00:01:46.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:58.000Michael, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:02:00.000It is great, as always, to be a very candid conversation, and maybe one day we'll get big enough where we can actually air these private conversations.
00:02:38.000Non-sarcastically straight down the strike zone.
00:02:41.000And I actually wanted to play devil's advocate more, but it's really hard when you're remote because you don't want to interrupt your guest.
00:05:15.000So I guess the question is then, when do we censor and how?
00:05:20.000And then I want to play devil's advocate with part of this because when I was thinking back to our conversation, it challenged a lot of things that I've said publicly.
00:06:09.000And then on the other end, they'll say, look, I can tell you with absolute perfect precision exactly what the standard should be at all times because I, king of the universe, am going to proclaim it to you.
00:06:22.000So what I would do if I were trying to figure out how to shape the American free speech regime, I would look to our past.
00:06:30.000I would look to what we have done before, what has led to flourishing in the United States, when we have suppressed obscenity, for instance, in the past, what the effect of that was.
00:07:15.000You were criticized because there was a porn star at an event, and then you were criticized because then there wasn't a porn star.
00:07:20.000The same story is all taped so we can talk about this and edit it as we see fit, right, Andrew?
00:07:25.000So it makes for good art is the ability to fail.
00:07:29.000So, yeah, I mean, I kind of like speaking and doing things, and then someone comes up to me and they're like, oh, yeah, by the way, there was a porn star here, and we kicked her out.
00:08:07.000Well, I mean, this is a pretty good example because I think whenever you hear that we need standards in society, all of a sudden people say, you're Hitler, you're Mussolini, you're limited.
00:08:18.000And you say, hold on, I'm just saying maybe we limit the spread of porn everywhere.
00:08:22.000Or, hey, maybe we don't let transvestites twerk for kids in the libraries.
00:08:26.000And maybe we can know that that's bad and we can agree.
00:08:29.000To use William F. Buckley's phrase, we can be epistemological optimists, by which he meant we could just know things and agree on at least a few things.
00:08:37.000Maybe we can agree that a man is not a woman and we can't.
00:08:42.000We don't agree on anything because we no longer enforce a standard.
00:08:56.000Like, I'm not going to intervene in social issues.
00:08:59.000Does it all of a sudden render this liberty unsustainable?
00:09:02.000Like, is this project by definition going to end in whomever is willing to use the sword?
00:09:08.000Well, the first definition you have to establish is liberty.
00:09:11.000Because if you go with the modern liberal definition that liberty is just doing whatever you want and the ability to do whatever you want, then you have to conclude that there should be no limits.
00:09:43.000When Aristotle describes, when Aristotle and other ancient Greek dead old guys describe freedom, this is what they're describing: the tamping down of the vices and the base passions and bringing those appetites into accord with the rational will.
00:09:58.000I mean, and we just don't do that anymore.
00:10:00.000But that was the purpose of liberal education.
00:10:02.000And it's funny now because when people go to get a quote-unquote liberal education in college, yeah, they just sleep around and get a licentiousness education.
00:10:11.000And everyone does it, or almost everyone these days.
00:10:14.000But it's why the quality of the education, both on the book learning and the behavior learning, has suffered so much.
00:10:21.000Well, I think what you just said, though, is the debate and the question around what is liberty, what is freedom, is basically the beginning and the end of what's happening in the conservative movement right now.
00:10:57.000Yes, but these are not people who have read the classical liberal tradition or who have read Hayek or Mises or Robinson saw some bastion on Ayn Rand meme.
00:11:20.000And, you know, the reason I think it's hard to describe them as libertarians is I don't think it comes necessarily from a place of real principle.
00:11:30.000I think often what it comes from is a place of political cowardice because they don't want to be the bad guys who tell you what to do and they don't want to have to exercise political power and they don't have to do the thing that the Constitution tells you to do.
00:11:42.000Yeah, I mean, but here's my question, though, is that do they just throw up kind of the card that says I'm a libertarian?
00:12:16.000I mean, there's a joke, you know, Ben has a new book coming out called The Authoritarian Moment, which I jokingly said is going to be my campaign slogan in 2028.
00:12:23.000Knowles 2020, The Authoritarian Moment.
00:12:26.000So, but how does that like walk us through that tension point?
00:12:29.000Because I think that's really interesting of two smart people that just don't see this the same way.
00:12:34.000Yeah, I mean, I don't want to speak for Ben, obviously, on it, but I think he has greater sympathy for the libertarian side of things.
00:12:41.000Drew Clavin, I think, has greater sympathy for the kind of classical liberal tradition.
00:12:45.000Matt Walsh is more in your camp, especially these days, is a little more in my camp.
00:12:49.000Jeremy has the most unique politics of anyone you'll ever meet, you know, and so you really can't guess where he's going to land on things.
00:12:56.000So, you know, that tension, though, is one that Russell Kirk described too.
00:13:01.000And because he cautioned against the conservative movement getting too libertarian, he said this is not going to work out very well.
00:13:08.000And he was much more from the traditionalist camp of politics.
00:13:12.000And, you know, it's hard to say that his predictions weren't true.
00:13:42.000And Josh Hammer, I said, so in a stunning turn of events, when I grew up, I was told that the right-wingers are going to control your body and tell you what to do.
00:13:52.000And that the liberals are going to allow you to do whatever you want to do.
00:13:55.000And now in 2021, it's right-wingers that are like super like, no, I'm never going to tell you what to do.
00:14:01.000And liberals that are telling you what to do with your body.
00:14:04.000Because in the 1960s, the left, as a tool, as an instrument, as a tactic, they adopted this laissez-faire attitude.
00:14:13.000And it's because they were living in a predominantly conservative culture.
00:14:16.000So by adopting the attitude that, hey, we should all do whatever we want in upend standards, they were giving themselves a tactical advantage.
00:14:22.000Now, that was not the end of the story.
00:14:24.000They were then going to reinstitute very rigid standards on grounds more advantageous.
00:14:28.000So you think they had that totalitarian impulse all along?
00:14:30.000Well, they just, I don't even want to use that harsh language.
00:14:33.000They had a political vision and they pretended to be laissez-faire for some period of time.
00:14:37.000And now they're instituting their vision.
00:14:39.000And we bought all of their stupid slogans.
00:14:41.000So now we're still using this really shallow sort of laissez-faire slogan.
00:14:46.000And we don't have our own political vision.
00:15:59.000I'm going to start quoting that to Hilaire Belloc.
00:16:01.000The line is that I am bound by my faith to believe that the Catholic Church is divinely instituted.
00:16:07.000But for non-believers and evidence of its divine institution is that no other organization conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.
00:16:15.000And we're seeing that play out right now in the episcopacy.
00:16:46.000No, you know, my argument, for those who are considering the Catholic faith, I mean, there are many, many good arguments for the church, but I'd make a political argument, too.
00:16:56.000My theological argument is that mankind needs sacrament.
00:17:02.000Mankind needs the regular interaction of the metaphysical and the physical, which you get in its fullest expression in the Catholic Church.
00:17:09.000And in some Protestant denominations, you get some simulacra of that.
00:17:12.000And then in a lot of Protestant denominations, they're totally separate.
00:18:57.000No, but the reason for that, of course, is the Bible was super expensive to produce.
00:19:01.000So they were under lock and key because they were very, very valuable, expensive things.
00:19:04.000With the printing press, the cost of that direct superintendent.
00:19:07.000I'm just interested, I'm not disagreeing.
00:19:09.000That under Catholicism dominance, civilization, that all of a sudden they'd be tossing out Bibles like frisbees to peasants in the Highlands.
00:19:18.000I think you would have had a much greater spread of the Bible.
00:19:21.000So the Catholic Church banned certain books, but the Protestants banned other books as well.
00:19:29.000So I'm actually sort of defending that aspect, I guess.
00:19:32.000Yeah, so I guess the question is, so a lot of people, myself included, would point to the Protestant Reformation and Luther as kind of this correction course towards this idea of natural rights and self-governance.
00:19:47.000And you would say, no, the Catholic Church would have figured it out and there would have been Catholic pilgrims.
00:20:17.000Like the Episcopal Church and I are on different planets.
00:20:20.000Well, especially these days, because it's been watered down into the world.
00:20:24.000And this is the problem, though, that I've noticed with a lot of the Protestant denominations is, you know, it reminds me of O'Sullivan's first law.
00:20:32.000Any organization that is not explicitly conservative will become leftist over time.
00:20:37.000And though the best thing the Catholics have going for you is you're, you know, they're trying to screw up, obviously, which is outwardly socially conservative.
00:20:51.000We're going to be ritualistic and we're going to abide by certain inertia of history, too.
00:20:58.000I mean, this is why even when you get radicals in the bishop seats or even in the papacy, they can't change all that much because they do not have the very helpful.
00:21:10.000Yeah, but I just, Western society, in my, I just, again, you don't know what would have happened.
00:21:17.000But the trajectory prior to Luther was not all of a sudden going to create just kind of out of nowhere, ex nihilio, create a civilization and the banks of Massachusetts if a bunch of priests showed up.
00:21:30.000I mean, the Americas were discovered by a devout Catholic.
00:23:13.000And so I just think all of these things that are sometimes considered to be the invention of the Protestants, I think, you'd be denying a thousand years of Western history to say that it's not a problem.
00:23:22.000No, I don't think that's fair because Protestants, it's like saying it's an invention of the Jews.
00:23:26.000It's like the Protestants just continued the best parts of Catholicism and kind of threw out the most corrupt ones, right?
00:24:25.000And, you know, when we say political, that's synonymous with public.
00:24:27.000So it's people gathering in a public form of worship and community.
00:24:32.000Yeah, but it's never was that that word church is a purely Western world.
00:24:37.000Like ecclesia means spontaneous gathering of people locally for a communal purpose under the word Eleutherian isonomia inequality.
00:24:45.000Words are colored over time by what they so for instance, you know, political refers to the Paulus in ancient Greece, but then over time it comes to refer to all public matters.
00:24:52.000The whole idea of the Catholic Church, right, which I don't agree with, is Jesus pointing to Peter, saying, on this, you know, the gates of hell will not prevail.
00:25:03.000At the mouth of the Jordan River, he says, Accessory of Philippi, on this rock build my ecclesia, right?
00:26:45.000And so what you see happen is a development because this, you know, unlike, I know there's a very modern kind of tendency to take things out of time or, you know, say that these are the eternal ways of politics.
00:26:59.000This is why we now talk about our democracies if it's the only political formation of all time.
00:27:03.000But what has happened from the institution of the church by Christ through the development of the early church through the various councils is you're seeing a gradual development.
00:27:11.000Even, by the way, when you look at the church in Alexandria, you look at the church in Athens, when there were disputes among the early churches, there was a kind of early strange role for the bishop of Rome to help to resolve them.
00:27:22.000So that would not look exactly like the modern papacy, far from it, but it shows the development of that role coming from Peter.
00:27:29.000The difference, one of the main things that just can't get me over the hill on Catholicism, probably never will, is you keep on referring to as like Jesus founding the church.
00:28:34.000Sometimes I think people want to etherealize to they want to say that, well, really, what Christ is saying when he founds the church, when he gives the keys to the kingdom of heaven to Peter, he's really just giving the gospel and it's available to everybody.
00:28:49.000But that doesn't make sense if the apostles have the power to forgive and retain sins.
00:29:26.000If there's no coherence to that, and if there, by the way, if there's no group of what became the bishops and then what became the Inquisition and then the Congregation for the Church of God.
00:29:38.000No, I think it's just like usually the Inquisition is not where people go to first.
00:29:41.000Right, but the Inquisition is terribly misunderstood because they conflate the Church Inquisition with the Spanish Inquisition.
00:29:45.000The Spanish Inquisition was Spanish because it wasn't the Church Inquisition.
00:29:48.000And the Inquisition still exists today.
00:29:50.000It's called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
00:29:52.000And so if you don't have people who can clarify matters of doctrine, which occurs at various councils and has occurred at synods, then you have absolute chaos because everyone will define their own religion.
00:30:04.000What if the Catholic interpretation is wrong?
00:30:10.000Well, then we are most to be pitied, I suppose, to quote St. Paul.
00:30:13.000But wouldn't it be more likely that it was a small D democratic gospel for all people of all nations?
00:30:19.000I don't think the kingdom of heaven is a democracy.
00:30:21.000No, small deed democratic can mean accessible to all.
00:30:26.000Democratic involves self-rule, and I don't think that the church is moliter.
00:30:30.000So you don't believe that obviously where we'll differ.
00:30:34.000I'd rather have clarity than agreement, as Prager would say, that someone just reading the Bible can't come to the truth of the gospel through the experience of the text.
00:30:44.000But I think that Christ loves us so much that he impels us to do more and to follow his word and to follow the shepherds that he has appointed, who he asks to feed his sheep and to regularly eat the body of the Lord and to drink his blood because those who don't have no life in them.
00:31:00.000Which is obviously a defense of the Eucharist, which again, I support.
00:31:03.000I just don't believe in transubstantiation.
00:31:28.000So theologically, I was most interested in the Western civilization question because I actually was surprised by your answer because I've heard Catholics go either way.
00:31:36.000Also, by the way, before we move on, I'm going to let the half-brother thing slide.
00:32:02.000And if I find them at a synod doubting the perpetual virginity of Mary, I'll smack them like St. Nicholas as an intercessor to Christ or whatnot.
00:32:59.000No, I just think it's interesting because basically you're saying Protestants were the rebels when they put the 95 theses and by God, they've never created like they're the.
00:33:10.000No, well, Christ turns all sorts of bad things for good.
00:33:13.000I mean, and I actually, I really mean, I actually mean this in a very direct way.
00:33:16.000There's an excellent book by Elizabeth Lev called How Catholic Art Saved the Faith, because there was plenty of corruption, there was rampant corruption before the Protestant Revolution.
00:33:38.000No, I mean, I just think that getting onto this point of this book, there was a sort of atrophying of the faith, and there were a lot of problems being created.
00:33:47.000And so much of today, what we consider to be some of the great glories of Catholic civilization were from the counter-Reformation.
00:33:54.000They wouldn't have existed, actually, without the Reformation.
00:33:56.000So maybe it made the Catholic tradition healthier.
00:34:46.000I mean, it's even like, for instance, I recognize that some people have actual theological problems with Mary's role and things, and they hear lots of questions.
00:34:55.000Yes, to some degree, and people who have even more problems.
00:34:58.000And I just go back to this idea of if you're really anti-Mary, if you're just like super anti-Mary.
00:35:04.000And you're not, I know, but I know some people that are.
00:35:06.000And I think, you know, even if it weren't the mother of your Lord and Savior, even if it were just like your buddy's mother, wouldn't you be kind of nice to her?
00:35:15.000And, you know, that reverence, I think, is very important.
00:35:19.000It actually creates a problem, even when, like, for instance, the Pope says and does things that are difficult to see, that one has to still have a spirit of obedience and reverence.
00:35:27.000And, you know, we always do this thing where we'll say, you know, far be it from me to criticize the Holy Father, but I wonder as a poor, miserable sinner, if maybe he shouldn't have quite said that thing.
00:35:36.000And frankly, that tone, I think, is helpful to us.
00:35:42.000These discussions have actually gotten more nuanced when we first started.
00:35:45.000We've done this like three or four times, and it's really fun.
00:35:48.000There's some things you're just not going to get me on, which is the Protestant Reformation was a legitimately and objectively good thing for humanity.