00:00:43.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:51.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:03.000Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of the Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
00:01:13.000Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com.
00:02:21.000And we've heard this argument often enough that myself and another colleague of mine at the Claremont Institute decided to just answer this once and for all.
00:02:29.000And so we wrote a fairly long article for Tom's site called America Totalitarianism American Style that lays out the answer to these claims.
00:02:39.000And we took a particular article that had a six-point list of what tyranny amounts to and why America doesn't meet any of those criteria.
00:02:49.000And we answered them one by one and said, in fact, yes, even according to your own list, there's real dangerous signs of encroaching tyranny according to these standards of an oppressive ideology, an overwhelming national police force, suppression of free speech, a monopoly on the use of force, censorship, and other things.
00:03:10.000And then we added a few other considerations that weren't in the list that were sort of alarming as well.
00:03:15.000The idea of the emerging global elite, which is certainly very threatening to American sovereignty, the emergence of an expert class that claims to rule in the name of higher wisdom.
00:03:26.000And then this danger that you talk about all the time of the postmodernism that controls the thinking of our intellectual class and why that's a real danger to American liberty as well.
00:03:36.000And so we laid out with a lot of links and facts and information in a way that a lot of people seem to have found useful.
00:03:42.000And the article's gotten a lot of traffic.
00:03:51.000It's incredibly powerful, this aspect here.
00:03:54.000Thanks to the conquest of nature and to be completely unabashed substitution of suspicion and the terror for law, the universal and final tyrant has at his disposal practically unlimited means for ferreting out and for extinguishing the most modest efforts in the direction of thought.
00:04:10.000The coming of the universal homogenous state will be the end of philosophy on earth.
00:04:16.000That's a quote from the very famous and influential political philosopher Leo Strauss, who saw decades ago already the early warning signs of this, as I said, this global elite, what he called the universal and homogeneous state, which would suffocate not only liberty, but thought.
00:04:34.000And we see more and more signs of this.
00:04:36.000I mean, the growing power of technology in the hands of the ruling class, the suppression of dissent.
00:04:43.000Strauss, you know, this very famous guy, influential guy, saw long ago by studying political philosophy what tyranny would look like.
00:04:52.000And his prediction has borne out in ways that are very alarming, I think.
00:05:02.000If you're looking for a reliable and clear way to have voice and text communication to any number from anywhere in the world, you need a satellite phone.
00:05:10.000And no one does it better than the satellite phone store.
00:06:52.000It would reduce us all to a kind of slavish conformity.
00:06:56.000And although there are certainly the hard elements, as you and I both know, and certainly the regime is willing to use force, the power of mass culture, the power of the media.
00:07:06.000Now, of course, we have social media and the internet.
00:07:10.000And the way it imposes a kind of suffocating conformity and makes us all sort of into zombies or robots.
00:07:20.000That's an aspect of this soft despotism that Tocqueville talked about that people don't, I think, fully appreciate.
00:07:26.000So I'm going to ask you, Glenn, and I know this is something that we've talked about in our classes, but I get asked all the time from people that believe everything you would write here to try and describe the motivations of the new authoritarian regime or the totalitarian regime.
00:07:43.000And because some people will say, well, they want to be philosopher kings themselves and they want to rule because they look at themselves as experts and they think that they could be part of this managerial revolution, the Cass-Sunstein types.
00:07:56.000Other people say, no, they just want to burn everything to the ground.
00:08:03.000Because it is tough at times to pin motives on this ever totalitarian chapter that America is entering.
00:08:12.000I think the part of the difficulty is there's more than one faction, right?
00:08:16.000So the ruling class is made up of a couple of different interest groups.
00:08:19.000And so in a way, all these answers are true, right?
00:08:22.000There certainly is a faction that seeks only its own power, that's simply ruthless, that doesn't really believe in anything, that just wants to dominate and exercise a kind of superior position in society without regard to any kind of other agenda.
00:08:39.000But there's also a much more, in a way, thoughtful, if that's the right word, element that really wants to transform human nature.
00:08:49.000It certainly does have a kind of utopian, otherworldly project.
00:08:53.000And it sees the power of science, in the power of science, the ability to transform human nature, to make us completely malleable.
00:09:01.000And this is behind things like, you know, the gender mutilation of children, transhumanism, using science in a way to remake us in this image that they have of what human beings should be.
00:09:14.000And so there's different elements at play here, which I think makes it difficult to pinpoint one element or one explanation.
00:09:22.000Yeah, and what science should be and once was an inquiry into the natural world to better understand, to observe, and to wonder and to measure.
00:09:38.000Hi, I'm Adriana, a politics major at Hillsdale College.
00:09:42.000Here's Hillsdale President Dr. Larry Arne with a Constitution Minute.
00:09:45.000America's founders recognized an obvious fact of life.
00:09:48.000Human beings differ in terms of physical attributes and talents.
00:09:52.000Because of this, some people will be better at some things than they are at others.
00:09:55.000But they also recognize that the tall and the short among us, the swift and the slow among us, are still human beings if we are recognizable as human beings.
00:10:03.000And therefore, we are equal in terms of the rights that pertain to human beings.
00:10:08.000Rights attached to human nature, rights that come from God.
00:10:11.000The Declaration of Independence names three of the big ones.
00:10:14.000Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
00:10:17.000Exercising these rights is necessary if we are to be truly free.
00:10:20.000In our own time, many influential people believe that only government can decide what our rights should be.
00:11:24.000They got carried away with this and they thought that all these new scientific discoveries that were happening in the early modern era really could give us eternal life, that we could establish a mechanistic basis for creating the peaceful, rational society by treating human beings as if we're gears and levers.
00:11:42.000And so this conceit of modern science of transforming human nature and creating the perfectly rational society goes back a long time, even before even before the worst of the Germans came along.
00:11:55.000Yeah, and it is rooted in a prideful approach to life that you can somehow change what I believe is created or is at least in nature.
00:12:08.000So Glenn, part of the piece that I also want to focus on here, and you mentioned this, is postmodernism and the truth as a construct.
00:12:15.000I'm going to read this, quote, the rejection of our Western cultural inheritance includes, perhaps most strangely to the average person, a rejection of the very idea of objective truth.
00:12:24.000In the words of one recent academic paper, quote, only if Western science is toppled from its pedestal and understood in a cultural way can it engage other sciences at eye level.
00:12:32.000Well, this strange attack on objective truth is not new.
00:12:35.000It was articulated and perhaps most incisively several decades ago by you wrote a book regarding him, and we're going to study him soon in our class by the French postmodern thinker Michelle Foucault, who explained that truth is literally a creation of what he called the power knowledge narrative or construct.
00:12:51.000Glenn, this is a hard thing for some, dare I say, you know, boomers in our audience.
00:12:56.000They say, are there really people out there that believe there's no such thing as absolute truth or any truth?
00:13:02.000So this is, again, why part of why it's hard to understand the woke ruling class agenda is, again, it's made up of different elements.
00:13:08.000There's an element that still believes in the transformative power of science, that still wants to use technology to remake humans according to their own desires and passions and crazy expectations.
00:13:21.000But against that, there's this element of postmodernism, right, which rejects all truth, even scientific truth, and said everything is merely a construct.
00:13:30.000Everything is merely a reflection of power.
00:13:32.000And postmodernist thinkers like Foucault, who you mentioned, following one of these bad Germans, Nietzsche, said that even science is a value.
00:13:43.000Even science is subordinate to the human will to make truth into whatever we want.
00:13:48.000And so you see, I mean, it starts out in the academy and then it trickles out to the rest of the world, the idea that we should have feminist chemistry or we should have, you know, we should reject the hegemony of mathematics as if we can build bridges on something other than regular Western mathematical engineering principles.
00:14:09.000And, you know, it started out as something that was sort of mocked in the academy, but it spread through DEI indoctrination in the corporate world, in the military, in the workplace.
00:14:20.000It's this ideology of postmodernism, which sees all truth as relative, is spreading farther and farther.
00:14:29.000The world is in flames and biotinomics is a complete and total disaster, but it can't and won't ruin my day.
00:15:16.000So Glenn, what can be done to fight such a totalitarian regime that seems less and less concerned with even being called tyrant, dictator, or totalitarian?
00:15:27.000So there's all the usual things, right?
00:15:28.000Get out, get involved, be sure to be active in politics, get involved at the local level to the degree that you can.
00:15:34.000I mean, Washington is pretty far gone.
00:15:38.000We're going to have to depend on red states and red counties and the places where there are still patriotic Americans who believe in and want to defend their liberties.
00:15:46.000And so they have to be active at the state and local level.
00:15:50.000What we can do with the national level is a little harder.
00:15:54.000We may get back a certain president who's willing to fight the bureaucracy and the deep state.
00:16:12.000The more you understand about this issue, the more effective you can act, the more effective you can be involved.
00:16:18.000You know, the Claremont Institute has a lot of resources for people who want to understand both what the original principles of America were, how they went off the rails, some suggestions for how to understand the situation we're in.
00:16:29.000And to the degree that people can educate themselves, they can engage in effective action at the national and the local level.
00:16:35.000So writing this piece and describing the different aspects of how America has become totalitarian and is setting in, I find this to be very persuasive.
00:16:47.000Have you received a response from otherwise people that would say, you know, I otherwise didn't think.
00:16:52.000I mean, it just seems so obvious to those of us that are living through this.
00:16:58.000So what's interesting is Tom Klingenstein, who's a friend of ours and, you know, chairman of the board of the Claremont Institute and runs this site, he was the one who encouraged me to write this.
00:17:08.000And I didn't really think it was necessary because you and I are hyper-aware, right?
00:17:12.000Some of the listeners are hyper-aware, but not everyone is.
00:17:16.000And Tom said, look, what we need is something that lays this out, gives people the facts, gives them links, gives them the information, and makes the argument in a clear, calm, coherent way.
00:17:34.000There's a lot of sense out there in middle America that something is wrong, but people can't quite put their finger on it.
00:17:41.000And so just laying out the facts and the steps and the information in a clear way, even though that's obvious to you and me, has turned out, as I found, to be very helpful to a lot of people.
00:17:54.000And sometimes it's important to put together the different data points and to say, oh, I don't understand how this would connect with these other aspects that are unfolding.
00:18:05.000This kind of goes to the final question, Glenn.
00:18:07.000We are in the midst of a cold civil war.
00:18:09.000Very few people are willing to acknowledge it.
00:18:12.000I actually think one of the ways we win the cold civil war is we need to keep on saying that we are in a cold civil war.
00:18:19.000And Tom, who runs the site and is a benefactor of mine, likes to say that all the time.
00:18:24.000The first step to winning a war is to know that you're in one.
00:18:27.000That's in a way the theme of the cold site and the guiding principle that underlies a lot of the material that's on there, which is very useful.
00:18:34.000Yeah, we have to understand the seriousness of the situation before we can act.
00:18:39.000And so I think you're exactly right about that.