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00:01:53.000Captain Ahab wishes he had what we have here at Human Events Daily.
00:01:57.000Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, the host of the Charlie Kirk show.
00:02:03.000We've got you here for Human Events Daily.
00:02:05.000And so, Charlie, when I go on your show and I've seen people respond, they say, they like, they're like, you guys like you, because you kind of unpack things and you go deeper about it.
00:02:15.000And, you know, we'll make references to things.
00:02:17.000We'll get into different stuff, but we're always kind of driven by the news of the day.
00:02:21.000We're always kind of driven by reacting to whatever crazy thing has come out next, you know, CNN's up to, whatever they're up to.
00:02:32.000And I don't just mean me and you or any of this.
00:02:34.000I mean, how did the West go from the towering world power, right?
00:02:40.000The driver of actual, you know, progress and intellectual thought and industrialization in the world to this sort of corrupted, backward, and really decaying kind of situation that we're in now.
00:03:55.000And one of the most famous lines or sentiments was, why are we focusing so much on these imaginary republics, a direct stab towards Plato, like 2,000 years before?
00:04:09.000And this is why don't we just go take it?
00:04:12.000Now, this was considered to be really unthinkable in heavily Catholic dominated Italy at the time and Europe where, you know, tradition and order and something that came before you that must always anchor you, this idea that you just can't be stumbling towards, you know, inevitable abyss.
00:04:36.000And in a lot of ways, he liberated political thought.
00:04:39.000He was the first kind of political theorist.
00:04:41.000Aristotle was too, but definitely in Europe.
00:04:44.000And Machiavelli is also known for his most famous line, you know, popularized by a lot of different people, which is the ends justify the means.
00:04:54.000That's kind of like very Machiavellian, but he wasn't wrong about everything.
00:04:57.000He was right about a lot of different power dynamics.
00:05:00.000So I think that a lot of people, though, when they look at sort of, you know, whether you want to call this wokeism or, you know, we eventually find ourselves in the social justice era.
00:05:10.000France, of course, found themselves there much faster.
00:05:47.000Now, he was an atheist, lost his mind towards the end of his life, wrote extensively about kind of how the West needs to recreate its own values.
00:05:55.000Now, it's really important because Nietzsche wrote God is Dead.
00:06:12.000And it ties directly into this because he said, and after my five decades of writing about this revolution, of course, the Russian revolution and everything that happened and all the atrocities, if you asked me to summarize all of it into one thing, he says it's that man forgot God and replaced him with ideology.
00:07:49.000Because it was right when the Soviet Union was like falling or about to fall, whatever.
00:07:53.000Point is that people were the end was kind of in sight yeah, and people were expecting a typical kind of dissident speech from another country.
00:08:04.000Instead it's like, no no no, what's there is now coming here, and we could go through many other thinkers.
00:08:10.000Nietzsche and Solzhanitsen obviously stand out.
00:08:12.000So you ask the question, how did we get here?
00:08:15.000I mean the cult of progress over the last 500 years, and that's not to say that improvements and adjustments have not been necessary nor beneficial to the human experience.
00:08:27.000Right, because I always hear people say this is it was started by the industrial revolution.
00:08:32.000I think I think the industrial revolution fuels it in many ways.
00:08:44.000We could go back to Machiavelli, and then, after Machiavelli, you had the social contract theorists, and the one that we overemphasize in conservative tradition is John Locke.
00:08:54.000Yes, the one we hate is Jean-jacque Rousseau rightfully got everything, basically everything, wrong.
00:08:59.000My favorite part of Rousseau is when he says, you know, if we can just go back to the natural world where all the animals are, because they're in such harmony.
00:09:05.000I'm like, no, I mean, have you spent any time watching animals in the natural world?
00:09:10.000Right, I mean, and Rousseau was a super hypocrite and spent a lot of time in Geneva Switzerland, doing things he shouldn't have done.
00:09:16.000But like he, he appeals to young people because he's super romantic and how he writes and he was a novelist.
00:09:21.000These guys, I mean, these guys are dreamers and he led to the French Revolution.
00:09:25.000But, but the one we don't talk about and we like that, but I don't like that.
00:09:28.000I don't like when those people are in charge.
00:09:30.000Well obviously, I mean yeah, I mean, you get Robespierre if yes exactly, you actually apply results, you get the actual and remember the, even the word terrorism right, this comes from the front, from the French revolution, because we must institute terrorism to go after the counterrevolutionaries.
00:09:47.000And look I, I i'm by no means an expert on this, but i've studied enough to have an informed opinion, and you know, people like Matt Peterson or Ryan Williams from Claremont would be much more articulate on this than I.
00:09:57.000But I agree with them, which is there was something that happened as soon as you have the Machiavelli's political stake in the ground and then followed quickly, not by the industrial revolution by the scientific revolution yes and, and this is the more important thing that we have to focus on, which is the science becoming an actual thing, which is largely thanks to sir Francis Bacon who, by the way, was a Christian.
00:10:22.000Sir Isaac Newton, who was a devout Christian, wrote more about the prophecies of Isaiah than actually the natural world, but then you had philosophers that started to wrestle with this question.
00:10:31.000Well then, if we can dominate the natural world, what good is this religion?
00:10:35.000I'm talking about people like Jeremy Bentham uh, Jon Stuart Mill, who weren't about atheists, and so this.
00:10:41.000But then eventually the, the man himself uh, who was, you know obviously, the most famous atheist um basically, who led to all the rest of them um, my goodness, he's from England um, i'll think of it in a second but sorry, go ahead, not Mill, but no no no, not Mill.
00:10:56.000Or Bentham um, i'll think of it in a sec yeah, but anyway.
00:11:00.000So then you get, and of course, we have the new atheist today right, but Hitchens and all these guys, and Harris, they all come from This tradition.
00:11:28.000And it's modernist thinking is birth, life, and there's like this huge compendium of the spectrum of life.
00:11:35.000And then death is like another line and it just says question mark afterwards, where versus medieval thinking was birth, then life very quickly.
00:11:42.000Or actually, first is knit in my mother's womb, amazing.
00:11:47.000Birth, then life, which are kind of like equal, and then eternity in heaven or hell.
00:11:52.000And that's this huge, broad, never-ending stretch.
00:11:55.000So we essentially killed eternity, right?
00:12:00.000And that's, that is what Nietzsche was talking about.
00:12:03.000You get rid of God, you get rid of eternity.
00:12:04.000You get rid of eternity, you get rid of judgment.
00:12:07.000Of course, then all you're going to be worrying about is number one, the here and now.
00:12:11.000You don't care about what happens afterwards.
00:12:13.000But you also have this situation where, and you can see this throughout the world today, where it's like secularists keep trying to make their own religiosities of science, of the climate, of whatever else.
00:12:37.000And so this is where the founders were brilliant and they weren't taken seriously.
00:12:40.000So the founders knew that the balance between the benefits of the Enlightenment and the anchoring of antiquity was the only way that human civilization and Hamilton were basically there.
00:12:56.000They're kind of so Jefferson goes all in on the French Revolution.
00:13:00.000And then Hamilton is like, you know what I mean.
00:13:03.000Yeah, I mean, the letters for him and Madison are the most.
00:15:21.000And so this was the founding father's prediction, which is, and Thomas Jefferson even talked about it, which is, okay, you're going to have the ability to do all this stuff.
00:16:12.000You have, and obviously, take COVID out of the equation.
00:16:16.000We have a jobs market that is generally very, very good.
00:16:19.000We have a standard of living that's beyond the average middle-class person today has things that the monarchs have to do with the 1800s, like IB profen, just like I have a headache.
00:16:53.000Well, I think they're directly correlated, though.
00:16:55.000I mean, I think that, first of all, the abundance was made possible quicker because we decided to forsake a lot of moral guardrails, because we decided to re-domicile industrial plants to China and not look after our fellow countrymen, because we decided to act as if another screen is going to solve all of our problems while not disciplining or actually raising our children.
00:17:16.000Because we never ever wanted to have a conversation about children being born out of wedlock or fathers not in the home or the destruction of the church or the nonstop propaganda campaign against American Christianity, which is everywhere.
00:18:50.000But the point is that Jordan didn't make a claim on that.
00:18:53.000Instead, he said, what is the deeper philosophical, psychological reason you should care about this?
00:18:59.000And so explain to me how people writing the Bible thousands and thousands of years before any of this science or psychology or et cetera was studied, and they got it all right.
00:19:32.000New science shows the earth was completely dark at some point.
00:19:40.000That precisely what it says, that no matter what your creation story is, big bang or whatever, that there was darkness over all the earth, meaning clouds covered the entire earth.
00:19:51.000So my, I mean, I remember being a kid reading about, you know, so I'm reading the seven days of creation and, well, it's a day of being rest.
00:19:59.000But then I always remember going to, you know, my teacher and saying, well, what is a day to God?
00:20:19.000What I also get, though, and I find amazing is every time, and let me just get to the point, is every time we uncover something new about the creation of the planet, it fits.
00:21:39.000The dietary standards, how to clean it beforehand.
00:21:41.000And so anyway, you ask the question, how is it that it's right?
00:21:44.000Well, it's because it actually happened and that this book built everything that we know.
00:21:49.000So we took that book, we, you know, the West, took that book and said, we're going to put this on the shelf.
00:21:54.000We're going to let it accumulate dust.
00:21:56.000We're going to let the spider webs crawl all over it.
00:21:58.000Well, sure, you can go to church on Sunday and do whatever, pray to your cross or whatever, but we are going to be over here building a much greater and stronger and more powerful utility.
00:22:07.000And again, that's why I pinpoint not the Industrial Revolution, but the scientific revolution.
00:22:11.000The mismanagement of the scientific inquiry into the natural world is why we're in the mess that we're in.
00:23:07.000So just to reinforce the point, every beautiful piece of music had Solia Dele, basically, I'm getting the Latin word wrong, glory to God at the top of every music, right?
00:23:17.000Whether it be Bach or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Chopin, whoever, it was all glory behind it.
00:23:30.000The French Revolution played a huge role, more so than the American Revolution.
00:23:34.000So the American Revolution gets misread by modern day leftists as this kind of liberal moment that we realize that we must throw the shackles off of everything before us and create a new.
00:23:44.000And the founders never mentioned any of that.
00:25:17.000And we should thank him for stirring up the revolutionary fervor.
00:25:20.000At the same time, you got to have a lot of respect for how the founders kind of cooled that down and struck that balance.
00:25:28.000And this is the misreading of the founding, which is that the founding was nothing more than the beginning of a multi-hundred-year progressive movement.
00:25:37.000And that's a position a lot of conservatives take.
00:25:39.000Because when we talk about revolutionary politics or revolutionary thinking or revolutionary ideologies, we never really talk about the American Revolution in those terms because inherently, I think we know that it's not, that it wasn't something.
00:25:53.000Yeah, and I've heard a historian say this.
00:25:54.000Thomas West, I don't think, agrees with this.
00:25:59.000It's more of a separation than it was a revolution.
00:26:02.000And I don't want to put words in the great Thomas West's mouth, but that's probably right, I think, because it was more just kind of like, hey, can we go our own way type thing?
00:27:04.000And so they replaced that with the cult of reason and they even convert notions.
00:27:08.000And so we as Christians at one point, too.
00:27:11.000I grew up experiencing all the different Christian stereotypes, like big mega church pastors screaming at you, asking for money or whatever.
00:27:20.000And, you know, I think that turned a lot of people off.
00:27:22.000The stereotype of the propaganda campaign, obviously not it being in essence true.
00:27:28.000But the Bible's the word of God and it's how you should live your life.
00:27:32.000There's not one thing anyone listening right now is experiencing.
00:27:36.000The Bible does not have a roadmap on how to bless you.
00:28:47.000All the signs show that taking one day of rest is actually really good for you.
00:28:51.000Have you ever gone and seen any of the illuminated manuscripts in Europe that they still have some of the preserved Bibles from the medieval times?
00:29:00.000You're probably not a Geneva Bible fan.
00:29:03.000But no, but I did go see the Book of Kells at the Trinity University or Trinity College in Dublin.
00:29:08.000And so these were the Bibles that were written during the Middle Ages when the only literacy was in the priest class.
00:29:18.000And so these people, when they're writing this, it's this beautiful every, and yes, each, you know, the title page of each book as it begins is each one of itself a masterpiece.
00:29:31.000But even the flowing calligraphy that you see, these people actually truly believed that what they were writing was each stroke of the fence was perfect because it was the word of God, period.
00:29:45.000And so this is the struggle ahead of us right now, right?
00:29:50.000Which is that so many people have believed that God doesn't exist or it's some sort of weird Eastern meditative God, which I guess is better than believing not in no God, but there's a huge difference between the God of the East and the God of the West.
00:30:23.000So like, even after all the years of communism, there's still this, and it's a total hodgepod of like from all traditional, yeah, the I Ching, et cetera.
00:32:11.000So one of the, um, I think it's in Colossians, Corinthians, there's this verse that is commonly quoted where people say, well, Charlie, God will never give you more than you can handle.
00:32:20.000I say, what kind of weird theology do you believe in?
00:32:37.000And just from the pure scientific clinical data, it shows you're actually a happier person, a more productive person, a more thankful person if you actually even go through the process of prayer, not alone, not to mention that prayer is actually an immediate and personal conversation with the living God.
00:32:53.000And so you ask the question, how did the West get here?
00:33:15.000I feel so bad for guy 26, but then at what, at what point does the meditative yoga circuit all of a sudden say, this is how God wants you to live?
00:33:26.000And then they're never going to say that, right?
00:33:28.000Instead, it's all about centering yourself.
00:33:56.000I've been to the monasteries and they have these incredible debates where they're looking at each other and they will clap with their hands at each other and yet they're not actually speaking.
00:34:08.000In Christianity, the two creation stories, God created heavens, the earth, and the beginning was the word, the word was God, the word was with God, right?
00:34:15.000Is logos, which is the word for speech.
00:34:50.000That I think resting is obviously important, but the highest level of Buddhist philosophy is that you then ascent to the highest level of nirvana, right?
00:35:14.000You don't have to go sit down and shut up and go to some hill and clap at each other and wear an orange robe.
00:35:19.000No offense, anyone that might do that that listened to our show, you might be a nice person, whatever.
00:35:22.000The point is that it's totally different.
00:35:24.000Here's a ticket, free admission, go free.
00:35:27.000As it says in John 8:38, the truth will set you free, that through Jesus Christ, we are free.
00:35:32.000And so when you have that type of religion at the center, let me take it back a little bit, at the center of your society, right?
00:35:42.000When you have that type of empowering ideology at the center of your society, because of course, you know, you go to Asia, they've all basically done away with Buddhism.
00:35:52.000But there's a lot of different variations of forms of that.
00:35:55.000Well, there are, I mean, you could go to, yeah, there's Tibetan Buddhism, there's Chinese Buddhism, there's the Buddhism of Southwest Asia, et cetera, et cetera.
00:36:54.000So if you are any other being, it's like we had this at our parish.
00:36:59.000They just started this new, and I don't know if we're going to be going there anymore, if they still keep doing this, but they said, oh, we're going to have a racial justice committee.
00:37:38.000And to me, quite frankly, if you're someone who's so concerned with the differences of people, you know, I really question whether or not you're putting Christ at the center.
00:39:37.000And so then you started to see there's no mystery than why you started to see philosophers posit, well, if we can dominate nature, why do we need this Christianity thing, right?
00:39:47.000It all came at the same time, obviously.
00:39:50.000And then it kind of hit this apex point where the Industrial Revolution was happening.
00:39:54.000But again, the Industrial Revolution only happened because of the scientific revolution.
00:39:58.000It does not happen one without the other.
00:40:00.000And then, yeah, you get people like Marx who says religion's the opiate of the masses.
00:40:03.000And you get Hegel who argues about a new way to view history.
00:40:07.000And you get this completely different paradigm.
00:40:09.000But throughout the entire thing, it's kind of been obvious.
00:40:13.000I mean, it's easy to play like, oh, they coulda, shoulda, woulda.
00:40:16.000But definitely in the last 50 years, I think conservatives have always been on the right side of the left's progress for the West.
00:40:24.000Meaning, like our idea of right is like, we're going to take the most right position of the left wing.
00:41:01.000And I think there's this whole new renaissance around these ideas because people like you and me, similar to Nietzsche, I never thought I'd say that, are seeing the absolute unraveling of everything around us.
00:41:12.000And we really don't care what you call us anymore.
00:41:15.000We've gotten to a point now where we realize that, you know, are we living through, I mean, we're clearly living through a collapse cycle, right?
00:41:25.000You know, and even Joe Rogan is talking about Kali Hugo is bringing up, you know, a lot of these different theories on fourth turning, et cetera, about what exactly kind of cycle we're in.
00:41:36.000So the question then becomes, when you look at other collapses, when you look at other societies that have gone through this, other civilizations, which ones managed it properly, which ones decided to actually take, you know, can you fight history, I think is a question.
00:41:50.000Well, I mean, the Romans are always a good example.
00:41:52.000And the Romans splintered and had the Eastern Roman Empire for a pretty long time.
00:41:57.000And that fell apart eventually, but that was a pretty big success.
00:42:01.000I mean, the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium, was the flagship for Christianity.
00:42:10.000It's hard to say the Ottoman Empire was Byzantium, but that's probably true to an extent, meaning that as soon as that absolved, you know, with the fall of Constantinople and whatever year that was, where the Turks finally won.
00:43:07.000It ends up being a lot more, and this is something that Tanya and I talk about.
00:43:10.000So my wife is Orthodox, and I've said that many times, but one thing we talk about is that it did end up being much more of a political separation than anything else.
00:43:33.000Well, it's like I was up in, I was in Toronto, and of course it was in Toronto, and we saw this Episcopalian church, because of course it was Episcopalian.
00:43:41.000And it was only, you know, it was with the refugees welcome and they have the crescent moon.
00:43:45.000And we're there with Tanya and she goes, you know, if you tried to do that to a mosque and said Christians welcome and put a cross in front of, imagine you go to Middle East and put that off.
00:44:35.000The way that I look at it is the way to manage it is, you know, okay, are we not, are we going to be an empire going forward or are we not?
00:44:44.000And if we're not, what do we do to reconstitute ourselves in a way that is most beneficial for the people who live here now?
00:44:51.000The problem with the American empire is that we never admitted we were one.
00:44:58.000It's like, oh, yeah, we're not an empire.
00:44:59.000Meanwhile, we're going to have bases in every corner of the world.
00:45:01.000There's some interesting theories out there about, you know, whether or not the British Empire just kind of continued through the Anglosphere.
00:45:29.000Is that just focus local and the rest might work, it might not.
00:45:34.000Because that actually is something that can be done.
00:45:36.000Well, and even smaller than that, even go back to, hey, we're going to have ordered families again.
00:45:43.000We should push policies that we're not going to make decisions for people, but we can say as a society, hey, society works better when we have these things called families.
00:45:53.000They were unafraid to make moral claims about the good of existence.
00:45:57.000This is good morally and it's also good socially better.
00:46:14.000I mean, you look at this town that just got hit with this.
00:46:18.000Was it Mayfield, I believe it was called in Kentucky.
00:46:21.000And I mean, it's like a Mayberry kind of town, right?
00:46:25.000But I was talking to somebody who lived near there and he said, you know, but it's just like one of these other towns where it was, we had this amazing community at one point.
00:46:33.000And then over the last 40, 50 years, it's just been gutted and the people there were already living in poverty, just absolute poverty.