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A
Hey, everybody.
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B
On this episode of the Charlie Kirk show, we have a special, unique and exclusive conversation with a brave liberal named James Lindsay. He's been on the program before. You are going to love his takedown of BLM Incorporated, Critical Race theory, and so much more, brought to you by our friends at ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN.com protect your data from big tech and big government by getting your VPN and ExpressVPN.com. charlie, if this conversation moves you in any way you feel this conversation needs to be heard by more people. And you want to support us before the end of the year and our team here on the Charlie Kirk show, go to charliekirk.com support. That's charliekirk.com support. When you support us, you allow us to reach millions of young people all across the country. A brave liberal named James Lindsay is here. Buckle up. Here we go.
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A
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
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C
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
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D
I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point usa.
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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. That's why we are here.
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A
James Lindsay, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
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C
Hey, Charlie.
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We have communicated digitally at first.
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C
Yep.
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And now in person. And you were at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit. How much hate did you get for being here today?
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C
A bit already. It's going to come in a flood. Yeah. Every time I talk to you, I get a mountain of hate for it, which is ridiculous. It's ridiculous.
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A
Just for exchanging ideas and exchanging ideas.
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C
But it's really association, this is the curse of our times, is guilt by association. You're not allowed to hang out with the. With the wrong people. You're not allowed to be friends with the wrong people. And somebody else is setting up who's who the wrong people are.
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A
This is such an interesting point. I want to start here, which is who's actually the one that gets to decide who is the untouchable? Can you ever redeem yourself from that if you say something incorrect when you're young or if you happen to take a picture with someone that you, you know, you shouldn't have? This entire idea of kind of being the moral referee of society has now impacted every single portion of our life, culturally, economically, politically. And they've come for you.
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C
Yeah, they have. So the people who get to decide are, I like to refer to them by a few different names, depending on who they are. Some of them are our betters, our betters in politics, our betters in the media. They know they have all the better opinions. Our betters are going to tell us. You know, we could call them the petite bourgeois, if we were French, I guess. But they're these people who think that they have the right opinions when they're more academic or public intellectual. I call them very smart people, those capital letters. They have the proper opinions and they are the ones who have the access, especially to media, so that they can call down dog piles on you. They can. They can put out a bad article about you, a hit piece about you. I had a book come out this summer. It made the bestseller list on every one of them. But the New York Times sold three times as many as other on the list, but didn't make it. And the people who make those kinds of decisions, largely in media, but some kind of a revolving door there with politics, as we're starting to find out more and more, those people, kind of that intellectual class, very fed by academia, which has been captured for 20, 40 years, maybe those people are making the decisions, the community guidelines, if you will, for who can talk and how they can talk, who can be friends and who they can be friends with, and they punish you with kind of social means because they can't use legal means yet. Yet.
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A
And they will use social media censorship. And what, what we're talking about here is so incredibly significant because it actually makes conversations like ours so incredibly rare. And so this shouldn't be a rarity, right? This should be normal, this should be regular, right? Where a conservative and a liberal and you say yourself, you call yourself socially liberal and almost everything, and moderate on the rest. Is that pretty much?
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C
Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
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A
But also, we agree on so many things. Really, really big picture things, right.
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C
And we agreed on voting for Trump, for example.
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B
Yes.
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A
Oh, you voted for Trump?
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C
I very. Yeah, I.
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A
Cause when we talked in August, you were kind of.
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C
I wasn't going to. No, I changed my mind. Watching the way that certain things are being handled. They started talking about packing the courts when all of a sudden, I mean, it was a little bit before that that I already decided, but once the whole laptop scandal just vanished and the New York Post got banned from Twitter for breaking it, I was like, oh, no, no. The job of the media is to hold power to account. And it's blatant that there's a candidate that they hold to account for things he didn't even do that just made up. And then there's a candidate that they won't hold to account for something that he did do. And I was like, that's it. You know, when you have that level of brokenness and dysfunction. But I had already decided. It was very specifically when they were talking about packing the courts. When they were talking about. Well, there was an article that came out that said abolish the Constitution.
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A
Yes.
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C
And I was like, they're crazy. They cannot be empowered. And people were like, oh well, Biden's moderate, blah, blah, it doesn't matter. He gets to appoint all this administrative stuff. Yes. The administrative state is not going to be accountable to voters. And it's huge. It's like 5,000 appointments. So you can cram a bunch of that stuff in there in low level appointments that nobody's paying attention to. So it's, it's just absolutely. It was a no brainer by that point. So I said it and then I had to go on TV and like three countries to explain myself.
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A
And, and so what ends up happening is this kind of academic to media pipeline that exists.
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C
That's right.
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Where there's a credentialing.
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C
That's right.
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Kind of wall.
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Whereas you do not have the proper
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credentials from the right schools. All of a sudden you're considered to be completely incapable of even discussing these topics.
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C
That's right. That's how the long march works. The long march to the institutions. Capture the education is really the most important first one. Then you can create that pipeline to the credentialed class. Credentialed class or who are going to be in the media, people with those proper opinions. They're going to go into politics. Once you get into that, you're in a trap. Okay. Because if you say the one wrong word, that's when they seize on you. Like you become the point of focus for maybe it's a day, maybe it's three days, maybe it's a week, maybe it's two weeks. And they do everything they can to make sure that your opinion is no longer going to be valid. But there's this pipeline through the institutions. It starts even now in kindergarten, all the way through our schooling, all the way through. But the big one is in the credentialing one. And I'll tell you, the biggest one here is the biggest thing. Nobody's talking about this. Nobody knows it. You cannot become a teacher in this country without going through a leftist indoctrination, a WOKE indoctrination. They captured the critical pedagogist, that's the technical name, captured our teaching colleges by the early 1980s. It is not possible therefore to get a public sector job teaching in this country without going through a political indoctrination to get credentialed. So you have these pipelines of credentialing and they do. The activists that are into this, they're cultural activists. They have a heavy duty preference, a very strong preference to want to take over places where they get to train people, where they get to set community guidelines for people, where they get to busybody manage people. So they want to be middle managers and the hiring managers and things like that to control the flow of people and information where nobody else really wants those jobs. And they, they create pipelines that feed their own thing in. Right. So that's what diversity is about. You hear diversity training. Well, it's to train people to only hire the right kinds of people. That's politically right kind. We think it's about identity, it's about politics.
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A
So how did this happen? I get this question asked me all the time. How is it that all of a sudden you cannot become a teacher, a fourth grade teacher without going through a leftist indoctrination camp. How did neoliberalism die in the education of our teachers?
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C
Well, I mean, there were a lot of activists starting in the early 70s that started to push it in education. The critical pedagogy story is absolutely crucial to understanding this.
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A
Marcuse.
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C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Marcuse. And so that's the long march taking place. They targeted education very vigorously. The universities made for a very soft target because they wanted to look progressive. This ideology, the WOKE ideology, which is just a new manifestation of kind of the underlying communist ideology. It plays upon certain things that academics are very susceptible to. One is open mindedness. You have to consider our idea. If you don't consider idea, you're a bigot. You have to consider it. You have to open up liberalism. You can think of the WOKE ideology like a virus and it attaches to the liberal body. And I mean that in the Thomas Jefferson small l. Yeah, small L. Liberal context. It attaches to that in our willingness to hear the argument, John Stuart Mill, to hear all sides of the argument from its best, its best proponents and to articulate that back and forth and to give as much charity as possible. That's the vector that the virus gets in. That's how it infects the cell and the universities. You have people who wanted to hear, they want to hear that, they want to take it up, they want to think about it. They have a overwhelming fear of looking like they're the stupid person in the room. So the second somebody says, well, you don't even know the definition of systemic racism, all of a sudden you've got an academic on his heels. So they just, you know, you're doing that kind of thing. I've got to learn this. I know. And then they're going to go get willing to be indoctrinated. You need to teach me. I need to learn from you. And then it's also most importantly, people who are afraid to not be liked. And academics tend to be actually surprisingly sensitive to that. Somebody else might not like them. Yeah, social pressure of their peers of that kind of storied academic class, almost like a. Almost like a priesthood now.
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A
But the idea of a professor used to be the exact opposite.
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C
That's. I mean, the point of tenure is the exact.
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That's the point I was about.
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C
The exact point of tenure is that you're. You can say whatever you want once you achieve enough to be qualified. The point of tenure was to preserve academic freedom, not to create a culture of conformity. And that got that. That's the answer to your question that got hijacked. So you had these. These activists filling the universities and kind of especially, you know, humanities departments at first and some social science departments. And what they started doing was creating the ability to credential themselves and people like them to give themselves tenure to start building. Out of the English departments were born women's studies first, then gender studies, then all the different ethnic studies departments. That was in the 60s, and then that has blossomed now into this whole kind of monstrosity. And since they're all activists, they all want to change the culture in the academy. They understand what I talked about at the summit. They understand that you have that politics is downstream from culture and the culture is downstream from education in the broadest possible sense, what you learn. So they started getting into the schools and they started credentialing themselves, making up their own fake academic disciplines and journals. I know all about their journals. I got right into that. You know, I got into their academic journals, published papers about dog sex, got an award in academic for, you know, academic excellence for publishing papers about dog sex in their journal. So you did. Yeah, that was me. It's called the Grievance Studies Affair. Look it up.
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A
And this was this the.
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The Prank.
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A
That was.
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C
Yeah, okay, I thought that was.
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I thought that was Boghossian.
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He was with me.
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Oh, you've got to be kidding me.
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C
Boghossian and Plautus.
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Okay, so you have to explain to our audience exactly what this is. Yeah, I thought it was just Boghossian.
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C
No, no.
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This is one of the greatest things that's ever happened in the history of Western civilization.
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It was technically mostly his idea, but I was actually the one who was in charge of making it happen. So we decided that the academic literature in these disciplines needed to be exposed for what it was, which is fraudulent. We needed to be able to show that these people are starting with their dumb conclusions. Including in the dog sex paper, for example. Including that it's acceptable to train men the way that you train dogs in order to combat this rape culture that they talk about. You can start with a conclusion and get yourself there. That's not academia. That is not scholarship. That's called sophistry. Okay? And so we wanted to prove it, so we started writing these fake academic papers, sometimes under fake names. We had one guy, perhaps professional bodybuilder, actually is this huge stacked 70 year old, like just ripped 70 year old Richard Baldwin, who let us use his identity to write. So we wrote a fat bodybuilding paper where, you know, you get up on stage and present how fat you are instead. But it's not a competition because they're against competition. So we wrote 20 papers in the span of 10 months. We submitted them and seven of them had been accepted. One about the dog sex, one an award for excellence in scholarship. One of them was a rewrite of a chapter of Mein Kampf using intersectional feminism.
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A
That one got accepted, right?
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That one got accepted by a feminist social work journal.
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Which school?
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Well, it's the journal's called Affiliate.
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Okay, so it's kind of like, yeah,
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they're separate from the schools, but yeah, the academic journal accepted Mein Kampf Free written as intersectional feminism. I mean, we kept a lot of Hitler's pathos, if you will, and some of his language. Exactly. It was pretty intense. So seven of those things got accepted. And then we still had seven more that were under consideration. By the time the Wall Street Journal caught us, the DocSex paper was just too over the top. And so journalists started asking questions. And eventually, you know, the Wall Street Journal called.
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A
Why didn't they ask questions out of the people that were accepting the papers?
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C
Well, they did, kind of, but they were trying to dig into the story and find out what was going on. So as the putative author of the paper, I had the email address for this Helen Wilson, PhD, who doesn't exist. They emailed me and I got this email from the Wall Street Journal and the journalist, I was like, oh, no, that's big. You know, I can deal with campus reform. I can kind of like, you know, get rid of them. I can't deal with the Wall Street Journal digging into it. They're going to do their due diligence properly. And they had, they had actually contacted the Journal and started asking really hard questions like, did you vet the identity of this person? So I also, that morning wok to an email that said from the academic journal, you need to provide, you know, proof of identity that you are who you are. And I was like, I'm not going to say that's racist.
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I don't do that.
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Yeah, I should have right now. But I wasn't going to go all the way into forgery for, for this, for the project. So the Wall Street Journal busted us, but we still had seven more that were out there. And I could do this all day now. I mean, so many of our papers have actually come true.
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A
Tell me one.
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C
Well, it's, you know, we want to avoid that mature rating on your thing. So we had one of our papers was that straight men would be less transphobic if they practiced, say by getting, as the, the term of art is pegged, if they. And that was, that was an article that just came out the other day, a real one. The peer reviewer called that a important contribution to knowledge. That's the exact quote. And it was all just fake, made up interviews. I just wrote these interviews. Absolutely ridiculous things that, you know, the. We allegedly interviewed people. I just wrote all of it. And I just wrote these absolutely ridiculous. I had these characters. I made up the characters separately. Like I was writing, you know, a comedy skit or whatever. And I just. What would they say? You know, it's like one guy's like,
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oh, I can't do that.
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C
There's poop up there. You know, it's like. And I put that in the academic paper. That's the key. It's like I put that sentence in the paper to put these ridiculous things. Important contribution to knowledge, Charlie. To knowledge.
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B
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C
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B
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A
And these are the people that are teaching our children.
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C
These are the people who are teaching our children. These are the people who are.
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A
This is not the onion.
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C
This is not the Onion. These are the people who are arranging. They are the ones that have the sway over the administrative decisions that the university is making.
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A
So this is even bigger than some third grade teacher. This is like the credentialing body.
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C
That's right. That's right.
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A
This is the NCAA of college basketball. This is the governing. One of the governing bodies of.
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C
This is the absolute gold standard of what we consider to be knowledge production and knowledge dissemination in our society. So when you have somebody who says something like, oh well, one in five women is going to be raped in her lifetime and blah blah, blah. They got this whole statistic that was done in a paper that's been heavily challenged at this point, that was published by these people. And so you've had, you even had President Obama stand up and repeat that as justification for the Dear Colleague project, the expansion of Title 9 and it turns out to be a very bogus statistic. They were very expansive in their definition of rape. It included many things that nobody would consider rape, like just being, you know, having somebody, like, try to kiss somebody or grab them or even accidental stuff or even, you know, after the fact, regret, relationship regret or whatever, all could fall into it. There were actual participants in the study who later found out that they were included in the 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 that it reported. And they're like, wait, I've. No, no, that never happened. That's not what I meant. And so this is when you hear somebody say, well, there's a study that says papers. There's academic papers that say, our scholars have said, this is who we're talking about. Not all of them. I mean, the physics journals are just only barely starting to do this with, like, I saw one recently, white empiricism that apparently they give white physicists a break that they don't give other races. Our medical journals now, though, are completely trashed. They're completely doing this. The New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, to some degree, New England Journal of Medicine is the worst. They're publishing at least, you know, some critical race theory article, almost several of them. I see one almost once a week now that that's coming out in the New England Journal of Medicine, which used to outrank the Lancet. Sorry, Lancet. But they. I think they did. That's our top medical journal. We're technically in the middle of a pandemic, and our medical journal is publishing crazy stuff that is based in critical race theory, which has no scientific basis whatsoever. It is a borderline, you know, religious, if you will, worldview in a very kind of twisted sense of religion, cult worldview. But there's no basis in science at all. In fact, it calls science a white supremacist construct to justify white power. So it's not scientific. And our medical journals are publishing this. I could write papers for medical journals just like we did before now. No problem.
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A
Can you give an example of one of those New England Journal of Medicine critical race theory?
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C
I would have.
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A
Without specific.
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C
I mean, the general thrust of all of them would be something like that racism is the real public health threat, or, you know, something like this or that racism is deeply infecting medicine. Who's really white? Something like that. So you'll see that, for example, you know, South Asian and East Asian doctors are doing extraordinarily well, so now they're white. And so that way they can keep the race narrative going, that it's. There's must be racial discrimination. Somehow. So now the ones that are doing well who aren't white are now white. Which is funny, by the way, because that's what they say is the problem, is that white is a political identification that white people had the power to expand to include who they wanted. And now that's exactly what they're doing, is expanding it so that they can use. Everything they do is projection, Charlie. It's iron law of woke projection, I tell you. So.
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A
You wrote an incredible book.
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C
I thank you. Yeah, I think it's good.
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A
And the New York Times decided to think it didn't even exist.
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C
The title is Cynical Theories.
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A
Walk us through what critical race theory is and why people should care about it.
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C
Okay, so the book chronicles the postmodern. I know that's a fancy philosophical term we don't have to dive into.
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A
Jacques Derrida.
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C
Yeah, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault.
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A
We've danced around this on our podcast. So our audience is a little bit
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C
more prepped for this.
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A
So lots of list.
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C
I got to make it a little more complicated for you, but you got two things that happened. One's older than the other. You have Neo Marxism, or Critical theory, which started in the 1920s. And then you have a different tradition that rose in France. It's called postmodernism, that arose in the 1960s. And what happened is in the 1980s, and going into the 1990s, they combined and became one thing. Jordan Peterson referred to it as postmodern Neo Marxism for a while, which is a mouthful, violating Carlin's laws of syllables and hyphens. But George Carlin, I mean. And so critical race theory is one of these that has adopted the postmodern ideas about truth into its otherwise Neo Marxist or Critical theory ideology. So critical race theory is a just to keep it kind of simple. It is a view about race and racism that begins with the assumption that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society. It explicitly says it is not an aberration. Racism is ordinary. And the people who are qualified, they have a critical race consciousness to be able to find the racism that's ordinary in everything that happens are called critical race theorists, and they use critical race theory to do it. And so a simple articulation of that that came from Robin D', Angelo, I think first in 2012, is the question under critical race theory is no longer, did racism take place? But how did racism manifest in the situation? So here's a good example of how it thinks about the world. Imagine that we own a store. I'm at lunch, you're alone working there. Two people come in at the same time, one white, one black, and you have to approach them to help. And it's one of those deals where you got to talk to them for a few minutes, you have to leave one person alone. And so you have to choose white or black. You have this binary choice. And so critical race theory says racism is present in your decision regardless of what it is. It's up to a critical race theorist to find it. So if you choose the black person, they'll say, well, that's because you don't trust black people to be left alone in your store. So that was racist. Or you realize that if you chose, you really wanted to choose the white person, but you knew if you did, you'd be thought of as racist. So you signaled by choosing the black person who you didn't really want to choose. Racist. Or on the other hand, if you had chosen the white person instead, they'd say, oh, it's obvious, you think that black people are second class citizens and have to wait, which is racist. So you can see it's a choose your own adventure kind of structure that always gets to the same place. Whatever you did was racist on the back end. This sets up a total grift where you can just accuse people of racism, get them to feel that guilt, get them no matter what they did. All you have to do is have a little bit of creativity to figure out how it's racist, then twist the knife on them and then use that. Whether it's for politics, whether that's for straight up grift. I saw one, somebody texted me today, some guy is like selling some furniture and he's moving. And somebody had texted him, is this still for sale? And the guy said, yes. And he said, well, have you considered donating it to a queer person of color for free? Like $700 couch or something? And the guy was like, no, and it was racist, was the immediate reply. That's critical race theory. That's the mentality. So that's in a nutshell kind of how it operates. But it is an attempt to use this Marx's idea of conflict, that same structure. We're going to pit the proletariat, the oppressed, proletariat, against the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, yeah. And the capitalists who are elites. You're going to pit them against each other in societal conflict. Except you take it out of producers and workers and you shift it over to racially dominant and racially oppressed. It's the Exact same architecture there.
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A
And I think it's really helpful if you help unpack how this is not a fringe ideology.
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C
Oh, yeah.
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A
So when I talk about this, the number one piece of response I receive is, okay, your summary is correct, but very few people are learning this. Very few people are teaching this.
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C
Okay, let me give you something. So as many of your viewers will know, the President, President Trump issued an executive order in September removing certain tenets of critical race theory from being able to be taught in federal agencies and federal contractors as a part of their workplace training. And it cannot be taught as a matter of uncontested fact in anything that receives federal dollars in the education system. It can still be taught as an academic subject. You can still have diversity training. We've been lied to about that. You can still have racial sensitivity training. It just pretends it's the only way to do that. Well, there was an article that came out just the other day in some one of these major newspapers that said one of the results of Trump's ban is that almost all diversity training has been canceled, which means basically every, everything has diversity training. Nearly all of it got canceled, which means nearly all of it must have contained critical race theory. It is not just on campus anymore, it is in hr. It's coming out of HR departments.
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A
In our military.
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C
It's in our military. It is that you talk about a national security threat. It is absolutely turning over the orders of protocol that you'd have in the military. It's creating racial division in the place where a split seconds racial division is life and death or failure or success of the mission. It's in our police departments. They're forcing police now to take all kinds of unconscious bias training, which is bogus. All these kind of race and diversity trainings rooted in critical race theory. I had a police officer send me a message, very stressed out and he said, we make split second decisions that are life and death for us and for the people that we're serving and protecting. And you add a few microseconds to that and somebody's dead. And now we have to, oh well, is pulling the trigger in this emergency going to be a racist, racist incident? You know, what am I going to do? You slow the whole process down. It's a catastrophe. It's in everything almost now
- [28:09]
B
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- [29:25]
A
A question I commonly get is what do these people want?
- [29:30]
C
Power. They want power, and it's not even about race. It's not like black power. They want power for the people who are part of this party that has these correct woke ideas. So if you're, if you are a minority, as a racial minority as they define it, who uses these ideas? You have lots of, lots of power. If you're a white person who uses these ideas, you're tolerated and accepted and as kind of in the club. And then if you are, for example, Kanye west is a great example. You know, Kanye is an interesting character. So he slaps on very famously, not so long ago, a year ago, or whatever, he slaps on Make America Great Again Hat. What's he say? He's like, I think for myself, you know, and what happened next? Ta Nehisi Coates, who's very fraud, very famous writer that's taken up this critical race theory stuff. Very famous. I think he writes primarily for the Atlantic.
- [30:19]
A
He also wrote Black Panther too.
- [30:21]
C
He was part of it. Did he? Yeah, he came out and said, connie is no longer black.
- [30:27]
A
Yeah.
- [30:27]
C
And then over the summer, we got our explanation. Nicole Hannah Jones of the 1619 Project, the new York Times explains that there's a difference between being racially black and politically black. And then mysteriously enough, she deleted that tweet, you know, with screenshots everywhere. But she deleted that tweet within, you know, an hour or something, very quickly, because, whoops, you're not supposed to say that part. So it's not about race. It's about having the correct woke politics.
- [30:53]
A
So.
- [30:54]
C
And they're after power, by the way, for themselves and to tear down Western society so that they can have the power.
- [30:58]
A
I think that's a good segue to really where I want the positive part of this, which I know it sounds like. What's the positive part of this, which is exactly kind of what on earth brought a liberal and a conservative, you know, a couple days before Christmas in Palm Beach, Florida, to talk about this is because this is such a, and I use this term intentionally, existential threat.
- [31:18]
C
That's right. We are in the jaws of a trap. And that that trap's going to snap shut and we're going to lose Western civilization.
- [31:26]
A
But I think there's a way to save it.
- [31:28]
C
That's right.
- [31:29]
A
And you said something so fascinating. My podcast, we have different religious views. I'm an evangelical Christian. I'll let you know. Describe your own views.
- [31:39]
C
No, I'm an atheist.
- [31:40]
A
Yeah, that. And that's a deeper. We could totally have that conversation at different time, but more pressingly is you have this really interesting theory that it's Protestant Christianity and people who are really, you know, from the Enlightenment that all of a sudden find themselves natural allies. How is that possible?
- [31:57]
C
Okay, there's two pieces to this. One is that the. The Protestant thing breaking off from the Catholic thing. The Reformation was a process of saying, no, we're not going to go through this gated institutional narrative, as Eric Weinstein would call it. We're not going to go through Cath. Church doesn't have to mediate the Bible to us. Let's print it in German, let's print it in French, let's print it in English. Let's learn this thing. Let's print it in the vernacular. That was a death sentence, by the way, at the time, to print the Bible in a vernacular language of Europe. And let's study the word and try to understand it. Let's study the objective truth as Christians hold it and try to understand it and get to the bottom of it. Exegesis is the primary tool, but there's history gets added in. Other subjects contribute. But the point is you believe in objective truth and you locate it in God.
- [32:45]
A
Yes.
- [32:46]
C
As an atheist, I would say that if I had to say I bow to a God, it's Spinoza's God, but Spinoza's God is the universe. Not in some kind of hippie way. In a way that there is something all around me, bigger than me, that I can't understand. And I'M subject to that whether I like it or not. And so there is an objective truth that is in that, and I have to set myself aside. Just like Christians know they have to set themselves. They have no standing against God. They have to set themselves aside. And because you believe in objective truth and I believe in objective truth, we have the ability to communicate. Our gods may be different if you accept, you know, the Spinoza's God construction. I don't mean to step on any religious toes, just as a metaphor for
- [33:30]
A
the moment, never offend me. Okay, good.
- [33:32]
C
So if, as long as you understand me, they may be a different perspective on things, but nevertheless we agree that objective truth exists and that the best ways to get at it are through things like enlightenment rationalism, whether that's applied to exegesis, whether that's applied to the scientific method, neutral principles of law, constitutional law, equality, theory under law, Newtonian physics minor Newtonian physics. You know, even Einsteinian physics, we know
- [33:59]
A
we're trying to get rid of those too.
- [34:00]
C
Yeah, well, of course. So it's a bit dated, but Sandra Harding, a feminist theorist in the 80s, wrote, I think in the. Trying to remember the title of the book, it's something like the Feminist Problem with Science or something like that. She wrote that Newton's Principia Mathematica was a rape manual. Yeah, yeah. So they're against the idea of objective truth entirely. That's why al summer I fought two plus two equals four. I fought for that two plus two equals four. I had to get that against people who were saying, you know, it can equal other things. And in particular, they doubled down into two plus two equals five. The reason was somebody who's high up in the Department of Education in the state of Washington. One of these activists got accused for her ethno mathematics program she's forcing into the schools, all the way down to kindergarten again in the state of Washington, that's being copied down the West Coast. She keeps getting accused of teaching two plus two equals five. And her reaction to that wasn't to say, no, that's not what we. We're doing. Here's. Here's what her reaction was. How can we turn this into a true statement? And the postmodern activists, the relativists, the subjectivists came to her defense, including Fields medalist winning mathematicians debasing themselves, saying the two plus two doesn't equal four. Now, my PhD is in math, but I don't need a PhD in math to know two plus two equals four.
- [35:17]
A
Right.
- [35:18]
C
Every kindergartner knows this. So that's. That's the difference.
- [35:23]
A
So now you see this alliance coming to go fight against Wokeism for freedom of speech and quite honestly, to save the west, right?
- [35:32]
C
Yeah, that's right. Do you like. Do you think that there's your truth and my truth and that those things.
- [35:37]
A
Of course not.
- [35:38]
C
No. There's the truth.
- [35:39]
A
I agree.
- [35:40]
C
And we have to.
- [35:41]
A
And the truth will set you free.
- [35:42]
C
That's what they say. Yes, that's right. So that's why you and I come together. That's why you and I can talk about. That's why this works is because you believe in the truth. I believe in the truth. I'm interested to hear your experiences in life, your lived experience, but that's not lived experience. I'm interested to hear your experiences in life and I'm interested to take that as indicative of something to do with the truth. And I'm ready to have the real investigation to find out what that real truth is. And so are you. So that's why we have this alliance between people who have different faiths, in our case, who have different politics. I'm sure in some regards, in our case, certainly the person I was a year ago, very different politics. And this, there is this repolarization to people who believe in truth versus objectivism. There's this repolarization between people who believe in freedom versus control.
- [36:34]
A
And there is a. There's a recalibration of putting together, putting aside any labels to say, maybe we should confront big tech woke ideology and preserve the West. Minor details.
- [36:46]
C
You can have minor things. Maybe we, we. We really do need to realize that there's so much at stake right here.
- [36:54]
A
So in closing, people ask me all the time, what can I do? You wrote a bestseller on this. Parents listening to this podcast. Tens of thousands are having their kids be taught critical race theory right now. What can they do?
- [37:05]
C
Stop sending money to the schools?
- [37:07]
A
What if it's their local public school?
- [37:10]
C
You have to start getting involved. You have to start learning enough about this to understand the basics. You have to start organizing with other parents. You have to start showing up. Why does your school district superintendent not know your name? Why are you not at the school board meeting? Why are you not at your city council meeting? You have to start getting involved if you're that everyday person
- [37:34]
A
at the local
- [37:35]
C
level now, if you're an alumnus of a big university, don't give them money if they teach this stuff. This is a fundamental threat to everything.
- [37:45]
A
Don't.
- [37:45]
C
It's not that. Somebody tweeted, I retweeted. I can't take credit for it. They said, you know, you have to stop giving them money. I loved my college experience too. It's not the same place. Start tell them you'll give them money when they quit doing this and put that financial pressure on them.
- [38:00]
A
Well said. Cynical theories. James, we're gonna have to leave it here.
- [38:03]
C
Right on.
- [38:04]
A
Thanks for joining. Appreciate it.
- [38:08]
B
Thanks so much for listening everybody. Email us your questions freedomarliekirk.com if you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com and if you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com support thank you guys so much for listening. God bless. Speak to you soon.