The Charlie Kirk Show - June 23, 2024


Who is Teaching Your Kids? Live from The People’s Convention ft. Hillsdale President Larry Arnn

Topics
Hillsdale College courses Turning Point Academy Hillsdale College education family work
Hosted by
Charlie Kirk
Mentioned
Larry Arnn Aristotle Winston Churchill Madison Kyle Turning Point USA Frederick Douglass Abraham Lincoln Hillary Clinton George W. Bush Metaphysics Beauty Trump Adam
THOUGHTCRIME Ep. 50 — Draft Our Daughters? Bringing Back Boomers? What's Your Phobia? Mike Rowe Tells The Rest of the Story

Episode Stats


Length

42 minutes

Words per minute

145.46

Word count

6,199

Sentence count

597

Harmful content

Misogyny

10

sentences flagged

Toxicity

18

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Learn English with Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College. Dr. Arnn joins us for a conversation from the People s Convention in which he discusses why Hillsdale is America's Greatest College and why you should go to Hillsdale to learn English. He also talks about the importance of public education and why the college is the best in the country for public education, and what it means to be a conservative in the 21st century and a student at a liberal arts college like Hillsdale and why it is better than any other college in the history of American education including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard Law, and the University of Notre Dame to name a few as well as why he is uniquely positioned to speak at the most influential person in the last decade to have spoken at one of the most important colleges in the U.S. in the past decade, Harvard, and why he thinks Hillsdale should be America s Greatest College in this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show. Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at NobleGoldInvestments.com. That s where I buy all of my gold! go to noblegoldinvestments.co/thecharliekirkshow to get all of your gold! go to my website and get all my gold!! it's where I Buy All of my Gold! Go to nobleco.investments@noblegold.co.org to get 20% off your first order gold and I'll give you 20% of your first month! I'll be giving you 5% off my first month with the Noble Gold Investing Club membership when you sign up for a spot on my platinum account! You'll get 10% off the next month, and get 5% OFF the first month, plus I'll get an ad discount when you become a patron when you enter the offer starts! It'll get you an extra $5,000 when you get my VIP membership when I buy a year of $5 or more! Learn more about my gold? I'm giving you $5-a-month and receive $10,000 or more when you shop at Noble GoldInvestments, I'll receive $25,000 and get a discount when I get my first offer, and you get 5,000, you get a $10-day VIP membership, and I get 5-month VIP membership offer when I become a VIP discount!

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 .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, happy Sunday!
00:00:01.000 Dr. Larry Arnn joins us, president of Hillsdale College, our conversation from the People's Convention.
00:00:06.000 Just one thing you have to know about.
00:00:08.000 Support Hillsdale College by going to charlie4hillsdale.com.
00:00:11.000 That is the website charlie, F-O-R, hillsdale.com.
00:00:14.000 They are wonderful supporters of our program.
00:00:16.000 They are America's greatest college.
00:00:19.000 So go to charlie4hillsdale.com.
00:00:21.000 You can take their online courses and learning, character, faith, and freedom.
00:00:25.000 They are inseparable purposes of Hillsdale College.
00:00:28.000 They develop minds and improve hearts.
00:00:30.000 Hillsdale College is a small, Christian, classical liberal arts college in southern Michigan that operates independently of government funding.
00:00:37.000 Their students come from nearly all of the United States and a dozen foreign countries.
00:00:41.000 It is charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:00:43.000 Hillsdale offers free online courses.
00:00:45.000 They're America's public education.
00:00:47.000 You can check it out right now.
00:00:47.000 their latest online courses are remarkable. Go to charlie4hillsdale.com.
00:00:53.000 That is charlie, F-O-R, hillsdale.com. You will learn something. You will
00:00:57.000 love it. Charlie4hillsdale.com.
00:01:00.000 Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:01:03.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
00:01:05.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:01:09.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks!
00:01:12.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:01:13.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:01:14.000 His spirit, his love of this country.
00:01:16.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:23.000 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.
00:01:31.000 That's why we are here.
00:01:35.000 Noble 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.
00:01:45.000 Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com.
00:01:52.000 That is noblegoldinvestments.com.
00:01:54.000 It's where I buy all of my gold.
00:01:56.000 Go to noblegoldinvestments.com.
00:02:00.000 Hello, everybody.
00:02:02.000 Great to see you.
00:02:03.000 Thank you.
00:02:04.000 Thank you.
00:02:06.000 First, I wanted to say, Turning Point Academy is doing such amazing work.
00:02:10.000 We're going to talk about that throughout our dialogue, but hot to you and the entire team.
00:02:15.000 If you are interested in alternative choices for education, please go by the Turning Point Academy booth.
00:02:20.000 Go up to the Turning Point Academy team and ask and inquire.
00:02:24.000 I have to tell you, you know my opinions on college, everybody.
00:02:29.000 I'm kind of well known for that, Dr. Arnn.
00:02:31.000 I use a scam word, right?
00:02:33.000 Not so good.
00:02:34.000 But if you read the college scam, which I know many of you have, there is one college that I say is not a scam.
00:02:40.000 Right there.
00:02:41.000 There's a copy of it.
00:02:43.000 And it's Hillsdale College.
00:02:44.000 That's right.
00:02:45.000 It's the only one I list by name.
00:02:47.000 And it has been such a blessing the last couple of years to get to know Dr. Arnn, to get to know Kyle, to visit Hillsdale.
00:02:53.000 Because I'm a critic of most colleges.
00:02:56.000 And the reason I'm a critic of most colleges, because they're not doing what Hillsdale is doing.
00:03:00.000 And what Hillsdale does is they have the right understanding of what education actually is.
00:03:06.000 And that's what we're going to talk about with Dr. Arnn today, mostly.
00:03:09.000 Because even some conservatives have the wrong idea of what education is.
00:03:15.000 I'm going to tell you one of the things I hear a lot.
00:03:17.000 Sometimes parents will say, I just want my teacher to be viewpoint neutral and let the kids learn as they want.
00:03:22.000 And they dictate the terms.
00:03:25.000 I hear that all the time from conservatives.
00:03:28.000 Or sometimes conservatives would say, I don't want the teacher to say what is right or wrong, I just want them to do what is math and science.
00:03:35.000 You've heard that a lot, right?
00:03:36.000 Well, the purpose of education is actually to lead a student closer to what is good, true, and beautiful.
00:03:43.000 Not just to allow them to meander into the abyss.
00:03:46.000 Hillsdale College is America's greatest college.
00:03:49.000 Period.
00:03:49.000 It is America's greatest college.
00:03:54.000 I am uniquely positioned to say that, because I think I have spoken at the most colleges of any living person in the last decade.
00:04:02.000 If you haven't visited, you'll see it for yourself.
00:04:04.000 Where other colleges are spray painting and taking down statues, they have statues of Frederick Douglass and Winston Churchill.
00:04:11.000 They have statues of Abraham Lincoln.
00:04:13.000 It's just remarkable.
00:04:14.000 When you meet a Hillsdale graduate, you just get it.
00:04:16.000 It's just a totally different thing.
00:04:17.000 And so we're super blessed and honored to welcome a mentor of mine, and a teacher, and someone who has just changed higher education from... Hillsdale was not where it was when Dr. Arnn took over.
00:04:29.000 It was well known, but it was not the behemoth or the machine.
00:04:33.000 And by the way, all of you can benefit from what Hillsdale does.
00:04:36.000 I take their online courses and I have over half of them completed.
00:04:39.000 Right, Kyle?
00:04:40.000 I had a second kid, so I'm a little behind the curve here.
00:04:43.000 But they're free of charge.
00:04:45.000 You guys can write it down right now.
00:04:46.000 It's charlieforhillsdale.com, charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:04:49.000 And you can listen to them as podcasts.
00:04:51.000 You can listen to them when you're in the car.
00:04:53.000 They are tough.
00:04:54.000 They're challenging, but they're worthwhile.
00:04:56.000 And they're about everything from the citizenship class, American history, Aristotle, Winston Churchill.
00:05:02.000 They're so worthwhile, especially.
00:05:03.000 for your kids and grandkids to take.
00:05:05.000 It's charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:05:07.000 So I want you to join me in welcoming the best leader in higher education.
00:05:12.000 If we had a thousand Larry Arns in colleges across the country, our country would be in a much better place.
00:05:16.000 Join me in welcoming Dr. Larry Arnn.
00:05:38.000 Welcome Dr. Arnn.
00:05:39.000 Hey, Charlie.
00:05:41.000 So, Dr. Arnn, I think there's so much to cover, and I did my best here to brag on Hillsdale, and I, of course, mean every single word, and you deserve such credit and praise.
00:05:51.000 I'm going to ask you a simple but deep question.
00:05:55.000 What is the purpose of education?
00:05:57.000 What does education mean?
00:05:59.000 I have to begin by correcting you, Charlie.
00:06:01.000 I met Charlie when he was 19 years old.
00:06:03.000 See, I don't talk about this part of the story.
00:06:06.000 I made a big mistake.
00:06:07.000 I think he's now 21.
00:06:13.000 But I was skeptical of that boy. 0.98
00:06:14.000 And I thought he was too young and ignorant to be famous. 0.89
00:06:18.000 And I told him he ought to get serious about his education. 0.95
00:06:22.000 And I now certify he's a man of serious worth.
00:06:27.000 He studies, he thinks, he grows.
00:06:29.000 So I'm proud to be here with you, Charlie.
00:06:33.000 This thing that he's built is an expression of his ambition and his goodness.
00:06:40.000 So there.
00:06:40.000 there.
00:06:41.000 Thank you.
00:06:42.000 So, what is education?
00:06:50.000 It comes from a Latin word that means to lead forth, and it raises the question, which way is forth?
00:06:55.000 There's some kids sitting right over there.
00:06:57.000 I noticed a bunch of girls come in, right? 0.99
00:07:00.000 And they're either going to go forth or they're not going to be very good human beings.
00:07:05.000 How do you go forth?
00:07:06.000 Just think of a human being like a plant, right?
00:07:09.000 My wife is English.
00:07:10.000 She's a gardener. 1.00
00:07:11.000 She can She can make anything grow, except she doesn't think she does that. 0.99
00:07:16.000 She thinks the growth is in the plant, and a good plant grows to be what it's supposed to be.
00:07:23.000 Well, we're different from plants because plants don't know what they're supposed to be.
00:07:28.000 In fact, they only grow in one way, whereas we make choices.
00:07:32.000 And so education, in leading forth, begins by telling the students what it is that they ought to become.
00:07:42.000 It doesn't matter, by the way, what you tell them.
00:07:44.000 What matters is what they hear.
00:07:47.000 And that means they have to have the right disposition for education.
00:07:51.000 And if you tell them things that are not true, they won't believe them for very long.
00:07:56.000 And they're very interested in their growth.
00:07:59.000 I can tell you our college is very difficult.
00:08:01.000 It's gotten to be terribly hard to get into.
00:08:03.000 We don't know what to do about that.
00:08:06.000 But we pick them by willing and able.
00:08:11.000 Every human achievement comes from a combination of willingness and ability.
00:08:16.000 And so you can't get in if you're not able, and that's not very hard to tell.
00:08:21.000 So the ones that get in, they're willing.
00:08:25.000 There's a young woman from South Carolina, I think she said.
00:08:28.000 She came up.
00:08:29.000 She's a sophomore.
00:08:30.000 She wants to come to our college. 0.79
00:08:32.000 And she's got the first step.
00:08:34.000 She really wants to come.
00:08:36.000 And I believe that now, you see?
00:08:38.000 Because when she gets in, She will have to do the work.
00:08:43.000 And it's work.
00:08:45.000 Hard work.
00:08:47.000 You know, he mentioned, I teach Aristotle and other things at the college.
00:08:52.000 Aristotle is the man.
00:08:54.000 I just love Aristotle.
00:08:56.000 And I've been reading Aristotle for 45 years.
00:09:00.000 I'm still learning about it, right?
00:09:02.000 It's hard.
00:09:03.000 You have to give yourself to it.
00:09:06.000 And Aristotle is one thing.
00:09:08.000 There are many others.
00:09:11.000 You commit yourself to a life.
00:09:14.000 I'm going to, you know, you've got these schools going.
00:09:16.000 We have a bunch of charter schools, more than a hundred I think now.
00:09:20.000 And they advertise themselves as difficult.
00:09:25.000 And the wait list is half the length of the student body over the nation.
00:09:31.000 And why?
00:09:32.000 Parents want that. 0.78
00:09:34.000 If they love them, they want them to struggle so they can grow.
00:09:40.000 Growth is not realizing yourself.
00:09:45.000 It's becoming an excellent thing of the kind that you are.
00:09:51.000 But it must point towards something.
00:09:53.000 And that is something modern education either refuses or they're pointing them in a different direction.
00:09:59.000 So let me give two examples.
00:10:01.000 The mantra of the Detroit Public Schools or Chicago Public Schools will be to create students to become social justice citizens.
00:10:09.000 So they're pointing them and they're trying to grow them in a direction, or they'll have other areas in conservative America that will say, we are neutral.
00:10:18.000 We're not trying to point them in any direction.
00:10:20.000 What are the faults in both of those approaches?
00:10:23.000 Well, uh, first of all, education is not something you do to anyone.
00:10:28.000 And remember the whole thing with the government of the United States today is it's been converted into an engineering project.
00:10:35.000 Its job is to work upon us to create the society.
00:10:39.000 You know, they think they make the economy grow, right?
00:10:44.000 Like, they do.
00:10:46.000 They think that.
00:10:48.000 That's a great way.
00:10:49.000 A bunch of engineer-minded central planners. 1.00
00:10:51.000 You know, they're stupid and they're dog stupid, and that's dog stupid. 1.00
00:10:56.000 And so, education is not something you do to them. 1.00
00:11:03.000 He says, a purpose, right?
00:11:05.000 Well, because humans have this unique thing, right?
00:11:10.000 Understand they make choices.
00:11:13.000 Roses and boxers.
00:11:15.000 We have boxer dogs in my family. 1.00
00:11:16.000 That's really stupid. 1.00
00:11:18.000 And they don't make choices, right? 1.00
00:11:21.000 But we do.
00:11:21.000 And so we have to do the work of becoming.
00:11:26.000 And you know, what are the virtues, right?
00:11:28.000 There are two groups, intellectual and moral.
00:11:32.000 That is to say, you've got to become a good person and you've got to become a knowing person, which means you need the traditional three R's. 0.79
00:11:40.000 I see that Charlie has invented new R's. 0.97
00:11:43.000 But reading, writing, arithmetic, those are the human skills.
00:11:47.000 Only human beings do those things, right?
00:11:49.000 So education is to get good at that.
00:11:52.000 They do it, you don't do it for them.
00:11:55.000 You can't, at any moment, Every act of learning that everybody, everybody in this room, in every class at Hillsdale College or any of these schools, that is accomplished by the person doing the learning.
00:12:09.000 And they have to want to.
00:12:10.000 They do, by nature, want to, by the way.
00:12:13.000 So you set out by saying, there are some things to know.
00:12:19.000 And they're wonderful things.
00:12:20.000 They don't know that they're wonderful.
00:12:22.000 They don't know what wonderful means at the beginning.
00:12:25.000 But they always react wonderfully to that, right?
00:12:29.000 Oh, yeah.
00:12:29.000 You know, like, the best teacher I know is a, and I know a lot of them, is a kindergarten teacher in, outside Austin, Texas, at one of our schools.
00:12:39.000 And I turned her into, her name is Janie Reardon, and if you go to the Leander Classical Academy, go to the kindergarten class.
00:12:48.000 I've turned her into a tourist attraction. 0.75
00:12:51.000 She, when you go in the room, Some midget will walk over and look you in the eye and shake your hand and whisper to you, please sit here, we're doing this, welcome to the class. 1.00
00:13:08.000 And then she was going to teach him, this is my favorite lesson I've ever learned in my life, she says, today, and you know there's an adventure in her voice, she says, We're going to learn.
00:13:24.000 And she starts writing on the board.
00:13:26.000 C-A-P. 1.00
00:13:28.000 And you know, everybody in the class going, ooh, you know.
00:13:31.000 And then she spells it out.
00:13:33.000 Capacity.
00:13:35.000 What does that mean?
00:13:38.000 The second grade, those mighty titans to the kindergartners, right?
00:13:43.000 They're coming over.
00:13:45.000 We're going to give them cookies and punch.
00:13:48.000 What is the capacity we need for the plates and the pitchers?
00:13:53.000 You see?
00:13:54.000 And now, and see, the first line of Aristotle's metaphysics is, the human being stretches himself out to know.
00:14:03.000 The Greek verb is very active.
00:14:05.000 We work to know.
00:14:06.000 We long to know.
00:14:08.000 You see?
00:14:09.000 And so, The purpose is to know.
00:14:13.000 And then once you settle that, now I'm going to contrast, you rightly characterized what they do in colleges these days, in schools, right?
00:14:25.000 The first thing they do at Harvard, for example, in the orientation, is they basically tell you there isn't anything to know.
00:14:33.000 There's only your opinions, right?
00:14:37.000 And you have a right to your opinions.
00:14:40.000 That's the worst thing in the world you can say to an 18-year-old.
00:14:46.000 I had a boy say to me once in front of 600 people in Scottsdale, he was 18 years old, and he said, if I come to Hillsdale, will you respect my opinions? 0.98
00:15:01.000 And I said, we don't give a crap about that. 0.97
00:15:03.000 And... 0.99
00:15:09.000 600 people laughed at him.
00:15:11.000 laughed at him.
00:15:13.000 And I said, by the way, are you 18?
00:15:15.000 He said, yeah.
00:15:17.000 I said, what could you possibly know?
00:15:21.000 And wouldn't you want to learn better?
00:15:25.000 Here's Aristotle again.
00:15:28.000 The source of knowledge of anything to be known is in the thing.
00:15:34.000 And not in the opinion of the one who learns it.
00:15:39.000 And if you have a difference of opinion, you have to recur to the source of knowledge.
00:15:45.000 What is it about?
00:15:47.000 Right?
00:15:48.000 Like this very controversial situation in this country today, right?
00:15:53.000 And both sides are calling each other unconstitutional.
00:15:57.000 The only way you can settle that would be to read the Constitution of the United States.
00:16:03.000 And...
00:16:04.000 And see, if you don't do that, you have deprived them of their purpose.
00:16:16.000 And if you tell them it's all opinions, then the next step is inevitable.
00:16:22.000 Because the only truth is in us, that's the claim, then we have to make truth.
00:16:30.000 We have to join these great causes and remake the world.
00:16:36.000 See?
00:16:37.000 And that's why They're calling each other hateful names and assaulting each other when in fact they're supposed to be colleagues, a word that comes from the same place the word college comes from, which is a form of friendship, right?
00:16:52.000 And that has entirely broken down now.
00:16:56.000 They can't hold class.
00:17:00.000 Those colleges are run by people who are in 100% agreement with each other.
00:17:05.000 By the way, I think I am accurately describing the ground of their opinions, right?
00:17:12.000 They've run them for a long time.
00:17:14.000 It's unanimity.
00:17:16.000 And I thought, this spring, when they're all collapsing, I thought, well, finally, they're getting a bad name now.
00:17:23.000 They're going to say to the troops, straighten up.
00:17:27.000 You know, let's have college here for a month and dress ourselves up. 0.90
00:17:32.000 They are unable to control because these principles, by the way, which are the same principles as are governing many inner city American, many American inner cities today, and they break down.
00:17:49.000 You can't go to them.
00:17:52.000 They can't function.
00:17:54.000 You see?
00:17:55.000 Whereas, if you have a purpose, which is, by the way, just the purpose written in your nature, You know, try to teach a dog to read.
00:18:06.000 They never learn, right?
00:18:08.000 I mean, we can't even teach our dogs to sit.
00:18:11.000 But every human child learns to talk on its own, and that's the same thing as reading.
00:18:21.000 You see?
00:18:22.000 So we are made to know And we want to know.
00:18:27.000 And once we start knowing, then we see there's a hierarchy of knowledge.
00:18:33.000 That one thing is done for another thing.
00:18:36.000 All you got to do is read the first page of Aristotle's Ethics and think about it.
00:18:42.000 You know, read it 30 times.
00:18:44.000 But, but, but it's every, the whole hierarchy of ends is described in the opening paragraph Right?
00:18:56.000 It's very beautiful.
00:18:57.000 Charlie likes that word, beautiful.
00:19:00.000 What that word means, the word in Greek is kalos.
00:19:05.000 The word for good is agathos.
00:19:10.000 Beauty is the most perfect good.
00:19:13.000 It is the ultimate thing for the sake of which other things are done.
00:19:19.000 And there are many examples of beauty.
00:19:21.000 Right?
00:19:22.000 Like, anybody been to Yosemite?
00:19:25.000 You know?
00:19:26.000 And when you go there, you stop and look in awe.
00:19:33.000 Because, wow!
00:19:35.000 How did this come to be?
00:19:36.000 Look at this thing!
00:19:38.000 And you don't even, you don't want to use it for anything.
00:19:42.000 You want to behold it.
00:19:43.000 In Christianity, the word for meeting God is beatitude.
00:19:48.000 You see?
00:19:49.000 The ultimate, the perfect thing.
00:19:51.000 The thing that cannot be improved.
00:19:54.000 In the end, that book, The Metaphysics, that begins with our wishing to know, it ends with Aristotle's description of God, which is a rational description.
00:20:03.000 It's not the same as the Christian description, which adds many features, but it's a being that is so perfect that he's only thought, he doesn't move, he only thinks about himself, because to think about something else would be a diminishment.
00:20:22.000 If you just reason through, you know, like, I'm picking out the young over there because they're my forte. 0.93
00:20:29.000 These girls over here are young. 1.00
00:20:32.000 They're going to have to struggle to learn.
00:20:36.000 And they're not just infinitely better than a dog at that, they can do it at all, and a dog cannot.
00:20:46.000 That means we're above the dogs, right?
00:20:50.000 But then we struggle to learn.
00:20:54.000 We don't learn everything at once.
00:20:55.000 We go from this to this to this to this.
00:20:59.000 Imagine a being that doesn't do that.
00:21:03.000 That means the evidence of God is in your own struggles, you see?
00:21:07.000 And today we We repudiate, we actually manage effectively to exclude any reflection upon that in the schools of America.
00:21:21.000 And that's what the crisis is.
00:21:23.000 I love that.
00:21:24.000 I'm going to read the five points of Hills.
00:21:26.000 This is very important.
00:21:27.000 I'm sure some of you have kids or grandkids going to college.
00:21:31.000 And if it's not Hillsdale, I caution that endeavor, but that's a separate issue.
00:21:35.000 But when you, let's say that you're a parent.
00:21:37.000 Or you're a grandparent and you're about to drop your kid off to school in August.
00:21:41.000 Ask them at University of Michigan or Indiana, what are the five priorities of life at University of Michigan?
00:21:48.000 Ask them that question.
00:21:50.000 Hillsdale College, you know I say this on my radio show every day.
00:21:53.000 The five priorities of life at Hillsdale College.
00:21:56.000 Glorify God, build a strong family, work diligently, serve church and charity, defend liberty and freedom.
00:22:03.000 How great is that?
00:22:04.000 And where the five priorities of Michigan State University would be get angry, tear
00:22:18.000 stuff up, DEI, diversity equity, yeah, DEI.
00:22:24.000 So, Dr. Arnn, talk about those five priorities of life, specifically defend liberty and freedom, Because that's one that most colleges are deathly afraid of adding as a priority.
00:22:37.000 And walk us through that.
00:22:39.000 Where did those come from?
00:22:42.000 Well, by the way, all lists of the five most important things, if they're the least bit intelligent, they're all true.
00:22:51.000 And that's because they are descriptions of the being, the human being is one kind of being, there are many kinds.
00:23:00.000 Aristotle says if you can tell what a good horse is, you should be able to tell what a good person is.
00:23:05.000 And you can tell what a good horse is.
00:23:08.000 Have you ever watched the movie Secretariat?
00:23:12.000 That is actually the best horse ever.
00:23:15.000 It's a wonderful movie, too.
00:23:17.000 Horse racing movies, by the way, it's an element of the natural law.
00:23:21.000 They're always good.
00:23:22.000 And they're always the same.
00:23:25.000 They always have the same plot.
00:23:28.000 You know, they do things in the movie to make you hope the horse will win, and then the horse does win, which is how it should be, right?
00:23:37.000 And that's a good horse.
00:23:39.000 That's not just a good horse.
00:23:40.000 That's the best horse, I think.
00:23:42.000 Fastest ever, right?
00:23:45.000 Well, what are the qualities that make it so?
00:23:47.000 Who's the best person you know?
00:23:50.000 Is the person brave?
00:23:52.000 Is the person fair?
00:23:55.000 Is the person wise?
00:23:58.000 Is the person self-restrained?
00:24:01.000 Those are the four cardinal virtues, right?
00:24:03.000 The description of the human person operating well, You know, the very greatest on the scale of Secretariat for horses.
00:24:15.000 Now, why the family?
00:24:19.000 That's how we come to be.
00:24:21.000 It's our process of begetting and growth.
00:24:23.000 That's what the word nature, which comes from the Latin word for birth, means.
00:24:27.000 It means, how do we come to be?
00:24:30.000 Now, how many of you have children? 0.98
00:24:33.000 Isn't that a pain in the butt? 0.99
00:24:33.000 Right? 0.99
00:24:36.000 And I've got grandchildren now, too. 0.99
00:24:40.000 And, you know, they're better than my children and also a pain in the butt, right? 0.95
00:24:47.000 They take so long to raise, right? 0.99
00:24:51.000 They do.
00:24:52.000 I mean, a four year old dog doesn't have a six, a four month old dog doesn't have any sense of who its parents are and vice versa.
00:25:03.000 You see?
00:25:04.000 So we spend 18 years.
00:25:08.000 Raising these kids.
00:25:10.000 And we have data that shows, but I mean, God, if you would need the data, it's better if the parents do that.
00:25:19.000 The family is an essential, the primary element.
00:25:26.000 Charlie's gotten old and wise now.
00:25:28.000 He's prompting me for words.
00:25:30.000 No, it's good.
00:25:33.000 I, you know, I learned it the hard way, but I respect Charlie Kirk.
00:25:33.000 You go ahead.
00:25:43.000 But, you see, the family is unusually important to us.
00:25:48.000 And it's, you know, a sort of trick of the Lord that our families are more demanding, and we need them more, and yet we're the people who make choices about it.
00:26:02.000 We don't have to do it.
00:26:04.000 And when we don't, and so often we don't these days, the results are terrible.
00:26:09.000 So that's one of those things, right?
00:26:11.000 In other words, if you want to help a human being, you don't produce human beings.
00:26:16.000 What you do is help them to grow.
00:26:17.000 And the problem of helping them to grow is exactly the same as their problem.
00:26:24.000 Like these children.
00:26:25.000 I urge you To divorce from your mind that anybody is going to do anything decisive for your child.
00:26:36.000 Your child has to do it.
00:26:39.000 The question is, will they help?
00:26:41.000 Will people help?
00:26:42.000 And part of the help, the earlier you are, the better.
00:26:45.000 This is true.
00:26:47.000 The help depends so much on telling them the purpose.
00:26:52.000 And they have to hear it over and over.
00:26:55.000 And it's not that it sinks in and they've got no choice.
00:26:58.000 They have to choose it or it won't be their purpose.
00:27:01.000 But you help them.
00:27:02.000 You can give them a head start by telling them, we're going to do this stuff and here's why.
00:27:06.000 Right?
00:27:07.000 And the next thing you know, they take off.
00:27:10.000 And so what are the others?
00:27:12.000 The family?
00:27:13.000 Work diligently.
00:27:14.000 Well, we're, one of our imperfections is we have to move.
00:27:21.000 If we don't work, we will die.
00:27:23.000 The highest intellectual virtues in the classics are knowing things that are eternal, that never change.
00:27:30.000 Those are the only things you can have certain knowledge of.
00:27:34.000 When they say in the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal, that's a tautology.
00:27:42.000 It is an element of the natural law because all it really says is all men are men.
00:27:47.000 They're not horses, they're not dogs, they're not angels, they're men.
00:27:51.000 And it's the characteristic of human beings that they have to sustain themselves, and that's where our choices arise.
00:27:58.000 See, if you read the curse of God upon Adam and Eve when he expelled them from the garden, that's a change in our nature.
00:28:08.000 We're going to be necessitous people now.
00:28:11.000 And so we are made the kind of person To confront that necessity.
00:28:17.000 And our virtues and vices are displayed and cultivated in how we do that.
00:28:22.000 So work, what's next?
00:28:23.000 Yeah, and so the last one I want to emphasize, but also remind the audience, Dr. Arnn is probably the foremost living historian on Winston Churchill.
00:28:33.000 Would you receive that?
00:28:35.000 Well, there's others, yeah, but I'm pretty good.
00:28:39.000 He's the best.
00:28:40.000 And definitely the best that also knows Lincoln very, very well and Washington.
00:28:45.000 Would that be fair?
00:28:47.000 And you know American history unbelievably well.
00:28:51.000 I'd love your take as to where we are as a country, the choices now the country has in front of us, because you've talked about choices as a historian and as a citizen.
00:29:03.000 Well, it's the third great death throw of America.
00:29:10.000 The first one came in the Revolutionary War, and the second came in the Civil War, and this is like that.
00:29:16.000 And the reason it's like that is that we're debating the most fundamental things.
00:29:22.000 Put them in the Aristotelian category.
00:29:28.000 The most important thing about a thing is its purpose or final cause.
00:29:32.000 And the next most important thing about a thing, these are all essential by the way, you can't take any out, is its form.
00:29:39.000 Its form is how it looks and how it operates.
00:29:42.000 So just stick to those two about America.
00:29:44.000 The final cause of the United States of America is stated in the most beautiful political document ever written, the Declaration of Independence.
00:29:52.000 And today that Final cause.
00:29:56.000 There's a 180 degree difference about what that document means.
00:30:01.000 And yet it's very simple, you know?
00:30:04.000 It's a problem of word definition.
00:30:07.000 What is equality?
00:30:09.000 What is human, right?
00:30:11.000 And today we think human being is something to, we love the word, transform.
00:30:17.000 I'm trying to Dismiss the word from my vocabulary.
00:30:22.000 Because to give a thing a new form is to make it into something else, right?
00:30:27.000 So the second cause of America is the formal cause, and that's the Constitution of the United States.
00:30:32.000 And that is how the government operates.
00:30:35.000 It's divided, you know, the structure of the Constitution is provided by separation of Separation of powers is made possible by representative government, which locates sovereignty outside the government and delegates it in in different measures to different parts of the government from the real sovereign, and none of those parts is sovereign.
00:30:56.000 Well, that's transformed now.
00:30:58.000 It is.
00:30:59.000 The great majority, I think it's over 80% of our laws, are not made by the Congress anymore.
00:31:05.000 Now they're made by permanent agencies, 150 or so.
00:31:08.000 It's actually controversial how many.
00:31:11.000 And the laws, you know, they fall from the sky like snowflakes.
00:31:17.000 And they empower those who enforce the law Because the law doesn't really mean anything definite anymore.
00:31:27.000 And that means they can do what they want.
00:31:29.000 So this change, and remember, in America, the structure of America, imagine a big circle, right?
00:31:36.000 And all the sovereignty is out there in the circle.
00:31:38.000 And inside the circle, there's a smaller circle that's about 15% at the maximum for the first 60% of American history.
00:31:47.000 And that's the government.
00:31:48.000 And the authority is delegated from outside into the government.
00:31:53.000 Right.
00:31:54.000 Now, if the government gets its mitts on something over half the money in the country, which it has today, and it has millions of people working for it, and in the private sector it's the biggest customer of anybody who will do business with it, which is basically everybody, not me, not Charlie.
00:32:17.000 They don't take any government money, by the way.
00:32:19.000 That is so important.
00:32:22.000 Nor do we, obviously.
00:32:24.000 So, you see, the thing to understand is that that is an enormous structural change in the country.
00:32:36.000 And before you decide whether or not you like that, And there are many people who do, by the way, although they are not particularly candid in admitting that that's what happened, right?
00:32:49.000 But the first thing is to just see that.
00:32:52.000 In other words, this thing operates for an explicitly different purpose and under an explicitly different form.
00:33:02.000 That's what's dangerous.
00:33:04.000 Because if the government is very large, And you know, the latest thing is the constitutional system, which in the 63rd Federalist by Madison is explained.
00:33:15.000 He says that it's unique, this one feature of it, that the sovereignty is outside the government and yet the sovereign, us, don't get to do the governing things.
00:33:26.000 We don't meet as a legislature or execute the laws.
00:33:31.000 It's a delegation into the government from the sovereign, which is a check on us.
00:33:36.000 We need it too, by the way.
00:33:39.000 But now that means that the fulcrum of American government is elections, right?
00:33:48.000 And if elections are distorted, if they're being adjusted for obviously but never stated partisan purposes, Then the chances that the people will lose control of the government to a thing that is much bigger and more powerful than it used to be, although not much more competent than it used to be.
00:34:12.000 And more sinister.
00:34:13.000 Yeah, it's a day, it's a, you know, if you, you know, the argument between the people who love this kind of government because they love it because It's a modern world and now we have artificial intelligence and, you know, machines and all that.
00:34:29.000 And the Constitution is a really old thing, right?
00:34:31.000 And so that, you know, blah, blah, blah, we don't need that thing anymore.
00:34:36.000 Well, you can figure that out simply by just saying in the 51st Federalist, the most beautiful part of the Federalist Papers, Madison writes that government is the profoundest of all commentaries on human nature.
00:34:49.000 If men were angels, no government would be needed.
00:34:52.000 If angels were to govern men, neither internal nor external controls on the government would be necessary.
00:34:58.000 That's why the Constitution has its form or structure.
00:35:01.000 Now, these people who, and there's a lot of them by the way, I think our particular form of government today has become something like an oligarchy, which is the rule of a few according to their own interest.
00:35:18.000 Are these people angels?
00:35:21.000 Right?
00:35:22.000 Because if not, they cannot be trusted with unchecked power any more than any one of us can, or any more than the whole of us can.
00:35:35.000 If they're human, then this is dangerous.
00:35:39.000 And that's what settles the argument for me.
00:35:42.000 So Dr. Arnn, looking at this, do you think with the administrative state and the Leviathan against the people, it really is an oligarchy and a regime against you, the citizen.
00:35:54.000 That is what is really on the ballot in 2024.
00:35:57.000 And the deeper understanding, which you just beautifully put, is what is the form of government we're going to accept?
00:36:03.000 Are we going to accept the idea that the administrative state gets to choose our candidates and choose our president?
00:36:09.000 Because that really is what is happening here.
00:36:11.000 Is that you have a council of experts, a managerial class, desk workers, is what bureaucrats literally means in French, will be able to tell you who your president is by throwing the opposition leader 700 years in prison.
00:36:25.000 Dr. Arnn, I want to get two more questions.
00:36:27.000 One of them, how should we think about this historically?
00:36:30.000 We've never lived through this in American history.
00:36:32.000 Well, obviously, it can only be properly interpreted, in my opinion, as an insult to the sovereign people.
00:36:37.000 And I don't even think they understand it that way.
00:36:39.000 Mostly it can only be properly interpreted, in my opinion, as an insult to the sovereign
00:36:46.000 people. In other words, they have, and I don't even think they understand it that way. I
00:36:55.000 think that they have forgotten about the dignity of the majority.
00:37:00.000 And the majority, by the way, does not have the dignity of the divine.
00:37:05.000 The majority must operate under a constitutional form that checks them, too, from the violations of rights, which is part and parcel.
00:37:15.000 I mean, if you just read the middle of the Declaration of Independence and think backwards, they describe the bad stuff the king does.
00:37:24.000 All of the big ones are things that are explicitly forbidden in the Constitution of the United States, right?
00:37:28.000 So they're doing a lot of those things now, and that's very bad, and they do it Because I think they think that everything has to be, everything will be, everything is transformed.
00:37:46.000 That's an ideology, right?
00:37:48.000 That means that I've watched the birth of three children, we haven't adopted one of four, and I've met my grandchildren when they were A few hours old, right?
00:38:07.000 That process is the same as Socrates' children, right?
00:38:13.000 And that hasn't changed.
00:38:15.000 And those children, you know, they're smarter than everybody else's grandchildren, but they're two and three years old, and they're years from mature understanding.
00:38:29.000 That hasn't changed, right?
00:38:31.000 They need their parents.
00:38:34.000 My younger daughter got married and we had a thing for her the other day and she's already putting up with me explaining about the need for her to get some babies. 1.00
00:38:43.000 But I said, both Hillary Clinton and George Bush were wrong about the takes a village, takes a family argument.
00:38:52.000 I look around at this reception and see that it actually requires an army.
00:38:56.000 To raise a kid.
00:38:57.000 And, you know, all the friends that are going to be friends with this young married couple are there.
00:39:02.000 And that's, in other words, this family thing.
00:39:06.000 It's the same.
00:39:09.000 And we know today that when it suffers as it suffers, everyone suffers.
00:39:14.000 It isn't good, right?
00:39:17.000 So the point is, everything is changing, except the things that don't.
00:39:22.000 Right?
00:39:23.000 And the things that don't are obvious.
00:39:25.000 They slap you in your face.
00:39:28.000 You know, I deal with students the ages of 18 to 21.
00:39:32.000 I love them.
00:39:34.000 They're so easy to torture.
00:39:37.000 And the 18 year olds, you know, in August 400 of them are going to show up at Hillsdale College, right?
00:39:44.000 And they're going to be nervous as deer in the headlights.
00:39:48.000 It's hilarious, right?
00:39:50.000 And we all make fun of them, right?
00:39:53.000 But then the 21-year-olds, they're seniors now.
00:39:59.000 They think they own the place, right?
00:40:01.000 On the other hand, argue with a grown-up with whom you have a real dispute.
00:40:08.000 We don't have very many real disputes at Hillsdale College, but once in a while.
00:40:12.000 A 21-year-old is not really ready to do that yet, right?
00:40:16.000 That hasn't changed, right?
00:40:18.000 Those things are just obvious.
00:40:21.000 What they need to grow has not changed.
00:40:25.000 And yet, you know, Republican and Democrat have been guilty of portraying the schools as an engineering project to engineer the future.
00:40:39.000 And I don't make partisan statements much.
00:40:43.000 Well, I'm again the whole thing.
00:40:48.000 But Trump was better about that stuff.
00:40:53.000 He has a better idea.
00:40:55.000 I sat in the White House one day and said, I've been in 10 or 12 meetings like this about higher education and education in the White House.
00:41:06.000 This is the first good one I ever came to.
00:41:09.000 And it's why, because it wasn't a collection of people sitting in the room thinking, we're going to make human beings into something different than what they are.
00:41:21.000 So, Dr. Arnn, this is a difficult question, but historically, is there any guide of what should happen in November?
00:41:32.000 Well, what should happen, it's not a partisan statement.
00:41:37.000 We should have a fair vote.
00:41:40.000 That is to say, every citizen votes.
00:41:45.000 Much better if they vote in person, by the way.
00:41:48.000 But, um...
00:41:50.000 APPLAUSE The reason is we meet as the super legislative body on
00:41:59.000 election day, and it's better if we all have the same facts in front of
00:42:04.000 us when we do.
00:42:05.000 And Churchill says that beautiful thing, he says, the strength of Britain That the dictators will never understand is the little man alone in the voting booth deciding the fate of the nation.
00:42:22.000 That's what must happen in November, and I fear it will not.
00:42:29.000 Give it up for Dr. Arnn, everybody.
00:42:30.000 Thank you so much.
00:42:32.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:42:34.000 Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com, and check out charlieforhillsdale.com.