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!
00:00:21.000You can take their online courses and learning, character, faith, and freedom.
00:00:25.000They are inseparable purposes of Hillsdale College.
00:00:28.000They develop minds and improve hearts.
00:00:30.000Hillsdale College is a small, Christian, classical liberal arts college in southern Michigan that operates independently of government funding.
00:00:37.000Their students come from nearly all of the United States and a dozen foreign countries.
00:01:16.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:23.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:35.000Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
00:01:45.000Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com.
00:03:25.000I hear that all the time from conservatives.
00:03:28.000Or 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.
00:04:17.000And 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.
00:04:29.000It was well known, but it was not the behemoth or the machine.
00:04:33.000And by the way, all of you can benefit from what Hillsdale does.
00:04:36.000I take their online courses and I have over half of them completed.
00:05:41.000So, 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.
00:05:51.000I'm going to ask you a simple but deep question.
00:10:01.000The mantra of the Detroit Public Schools or Chicago Public Schools will be to create students to become social justice citizens.
00:10:09.000So 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.
00:10:18.000We're not trying to point them in any direction.
00:10:20.000What are the faults in both of those approaches?
00:10:23.000Well, uh, first of all, education is not something you do to anyone.
00:10:28.000And remember the whole thing with the government of the United States today is it's been converted into an engineering project.
00:10:35.000Its job is to work upon us to create the society.
00:10:39.000You know, they think they make the economy grow, right?
00:11:21.000And so we have to do the work of becoming.
00:11:26.000And you know, what are the virtues, right?
00:11:28.000There are two groups, intellectual and moral.
00:11:32.000That 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.
00:11:40.000I see that Charlie has invented new R's.
00:11:43.000But reading, writing, arithmetic, those are the human skills.
00:11:47.000Only human beings do those things, right?
00:11:55.000You 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.
00:12:29.000You 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.
00:12:39.000And I turned her into, her name is Janie Reardon, and if you go to the Leander Classical Academy, go to the kindergarten class.
00:12:48.000I've turned her into a tourist attraction.
00:12:51.000She, 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.
00:13:08.000And 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.
00:14:13.000And then once you settle that, now I'm going to contrast, you rightly characterized what they do in colleges these days, in schools, right?
00:14:25.000The first thing they do at Harvard, for example, in the orientation, is they basically tell you there isn't anything to know.
00:14:37.000And you have a right to your opinions.
00:14:40.000That's the worst thing in the world you can say to an 18-year-old.
00:14:46.000I 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?
00:15:01.000And I said, we don't give a crap about that.
00:16:37.000And 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?
00:16:52.000And that has entirely broken down now.
00:17:16.000And I thought, this spring, when they're all collapsing, I thought, well, finally, they're getting a bad name now.
00:17:23.000They're going to say to the troops, straighten up.
00:17:27.000You know, let's have college here for a month and dress ourselves up.
00:17:32.000They 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.
00:19:54.000In 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.
00:20:03.000It'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.
00:20:22.000If you just reason through, you know, like, I'm picking out the young over there because they're my forte.
00:22:24.000So, 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.
00:25:43.000But, you see, the family is unusually important to us.
00:25:48.000And 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.
00:28:23.000Yeah, 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.
00:28:47.000And you know American history unbelievably well.
00:28:51.000I'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.
00:29:03.000Well, it's the third great death throw of America.
00:29:10.000The first one came in the Revolutionary War, and the second came in the Civil War, and this is like that.
00:29:16.000And the reason it's like that is that we're debating the most fundamental things.
00:29:22.000Put them in the Aristotelian category.
00:29:28.000The most important thing about a thing is its purpose or final cause.
00:29:32.000And the next most important thing about a thing, these are all essential by the way, you can't take any out, is its form.
00:29:39.000Its form is how it looks and how it operates.
00:29:42.000So just stick to those two about America.
00:29:44.000The final cause of the United States of America is stated in the most beautiful political document ever written, the Declaration of Independence.
00:30:11.000And today we think human being is something to, we love the word, transform.
00:30:17.000I'm trying to Dismiss the word from my vocabulary.
00:30:22.000Because to give a thing a new form is to make it into something else, right?
00:30:27.000So the second cause of America is the formal cause, and that's the Constitution of the United States.
00:30:32.000And that is how the government operates.
00:30:35.000It'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.
00:31:54.000Now, 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.
00:32:17.000They don't take any government money, by the way.
00:32:24.000So, you see, the thing to understand is that that is an enormous structural change in the country.
00:32:36.000And 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?
00:32:49.000But the first thing is to just see that.
00:32:52.000In other words, this thing operates for an explicitly different purpose and under an explicitly different form.
00:33:04.000Because 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.
00:33:15.000He 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.
00:33:26.000We don't meet as a legislature or execute the laws.
00:33:31.000It's a delegation into the government from the sovereign, which is a check on us.
00:33:39.000But now that means that the fulcrum of American government is elections, right?
00:33:48.000And 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.
00:34:13.000Yeah, 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.
00:34:29.000And the Constitution is a really old thing, right?
00:34:31.000And so that, you know, blah, blah, blah, we don't need that thing anymore.
00:34:36.000Well, 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.
00:34:49.000If men were angels, no government would be needed.
00:34:52.000If angels were to govern men, neither internal nor external controls on the government would be necessary.
00:34:58.000That's why the Constitution has its form or structure.
00:35:01.000Now, 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.
00:35:22.000Because 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.
00:35:35.000If they're human, then this is dangerous.
00:35:39.000And that's what settles the argument for me.
00:35:42.000So 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.
00:35:54.000That is what is really on the ballot in 2024.
00:35:57.000And the deeper understanding, which you just beautifully put, is what is the form of government we're going to accept?
00:36:03.000Are we going to accept the idea that the administrative state gets to choose our candidates and choose our president?
00:36:09.000Because that really is what is happening here.
00:36:11.000Is 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.
00:36:25.000Dr. Arnn, I want to get two more questions.
00:36:27.000One of them, how should we think about this historically?
00:36:30.000We've never lived through this in American history.
00:36:32.000Well, obviously, it can only be properly interpreted, in my opinion, as an insult to the sovereign people.
00:36:37.000And I don't even think they understand it that way.
00:36:39.000Mostly it can only be properly interpreted, in my opinion, as an insult to the sovereign
00:36:46.000people. In other words, they have, and I don't even think they understand it that way. I
00:36:55.000think that they have forgotten about the dignity of the majority.
00:37:00.000And the majority, by the way, does not have the dignity of the divine.
00:37:05.000The majority must operate under a constitutional form that checks them, too, from the violations of rights, which is part and parcel.
00:37:15.000I mean, if you just read the middle of the Declaration of Independence and think backwards, they describe the bad stuff the king does.
00:37:24.000All of the big ones are things that are explicitly forbidden in the Constitution of the United States, right?
00:37:28.000So 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.
00:37:48.000That 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?
00:38:07.000That process is the same as Socrates' children, right?
00:38:15.000And 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.
00:38:34.000My 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.
00:38:43.000But I said, both Hillary Clinton and George Bush were wrong about the takes a village, takes a family argument.
00:38:52.000I look around at this reception and see that it actually requires an army.
00:40:55.000I 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.
00:41:06.000This is the first good one I ever came to.
00:41:09.000And 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.
00:41:21.000So, Dr. Arnn, this is a difficult question, but historically, is there any guide of what should happen in November?
00:41:32.000Well, what should happen, it's not a partisan statement.
00:42:05.000And 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.
00:42:22.000That's what must happen in November, and I fear it will not.