The Charlie Kirk Show - Totalitarianism, American-Style

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody, it's Anna Charlie Kirk Show.

00:00:01.000 Glenn Elmers joins us for a meaningful and powerful conversation about totalitarianism, American style.

00:00:08.000 Enjoy this conversation as we go in to the death of truth, the secret police that exist in our country, and more.

00:00:15.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

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00:00:26.000 That is tpusa.com.

00:00:28.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:29.000 Here we go.

00:00:30.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

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

00:00:34.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:37.000 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, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:00:51.000 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.

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00:01:28.000 Joining us now is one of my teachers.

00:01:31.000 That's right.

00:01:31.000 He was just teaching a great course last night, and I enjoyed it.

00:01:35.000 Socrates and Alphabetes, I say that right?

00:01:39.000 Glenn Elmers is with us.

00:01:40.000 Glenn, it was a great course.

00:01:41.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:01:42.000 Always good to be.

00:01:43.000 I'm glad to hear that.

00:01:44.000 And it's always good to be on your show.

00:01:46.000 I'm learning a lot, and it's one of the best parts of my week.

00:01:49.000 Glenn, there's a really important piece here: Totalitarianism American Style.

00:01:53.000 It's on tomklingenstein.com.

00:01:55.000 We've had Tom on the show before.

00:01:56.000 He's a fan favorite.

00:01:58.000 Tell us about this piece.

00:01:59.000 So, you know, more and more we're hearing the left and even a lot of NormiCons say, you guys are engaged in a lot of danger.

00:02:07.000 You, you know, you base people on the right.

00:02:09.000 You're engaged in a lot of dangerous rhetoric, talking about how bad things are.

00:02:12.000 And the truth is, they claim, you know, everything's pretty normal.

00:02:16.000 There's nothing to worry about.

00:02:17.000 There's no encroaching totalitarianism.

00:02:19.000 There's no encroaching tyranny.

00:02:21.000 And 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.

00:02:29.000 And so we wrote a fairly long article for Tom's site called America Totalitarianism American Style that lays out the answer to these claims.

00:02:39.000 And 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.

00:02:49.000 And 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.

00:03:10.000 And then we added a few other considerations that weren't in the list that were sort of alarming as well.

00:03:15.000 The 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.

00:03:26.000 And 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.

00:03:36.000 And 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.

00:03:42.000 And the article's gotten a lot of traffic.

00:03:45.000 It's excellent.

00:03:46.000 And we're going to link it.

00:03:47.000 People can find it at tomklingenstein.com.

00:03:50.000 I want to read from part of it.

00:03:51.000 It's incredibly powerful, this aspect here.

00:03:54.000 Thanks 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.

00:04:10.000 The coming of the universal homogenous state will be the end of philosophy on earth. 0.83

00:04:15.000 Tell us about that, Glenn.

00:04:16.000 That'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.

00:04:34.000 And we see more and more signs of this.

00:04:36.000 I mean, the growing power of technology in the hands of the ruling class, the suppression of dissent.

00:04:43.000 Strauss, you know, this very famous guy, influential guy, saw long ago by studying political philosophy what tyranny would look like.

00:04:52.000 And his prediction has borne out in ways that are very alarming, I think.

00:05:00.000 Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.

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00:06:03.000 So part of the issue that some people in the middle have is they have an idea of a very specific time type of tyranny.

00:06:12.000 They think of just people marching in the streets and raiding homes.

00:06:16.000 Now, we do have that too, to be perfectly clear.

00:06:18.000 People's homes are being raided.

00:06:20.000 But you have this term that I really like, soft despotism.

00:06:24.000 Can you elaborate on that?

00:06:26.000 I think it's really powerful.

00:06:28.000 Sure.

00:06:28.000 Yeah, that's a really important concept.

00:06:30.000 It comes out of a very influential writer on the American scene who wrote in the 1800s named Alexis de Tocqueville.

00:06:38.000 And what he predicted was that especially in a democracy, tyranny would emerge in a sort of different way.

00:06:44.000 It would have a soft aspect, right?

00:06:46.000 It would smother you rather than beating you over the head.

00:06:50.000 It would sap your energies.

00:06:52.000 It would reduce us all to a kind of slavish conformity. 0.98

00:06:56.000 And 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.

00:07:06.000 Now, of course, we have social media and the internet.

00:07:10.000 And the way it imposes a kind of suffocating conformity and makes us all sort of into zombies or robots.

00:07:20.000 That's an aspect of this soft despotism that Tocqueville talked about that people don't, I think, fully appreciate.

00:07:26.000 So 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.

00:07:42.000 And this is difficult.

00:07:43.000 And 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.

00:07:56.000 Other people say, no, they just want to burn everything to the ground.

00:07:58.000 They want transformation.

00:08:00.000 They want the bitter and utter destruction.

00:08:02.000 Can you elaborate on that?

00:08:03.000 Because it is tough at times to pin motives on this ever totalitarian chapter that America is entering.

00:08:12.000 I think the part of the difficulty is there's more than one faction, right?

00:08:16.000 So the ruling class is made up of a couple of different interest groups.

00:08:19.000 And so in a way, all these answers are true, right?

00:08:22.000 There 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.

00:08:39.000 But there's also a much more, in a way, thoughtful, if that's the right word, element that really wants to transform human nature.

00:08:49.000 It certainly does have a kind of utopian, otherworldly project.

00:08:53.000 And it sees the power of science, in the power of science, the ability to transform human nature, to make us completely malleable.

00:09:01.000 And 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. 0.89

00:09:14.000 And so there's different elements at play here, which I think makes it difficult to pinpoint one element or one explanation.

00:09:22.000 Yeah, 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.

00:09:38.000 Hi, I'm Adriana, a politics major at Hillsdale College.

00:09:42.000 Here's Hillsdale President Dr. Larry Arne with a Constitution Minute.

00:09:45.000 America's founders recognized an obvious fact of life.

00:09:48.000 Human beings differ in terms of physical attributes and talents.

00:09:52.000 Because of this, some people will be better at some things than they are at others.

00:09:55.000 But 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.

00:10:03.000 And therefore, we are equal in terms of the rights that pertain to human beings.

00:10:08.000 Rights attached to human nature, rights that come from God.

00:10:11.000 The Declaration of Independence names three of the big ones.

00:10:14.000 Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

00:10:17.000 Exercising these rights is necessary if we are to be truly free.

00:10:20.000 In our own time, many influential people believe that only government can decide what our rights should be.

00:10:25.000 This is dangerous.

00:10:27.000 Understanding our rights and how the Constitution protects them is vital to our freedom.

00:10:31.000 To learn more and get a free pocket constitution, visit constitutionminute.com.

00:10:38.000 Science changed.

00:10:39.000 Can you talk about when that changed?

00:10:41.000 It was obviously the Germans there to blame for basically everything awful. 1.00

00:10:44.000 But they got this fanatical idea that we can use, we could use this to actually recreate or to transform.

00:10:53.000 Sure, yeah.

00:10:54.000 The Germans, as usual, have a big negative role here in this. 1.00

00:10:59.000 But in a way, it even goes back before the great German thinkers of the 18th and 17th century, 19th century, to the early moderns, more like the 1500s with people like Francis Bacon and René Descartes and others, who at the dawn of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution saw in the power of all these emerging technologies in optics and calculus and mechanics.

00:11:24.000 They 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.

00:11:42.000 And 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. 1.00

00:11:55.000 Yeah, 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.

00:12:08.000 So 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.

00:12:15.000 I'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.

00:12:24.000 In 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.

00:12:31.000 What does this require?

00:12:32.000 Well, this strange attack on objective truth is not new.

00:12:35.000 It 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.

00:12:51.000 Glenn, this is a hard thing for some, dare I say, you know, boomers in our audience.

00:12:56.000 They say, are there really people out there that believe there's no such thing as absolute truth or any truth?

00:13:01.000 Yeah, there is.

00:13:02.000 So 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.

00:13:08.000 There'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.

00:13:21.000 But against that, there's this element of postmodernism, right, which rejects all truth, even scientific truth, and said everything is merely a construct.

00:13:30.000 Everything is merely a reflection of power.

00:13:32.000 And postmodernist thinkers like Foucault, who you mentioned, following one of these bad Germans, Nietzsche, said that even science is a value. 0.98

00:13:43.000 Even science is subordinate to the human will to make truth into whatever we want.

00:13:48.000 And 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.

00:14:08.000 And this is a real phenomenon.

00:14:09.000 And, 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.

00:14:20.000 It's this ideology of postmodernism, which sees all truth as relative, is spreading farther and farther.

00:14:29.000 The world is in flames and biotinomics is a complete and total disaster, but it can't and won't ruin my day.

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00:15:10.000 TomKlingenstein.com.

00:15:12.000 Totalitarianism, American style.

00:15:16.000 So 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?

00:15:26.000 Right.

00:15:27.000 So there's all the usual things, right?

00:15:28.000 Get out, get involved, be sure to be active in politics, get involved at the local level to the degree that you can.

00:15:34.000 I mean, Washington is pretty far gone.

00:15:38.000 We'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.

00:15:46.000 And so they have to be active at the state and local level.

00:15:50.000 What we can do with the national level is a little harder.

00:15:54.000 We may get back a certain president who's willing to fight the bureaucracy and the deep state.

00:16:00.000 And so get involved.

00:16:03.000 But also, I'm a teacher of political philosophy.

00:16:07.000 I have a PhD in this subject.

00:16:09.000 And so, my belief is educate people.

00:16:12.000 The more you understand about this issue, the more effective you can act, the more effective you can be involved.

00:16:18.000 You 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.

00:16:29.000 And to the degree that people can educate themselves, they can engage in effective action at the national and the local level.

00:16:35.000 So 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.

00:16:47.000 Have you received a response from otherwise people that would say, you know, I otherwise didn't think.

00:16:52.000 I mean, it just seems so obvious to those of us that are living through this.

00:16:56.000 Can people be won over on this case?

00:16:58.000 Yeah.

00:16:58.000 So 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.

00:17:08.000 And I didn't really think it was necessary because you and I are hyper-aware, right?

00:17:12.000 Some of the listeners are hyper-aware, but not everyone is.

00:17:16.000 And 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.

00:17:26.000 And it turned out he was right.

00:17:27.000 I heard from all sorts of people who said, look, this turned out to be very useful.

00:17:31.000 I'm so glad you wrote this.

00:17:33.000 And I can share with people.

00:17:34.000 There's a lot of sense out there in middle America that something is wrong, but people can't quite put their finger on it.

00:17:41.000 And 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.

00:17:53.000 I totally agree.

00:17:54.000 And 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.

00:18:05.000 This kind of goes to the final question, Glenn.

00:18:07.000 We are in the midst of a cold civil war.

00:18:09.000 Very few people are willing to acknowledge it.

00:18:12.000 I 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.

00:18:18.000 That's exactly right.

00:18:19.000 And Tom, who runs the site and is a benefactor of mine, likes to say that all the time.

00:18:24.000 The first step to winning a war is to know that you're in one.

00:18:27.000 That'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.

00:18:34.000 Yeah, we have to understand the seriousness of the situation before we can act.

00:18:39.000 And so I think you're exactly right about that.

00:18:41.000 Glenn, great work.

00:18:42.000 Love the courses.

00:18:43.000 Just everyone knows the Claremont Institute does these telos courses.

00:18:47.000 I don't know if we're allowed to talk about it or not, but it's not totally a secret society.

00:18:50.000 But it's just, you know, we read the classics and we talk about Machiavelli and Socrates and Plato.

00:18:55.000 And it's great, especially for high school graduates such as myself.

00:18:59.000 Glenn, thank you so much.

00:19:01.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:19:02.000 Great work.

00:19:02.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:19:03.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:19:06.000 Thanks so much for listening and God bless.

00:19:10.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - February 21, 2024

Totalitarianism, American-Style

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