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The Charlie Kirk Show
A Catholic, a Jew, and an Evangelical on Saving the West with Sohrab Ahmari and Josh Hammer (Part 1)
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Charlie Kirk
Hey everybody. My conversation with Sohrab Amari and Josh Hammer about tradition. A Jew, a Catholic and an evangelical talk about the future of America. Think you'll enjoy this conversation. If you want to support our program, you can do so@charliekirk.com support. That's charliekirk.com support. Email us your thoughts freedomarliekirk.com and if you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, you can do so@tpusa.com A Jew, a Catholic, and an evangelical talk about the future of America. Buckle up, Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
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Sohrab Amari
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
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Charlie Kirk
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
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Sohrab Amari
I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy, his spirit, his
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Josh Hammer
love of this country.
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Charlie Kirk
He's done an amazing job building one
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Josh Hammer
of the most powerful youth organizations ever
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Charlie Kirk
created, Turning Point usa. 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. How many years have I been telling you about Relief Factor? A lot. Truth is, I know millions of people. In fact, some people say over 100 million people are struggling with some kind of pain, maybe from exercise or just getting older. Now, Pete and Seth Talbot, they are on a mission. You rarely see this kind of focus and commitment. They recently shared with me that they are doubling down and want to literally double their total number of happy customers in the next year. And I believe they'll do it. So here's the deal. Go to relieffactor.com that's relieffactor.com or call 800 583. 84. People ask me, tell me why Relief Factor is so successful in lowering or eliminating pain. I'm often asked that question. So maybe you want to be able to do cartwheels or be able to do backflips like producer Andrew. Maybe you want to be able to run a marathon, swim underseas, swim underwater, go scuba diving, jump out of an airplane. But maybe it's your knee pain, back pain, joint pain, whatever pain it might be. Maybe Relief Factor is for you. Reliefactor.com, 100% drug free. Check it out. Reliefactor.com Good morning everybody. You have an amazing day planned. I've been so excited about this conversation that we have today. With us is Sohrab from the New York Post. We just had an amazing conversation on the Charlie Kirk show and Josh Hammer from Newsweek and we wanted to have this discussion around different religious views, all agreeing that we need to save Western civilization. And I want to kind of start this conversation first by asking, what is Western civilization? So we're going to talk about this from an evangelical Protestant standpoint, from a Jewish standpoint, and then a Catholic standpoint, which I think is going to be really fun and exciting. So Josh, welcome and walk us through. First of all, what is Western civilization? All right.
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Josh Hammer
Yeah. So thank you, Charlie. Thanks to Turning Point for having me. I'd be remiss if I didn't also thank Charlie for being a Newsweek columnist. So thank you for that and yeah, great to be here. Saurabh and I got dinner last night. We were joking about how we can possibly talk about how to save the west in 30 minutes. So let's kind of dive right in and get right to the point here. So I mean, Leo Strauss famously defines Western civilization as kind of the ever existing tension between Jerusalem and Athens, between the Bible and between kind of Greco Roman reason, if you will. I think that's a good place to start. You know, I'm a research fellow at the Edmund Burke foundation, which is Yoram Hazoni's think tank. It's a home for kind of national conservatism. And we think of the nation state, the nation state as being directly derived from the Hebrew Bible, actually the tribes of Israel themselves kind of being the original the OG nation state, if you will. So I think just recovering a sense of biblical identity and the importance of the nation state in contrast to globalism, in contrast to all sorts of kind of utopian global ideals is a good place to start. So it starts with the Bible truth, Jerusalem, Athens, and then obviously Rome as well, which is more my good friend's territory.
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Charlie Kirk
Of course, there's a lot there. And so Saurabh, you have an interesting perspective on this. So can you tell us what makes the west different? Why is this worth preserving? And dare we say, is the west better than other civilization projects currently or previously?
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Sohrab Amari
So I would define the west not too dissimilar from what Josh shared as the combination of Greek philosophy, Roman law and Judeo Christian religion. And what's special about that combination is this view that man and woman are at home in the world, that there is that using reason we can understand the world. And because we are part of a whole that is a legible whole that can be discovered using reason, we can also understand what it means to be happy as a human being. And then the Christian dimension comes in, the dimension of Revelation. And that points out that although we have some natural ends that are good for us, we flourish in families, we flourish in political communities, there's the health of a body that you can discover and learn about, but that there's also a supernatural good that ultimately points us to a transcendent horizon beyond this world. So we're of this world, we are in this world, but not of it. But nevertheless we love it because it's God's creation. I think that. And we can ultimately then help people reach that flourishing using law, which is where the Roman aspect comes in. So that tension between those three, that synthesis between those three is the west. And it's made for a truly glorious, beautiful civilization.
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Charlie Kirk
So I hear from both of you that it's this balance between reason and revelation. So Saurabh, I want to ask you, do you think that there's been an overemphasis on reason, almost over emphasizing the Enlightenment and almost putting away the tradition of what is a transcendent order? Who are we and how are we supposed to live? How are we supposed to strike that balance? Because you're saying that we shouldn't forsake reason. It sounds like an argument that Thomas Aquinas would make about how reason being a gift from God. At the same point you say if we govern solely by reason, then all of a sudden we start to have a massive issue on our hands. Can you help us navigate that?
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Sohrab Amari
Well, I would reformulate the question. I would say that the Enlightenment modern view is an unfortunate narrowing of reason compared to what the pre moderns, the ancients and the medievals, thought reason could accomplish. The modern view is generally that reason is only that which can be known with our senses, what we can measure with our scientific instruments, and that's reason. And everything else becomes revelation or opinion or superstition. Whereas the tradition that stretches from Aristotle to St. Thomas Aquinas says no, actually we can also know by reason we can know of God's existence. We can know that there is an objective human good, that human beings flourish in one way and not in other ways. And we can make these judgments about them. So what we live in is not only the fact that God has been banished unfortunately from the modern Western, but we've actually got a narrow, too narrow account of what reason can do.
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Charlie Kirk
I think that's really well said. So Josh Saurabh mentioned something and so did you. There is this idea of objective truth. It's something that we don't like to talk about very much in the last 20 years. In fact, we play into this idea of my truth. I'm sure a lot of you have heard that on your college campus or your high school campus. How many of you have heard that recently? It's my truth. Is there such a thing as my truth? And what happens when we decide to organize society around everyone's independent view of how they think society should be organized?
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Josh Hammer
So, I mean, the short answer is that, no, of course not. There's no such thing as, quote, unquote, my truth. So, yeah, I would be remiss if, you know, as the Jew on a panel with one evangelical, a Catholic and a Jew, if I didn't talk about Judaism here a little bit. I think it's important. So today is actually Tisha B'Av on the Jewish calendar, which is actually the saddest day on the entire Jewish calendar. It's a fasting day. You won't see me eating today or anything. Both the first and second temples were destroyed on this day. Lots of other tragedies happened to the Jewish people on this day. The edict of expulsion from the Kicking the Jews out of England happened on this day in the year 1290. The Nazis began the rounding up of the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka in 1942 on this day. So I was actually in the Warsaw ghetto in Treblinka less than two months ago. I was over there in Poland. And it's kind of a very roundabout way of answering your question, Charlie, but it was my first time seeing the ghetto, seeing the death camps for myself. And when you see that level of human depravity, when you see that level of evil, but you also learn the good stories. You learn about the heroes, the people on the outside of the walls of the ghetto who helped the Jews. So the heroes in the camps themselves, you see that there's also such good, that human beings are capable of such good. And it was very difficult for me to kind of walk away from that with such a kind of moral relativism of, like, my truth, your truth, his truth, her truth. There is such thing as good, there is such thing as bad. And from my perspective, it obviously starts in the Bible. And, you know, I think the three of us probably have slightly different definitions, I'm sure, of, like what the Bible is and what that contains and what to make of that. But that is. That is where truth begins, obviously, is in the Bible.
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Charlie Kirk
And so, Josh, let me just follow up. You know, so in the Jewish belief of the Old Testament, it's this belief in the law that was given by God. And so if you were to even say that on a college campus, you will be ridiculed and mocked, that the divine would give you a way to live your life using the best reason based argument you can. Can you help equip the audience here of how do they tell their friends on a secular type college campus? No, there actually is a law and if you follow it, it will actually make you more free. Can you help us walk through that?
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Josh Hammer
Yeah, no, this is a fabulous question. I think Saurabh and I both have a lot of thoughts on this exact topic actually. So there is this paradox, there is this mentality that has really kind of creeped in, in the United States and a lot of Western civilization for the past half century. Really more than that. The past century, Century and a half, at least a lot of it is kind of is intellectually downstream of the Enlightenment of particularly bad strands of Enlightenment thought, I would add. The Enlightenment is obviously complicated. The Scottish Enlightenment is a heck of a lot better, for example, than other strands. But let's simplify and say that a lot of this kind of, this intuition that we are free when we are, when we have maximum consumer choice, that we are free when we can use whatever social media platform we want to realize self realization, self potential. You know, I'm a lawyer. I'm a lawyer by training. In one of the more infamous Supreme Court cases of the past 30, 40 years, the Planned Parenthood vs Casey case, which effectively reaffirmed Roe vs Wade in 1992, Anthony Kennedy has this utterly ridiculous passage, lawyers call it the mystery passage, where he talks about how like the great achievement in human life, it's the eternal mystery, it's everyone's duty to define his or her own existence. That's kind of this mentality to its climax, right? All this is nonsense and it explains a lot as to why Western civilization has just gone totally off the rails. Sohrab has been adamant about this, probably more eloquent about it than basically anyone in this space. I don't want to take up too much of his time, but there is a different conception of freedom. There's a different conception of freedom that is not just libertarian live and let live. There's a different conception of freedom, that true freedom, that true liberty can only be attained and fulfilled by through living a virtuous lifestyle with certain constrictions and parameters and barriers in place. When the founders, you know, we speak of the founders in broad terms. The founders disagreed about this among themselves. Perhaps Jefferson, when he spoke of, you know, self evident truths, he had this more enlightenment motivated, kind of strong form of Lockeanism. But there were other founders too, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, who definitely adhered to this more traditional view of freedom. And you know, we see current politicians today. A lot of what Senator Josh Hawley is doing, for instance, is really trying to I think kind of recover this definition of freedom. So that is what Saurabh and I and a lot of our work are trying to do. For sure.
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Charlie Kirk
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Sohrab Amari
Yeah. So the argument was. And it's not just drag Queen Story Hour, which as a. At the time, I was a recent father, and it did outrage me the fact that, you know, drag queens, I live in Manhattan. I actually happen to live literally above a drag bar. And Josh has seen it because my place, you know, that's one thing because it's known as, okay, that's where you go, you have your, like, if you're about to get married, you know, you have your bridal party at the drag, fine. But to then to say that this needs to be brought forth in front of children and to say, well, you know, this kind of, kind of frank, frankly, transvestic fetishism should be normalized for kids outraged me as a father. Maybe it's because I'm from the Middle east, but I think a lot of Americans who aren't from the Middle east have the same intuition that there's something gone really wrong civilizationally when we, when we, when that happens and someone dressed in, like, latex boots up to here is. Is reading books to toddlers is bizarre. And so I argue that some of this has to do with precisely what Josh said is this account that freedom just means having maximal choice and having as much autonomy as you want. And what that paradoxically does, because it gets rid of various traditional limits, it makes us less free. We see this in gender ideology so much more. Right. Gender ideology was initially began as this claim about, look, you know, I subjectively believe that I'm a woman, but I've been born into the body of the man. Why don't you recognize it and let me do what I want? It doesn't stop there, because my demand for full autonomy begins to become, you have to recognize me as such, therefore, you have to alter your language, therefore, we have to create a new pronoun system. Therefore, you may be banned from social media if you use the wrong pronoun, and so on and so forth. So I know she's speaking here when, when Tomi Lahren said, well, why are people picking on Caitlyn Jenner, of course, or the person formerly known as Bruce Jenner, of course. We have to object to any kind of bullying or viciousness to anyone because everyone is born in the image of God. But why is it important? It's important because reality itself is at stake. Those traditional constraints preserved our ability to have access to reality and not to be forced to. To say something that is not true, such as the idea that a man can ultimately become a woman. No. Gender differences are fundamental. You don't need to go to Genesis to know this it's in genetics.
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Charlie Kirk
And so can I follow up on this? And I totally agree. And we're, we're an educational organization, not commenting on politics. I said this on television, that a man who thinks that he's a woman has no place running in the Republican Party in any position whatsoever. And so, and so I, I want you to kind of help our audience here, though, because if they said what you and I just said, you know, you run like the oldest newspaper in the country. You know, I run Turning Point. In some ways, I'm not going to have to get some sort of crazy activist coming up to me in some, you know, North African lesbian poetry class at their school. Right. So how are they supposed to defend their peers? Who will call them transphobic? Who will call them hateful and bigoted? That traditional gender roles, not just. Let's forget traditional gender roles. How about, like, just a man is a man and a woman is a woman help equip our audience to be able to be prepared for that.
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Sohrab Amari
Yeah. I mean, the language to use is the language of, of equal indignity, but also different. Men and women have, have equal dignity, but they are different. And when you attempt to cross that boundary, it ends up in far worse coercion than what we had before. Again, it's the coercion that you face on campus. But I will say this. You and I and Josh can withstand cancel pressure, right? When, when I work at the New York Post, when the Hunter Biden story, which we did, I was not involved because I run, I helped run the opinion pages when we did that. As you remember, Facebook banned our reduced circulation, our story. Twitter banned our accounts. You couldn't even use direct private messages to share our story, which remains to this day to be true. Hunter Biden has not said. Those were not emails. That was not my laptop. He could have done that 24 hours, two hours after the story dropped. They didn't. It was a true story that was censored. But look, we can fight back. I can go on Fox. My colleagues can go on Fox. We can make our case. And ultimately, we prevailed as much as you can. At least we got our account back. And now you can share that story, but the ordinary person can't. Which is why those of you who are concerned about tradition, as much as you have to show personal courage on campus or in your workplaces, we also have to seek political solutions because you're individually, we are too alone. We have to. The pressure of big tech is a matter of fundamental danger to what matters. Political speech. Right Section 230 of the Communications Decency act in 1996 was enacted in order to keep prurient content out of these bulletin boards, like Facebook, like Twitter, which would come a few years later, but not to suppress political speech. Perversely, now they use Section 230 to repress conservative political speech, but all sorts of prurient content can be found on their, on these platforms. And that when you have, especially the collusion of government, when you have the Biden administration telling these firms that you have to censor X, Y and Z, you're dealing with something else. It's this blob of corporate government power and political power action of the time that would have been recognizable to an Andrew Jackson is what we need.
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Charlie Kirk
So, Josh, I want to kind of get into this because we have been told as conservatives, the only way to save the west is through cultural transformation and being able to make better arguments. I agree with all of that. And as an evangelical, I think that we need to realize we're in a spiritual battle, not just in a material battle. And I think that, you know, in the specific, you know, religious view that I have, that just, you know, talking about things that we can see is a mistake. However, so, so often conservatives say, well, I agree that Drag Queen Story hour is wrong. I agree that, you know, I don't want to see men go into a restroom that's a woman's restroom. But who am I to legislate morality? Who am I to use political power? Josh, is it time to start using political power?
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Josh Hammer
The time for that has long since passed, I think, is the short answer. Look, anyone who is answering no to that question does not understand what time it is in America. If you are looking at what is happening out there. We are obviously over 100 years into the Woodrow Wilson kind of progressive transformation, but this transformation happened quite a bit before then. But you can go back again to the writings of the American founders, a very kind of intellectually and politically diverse group, but they spoke all the time about the duty, the obligation of legislators, of lawmakers to pursue a politics oriented towards human flourishing, justice, and the common good of the whole. The Preamble of the United States Constitution enumerates seven substantive ends for governance. I don't have them all memorized verbatim, but a more perfect union, promote the general welfare, domestic tranquility, secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Which, by the way, that that latter phrase is often, from my perspective, misinterpreted. A lot of people, you know, this became Kind of like a running joke, like, you know, hashtag blessings of liberty in this drag queen story hour context. It's kind of like a Twitter meme at this point. But that's totally, totally wrong. If you actually look at what the, the phrase secure the blessings of liberty is saying it's the blessings that they're trying to secure. The liberty is an instrumental means to achieve those substantive blessings, which of course are downstream of biblical principles. But more generally speaking, here, look, you know, the, the late Andrew Breitbart, you know, may his memory be a blessing. You know, famously said over and over and over again that politics is, is downstream of culture. I guess my reaction to that is always it, it's a two way arrow. The two like very clearly do relate to one another. I think legislators, I think political statesmen, even judicial statesman, frankly that our best judges, you know, Chief Justice John Marshall in the early 19th century, the greatest, even justices have understood this, that there is a powerful role for the state to also use the levers, whether it's the political levers or the judicial opinion levers to influence culture as well. And look, we have to know what time it is in America. I realize I've said that already but like that you guys are the future. I mean you have to look out there and see what the left has done. And I guess here's kind of the other thing I'll say about this. Look, Saurabh's already talked about this a little bit. You know, Ronald Reagan famously said that the most terrifying words the English language were I'm from the government and I'm here to help. That probably was true at the time he said that. I don't think that's true anymore. I think the most terrifying words in the English language in the year 2021 are, I'm from the ruling class and I'm here to subjugate you. That is what we see with this new Biden administration, you know, countering domestic extremism document. That is what we see with this grotesque partnering with the federal government in big tech, most recently this Facebook Covid misinformation stuff. We have to get in there. It is way past time for us to get comfortable, use the levers of power to get in there and try to steer this ship back in a direction that is healthy, sustainable again towards those overarching substantive ends, justice, human flourishing and the common good before it's too late.
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Sohrab Amari
Just very quickly, to Republican legislators that say legislators, but also intellectuals of a kind of establishment older generation who say, well, my purpose in being in government is just to not use government power. Then why are you in government? I'm sorry, but in any civilization across all of human history, people go into government to use power. It's only this bizarre class of the, of the GOP establishment, I think, which relative recently has convinced itself its role is to not use power. Of course. And anyone who labors still under the idea that, you know what, the public square can be neutral, so and so can believe that there are 157 genders. I think there is only two sexes, but we can go doesn't work that way. And that's an obvious example. There are many others of this kind where we see that one way or another, some orthodoxy or other will be enshrined in the public square. So it might as well be a true orthodoxy, one that says that God is logos itself, reason itself. One that says that man and woman are made in the image of God and therefore they have an inherent dignity. That's the orthodoxy that the west has, broadly speaking, enshrined and should be enshrined again.
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Charlie Kirk
And the great irony of it is that each side did the opposite of what the other side was afraid of. And so, for example, it's now the left that is mandating vaccines and trying to control your body, which is what we're always accused of when it comes to the life argument. And we're the ones that are totally indifferent when you want to do something that is probably, you know, not good for society, which is always what we accuse the other side of doing, of kind of just being indifferent. It's this kind of, it's all the kind of accusations have now been kind of absorbed as kind of behavioral, you know, traits in each side, which has been a really bizarre thing to see. Saurabh, I want to ask you this as a follow up though. Someone like David French would say, who you know very well from your debates, you're nothing more than a central planner. You want to use political power because you don't trust people to have their own ability to self govern. There's two statist movements and one calls themselves conservatives, one call them self liberals. Is that true? Are we just central planners? Now is the era of big government here.
- [26:53]
Sohrab Amari
I'm going to appeal to authority. I'm going to appeal to authority because someone like David French or other of my and Josh's kind of interlocutors or our critics in the conservative movements make this point. They say that we just, what we want to do is exhort people to virtue and just Evangelize the culture and that will do its job. And I totally believe in evangelizing the culture. Of course, it's the Great Commission in the Bible, Our Lord says, go baptize nations in my name. That's fine. But the ancients never thought that mere evangelization or mere exhortation was enough. It had to have the force of law. Because most people, because of their fallen nature, need the guidance of law. The law is a teacher. St. Thomas says exhortations to virtue are good, but they're not enough. You also need some coercive dimension. And if you say, well, coercion is bad, well guess what, you coerced one way or another. If you're afraid of government coercion, as Josh said, how much more should be afraid of a coercion of a few Silicon Valley dweebs in Birkenstocks who wield enormous power to make unperson you disappear you from the Internet and therefore so much of your identity is erased. And you don't have a supreme Court to go to. You don't have a legislator to go to. It's a private company. So coercion is inevitable. Again, the only question is what are you coercing for? What means are you using? Are you using them for reasonable ends or unreasonable ends? But the idea that you can have a society without coercion is fantasy.
- [28:36]
Charlie Kirk
If you choose to believe Google, then all you need to do is surf the Internet privately in incognito mode in your browser. And we're supposed to think that we trust big tech? Well, wrong. It doesn't matter what the browser mode you have or you clear your browsing history. Your Internet service provider can see every single website you've ever visited and they can even sell your data to advertisers. That's why I use ExpressVPN to keep my online data secure and private. ExpressVPN makes sure your ISP, Internet service provider and third party trackers can't see your online activity and location. It does that by rerouting your connection through a Secure encrypted server. ExpressVPN is also the fastest and most trusted VPN on the market. That's why they've rated number one VPN by cnet. So protect your online activity today. With a VPN that I trust to keep me private, visit expressvpn.com Charlie I use ExpressVPN and you guys should as well. It's on my phone and my laptop right now. You can get an extra three months free on a one year package that's ExpressVPN.com Charlie right now to learn more. So, Josh, what does this look like? So you say it's time to use political power. It's time for us to use the institutions and the instruments that were given to us. And by the way, I want to be very clear, when a conservative has political power, they did not stage a coup to get it. It was given to them by the consent of the governed.
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Josh Hammer
But what does that look like?
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Charlie Kirk
Does that. Because the fear, just so we're all clear, is some conservatives, and I hear you with this fear, they start, their alarm bells start to go off. It's a five alarm fire. They're like road to serfdom, fa hayek, tanks in the streets, surveillance state 1984. We can't do that. We might as well do nothing. What do we do?
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Josh Hammer
Right? So I mean, part of this depends on which sphere of government we're talking about. So, you know, on the state level, a lot of the action nowadays is obviously at the state level. Look, there's a debate right now on the right as to whether we should actually ban the indoctrination of critical race theory of which is effectively anti white, anti Christian, anti Jewish racism as far as I see, whether we should actually use the powers of the state to ban this outright or to just let it be. You know, the predictable actors have all taken their kind of usual battle lines, this debate. The short answer is, of course we should ban critical race theory. I mean, properly, this is, you know, hold aside the fact that it's already illegal under title VI of the Civil Rights Act. But of course we should feel comfortable at a state level banning the racial indoctrination of our children to hate their heritage, to hate their race and all of that. At a local, kind of municipal governance level, of course we should get on board with banning Dread Queen story hours. And then at the federal level, you know, we talked about the tech issue, the big tech issue. One of the reasons that I find it so interesting is really it's kind of tip of the spear for this kind of broader discussion. Here really is kind of big tech is the ruling class's quote, unquote, private sector enforcement army. That's, that's exactly what happened to Saurabh at the New York Post with this Hunter Biden story. You know, I call it their Pearl harbor attack. At the time when Facebook and Twitter kind of, it seemed to me to kind of gang up and suppress this Hunter Biden story. Little did I know that literally, you know, two and a Half months later, in January, after January six, what happened to Parler? It was naked collusion. It was literally naked collusion from Apple, Amazon and Google to that. So what do we do about that? Well, it's kind of an all of the above strategy. We talked about Section 230 reform. Any conservative who calls himself conservative who does not see the imperative of trying to get rid of Big Tech's gratuitous Section 230 immunity again does not see what time it is. And there are other things too we need to get more comfortable with antitrust enforcement. For example. There's a very long Republican Party tradition of antitrust, by the way. It was literally a Republican policy when it was founded. John Sherman, who gave his name to the Sherman Antitrust act, was, was the brother of William Tecumseh Sherman, you know, the, the famous general for the union in the Civil War. Teddy Roosevelt, of course, was a Republican. The great trust buster. And then of course there's a common carrier regulation as well, which Justice Clarence Thomas had a fabulous recent Supreme Court writing on. These are all things I'm thinking about that I'm writing about. But Big Tech is really the tip of the spear at a federal level for kind of putting this into action, I think.
- [32:43]
Charlie Kirk
So, Rob, a lot of these students here are going to go back to campus for the first time in a long time. And they're going to come back to a campus environment for some of them will be even more hostile and even just quite honestly unrecognizable. I think that just to put yourself in their shoes, many of these students kind of had a half campus experience this last semester with very little activism on campus for obvious virus protocol reasons. Some students were online. But this is the first semester where it's going to be college again for the first time in almost a year and a half. And since then we saw the BLM Incorporated kind of, you know, just, I could call it a revolution almost in the last year, not for the better. And so a lot of the students here are going to be asked the question in their class and from their friends, why is this civilization worth saving? It's colonialist, misogynistic, hateful, homophobic. Don't you realize this is nothing more than an oppressor and oppressed scheme? Give them a little bit here of how they can deal with that because they are constantly bombarded with this line of propaganda.
- [33:55]
Sohrab Amari
Well, I mean, you have to defend the West. But what I would do is I would defend the West. Rightly understood. And again, I will repeat this Greek philosophy, Judeo, Christian religion and Roman law, that combination. And it's, it's the source of an incredibly humane civilization. It's the source, as I said, of a civilization that says that, that, that God so loved the world that he sent his only son and that son, that, that that person is truth, is reason itself. Now, now if you do that, then you don't, you can be nuanced. You know, they bring up some colonial crimes. Time you say, yeah, that was bad. It fell short of what the civilization, civilization's true meaning was, but also then put it into perspective next to civilizations that, that, that didn't have that. And so the barbarism, you know, of the Roman Empire before, before its conversion in some ways as, as, as wonderful of a civilization it was. It also had its barbarous aspects or, or, you know, the, the kind of civilizations of the Americas before the arrival. I mean, there was brutality there. But you can judge it all next to the absolute standard of truth, rather than trying to apologize for everything. You don't have to apologize. There's some things that were bad.
- [35:18]
Charlie Kirk
So, Josh, in closing here, there's this narrative that continues, which is that freedom is being able to do whatever you wish. We touched on this earlier. If you go to the Harvard Law School, in one of their stairwell corridors, they have this big saying that says the law is the wise restraints that keep men free. So I want everyone to think about this, that it's the restraints that you put on yourself that keep you free. It's not doing what you want to do that keeps you free. How do we take back the word of freedom? Because I think we have allowed these beautiful words of liberty and freedom, which the Greek words Eleutheria and Isonomia, we've allowed it to be corrupted into almost indulgence. Some would call it licentiousness. How do we take that back? And then it's hard for an 18 and 19 year old because there's kind of this I'm bulletproof and I walk on water mentality. How do, how do we win that argument?
- [36:13]
Josh Hammer
Yeah, and it's kind of million dollar question, obviously. First of all, I'm shocked that that
- [36:17]
Charlie Kirk
Harvard Law School, it'll be removed. Yeah, I keep mentioning it. It's just that Harvard will take that down in a blazing glory soon.
- [36:23]
Josh Hammer
Yeah, no, I'm shocked it's not already canceled, to be honest with you. But I mean, that was effectively that quote right there. That was the consensus. I mean, that was the way that human beings, whether in Jerusalem, Athens, Rome at English common law. You know, the United States, obviously we inherited the English common law. It's still kind of our state level law for property torts, all this stuff. The English common law was emphatically based on the quotation that Charlie just said there, that without restraints, without kind of an inherent orientation towards society, societal national interest, common good oriented virtue, that the law itself was not true law, that was not substantive law. So how do we actually kind of go ahead and take that back? Well, you know, I don't have all the answers, but I could just give a couple of ideas here. I mean, like I said, you know, there are I think some legislators, there are some politicians who I think get this. The fact that in kind of a hands off approach to big Tech is increasingly anathema in the Republican party is great, it's a great place to start, I think. But it ultimately, and so I've kind of hinted at this earlier, it has to go beyond that. The threat of woke capital, the threat of corporate power in general in America is very real. And I think there was a time, you know, where it probably made sense for the American right, for the GOP establishment, for the chamber of commerce, et cetera, to kind of get in bed and cozy up one other because you know, the corporations would promise more choice, more consumer choice, you know, lower prices, right? All this kind of like neoliberal fantasies that we were sold. And what was the result of that? What was the result of this maximal bipartisan neoliberalism? An unprecedented opioid crisis ripping apart the industrial heartland. Jobs shipped like you've never seen to China, to say nothing, of course of Mexico and countries in our own hemisphere. So we have to kind of just talk about and just get there in the public discourse through conversations just like this at the federal government level. Senators like Josh Hawley are kind of already saying things along these lines that freedom is only, is only true freedom insofar as we are looking out for the common good of the whole. Insofar as we are expressly legislating and enacting policies oriented towards that. So Tom Kahnen is another example. I'll just end on this note. He has a recent kind of policy proposal. I don't remember the exact details, but he basically would just would tax Harvard, Princeton, Yale, et cetera, their endowments, and then directly take that money to provide better access to kind of technical training, community college. These are exactly the sort of policies that we should be looking at. Whether they call us status authoritarians, leftist central planners, who cares? That's what we have to do. That is a time in America. And we can only just encourage it with conversations like this.
- [38:57]
Charlie Kirk
So here's how I want to close. I know that we're going a little overtime first, if you want to hear this conversation and the extended backstage conversation, if you guys can hear it on the Charlie Kirk show podcast, thank you for subscribing to it. If you guys aren't yet subscribed, if everyone in this room subscribed, we would beat Rachel Maddow in the New York Times, the podcast charts. So that would mean if you take out your phone and subscribe, it would mean a lot. And we're going to have some backstage conversations that we're looking forward to diving deeper. Here's how I want to end this conversation. So, Rob, talk about what your faith has meant for you. Talk about your faith journey. I know we have like 30 to 45 seconds. And just because some people out here might be drifting away from their faith, they might have been raised Catholic, they might have went to a Catholic school, and they're like, ah, I don't want to get involved in that. Talk about your own personal story.
- [39:43]
Sohrab Amari
Sure. I mean, I converted in 2000, December 2016. And I mean, I was. Thank you. I don't, you know, the church needs the claps, not me. But what it's meant to me is, you know, frankly, I mean, look, I was living my 20s, I was working as a, as a journalist in New York and London, but had this sense that there's more to life. And that sense found itself, its fulfillment, ultimately at the altar. And since this is a panel about tradition, tradition, the best definition I've encountered, it's the shortest, is tradition, is ordered continuity. That is, you have this sense that there are steps leading behind you, therefore steps leading in front of you. And to live within the bounds of tradition, you actually get a lot of confidence. Right. If I, that I know what I am, I'm a man and I will find my true fulfillment in family life, in having children. And that allows me to actually be free, to leap forward. And I can kind of eliminate a lot of distractions that I actually don't need. Once you do that, rather than being like looking inside yourself, who am I? What do I really believe? There are certain truths, really fundamental truths that have been handed down. That's tradition. Traditio is hand down and, you know, so you don't have to explore your insides for wisdom. You probably won't find it there when you have this. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. That's the beauty of all tradition.
- [41:13]
Charlie Kirk
And speaking of things that are traditional, basically the world's first religion. Tell us about your faith and what it's meant for you, Josh. Sure.
- [41:23]
Josh Hammer
So I mentioned Edmund Burke in passing earlier. Edmund Burke was not Jewish, to be clear, but he did famously speak of this notion of a partnership among the generations dead, dead, living and unborn. That is how I think about politics, and that's how I think about religion in general. I take an immense amount of pride and joy, frankly, in the fact that as a Jew, I can directly trace my lineage to Revelation at Sinai. It's an incredibly powerful thing for me. And look, I grew up personally in a fairly kind of secular home. I grew up in a Jewish home that would really only go for kind of the high holidays, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah. As I've. As I've gotten older, you know, now when I travel for conferences like this, when I go speaking and stuff, I always travel with. With my sitter, with my prayer book, with my Tefillin, which is what Jews always, every day, they wrap themselves with. It's part of the liturgical morning prayer, the shocker at service. And what I've learned, it's kind of similar, really, to what Sourabh said, is that you are not prepared, especially in this line of business, Charlie. In this line of business, you are, like, not prepared. We are not prepared to go out there and do kind of intellectual fisticuffs, to kind of engage in the. In the public square, to duke it out in the battle of ideas. If you don't have something to point to, you need something in there to guide you, to sustain you, to look at every single day, you know, as I've become more observant over the past few years, as I've come to kind of pray every day, I find that. And I only hope that all of you can find that as well.
- [42:58]
Charlie Kirk
It's wonderful. I want to keep talking to these two, and you guys can hear that exclusive stuff if you check out the podcast. For me personally, I gave my life to Christ in fifth grade. It's meant more every single year as I've gotten older. And it's been the most amazing thing. And I totally agree, Josh. In this space, if you don't have something anchoring you, and that means a person, personal relationship with Christ and realizing that I am not enough, that salvation is not going to be earned, and checking a bunch of boxes, but instead being obedient and accepting Christ into my life, and making him the chairman of the board of all of my decisions and everything that I do. And so I just want to say that this kind of conversation is really unique and we need more of it. And I don't think we disagreed on basically anything. But for all of you guys out here, the big takeaways are respect tradition to know that road ahead, ask those coming back. And Lord Falkland famously said that if it's not necessary to change things, it's necessary not to change them. And I think all of you can be articulate and compassionate, yet firm and courageous spokespeople for this beautiful gift that we have been given, which is Western civilization, quite honestly, the greatest experiment in self government in human history. And that's really what we're fighting here for at Turning Point USA to save the West. God bless you guys. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us your thoughts freedomarliekirk.com and if you want to support our program, you can do so@charliekirk.com support thanks so much for listening, everybody. God bless. For more on many of these stories
- [44:43]
Sohrab Amari
and news you can Trust, go to charliekirk.com.