderism and LGBTQ rights. 0.73
00:29:45.000 I don't know what that means and like homosexuality all around the world. 1.00
00:29:50.000 This is the, again, the historical irony of the story of the Cold War is that the United States kind of became what it set out to fight.
00:29:59.000 And sometimes there are admissions of this.
00:30:01.000 Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called, yeah, The End of History.
00:30:05.000 That's right.
00:30:06.000 And he famously broke with neoconservatives because he viewed neoconservatives as basically Leninists in the United States and the other side of the coin of neoliberalism.
00:30:15.000 But Fukuyama famously said that these Leninists had emerged first as tragedy in the Soviet Union as Bolsheviks and now as farce again in the United States as neoconservatives.
00:30:28.000 And so rooted in neoliberalism is a couple promises that I once believed because I was naive and young.
00:30:35.000 And it was also so dominant, Pedro, in the conservative movement in 2012, 13, 14 for kind of new people that were entering into it, which is that all international trade is good no matter what, that any trade barriers will actually make you go into recession and immediate depression, that there really isn't a better thing about your nation.
00:30:53.000 You could believe in American exceptionalism, but you only believe in American exceptionalism because of our ability to espouse neoliberal ideas.
00:31:00.000 That was the only type of American exceptionalism that was okay.
00:31:04.000 For example, there was kind of talking points on the right that says, you know, America is such a great country because we're more tolerant than other countries.
00:31:12.000 And of course, if we read Aristotle, tolerance and apathy are the two dying signs of a society.
00:31:19.000 And so it's also open borders is a big part of neoliberalism.
00:31:22.000 And there's also another one, which is who are we to judge?
00:31:26.000 That's a big part of neoliberalism, right?
00:31:28.000 And it's a lie, obviously, because the people doing the judging are the ones telling you not to judge, but it's kind of a live and let live phenomenon, right?
00:31:35.000 Which is, you do you, and I do me, which of course is nice.
00:31:39.000 It sounds good until the person on the other side wants to tell you how to live a certain way, which is inevitable.
00:31:46.000 Can you talk about the ideological underpinnings of this quote liberal world order that now the Biden regime is saying we must suffer high gas prices, food shortages, and breadlines potentially to execute the finishing touches of that?
00:32:00.000 Help me through that.
00:32:02.000 Yeah, well, I think the key thing here is that because we're talking about ideology, that means it's not really connected to reality.
00:32:09.000 So, I mean, if you look at the United States right now, let's focus on the military.
00:32:14.000 Right now, the military is having a really difficult time finding bodies to fill roles.
00:32:18.000 Recruitment is at some historic lows right now, which is why they're relaxing all of these standards to get people where they need to be in the military, right?
00:32:26.000 At the same time that that's happening, you've got these neoliberal ideologues talking about how the United States needs to prepare for a simultaneous war with both Russia and China.
00:32:38.000 I mean, that is insane.
00:32:40.000 But you can read this article in Foreign Policy Magazine by Matthew Kroenig, who's saying that the United States has to be ready to defeat Russia and China in overlapping timeframes.
00:32:52.000 There is, I don't know anyone who actually has their feet on the ground and looks around with open eyes and sees that they think that that's possible or that we should do that.
00:33:01.000 I mean, Kroenig is saying not only can we, we should.
00:33:06.000 That, again, ideology is extremely dangerous because it has nothing to do with reality.
00:33:11.000 And so, yes, if you're an ideologue, it's perfectly normal to say, well, a few million Americans are going to have to starve or lose their homes or not be able to support their families.
00:33:21.000 That's the price that we have to pay to support this ideology.
00:33:24.000 And I think this is the consistent thing with any ideology, is that it subordinates reality, the facts on the ground to the idea.
00:33:33.000 I mean, again, look at the Soviet Union, this kind of denialism all the way up to the end among the ruling class, right?
00:33:39.000 That everything's fine.
00:33:40.000 At the same time, that in fact, everything is crumbling.
00:33:44.000 And I think, again, the United States is this kind of bizarro version of the Soviet Union with this or under the spell of the liberal world order, the neoliberalism ideology, whatever you want to call it.
00:33:58.000 People give different names.
00:33:59.000 But I think it's the same kind of thing.
00:34:01.000 And you're seeing this kind of come to a screeching halt and the cracks starting to emerge in this.
00:34:07.000 Yeah, and that's such a good point, which is at its core, it is about denial of material reality, whether it be biological reality, geopolitical reality, human reality.
00:34:21.000 And Alexander Solshenitsyn, who actually helped take down the Soviet Union, he warned America about hyper-ideological movements.
00:34:29.000 And so Alexander Solzhenitsyn actually said the Soviet Union became what it did thanks to ideology.
00:34:34.000 That was his quote.
00:34:35.000 But then what was so interesting is Solshenitsyn came and gave the Harvard commencement address, I think in 1980 or 81.
00:34:42.000 We actually read it in our Claremont deal that we did last summer.
00:34:46.000 It was so interesting is that he was admonishing the West.
00:34:49.000 He's like, you guys think you're better than the Soviet Union? 0.68
00:34:52.000 That's right.
00:34:53.000 You have your own kind of messenger RNA equivalent of a virus of ideology that will capture all of you guys.
00:35:01.000 And Harvard in 1978.
00:35:03.000 And Harvard, they're like, whoa, how dare you say that?
00:35:06.000 Who are you to say, you gulag person? 1.00
00:35:09.000 It's like, okay, well, you guys loved him until he called you out.
00:35:12.000 And boy, was he right.
00:35:14.000 No, it was an extremely pessimistic speech.
00:35:18.000 It was an extremely pessimistic speech.
00:35:20.000 I think for Harvard, these young optimistic people, it was shocking for them.
00:35:25.000 But I think we'll come back to an important point about what happens if you believe that your nation is an ideological one and how that connects everything else.
00:35:34.000 What do you do when you recognize or realize you're living in a nation captured by ideology?
00:35:38.000 Is that correct?
00:35:39.000 So basically, if you believe that it's possible to take a nation and reduce it to an abstraction, basically to just a kind of set of ideas, then it follows that that's going to apply to every aspect of life.
00:35:39.000 Yeah.
00:35:52.000 I mean, everything, down to the most obvious one, which is that simply men can snap their fingers and become women. 0.50
00:35:59.000 Everything, in other words, becomes an abstraction or susceptible to abstraction.
00:36:05.000 So there is no such thing as gender.
00:36:08.000 There's no such thing as even when we say things like American culture.
00:36:12.000 Well, there's no such thing because to be an American is simply a kind of subscription to a set of ideas, the liberal world order.
00:36:21.000 It's basically just the reduction of life to a bunch of buzzwords, which on the one hand sounds absurd because it is, but on the other hand, it's also how you get totalitarian societies.
00:36:33.000 Because in an ideological regime, everyone has to subscribe to the ideas.
00:36:39.000 That means it's not enough for you to simply just keep your head down, mind your own business.
00:36:44.000 Yeah, so let me ask you to go ahead.
00:36:46.000 I mean, I totally agree, but can you differentiate for our audience?
00:36:46.000 No, no, no.
00:36:49.000 Because some people would probably say, well, I'm ideological.
00:36:52.000 I believe in liberty and I believe in family.
00:36:54.000 Can you build that out for us of how actually we as conservatives reject the kind of meandering ideas of the clouds and abstractions?
00:37:02.000 We talk about things that have worked, that are rooted in provable truth.
00:37:05.000 Can you build that out quickly for us?
00:37:07.000 Yeah, I mean, there's a difference between saying, like, liberty is nice.
00:37:11.000 I like the idea of liberty.
00:37:13.000 And the difference between that and saying that the United States has a kind of moral obligation to build democracies around the world.
00:37:21.000 That we can simply turn men into women by using different language, pronouns.
00:37:28.000 I mean, I think the funny thing about pronouns is they're actually much more totalitarian than people realize because it's you kind of denying that reality is a thing and kind of acquiescing to this lie.
00:37:41.000 So I think it's not so simple as saying, well, if you believe in the idea of liberty, if you believe in the idea of family, we're not talking about ideology here.
00:37:51.000 We're talking about something very different.
00:37:53.000 And again, the problem with ideology is on the one hand, again, like I said, everyone has to believe in it.
00:38:00.000 But on the other hand, it's always changing.
00:38:03.000 There's always a kind of new addition, a new thing that you have to believe in in order to stay up to date.
00:38:09.000 Otherwise, you end up like J.K. Rowling, who was basically fine with a lot of things that we would identify with neoliberalism or the liberal world order, again, whatever you want to call it.
00:38:20.000 But she broke with her liberal friends on transgenderism and they completely cannibalized her and people like her because she's not keeping up with the latest aspect of this. 0.95
00:38:31.000 So it's very different from saying, again, like, I believe in freedom and liberty and this kind of totalitarian ideology that demands complete fealty to it, complete subordination to it.
00:38:44.000 And I also want to add, though, that ideology is different than philosophy.
00:38:44.000 Yeah.
00:38:49.000 They're just different words, right?
00:38:51.000 So philosophy is actually the love of wisdom.
00:38:54.000 So we should love wisdom.
00:38:55.000 We should love things that are always true.
00:38:57.000 We should design systems around things that could take scholarship and reflection, reading of the classics and of the Bible.
00:39:04.000 Ideology, though, tends to be things that spring in the modern or postmodern sense.
00:39:09.000 They're usually at war with antiquity.
00:39:11.000 They're at war with things that have been written before or that have been articulated before.
00:39:16.000 Talk a little bit about that.
00:39:17.000 Yeah, that's a really good point.
00:39:19.000 Ideology is kind of a modern invention.
00:39:21.000 That's exactly right.
00:39:22.000 And the important aspect of ideology is that it's completely unaccountable to facts and logic, we could say.
00:39:30.000 It's completely pointless to debate with someone like Sam Brinton, who now works in the federal government at the Department of Energy.
00:39:39.000 We have a picture relationship to nuclear waste disposal.
00:39:42.000 Yeah.
00:39:43.000 So Sam Brinton shared a picture of himself in address and heels celebrating his new job in the federal government.
00:39:51.000 There's no arguing with Sam Brinton about why everything he believes in is untrue.
00:39:56.000 You will never be able to penetrate his ideology, his thought with any amount of facts or logic.
00:40:03.000 It is completely pointless.
00:40:05.000 So yes, it's the exact opposite of philosophy, which is philosophy is, I mean, ultimately, we're really just talking about a willingness to kind of subject everything to interrogation.
00:40:15.000 It is the opposite of ideology.
00:40:16.000 It's completely self-contained.
00:40:17.000 That's exactly again.
00:40:18.000 It is totally impervious and external.
00:40:22.000 You can't cross-examine it.
00:40:24.000 You can't question it.
00:40:25.000 You can't reason with it.
00:40:26.000 Where philosophy is rooted in Socratic pursuit of truth or in the love of wisdom, things that never change, things that all people can understand, not just be captured by a certain hallucination or delusion.
00:40:38.000 Thank you so much.
00:40:39.000 Great commentary as always.
00:40:40.000 Thank you.
00:40:41.000 Thank you.
00:40:42.000 Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
00:40:43.000 Email me your thoughts as always.
00:40:44.000 Freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:40:46.000 Thanks so much for listening.
00:40:47.000 God bless.
00:40:50.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.