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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 2)
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Hey everybody.
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Part two of our episode of an Evangelical A Jew and a Catholic Try to figure out what's wrong with America. This is the private behind the scenes part of this. So share this with your friends. It's a lot of fun. I want to thank Amber from Indianapolis, Indiana for supporting us@charliekirk.com support Robert from Chesterfield Township, Michigan. Charliekirk.com support Rebecca from 20 in Palms at charliekirk.com support Jenna from Fullerton, California at charliekirk.com Support I want to thank Rick Warren for supporting us. I think it's a different Rick Warren than from Saddleback Church.
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Maybe.
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D
Yes.
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I mean San Ramon, California. I don't know where that is. Charliekirk.com support maybe Rick Warren has really become a monthly supporter. Maybe so. A Jew, a Catholic of an evangelical. Try to figure out where we're going. Get involved at turningpoint USA. TPUSA.com, buckle up everybody. 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.
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I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
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A
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
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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
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created, Turning Point usa. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we
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are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here. If you run a conservative or faith based business or organizations that accept credit cards for donations, events and merchandise or anything, listen carefully. Do not expose yourself to being shut off because of Cancel culture. The Charlie Kirk show relies on Cornerstone Payment Systems to provide uninterrupted credit card processing for all of our work. We trust Cornerstone for our processing because I believe, and I think you will too, you'll benefit from their solutions, their low costs, and most importantly, their commitment to safeguard your transactions. Cornerstone provides all types of credit card solutions including e commerce, retail donations, crowdfunding
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and text to give.
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A
Hey everybody. We are now in the overflow conversation from our Turning Point USA Student Action Summit. Josh and Sohrab, welcome. And I want to get right into it. Sohrab is this idea of liberty that we founded our country on. The Enlightenment principles, Is it inevitable to result in authoritarianism and totalitarianism, the erosion of our rights? Is it possible to actually sustain it?
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C
So I kind of go back and forth on this, that what we're suffering now, the woke totalitarianism, is it a natural outgrowth of some of the enlightened ideas embedded in our founding? By the way, our founding, as Josh said in the main conversation, had other strands, including the Puritan one, which makes it more complicated. And so I don't condemn the whole founding, but it certainly had some of those kind of Enlightenment elements. Is it a natural outgrowth or is it, as our friend David Azerad said, there is some natural disposition because precisely because it's willing to tolerate any view, eventually it'll tolerate views that would destroy a decent society.
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A
Do you think it's like the second law of thermodynamics? Like eventually it's going to decay if we don't have a real strong principle around it?
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C
Well, it's like this. My friend Adrian Vermeil calls it the ever receding horizon of liberalism. What that means is, if you've noticed, as soon as liberals won, let's say, abortion, then it became gay marriage. As soon as they won gay marriage, then it became trans stuff. As soon as they won trans stuff, it became a new racial politics. There's always. There's something in this ideology of you always have to be liberating something, liberating yourself from some dark past, and that there's always more to overcome. There's no limit.
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A
So you said that on our podcast, and I thought it was the best point I've heard, and I have used it repeatedly, sometimes with reference. But, Josh, do you agree with that? And are you as harsh on the founders as Sora? I'm not saying you're harsh, but, you know, you have balanced it. Do you think that this idea of the Enlightenment has an inevitable kind of conclusion and chaos, like it starts kind of somewhat excitedly, gets to this point of kind of this society that we're enjoying, but then eventually you're gonna end up in chaos.
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D
So part of the problem is that we on the American right speak of the capital F founders as if they were one kind of monolithic school of thought. It was actually an immensely complicated and intellectually diverse school of thought. Right. Many of them were pious Christians, John Adams perhaps, chief among them. Many of them were Deists. Thomas Jefferson, of course, being the leader of that camp. The deists who really were just intellectually downstream of kind of like a strong form of kind of Lockean Enlightenment liberal thinking did kind of think that America was a true revolution in like the truest sense of the term was effectively kind of synonymous with kind of the French Revolution. It was kind of just, you know, these self evident truths that we can just use pure reason, unadulterated reason, with no sense of tradition whatsoever. And then we just kind of go out there and kind of build our utopia. But the other strand of thought, this John Adams kind of Alexander Hamilton, kind of the early era Federalist Party, you know, in first party system, was a very different strand of thought. It was kind of, it was much more Anglophilic. They took a much stronger view of the common law. And for a lot of these statesmen, the American Revolution really wasn't so much a quote unquote revolution insofar as it was kind of a Restoration of the 1688 English Bill of Rights that the Englishman, or excuse me, the Crown had actually cracked down upon on the American colonists who, you know, because they were still Englishmen, deserve the rights of Englishmen. So it's very complicated stuff here. To go back to what Saurabh was saying here though, look, there is a kind of tension between kind of, you know, I guess Patrick Deneen would be a good example who basically says that kind of liberalism is kind of inherently kind of, it was corrupted at kind of the gecko that we were going to get this kind of woke illiberal authoritarianism. David Azrad refers to it, as Saurabh said, as kind of liberalism's genetic predisposition. I also go back and forth on this. I'm closer to the, I'm closer to the Azerad view, but the reality here is that it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible to have a purely quote unquote neutral public square. This utopic fantasy of kind of liberalism in its purest form, that there will be no such thing as kind of substantive values, that everything will be pure kind of proceduralism and values neutral. And live and let live was always, always, always a lie. Because human beings in our core, we know this from both the Bible and from the Greeks, from our reading of Aristotle. We are moral creatures who strive to lead moral lives and we strive to kind of inculcate those moral teachings unto others. So I really like what Saurabh said about how Adrian frames is kind of the receding tide of liberalism wherever the exact line is horizon, horizon. Okay, so that makes a lot of sense to me. I mean it's true they obviously went from gay marriage to the transgender stuff, you know, yoram, Hazoni, Miami Burke foundation colleague, wrote a fabulous essay at Quill at just about a year ago last August, kind of he called the challenge of Marxism. And the point of this essay was just to show that what's happening right now in terms of kind of the woke movement is literally just Marxism under a different name. It's just not economic class warfare. It's a different kind of, kind of identitarian warfare. So these problems don't go away. And a lot of it is kind of baked into the equation of liberalism. No doubt about them.
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So Rob, what would you say about a critic who says, look, well, some of the liberalism has been rather helpful for humanity. Women's right to vote, civil Rights act, freedom of speech, these are some of the fruits of the Enlightenment. Should we say that those things would have happened without of this kind of movement towards more of a Lockean philosophy? Because that is the greatest selling point that small l liberals have is look how far we've come. In fact, you hear this quite often and most people don't even realize they're saying it honestly. It's become so like, you don't talk
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C
like an ambient assumption.
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Yes. Where it's like, look how far we've come. You know, we're not who we were in 1619. Look at us now. Is, is there some truth to that as well as some danger to that?
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C
So here's what I would say is that a lot of the things that liberal ideology takes credit for has its roots in pre liberal, pre modern achievements of Western civilization. Right. The idea of, you know, regular, predictable administration is not something the liberals invented three, 400 years ago. It is found in ancient China. It is found in a lot of even non Western civilization. The idea that power has some limits and it should in, in its treatment of people. It can't go beyond certain limits, especially limits imposed by spiritual authority. That was an achievement of the Church. You know, the Magna Carta is pre liberal and decidedly pre modern. So I think that liberal ideologues do this kind of trick where as you said, people take it for granted and it's, it's ahistorical, where it's like, well, if you lose liberalism, then you're going to lose everything. We're going to go back to barbarism and in fact that's not the case. Right. I mean, there's a lot of these institutions that, that we cherish have pre liberal, pre modern roots. Therefore, it means that if we transcend liberal ideology, it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to go to some tyranny. And of course, then you look at, you look at society as it exists today and there's a tremendous lot of tyranny meted out by liberals themselves. So I just, I think it's a. Basically it's a psyop when they say so.
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So I want to just clarify for our listeners. We're talking about small L liberalism, not the kind of liberalism that you might think as your kind of double mask wearing, weed smoking liberal who is constantly screaming at your children and burning flags. We're talking about the small L classical liberal. This idea that although a lot of
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C
them were kind of like that for the 18th, they were, they were basically the double mask wearing weeds in the 18th century. Of the 18th century.
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B
Can you talk about that?
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C
Yeah, I mean a lot of them had 18th and 19th century. I mean, John Stuart Mill had a
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degenerate life, the father of utilitarian ethics.
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C
You know, a lot of them were childless and unmarried. In a weird way. You know, Rousseau didn't lead a whole life.
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He kind of bragged about it though. I mean, his philosophy.
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C
Sure.
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You know, kind of just read confessions. So I guess my question.
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C
That was a side joke.
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Sorry. No, it's fine. We talk about Rosso here. He was the worst of the social contract theorists. So I guess here's where this. And Josh, I'd love to get your take on this. The way that American history is told, even by conservatives is this arc of progress and self improvement and the bad guys have always been standing in opposition to it. And therefore, then we take that story, implement it to today. And therefore we say if you actually stand against our current campaign to liberate whatever group, you would have been against all these other things as well. A very, it's a very disarming tactic.
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C
Right.
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So Josh, I want you to talk about something that really, you know, got my curiosity. You mentioned Leo Strauss earlier, which of course I love, and I think Harry Jaffa was probably his best student and the most prolific.
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D
You're a good Claire monster, Charlie.
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A
Not yet, no, we're getting there. I'm actually going there in a couple weeks. So Lincoln Fellowship and all that stuff. But the point is, what you made, which is really interesting, is what we're taught in our schools, that the American founding was strictly Enlightenment. Can you talk about this tension of actually how the founders wrestled with tradition and keeping things the way they are and then also kind of throwing the tables up as we know it?
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D
Sure, yeah. I mean, we really do kind of. We are really told I think, like in elementary school and high school. I mean, frankly, at most university campuses, I'm sure. Not that I didn't take them to US History courses in college, to be honest with you. But I'm sure if you did, they would tell you the same thing, which is like the American founding was just straight up Enlightenment liberalism. You know, the whole point of what I was saying earlier is there obviously was that strand of thought. Okay. The Jeffersonian school definitely viewed this experiment as basically being. Thomas Paine, you know, famously wrote his pamphlet common sense in 1776. Yeah, he very much was also kind of a traditional. It's kind of an oxymoron, but a strong form Enlightenment thinker. I was gonna say traditional Enlightenment thinker.
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And Locke was the early 1700s. Just so people, everyone understand this was building up for doubt, decades, for this literature to really saturate the psyche of the West.
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D
Right. But like, again, the men who became we on the right. I can't emphasize the point enough. We talk about the Capital F founders as if they are one monolithic bloc. It's just so silly. I mean, I could tell you as a lawyer, like, I have pored over the first second Congress and looked at the intensity of the debates they had. They disagreed on almost anything. There's this infamous exchange called the Helvidius Pacificus debate between Madison, Hamilton, where they're debating kind of various constitutional clauses. That was kind of in its most academic setting, in its most kind of, you know, visceral kind of animalistic setting. You got kind of the election of 1800 between Adams and Jefferson, where there's all sorts of, you know, terrible things being said in the newspapers. They were not one block. They disagreed about a lot. And the point is kind of this John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, probably the most famous person in this camp of the men who largely became the Federalist Party in the first party system. They really were not straight liberals. I cannot emphasize that point. Go back and read George Washington's first inaugural address. It's amazing. He literally talks about how the future of the national whole, how America will not sustain itself unless it begins in private morality in the home. That is not kind of John Stuart Mill, Anthony Kennedy mystery passage.
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A
Well, John Adams famously said the Constitution was written solely for a moral and religious people. Totally inadequate for the people of any other.
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D
Absolutely.
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Without that kind of foundation, this idea in self government will fall apart.
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D
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D
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A
So, Rob, I want you to put our audience at ease. I can tell that there's some people that have maybe the libertarian leaning that is it ever right to change things and if so, when. So what should our process be to change things? Because I think you would agree, of course, Civil Rights act was a good thing in our country that the, you know, that there has been legislative adjustments and passages that have been done. So we. So how are we supposed to use prudence and practical judgment? Because it's not saying that, we're saying all change ever has always been bad. Or maybe you are saying that just help us.
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C
No, I mean, look, not everything that's been handed down is good.
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B
So tell us, how do we differentiate that then?
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C
So in order to do that in a, in a prudent way, as you said, you have to have the benchmark of some other sound tradition. So, for example, the natural law, right. The natural law is a great mechanism for judging the changes of the past two, 300 years. And so, for example, it would look at the abolition of slavery and the natural law would immediately say, of course, right, because. Because men are born equal and so decided to institute slavery is an offense against that. And let's wage war if need be to eradicate this evil. If there's going to be voting, if that's what the system we want, then to withhold it from some people just by mere dint of their sex or their skin color is against, again, it runs against our sense of justice. So we, you have to have some ultimate standard.
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A
Yes.
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C
Of justice. And then you can make those, you can make kind of prudential judgments, you can make debates about it and so forth. I think the much more dangerous threat today is the idea that all change is good. And that's. And that's that.
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A
Well, that's the cult of progress.
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C
Right, that's we. And you were saying, you were mentioning it earlier too. It's like, well, we've done this, we've done this, we've done this. So what's the next.
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A
Might as well keep the momentum going.
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C
Exactly right.
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A
Equals match time.
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D
Well, this is, this is the ever receding horizon that we were just talking about. Right. I mean, there is this kind of liberal impulse, even a classical liberal impulse, say nothing of the modern progressive Movement to constantly find. You know, it's funny, I think back when the gay marriage fight was still kind of a fight, you know. Well, to be clear, we're still fighting. It's just, you know, the Supreme Court has said what it said, but before the court affirmatively ruled on this. I'm thinking Back to like 2014, 2015, right around then there was this Atlantic essay that I remember reading. I don't remember who wrote it, but it was talking about how the gay marriage, by the time was kind of like the new generations, I guess, the millennials version of like their Selma march. Look, I find that analogy abhorrent, frankly, and reprehensible. Yeah, I mean, it's utterly. It's ridiculous, frankly, for lack of a better term. But there is this impulse in kind of the leftist, both progressive and frankly, more classical liberal mindset to find your next salmont. And that is like the way that you fulfill yourself.
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A
Totally agree.
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D
But, you know, it's funny. Dennis Prager's most recent syndicated column, he actually takes this head on. He says that, like, there is kind of this impulse, frankly, for a lot of people to best fulfill best, kind of maximize your potential, to best serve kind of the nation, to the extent liberals even care about that anymore, by finding kind of the social justice cause du jour, like the hot cause of the day. And you know what Prager says? He outlines kind of five concrete steps. I could not agree with this more. To actually meaningfully improve your life in a way that you don't need to have these kind of abstract goals. And it's his columns, profoundly conservative. He talked about the imperative of marrying, raising children, of providing for your children, providing for your parents when they get elderly. Something that a lot of conservatives, frankly, have forgotten.
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A
It's a biblical commandment. It is the only one with a promise.
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D
Absolutely. No. In the Jewish liturgy, we literally, that is, in our liturgy, every single day actually is the imperative to care for your parents. He talks about going to church or synagogue and just morally improving your own life, which, by the way, is straight out of that George Washington quote that I said earlier. Right. This is the traditional mindset, is that if you want to take action on a broader level, on the nationalistic level, or even if your true utopian mindset to the global level, it all starts in the home. It starts in your private life.
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A
So I want to ask you more about Judaism in a second. So don't let me forget, because I have something I'd love to have you walk me through. When it comes to Judaism, and liberalism. And I want you to explain to me the ever constant mystery in my mind and how those things seem to be happily married together. But first, because it just seems that is the predominant view. First, I want to ask you, Sohrab, about this idea of constant change and things around us. Let's just talk pragmatically and concretely and kind of get out of the clouds. Not that there's anything wrong with the clouds. I think it's, you know, nice to kind of live in Plato's world. But let's go into Aristotle for a second of things we can see and things we can know and things we can understand, which is, what is it going to take for people to want to re. Embrace tradition? Is it going to take this kind of just really unhappy existence? Just kind of the chaos of the moment? Is that the only way to get us back to tradition? You have to hit metaphorical rock bottom before you can start to rise up again?
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C
That's a point I often make. People say, what do you have hope in? And one of the things I give several answers, one of them is gravity. No, precisely. You're right. I always make this point, you know, because if you're a populist conservative, if you're opposed to big tech, some of our critics will say, well, but this is a free society. What are you gonna do with freedom? It's like, do you feel free? Do you feel free really? I mean, again, the three of us around this table do, but lots of people at this conference do not.
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A
Well, it's also like, I just have to interject. I'm sorry, it's just becoming more and more unenjoyable to live in this country or I can't even watch baseball anymore. And that's just like a very basic.
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C
No, I know exactly what you mean.
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D
You know what I mean?
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C
Yeah.
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B
I don't want to live in this country.
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C
Something's going.
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B
I have to kind of police my sports decisions now.
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A
Yeah, that's not a fun place to live.
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C
Yep. So. And then you, you go into, like, much deeper social crises. The opioid crisis.
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A
Yeah.
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C
No, no, no. But that's part of it too. Baseball's part of it because it's part of the American kind of American tradition and story. But. But then you have opioid crisis. You have what labor arbitrage has done to the working class country. Two and a half million jobs maybe lost in the heartland to offshoring in China. What has that done to families? So the point I'm trying to make is I think I do get hope from how bad things can get because at some point people you hope will say, well, how else have people organized their life? Just one more point. The only point I was going to say is as a political movement, though, the constant change, much of it is baked into how we organize our economy. Our economy is designed for people who are kind of college graduates, super mobile, and they like being in mobile. They gravitate toward urban cores. They leave their families behind, they don't have a filial piety, and they just sort of thrive in these environments and they're, they're like that. But there's lots of other people who either don't want to and, or can't live that kind of a kind of overclass lifestyle, as my friend Michael Lin calls it. But the economy that the overclass has created creates constant change. If you want tradition, if you want people to go to church or synagogue, if you want them to show filial piety, that needs a level of stability, a level of calm. If your job is always at threat of being shipped off overseas, if you're constantly under these kind of pressures that a neoliberal economy creates, you don't have time to worry about tradition. If you're, if you're working for Jeff Bezos and he only gives you 20 minutes time off task, and in order to relieve yourself, you have to use a bottle because that's not enough time that you don't. There is a kind of material substrate to being able to live a fulfilled life. And that's what we have. We have to think about what is that ordinary American who works, you know, in these kind of exurbs of large cosmopolitan cities and has, you know, is, is, is his livelihood, is ever at threat of being threatened by automation or free trade, what does he need or she need to be able to live a virtuous life. And so there's some of the work we have to do is, has to do with political economy.
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A
Well, I totally agree. I'd go a step further, further and say it has to do with space as well. I think a highly centralized way of living, concentrated, you're going to have people that then by definition start to become more in the direction of collectivist and totalitarian when you're more likely to rent than own. Well, then of course, it's the tragedy of the commons. Why would I conserve anything?
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D
Right?
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B
It's the public park, it's the public elevator. But if you're spaced out by a
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A
mile from your neighbor, you got a lot of acreage between you and your neighbor. By definition you have to have self government. You also have a lot of time, time of travel, more to ponder and reflect. So I think that the kind of concentrating our population in smaller and smaller areas has been really bad. And it's happened because of our economic policy. Because then all of a sudden the family from Hubbard, Ohio, they're gonna tell their 16 year old kid, look, get out of town, go work in Detroit, go work in Chicago, because it's not going to happen here in Hubbard. We're going to sell the home in a couple of years and move to Florida. And the next thing you know, that happens over two generations and Hubbard, Ohio becomes skeleton of what it used to be. So, Josh, I want to ask you about something unrelated but somewhat related to all of this, which is that one of the most reliably liberal groups in America is the American Jewish population. I've heard a lot of different explanations for this. I've asked everyone from Dennis Prager to Ben Shapiro. Super fascinating to have you explain this. I get this question a lot from our listeners. I don't think we've talked about this for quite some time, but it's the way I've heard it explained is the more religious you are, the more conservative you are. And some Jews aren't that religious.
- [27:29]
D
It's true in basically every religion.
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A
Yeah, which. That's right. And so, but can you tell me though that in a religious tradition which has such an emphasis on things that are passed down, on doing customs and meals and even names that existed thousands of years before, why is it that that group seems at times the most enthusiastic about deconstruction?
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D
Charlie, you're getting at one of my biggest pet peeves in all of life.
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A
I would say
- [27:58]
D
I have been frustrated by this question for virtually since high school. I mean, I first identified as someone right of center, broadly speaking, in like seventh or eighth grade. And basically since high school, I've just been utterly baffled by this. I mean, obviously like immense amount of ink has been spilled on this very question. Lots of books have been written about it. The look, the shortest answer that I can give is that most American Jews today, you know, we're in the year 2021, are frankly 100 years. I mean, no more than 120, 125 years removed from their ancestors from the great Ellis island immigration wave. Right. I mean, speaking personally here, I mean, you know, my, my great grandparents mostly came in immigration wave. You know, they grew up in kind of those traditional like Lower east side tenements in New York City. My great grandfather, my father's side, was an immigrant from Poland, kind of worked the graveyard shift overnight six days a week deep in the heart of Brooklyn. So there was kind of this scrappy kind of working class mentality that kind of naturally inured itself to kind of FDR style welfare state liberalism, I guess you would say. And I think just kind of subsequent generations of Jews especially, obviously the less orthodox, the less religious ones just imbibe this like it was mother's milk. And you can't disentangle the two. Right. The more often, like a Jew will stop being a traditional Jew, will be the kind of Jew who, you know, their Judaism is effectively watching Seinfeld, eating bagels, going to shul once or twice a year. That is naturally going to be the kind of Jew that gravitates towards a political party that doesn't care about tradition. Because Judaism, as we said on the panel earlier, Charlie, I mean, it's the oldest monotheistic religion in the world. You know, I mean, the reason why the anti Semites ultimately end up hating Christianity as well is because without Judaism, there obviously is no Christianity. I mean, Karl Marx was the, was the grandson of an Orthodox rabbi. I mean, Karl Marx was, was probably the most famous self hating Jew in Jewish history. But he of course despised Christendom. He of course despised Christian civilization. The two cannot be disentangled. So look, what's happening in the Jewish community I think is very sad and is tragic. You know, Ben Shapiro, my former boss and friend, he uses the crass term or he has in the past. He hasn't used it in a while. He used to use the phrase Gino instead of Rhino for Republican. Name only, he would say like Jew. And name only. I read Rambam. That's who we call Maimonides Nemishna Torah, who speaks pretty clearly about not speaking ill of other Jews. And I would never tell Ben Shapiro, who's a better Jew than I am, frankly, how to observe Judaism. So I would not go quite that hard as far as kind of rhetorical barbs are concerned. But that obviously is true to an extent. There are very, very, very few kind of observant Jews. I think the Orthodox Jewish community broke for Trump like 83 to 17 or something like that. That's literally a higher percentage than evangelical Christians.
- [30:48]
C
And they're winning demographically, aren't they?
- [30:50]
D
They are. I mean, they're having, you know, three, four children. The Reformed Jews are intermarrying. They're by definition kind of breeding out So I am hopeful over the long term, but I'm frustrated how slow the movement is.
- [31:01]
A
So I'm going to throw it now to Sohrab. Why are Catholics so liberal? And I heard the JFK explanation, but another religious belief that is has a heavy emphasis on tradition. Why is it that the American Catholic population, at least largely tends to be more to the side of gay rights, whatever that is, you know, to abortion. Help us, help us through that.
- [31:29]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think the assimilationist pressures that, that Josh talked about with respect to, with respect to Jews is also a factor. That's, that's, that's JFK essentially saying, in order, in order for me to, to seek political power, I will reassure you that I don't take my views, my beliefs, my most dearly held beliefs that seriously. That was his bargain. And again, we see it with, with now President Biden as well. I think it's partly because the bishops, over a very long time have relinquished their role of trying to discipline. Because Catholicism is a public religion. It is most definitely a public religion. It cannot be relegated to just like meaning. It makes claims on public life. It has an account of the common good, of what society should look like, and certainly it's kind of its moral teaching. And so what that means is that, but that requires an element of the bishops disciplining Catholic politicians. And they've over a very long time, maybe starting really with Mario Cuomo, Governor Cuomo's father. I think he really pioneered the idea that, well, I, I oppose abortion personally, but I supported, as a, as a lawmaker. They really relinquished the role of disciplining him. And now I think the bishops are kind of trying to do that with Biden. I don't know if you've been following.
- [33:02]
A
Oh, I've been following. It hasn't happened yet, though. They have to appeal to their, I don't know, the hierarchy as well. I had someone explain it to me.
- [33:09]
C
But the bottom line is I think that that's, that's been part of the process. You know, it's that assimilation. I mean, the American Catholics gave up with, with enthusiasm their ethnic ghettos where the religion was thick and the priest was taken very seriously to move to the suburbs and kind of become kind of like wasps. And they kind of settled in. The last factor is, I think more recent is unfortunately, the sexual abuse crisis. That's that there used to be a time, and this is the tragedy because the cardinals in the big cities were a great restraining force on urban liberalism.
- [33:47]
D
Right.
- [33:47]
C
They, they were kind of pro working Class support, you know, workers. That kind of.
- [33:51]
A
So true.
- [33:52]
C
But. But Cardinal Law, for example, could pick up the phone and be like, hey, cut it out with this.
- [33:56]
A
Whatever in Boston.
- [33:57]
C
In Boston or who, whatever. You could go in Chicago and then after the sexual abuse crisis, especially in Boston, they lose that power, they lose that authority. And so urban liberalism has no restraining force.
- [34:13]
B
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- [35:48]
A
do you think that there's this kind of younger Catholic community of priests that didn't grow up in the shadow of this kind of sexual crisis? Which it was a crisis and it's disgusting, quite honestly. It was institutionally handled in a lot of different ways.
- [36:03]
B
They're kind of like, you know what,
- [36:04]
A
I don't have to apologize for something I wasn't involved with. And they're kind of going to be more bold. Do you see that in the Catholic Church amongst some of the younger priests?
- [36:13]
C
Not just priests, but the laity as well. There's a lot of based Catholics, if
- [36:18]
A
you will, but I hear this term a lot.
- [36:20]
C
But, but you know what? They. And by the way, they don't line up easily with, with GOP orthodoxy either. This is the refreshing part of it. They certainly disagree with Biden on abortion and sexual matters, but they're not so easily like kind of rah, rah, rah, free marketeers or foreign policy neoconservatives as they were maybe a comparable generation. So it's this kind of combination that we're going to take the church's kind of moral and sexual teaching seriously, but we're also going to take its economic teaching seriously, which is far more kind of corporatist and, and, and concern. Corporatist is, is badly used in American discourse. But the idea that society as a whole should, should be organized with various units kind of aiming at the same end, including private sector, labor, government, this kind of tripartite alliance of, of all working for the common good of the whole. But anyway, they take the economic and social teaching seriously. They take the, the moral and sexual. And so they're, they're going to come up and this is a very exciting.
- [37:20]
A
I see that happening.
- [37:21]
C
I'm sure you see it on Twitter, but in minor ways.
- [37:24]
A
Yeah, I see it in other ways too. Just kind of private conversations when I do these events. And I'm not Catholic, but you know, we talk a lot about how we have such a respect for the Catholic Church in a lot of ways because at least they won't waver on some of these issues. And I go to these events and these priests show up. Like, I'm a huge fan of yours.
- [37:42]
B
Like, really?
- [37:43]
A
You are? Like, I'm evangelical, like Protestant. They're like, oh yeah, I love when you talk about abortion and all this. It's like there's something happening here that I think is really unique in Judaism. Do you see that same sort of trend? Do you see that like kind of Orthodox conservative ranks increasing or decreasing outside of kind of the Hasidic community that you mentioned demographically, do you think, like some of the younger Jews, are they becoming more secular Jewish or more kind of.
- [38:06]
D
Yeah. So at a sheer demographic level, you know, like we were saying earlier, I mean, the average American Jewish Orthodox home, I think has between three and four children. The Hasidic black hat communities, obviously even higher than that. Six or seven. Yeah, it's somewhere in that range, right? It probably is right around six or seven, actually. And the reformed Jews are intermarrying at like a 50, 60% rate, which is really quite tragic. You know, there was a recent, there's a recent chief rabbi in Israel. I think he was a Sephardic Nanishkenazi rabbi. I might be wrong about that. But in any event, he referred to intermarriage as kind of a Silent Holocaust. And it kind of. It really kind of shook a lot of American Jews up, which is like.
- [38:41]
C
Is that Rabbi Sacks?
- [38:42]
D
I don't think it was Rabbi Sacks who said that.
- [38:43]
A
So let's just make sure we're defining our terms. Intermarrying, which means that a reformed Jew will marry a non Jew and not carry on the Judaism to the children.
- [38:53]
B
Is that correct?
- [38:53]
D
Yeah, exactly. Specifically in Jewish law, halaka is what
- [38:56]
A
we call it through the mother.
- [38:57]
D
It's to the mother. Exactly. It's matrilineal descent. But intermarriage, you know, I would endorse that. I do think it's a silent holocaust I've seen in my own life. It is tragic every time I see it. But based purely in the demographic data, on the one hand, obviously I think Jews will get more conservative over time. I am saddened that it hasn't happened more quickly. But there are other factors at play here too, which is, look, the Democratic Party, which is increasingly a woke, illiberal, authoritarian institution, whatever you want to call it.
- [39:32]
C
You say illiberal like it's a bad thing.
- [39:34]
D
It's funny, I literally was like thinking, as the words coming out of my mouth, I was like, oh, authoritarian. Yeah, okay, totalitarian. Yeah. I mean like woke up to a word. Sarab doesn't like wokeism. Look, let's just define wokeism as a substantively abhorrent strand of anti liberal thought. I guess would be the best way to quickly say it. But in any event, the woke ideology. And it is an ideology. It is an ideology that kind of takes the place when you have kind of a heathen, godless civilization.
- [39:59]
A
Oh, it's religious.
- [40:00]
D
Yeah, it is absolutely religious. They condemn the heretics. They shun them from society. It is, it is, frankly, it's neo puritanical.
- [40:07]
A
Yeah, they have rituals.
- [40:08]
D
Yeah, it really is neo puritanical zeal.
- [40:10]
C
They kneel together and all this. That's.
- [40:12]
A
That's right.
- [40:12]
B
Yeah.
- [40:12]
C
It's a liturgy.
- [40:13]
A
And they also have a hierarchy and they have. I mean, it is a religion.
- [40:17]
D
That's exactly the point I was going to make, though. So when you get to kind of intersectionality, this intersectional hierarchy in like its truest form, the Jews are always at the bottom. I mean, what we saw in the most recent Israel Hamas skirmish in May hold aside for a second the predictably abhorrent rhetoric from AOC and people like that Israel apartheid state, all this total garbage. But Jews were being beaten up on the streets of America. And this is no longer like just an anti Zionism is not anti Semitism kind of thing. The proof is now in, the jury is out. And they obviously are effectively synonymous with one another. Because when you are taking it out, when you are punching Jews in midtown Manhattan or Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, because what's happening halfway around the world, you are an anti Semite.
- [40:59]
A
Yeah, but then I have to be.
- [41:00]
B
We have to be elected by ADL
- [41:01]
A
that the biggest threat to the world is Tucker Carlson. Like spare me the swan song, okay? You know what I mean? And it's just, it creates this kind of pent up like you don't actually care about the real problem.
- [41:11]
D
Look, the American Jewish establishment is completely corrupt in myriad ways. I probably need to write like a no, you should. I long form essay smacking these clowns, basically. But what we're seeing here, just in general, is that as the intersectional identity politics mentality reaches its logical conclusion, even holding aside those demographic data about higher Orthodox birth rates, I think we will see more and more less observant Jews who even have like a vestige of fidelity, of pride in their tradition and their inheritance. Even some of them will come around and see that this is a threat to my life. Because the Jews who are getting beaten up, they're not all black hat Jews. They're going around smacking even some reformed Jews too. So for sheer survival reasons, if we wanted to get like, it's like basis, like most pure form, I do think we'll see more Jews of all stripes come around to see the light.
- [42:00]
A
So here's how I want to close. Talk about whether or not adhering to your religious tradition personally has enriched your life. A lot of young people right now that are listening, that are straying and they know would mean a lot if they heard from you. Maybe not. Maybe the more you adhere, you find it to be frustrating and, and kind of puzzling. I don't think that's the case. But we'll start with you. So, Rob, we'll go to.
- [42:25]
C
And what can I say? I mean, I found it so enriching that I wrote a memoir about it to try to explain.
- [42:30]
A
What's the name of that book?
- [42:31]
C
It's from Fire by Water, as you mentioned, my new book is called the Unbroken Thread.
- [42:36]
A
That's right, Unbroken Thread.
- [42:38]
D
Playoff we discussed.
- [42:39]
C
Yes, but no. It's this sense of security, right. It actually is a really great feeling
- [42:47]
A
that,
- [42:50]
C
you know, set aside salvation, which is no small thing, but to know that you're walking on solid ground, that if you stumble, you know, the church is there to salve your wounds. And again, I personally find I can leap into what's really important in life as a professional, as a husband, with this sense that there's a kind of cosmic order. I fit into it in my own way, you know, where I'm supposed to be and I don't, I don't need to kind of. Again, anxiously, I mentioned this in the main program, anxiously, constantly self examine what I really believe.
- [43:29]
A
So, so for someone listening right now that's maybe 20 years old and they grew up in a secular home and they're really confused about what they're seeing. They might have self identity problems, they might be all of a sudden dealing with all these kind of quasi nihilistic thoughts. Nothing matters. Does the church and your experience religiously, does it help you make sense of the world?
- [43:48]
C
I mean, of course, yeah, I mean it's.
- [43:49]
A
No, I know, it's obvious. Of course for you.
- [43:51]
C
Yes, yes, exactly. That's a fair point.
- [43:54]
D
Yeah.
- [43:55]
C
I mean, I'll mention my 20s, I was, I mean, again, career wise, it was successful, going from strength to strength, if you will. But there were these moments of, of, you know, where you suddenly face. Feels like an abyss, like life itself is kind of being drained down and, and if, if there's no meaning, if there's no God, the abyss goes all the way down. And not just culturally, but, but personally. Yes, but luckily, I mean, there is a solid ground. And the first you begin is, forget about, forget about the Bible, forget about revelation. You don't, you don't have to go there. Just stick with reason. And the classical proofs for the existence of God.
- [44:31]
A
Aquinas,
- [44:34]
C
I think, are still extremely persuasive. So if you're an intellectually minded 20 year old and you think religion is just revelation or superstition or what. Have you read the five proofs?
- [44:46]
A
I totally agree. Summa Theologica is the best.
- [44:48]
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean. Or no, no, but it was, it was a much shorter book by a professor called Edward Faser and it's titled
- [44:56]
A
like, I think it's something.
- [44:58]
C
Yeah, I think he teaches, it actually teaches at a college in California. But anyway, the book is Aquinas A Beginner's Guide and the title makes it sound like it's.
- [45:07]
A
You don't have to read the Summa.
- [45:09]
C
Well, I mean, look, you can graduate to. But start with phaser.
- [45:12]
A
I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
- [45:13]
C
Start with phaser. And if you're intellectually minded and you're like, yeah, no, the thing that people believed is reasonable too, and A lot smarter people than you have believed.
- [45:26]
A
So I, and I totally agree with that. And I was just having this conversation with an evangelical spirit filled Protestant pastor and their son has recently started to kind of get into deconstructionism. Right? And I sat down with this Protestant pastor and I said, you son is very smart, high IQ guy. I said, has he ever read Aquinas? And, and this, this guy was like, I really not familiar with Aquinas. I said, here's the problem with evangelicalism right now is that we don't know how to deal with this kind of deconstructionist stuff because we have no idea what classical education is. And so the way that evangelicals and Protestants educate their kids is they will
- [46:07]
B
tell a five year old the Bible
- [46:08]
A
is true, it's inerrant, and if you disobey, you're going to hell. Now that's effective with a 5 year old for a 5 year old, a 10 year old, a 15 year old, but it's not effective when that 23 year old opens up Instagram and all of a sudden gets introduced to Christopher Hitchens or to liberal theology. The 23 year old who was classically educated in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, Aquinas, Augustine and the church fathers, the five proofs of God, all of a sudden has already naturally grown to that place where all of a sudden that doubt, they're like, oh no, no, I know how to kind of work through this. And that's the crisis right now in the evangelical world. And I'm dealing with that personally. Josh has your. And I'd love to sidebar with you on that because I think it's just really interesting. Definitely your specific religious tradition, the way you eat, right, honor the Sabbath. Which is kind of my most, the thing I'm the most jealous of in the world is how Jews have like an awesome reason to kind of just rest for a day. We're trying to find our best to do it. Has that given you a sense of purpose and a sense of clarity in this ever increasingly confusing world?
- [47:16]
D
So Ariana Huffington of all people wrote like a beautiful, like let's imitate the Jewish Sabbath essay like, like a year or two ago.
- [47:22]
B
That's right.
- [47:23]
A
She had the book on napping or rest or something. Right.
- [47:25]
B
Sleep or something.
- [47:26]
D
I think essay was, was timed around that. Yeah. Sohra recently wrote a. He excerpted your book in the Wall Street Journal, if I'm not mistaken, about the Sabbath as well. It was a beautiful essay. Would highly encourage you listeners to check out that as well. Look I mean, we talk about this, you know, in the main program a little bit as well. But I firmly echo what Saurabh said. In order to go out there to do what the three of us do every day, we are all engaged in the battle of ideas. We have chosen this as a profession. It's a pretty fun profession. I happen to be having a good time. I mean, it's a lot of fun. I love speaking in conferences like this, but in order to kind of have the fortitude, the spine, the backbone to go, go out there and be confident in your convictions in order to have just. And not just the confidence, but just the, frankly, just the personal strength. In order to not like be pliant and bend easily when someone presses the first, you need something to point to. It literally is just that simple. You need something to fall back upon. You need a personal anchor. And for Jews, that's obviously the Torah. I mean, you know, God tore Israel
- [48:24]
A
is the Jewish trinity.
- [48:25]
D
Yeah, yeah, that's basically right.
- [48:28]
A
That's what Prager says. So if you got a problem, you good?
- [48:30]
D
No, I. That's fine. I mean, it's a little simplistic, but like, it's totally fine for my purposes. But the point is, yeah, you need something to fall back into. And you know, look, I mean, as I, as I've gotten more observed the past few years, you know, as I, as I travel, my suitcase with my prayer book and my tefilla, what I wrap myself with, it's a. It's very powerful when, you know, when I wrap myself into fill and when I put on my keepa, when I'm, When I'm. When I'm kneeling during the Shimona Esreh, the Amidah, which is the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy, I feel that, I feel that strength and that does give me a backbone to then go out there and do what I do, whether it's writing, speaking, podcasting, anything along those lines. So it's very powerful.
- [49:10]
A
Can I tell you what I love about Jews?
- [49:11]
D
Please.
- [49:12]
A
I have a theory.
- [49:13]
D
Only one thing, though.
- [49:14]
A
A lot of things I love about Jews. One of the reasons why Jews are so smart is it's in Isaiah 1 where there's this idea of let us reason or debate or argue with each other. If you go to a Jewish meal, which you grew up in, you always have to have your argument pretty well articulated or else someone's going to run you over from a seven year old, an eight year old, a ten year old, right? So these young kids are experiencing, you know, very informative rational arguments. And if, even if you're an 8 year old and you're not articulating your opinion, you're going to kind of like, yeah, okay, come back next week, Jacob.
- [49:44]
D
Right, right.
- [49:45]
A
And it, so it increases the kind of mental, you know, kind of how alert they are.
- [49:50]
D
It's kind of ingrained in our tradition, actually. So just a quick point on this. The Talmud, which is our, our Oral Torah, there's a Rin Torah on the Oral Torah, there's a program called Dafi Omi, which is. You read one page of Talmud every day. It's a seven year, roughly seven year cycle. I started the Dafi Omi cycle for the first time about a year and a half ago. So January 2020. So I'm a year and a half into the seven year cycle now. So I've been kind of going through this now for, for a year and a half. The rabbis and the Talmud is basically rabbis kind of hashing out various elements of Jewish law. They disagreed about everything. I mean, they disagreed about Jewish law probably more vociferously than like Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed about like, you know, American founding stuff. Right. And the way that they did that is because they ultimately had, for the most part, a certain level of respect for one another. But, and here's, I'm going to take it back to my good friend Sorba over here. This is a really, really, really interesting thing. They respected one another, but they were not afraid to be uncivil if need be. In fact, I published a beautiful op ed in Newsweek a number of months ago from Rabbi Ari Lamb, who's one of my favorite new thinkers.
- [50:53]
C
Oh, I run him too.
- [50:54]
D
He's a good guy. He's absolutely fabulous. He's based in New York Yeshiva University. Joshua Project is his new kind of think tank, Pan Faith kind of think tank of sorts of. Anyway, so Rabbi Lamb's op ed for me, it was, I can tell the op ed was like against civility. And he was basically saying like, if you read the Talmud, if you go into Yeshiva, you know, Ash Hatara, which is like this big vault to shoot with yeshiva in, like right next to the old. It's in the heart of the old city of Jerusalem.
- [51:22]
A
Yes, I know, exactly.
- [51:22]
D
I've been there numerous times. You go in there and like, it's loud. People are arguing. They're like, they're not, they're not afraid to like hurt someone's feelings if need be. There's a baseline level of respect, but
- [51:32]
A
there's a line you don't cross.
- [51:33]
D
There's a line you don't cross.
- [51:34]
A
You're not going to go right up to that line.
- [51:36]
D
Right. But you will not be afraid to get in there to pursue the truth. Which is kind of the whole point, obviously of Sohrab's kind of, you know, fusillade against David Frenchism, which is that, like, civility is an overstated principle. Which is exactly right. Of course, the goal here is to
- [51:49]
B
find WASP culture for sure.
- [51:51]
A
Yeah, I could get into that. You know, in WASP culture, it's, you didn't win the game, your team won the game. Big difference.
- [51:57]
D
Right.
- [51:58]
C
And it has great virtues, by the way. Oh, no doubt our WASP elites were a lot better than our woke elites.
- [52:05]
D
Let's.
- [52:05]
A
Let's say that, you know, but our WASP elites, you know, to talk about my people, they made some awful mistakes in the 70s, 80s and 90s, especially corporately and with capital flows. We are over, over time. What do you want to plug your book?
- [52:19]
C
Yeah.
- [52:19]
A
Unbroken Thread from Preserving Tradition and Age of Chaos. I get that.
- [52:23]
C
Yeah. Discovering Tradition.
- [52:25]
B
Really?
- [52:25]
D
Yeah.
- [52:26]
B
It's close.
- [52:26]
C
It was good.
- [52:27]
A
Josh Hammer, Newsweek.
- [52:28]
D
Yeah, I've got no new book out. Follow me on Twitter oshammer.
- [52:31]
B
You got to write a book about
- [52:32]
A
some of this stuff. It'd be super interesting.
- [52:34]
D
It is my next to do item, Charlie.
- [52:35]
A
I'm telling you, this idea of the Jewish culture of debating and arguing.
- [52:40]
D
Yeah.
- [52:40]
A
I think would be really fascinating.
- [52:42]
D
We'll take that to heart.
- [52:43]
A
All right, thank you guys so much.
- [52:44]
D
Thank you.
- [52:46]
B
Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us your thoughts.
- [52:49]
D
Freedom.
- [52:49]
B
Charliekirk. Com. Thanks so much for listening. God bless. For more on many of these stories
- [52:57]
C
and news you can Trust, go to charliekirk.com.