Ep 75 | The Best Argument to Save America from Socialists | Charlie Kirk | The Glenn Beck Podcast

I recently sat down with Charlie Kirk for his podcast.

He is the founder of probably one of the most important political organizations in America and becoming the world.

Turning Point USA is a collection of people in high school and college campuses that dare to question authority, that dare to think out of the box, to dare to think beyond political correctness and what everyone is supposed to say.

These are people that are looking for true freedom and they have real principles behind them.

And it comes from their leader, Charlie Kirk.

This is his podcast, but I find him so intriguing and so smart.

And his comments and his questions all throughout this podcast, I wanted you to hear Charlie Kirk in an interview about arguing with socialists, something that he does on college campuses every single day.

This is Charlie Kirk on the Glenbeck podcast.

Hey, everybody.

I am honored today to be joined by someone that has had a very big influence on my life.

I was listening to his radio show and watching his television program after school.

Boy, when I was in a freshman year in high school and sophomore year in high school, none other than the incredible leader, Glenn Beck.

Glenn, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

Thank you very much, Charlie.

Thank you.

You have a new book out, Arguing with Socialists.

I'm excited to talk to you about it and dive into it.

First, tell us why you wrote this book and just a quick summary about it.

And then I'd love to dive into some questions about socialism in general and the kind of the trend of the country.

So I wrote it because if you remember right, probably when you were a freshman or a sophomore in high school, I put another book out called Arguing with Idiots.

And this is kind of the follow-up of that and the reason why we use this format.

It's, you know, it's got all kinds of, it's a graphic novel in some ways.

It's got all kinds of charts and pictures and cartoons and everything else.

And I did it that way in Arguing with Idiots because I'm riddled with ADD.

And so it's something that you could just pick up.

You can use it as a reference book.

You can read it cover to cover.

You can

use it any way you want.

But the reason I came back to this format is over the years, I've heard from so many people who are now your age that say they got that book or they got an inconvenient book or broke, which was in this format.

And they used it because the last 100 pages in this book are all footnotes.

And they're not footnotes to the Heritage Foundation.

They're all footnotes to things that your lefty friends will accept.

And we really did our homework so you can have the arguments, the intelligence arguments with the sources that they will accept as truth to be able to take this argument apart on socialism because it is an absolute lie that it seems like every 20 years or so we have to defeat.

I totally agree.

I remember arguing with idiots.

I remember reading it, and I loved the pictures and the charts throughout.

And so, I won't necessarily get into therefore I repeat myself, arguing with socialists, arguing with you, could fill in the rest, but that's a different conversation for a different time.

I'm sure someone said that before.

My favorite book of yours is actually The Overton Window.

I think that had a tremendous contribution to the conservative zeitgeist over the last couple years, especially to how we view the ever-changing new normal of how the left basically changes the goalpost, if you will.

But I think the Overton window actually describes that a lot better.

I do want to ask the question, Glenn, as we dive into the specifics of the book: do you think that the socialists are currently winning?

I mean, you might say it's a tie, but do you think as things are happening right now in our country, do you think the socialists are winning?

I think because it's a global movement, I would have to say yes.

Here in America, I'm afraid that the dropping out of Bernie Sanders is going to be viewed as

a win.

And I don't believe it is.

Bernie is never, he was never the guy to

lead the nation and be the president.

He was a great catalyst for change and

a great message bearer for many people.

And I think he's more of the Barry Goldwater of the far left.

Barry Goldwater

was torn apart by the press and just decimated in the election.

But Ronald Reagan came out of the Goldwater campaign

and so many others that were about your age in the 1960s.

And that's what led to the Reagan Revolution.

So I'm not concerned about Bernie Sanders and what we fight today.

He has used this time to plant the seeds deeply into people.

And

if you understand people of your age,

you can understand why socialism is so popular in a way.

You know, you were probably born around 9-11.

Maybe your first memory might be of 9-11, maybe.

And so what that was, you felt unsafe.

The world was coming undone.

the markets were coming undone maybe people lost their jobs etc etc we went to war then your next big memory of the world is 2008 and the government bails out all of these banks and people get screwed and mom and dad might lose a job or lose their house and then we have the great recession and now covid 19.

This seems like a system that just doesn't work.

It seems like a very unsafe way to live.

It seems like something where you're always constantly losing your foothold.

You're just getting ahead and then it's taken away from you again.

That's the mindset of so many people your age and younger.

They see their parents struggling like this and they think this isn't fair.

This isn't right.

And when it happens, the big guys get bailed out and mom and dad don't.

I don't want anything to do with this.

And I think that's a very real

understanding of what we're facing right now.

That is so well put.

I want to ask about some of the more philosophical roots of socialism.

But before I do, I want to compliment your

comparison of Senator Sanders with Barry Goldwater, because Barry Goldwater was ahead of his time in a lot of different ways, despite his views on abortion, which people, I actually think he was misguided on that particular topic.

He led a conservative revolution where we saw people, not just Ronald Reagan, as you put, but you started to see the real movement conservatives start to have a voice versus the Rockefeller, Romney, Bush wing of the Republican Party that finally had a sizable challenge.

Ronald Reagan did the speech time for choosing in 1976, I think, or was it 72?

It was a lot of people.

Time of choosing was, I think, 64.

I think 65.

May have been 68.

I'm not sure, but it was in the 60s.

So

you correct me.

Thank you.

And then, of course, he then challenged Ford in 76, is what I was thinking of,

unsuccessfully, but leading the way to the conservative Renaissance and the Revolution.

I think Senator Sanders has a lot of

similarities there.

My question, though, is how do you.

And it's funny that

I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's interesting to note that the reason why Sanders was blocked by Hillary Clinton was because of the system that the Democrats put in after the Reagan Revolution.

They saw Reagan come in and just decimate the Republicans, the standard rhino, and said, my gosh, you know, a rogue group of people could take over these parties.

So they put in all of these things with

the superdelegates and everything else.

That's what stopped Bernie Sanders this last time with Hillary Clinton.

And it all came because Reagan was such a rebel and completely changed the face of the Republican Party, at least while he was alive.

And to credit to the Republican Party, I don't always go out of my way to compliment the Republican infrastructure.

To keep that intact allowed Donald Trump to win the nomination and not the heir apparent Jeb Bush or somebody else within the establishment mold.

So, Glenn, I want to ask, How do you define socialism?

Because when I go to college campuses, when I talk about socialism going back to the roots of Marx, Rousseau, and Plato, abolition of private property, the deconstruction of the idea of a market-based system, a lot of socialists will say, no, no, that's not real socialism.

Let me tell you what real socialism is.

I think that we have, sometimes we're talking past each other, I don't have an agreement on commonality of terms.

Can you

tell our audience how you define socialism?

Yeah, well, I define socialism the same way you define socialism.

You know, the thing that

you need to use

with people who are socialists, ask them to define communism because communism gets this bad rap.

Communism is the gulags, is the military state.

Socialism is the happy place.

That's the exact opposite of what Marx talked about.

Communism has never been done.

If you look at the USSR, it's the United Soviet socialist states.

That's what they were, the Republic.

They were socialist.

Communism has never truly been achieved.

Communism is the utopia.

Communism is when we all are just going to put our money in a big pile and there's no big strong arm and we all are living happily ever after.

That's communism.

Socialism is the step in between the free market and that happy place.

Socialism is where you have to have the re-education camps.

It's where you have to silence dissent.

It's where you need a strong arm, man, to be able to push it through so you can get to the happy place.

You know, one of the things that I did, and I'm just looking at the

book, the first chapter, I brought up this very point.

We have to...

We have to define these terms or we're just talking past each other.

So in the book, in the first chapter, socialism, any various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

Democratic socialism features the same system of collective ownership and management of property inherent in every other socialist system, along with all of its problems.

The only difference is

the adherents also pinky swear that they'll never support any form of government other than the one that the elections

are democratically held as if democracy somehow or another manages to magically guarantee there won't be tyranny.

Swedish-style socialism, a mythical

creation invented by socialists desperately looking for proof that socialism works.

Communism, then real-world communism, and then capitalism, and free market capitalism with a security net.

And this is where...

This is where we really get,

we can make points.

When people talk about capitalism, we are not doing capitalism.

We haven't had capitalism in I don't know how long.

What we have is capitalism and cronyism combined.

We have the worst of both parts.

And when the capitalists understand that they can cozy up to the government and get special favors, It's just as bad as anything else.

We must have the freedom away from the government interference.

Government should never get involved in anybody's business except for holding people accountable.

If I'm selling you something that I knew was dangerous

and

it violates everything good and decent,

the government should be able to step in and say punishment for that.

The government should be able to step in and say punishment for this if you're ripping people off.

But other than that, stay out of business, government.

Stay out of business.

Just make sure it's fair for everyone.

That is so well said.

I'm just taking notes here because you're kind of jogging some of their questions.

So, Glenn, I also find that when I argue with socialists, and I've already ordered my copy, I can't wait for it to arrive.

I think there's a little bit of a shipping lag time, but everyone should go buy their copy right now.

When I argue with socialists, it seems that we have such a big disconnect in human nature that the socialists and the communists and the Marxists, going back to Rousseau and before that, Plato, they believe that if we were able to solve our material inequality, somehow human beings would become better people.

Or almost human nature is not flawed naturally.

They don't believe in the idea that human beings are naturally inclined towards sin, greed, or self-interest.

Do you dive into this at all in the book, or do you speak about this?

Because I think a lot of the motivations of the Marxists and the socialists are, I think, the flawed idea that they can fix a lot of the issues in society as long as they fix the material inequality around it.

Yeah, I do dive into it, and I dive into the fact that socialism just denies human nature.

It denies reality.

Some of the most miserable people that you'll ever find are very, very wealthy, famous people.

Well, on the lower end of the spectrum, everyone would say, I just want to be rich and famous.

Well, no, you don't.

Look at the rich and famous people.

Many of them are miserable because that's not a solution to the human condition.

In many ways, that is a barrier to the human condition.

That just makes everything exaggerated.

And

once you obtain it, you realize how empty it is.

That is denying human nature, that happiness comes from within.

Some of the happiest people I've ever met, I mean, some of the best Christians I've ever met are the ones that were slaves from ISIS that we went in and rescued, had nothing, lost everything, lost their children.

I bring their children out of slavery.

They are more faithful,

more

happy, more grateful, even in their abject poverty and conditions that none of us would be able to handle than some of the best people I know in America.

It's not the physical, it is the internal struggle.

And when you deny that there is an internal struggle, there is the good side of man and the bad side of man.

When you deny that each of us holds that

and it's a constant battle to balance which one is going to win, it all falls apart.

You know,

you lose what the founders knew, and that is

government is like a fire, and it's good if you control it.

But if you don't control it, it will be controlled by others.

And those with power almost always go bad.

And that human nature in those who have power over you are going to rule over you in a way that is not benevolent.

So, Glenn, something that you could help me with and help our audience with.

When we talk, when we argue as socialists, I think our movement is getting better at the indictment of socialism, using real-world examples, making the moral argument.

But something I think we struggle with on our side, because of our politicians, is painting what we actually stand for and the alternative to socialism, which is a question I get quite often.

I'm very effective at indicting Marxism at socialism, and I think this book will instruct me even better at this.

What I need to do a better job of, though, is articulating to someone who has never heard it before what we believe and why we believe it.

And it's become more difficult, Glenn, when you get 96 to nothing votes in the United States Senate for the biggest bill ever in American history to spend $2 trillion.

Can you comment on that and build out how we address this issue in our movement?

Yeah, let me,

it's the last chapter in the book, Free Markets, Free People, and Prosperity.

When was the last time you went to the grocery store and just stood in awe about how truly amazing these modern marvels really are?

Meats, breads, fruits, cheeses, green things, vegetables, as far as the eye can see.

And the Twinkies, oh, the Twinkies.

You can buy dozens of them for less than $10.

Grocery stores alone are remarkable places.

Today, our people are healthier, wealthier, happier, and safer than man has ever been before.

Americans generally live long lives, even though without much wealth, and high-quality, affordable food is available for every town in

every county.

Men went from farm and fire to supermarkets and space travel in less than 200 years.

Why?

What happened?

At almost any other time in human history, going back for a thousand years,

a store of comparable of your run-of-the-mill modern grocery store would have been considered a modern wonder of the world.

Markets existed in ancient times and some important cities.

You could buy products from hundreds of miles away, but they were nothing like our modern grocery stores where you can, in a single trip, buy apples from Washington State, oranges from Brazil, prosciutto from Italy, chocolate from Belgium, cheese from Wisconsin, cereal from Mexico, coffee from Colombia, milk from the nearby dairy.

Some believe this is a bad thing due to carbon emissions, but before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, let's realize what it means to the health and welfare of the entire world to destroy the very system that man has never seen before and has literally saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

So

I take the tact in the book of let's just stop for a second and separate the bathwater from the baby.

Don't throw it all out.

This has never been done before.

It happened for a reason, a very specific reason.

It's not a coincidence that America is founded, then all of a sudden we go from fire to electricity.

It's not a coincidence.

So, what is it that caused this?

And throughout the book, I really try to take an open position on

I think that

most young socialists,

you know, I think Winston Churchill said, if you're not a socialist when you're 20, you don't have a heart.

If you're not a conservative when you're 50, you don't have a brain.

It's the combination of the heart and the brain.

So I try to take an approach to where I say to the honest person who's looking at socialism and saying, this might be a better way.

Okay, let's really look at what are the results

and what are the results of the free market.

What are the bad things about the free market and the bad things about socialism?

What are the good things about each?

When you just make that list of good versus bad on both sides,

the tables

turn quickly towards free markets.

Not what we're doing, but towards free markets.

The left will commonly use

people's desire to make the world a better place as a way to market socialism.

And they will indict capitalism and free markets by saying all you care about is yourself and your own self-interest.

self-interest.

I actually think it's moral to look out for your own self-interest as an individual.

That I'm sure you've talked about quite often, Glenn, when you talk about how we should be proud that we have individual rights, that we're first and foremost human beings created in God's image, and then from there we create social society and civil society.

In the book, Glenn, how do you make the argument to a young socialist who has grown up in 16, 18, or 20 years of a society through government-run schools, through left-wing media, and through Marxist Hollywood programming to believe that the capitalist system is exploitation and that we have to get back to a system that is primarily one based in compassion and caring and sharing.

What's your best argument for that, Glenn?

Because that's something a lot of our students face every single day.

Well, I don't know if I have the best argument for that, you know, off the top of my head.

I will tell you this: the best best thing that we can do is listen to those who are honestly seeking truth in a better way.

There's a lot of people that aren't.

A lot of people are just playing politics on both sides.

They don't really care.

You know,

David Horowitz talked about it.

He was a leftist in the 60s, and he really believed that Vietnam was wrong and we should get out.

And, you know, the right was saying if we get out, all these people, you know, there'll be killing fields in Cambodia.

Well, we left, and that's exactly what happened.

And

the socialists there would not recognize the truth.

And that's what turned him away from that, because he looked at it and went, wait a minute, guys, are we not even going to recognize that they were right about these things?

We might have been right about these, but what about all these dead?

And he realized they didn't really care.

It was about power.

That's when he got out and started railing against the left.

So we have to look for those people who are honestly seeking answers first.

If you're not honest,

you know,

one of the best questions asked of me by, I'm trying to remember his name, the scientist,

the group of scientists, the three of them that just did the

bogus reports and took Mein Kampf and made it in, took Jews and made it into women.

We'll get the name in a second.

One of those guys.

Yeah, one of those guys was saying to me, he said, he's an atheist and I'm a religious guy.

And he said, let me ask you a question.

If I could prove to you that there is no God, and he said, I openly admit I couldn't do that.

But if I could and I had definitive proof there is no God,

would you admit there is no God?

And I said, well, you can't prove it, but if you could, and it was definitive, and I agreed with the study, I could see it for my own, with my own eyes, yes, I would.

Let me ask you, you're an atheist.

If I could prove to you, which I don't think I can, that there is a God in proof, or you could just read it and it's math and there is a God, would you say you're wrong about atheism and believe in God?

And he said, yes.

We can have all conversations together.

We can get along forever, even though we disagree on that fundamental principle because we are We're not playing games.

We're honestly seeking truth.

So the first thing you have to do when you're in an argument with somebody is, are you an honest broker?

Will you call your own side out?

Will you admit that the socialism of Hugo Chavez has led to death and misery and destruction?

Will you admit, unlike Bernie Sanders, that

Fidel Castro, when he dies with

eight or nine billion dollars in the bank, is not one of the people.

He was raping the people.

You don't in 1950 have nothing and then $9 billion

just because you're a man of the people.

You were stealing from the people.

While the people starved, you were taking your country's money.

If you can admit those things, I can admit the bad things about capitalism.

And now we can start to look and say, okay, what do you really want?

What you really want is a better way to take care of people in need.

Okay, great.

Let's just look at the numbers.

How can we affect the most amount of people?

Let me give you one example.

Is it moral for the White Star line to not put enough lifeboats on the Titanic because they didn't want to spend the money and they didn't want to redesign?

Clearly, horrible, horrible capitalists that are, they don't care about about people, they only care about their bottom line.

Once those lifeboats were in the water,

was it moral for the lifeboat captain, the person that was just a passenger just a few minutes ago, most likely, when that lifeboat was full, was it moral for them to

make their way away from all of the people in the water?

Yes,

it was,

because they all would have died.

They could save 12 or 25 or however many fit in that boat, but that's all they could save.

If they went back into the sea, they would be swamped and all of them would die.

That's the same thing with saving people

with our country.

We cannot have open borders and free stuff because we will swamp our boat and we won't be able to save anyone.

That doesn't mean that you don't it doesn't mean that you don't love people and want to save them.

Yes.

You're actually using your brain and your heart.

I can't save everybody.

How many can I save?

Yeah.

That's a very good argument for Jon Stuart Mill's ethics.

So in a lot of ways, I think you actually

appropriately applied

utilitarian ethics in that sense.

So Glenn, you mentioned something.

You want people that want to pursue truth.

A couple thoughts on that.

I believe that the rise of Marxism and socialism is directly correlated with the hyper-secularization of America and the spread of atheism in America.

And the lack of individuals, especially students, believing in a higher power and believing in God is a gateway drug to Marxism and socialism because

they don't lack connecting to something.

As soon as they don't believe in a vertical relationship with God, they look at some sort of a connection to government.

My question is this, though, Glenn.

Go ahead, please.

Yeah.

Comment on that.

Nietzsche, please.

Nietzsche talked about it.

When he said God is dead, that wasn't a celebrate.

That was a warning.

God's dead.

What are you going to replace him with?

Because people will replace God with something else.

That's what happens.

When you don't have God, you have to have something else that fills that space.

And they will not admit that their God is government, but it is.

It is.

It's an absolute.

You can't question it.

this.

And Glenn knows better than everybody else.

And I go a step further.

You have the hyper-secular left right now.

Since they don't believe in God and they don't openly admit that government is their God and government is their church.

You can look nowadays, though, that the left, they almost view the medical professionals, and especially the ones in science, if you will, as untouchable religious clergy.

Now, no individual in any position should be untouchable.

They should always be open towards cross-examination.

But you could see how the left,

especially the ones that are in the media, they treat it as if certain individuals are above any sort of cross-examination or reproach at all whatsoever.

And this was a point that the great Dennis Prager made a couple days ago where he said, just because you get rid of government doesn't mean the left is going to try to replace, just because you get rid of God, if you will, and the church, doesn't mean that the left won't try to replace that.

But I guess, Glenn, my question is,

when you're trying to find someone that is pursuing truth, I guess first you have to convince them that truth actually exists.

I know this might be getting deeper and deeper into philosophy, but not everyone even has been convinced that there is anything such as absolute truth.

They believe there's something as my truth, and that's rooted in the,

I think, the very dangerous ideology of postmodernism.

So that's something I encounter a lot on college campuses where students say, No, there's no such thing as absolute truth.

You have your truth, I have my truth.

Do you think that that's even worth getting into and talking about the ideology of socialism, or is it more effective and more useful?

Yeah, I'd love to get your thoughts on that.

So

I've always hated

philosophy that is not applied philosophy.

If I can't, you know, a wheel is a wheel because we call it a wheel.

Okay,

fine.

Shut up.

That mental masturbation, if you will, is

just ridiculous.

It's a waste of time.

Applied science, applied philosophy is good.

How can I apply this to my own life to make myself better?

And I think,

you know, that is because, for me at least, there are lots of people that don't mind spending their whole life in that circle of philosophical thought that's really not going to move man in one direction or another.

And I think there's a lot of people that are stuck.

on there is no truth and they're not going to move past it now.

And there is urgency to what we do.

And my feeling, and I could be totally wrong, but my feeling is you've got to

throw it out and scatter the seeds, but don't spend any time watering any seed that is on concrete, is not going to take root.

Go where there is a chance of life and a chance of turning and connect with those people because

that's right.

Yes.

And I always laugh when someone says there's no such thing as absolute truth.

And I kid with them.

Do you believe that?

Absolutely.

You apply its own logic against the statement.

Yes.

All of a sudden, their entire worldview can go crumbling down.

But, Glenn, can you comment for a second as the other point I made, which is the rise of secular atheism in connection with the strengthening of Marxism?

Because I do believe they're interconnected and they're related.

And I think the less spiritual and less religious our country becomes, the more likely we are to embrace a socialist revolution.

Do you talk about this in the book?

I know that you're a man of faith.

You have commented about your faith publicly so many times.

You've been a great fighter for Israel and done many

amazing events in Jerusalem.

Can you please comment on that?

Because I think it's a very important point when talking about the general socialist debate

as it is.

Yeah,

let me start with this: kind of a surprising take on this.

Some of my best friends are atheists.

They're honest atheists.

They don't hate religion.

They don't hate

people of faith.

They just don't believe in God and they don't believe they need God.

But

they look at it

and say to me, you know, it's great.

Your faith is great.

It does wonders for your world.

This is the place where we all have to get to.

We have to be able to work together.

So let me take a surprising tact on this.

Some of this stuff, some, is caused by,

in the past, religious people jamming it down everybody else's throat.

If you don't go to my church, you're a heathen.

If you don't believe exactly what my doctrine says, you're not a believer.

If you don't live your life, you are less than worthy.

That's what our founders fought against.

They fought against it.

They went and

they would be witnesses in trials for faiths that they vehemently disagreed with, but they wanted that faith to be able to plant that seed where it stood.

You had to have all of the equal rights.

And I think, you know, the problem is, is the pendulum always swings from one extreme to another, and it's in the extremes where we're in trouble.

It's always in the center where it's best, where we can live with one another with different points of view.

So I think, A, that's really important, that we are open

and not jamming anything down anyone's throat.

With that being said,

you know, Adam said this system is

wholly inconsistent or incompatible with a group of people that are not religious and spiritual in nature.

If you are not a religious person,

that you look to a God to give you a governor, 10 safety tips.

Hey, let's not kill each other.

Let's not steal.

Let's not lie.

Just safety tips.

If you don't have something giving you those 10 things and using and putting a governor on your own animal desires,

then somebody's going to have to rule you.

But if you can self-regulate, Pendillette's a good example of this.

He's one of the more moral people I've ever met.

Really good guy.

Doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, he smokes, doesn't drink, doesn't do drugs, has a great family, is happy, helps his community.

He didn't believe in God.

Okay,

he doesn't need that regulator.

He had another regulator.

It was his mother and his father.

They instilled these things in him.

So he just doesn't ever want to shame them.

He believes in what they taught him and how to live.

But that's not enough for most people.

You know, some people will say, well, Glenn, he's crazy because he's a Mormon.

Well, I'm not trying to convert you to join me.

I didn't want to be a Mormon.

I found it to be true, and here's what happened.

It changed my life.

It totally changed my life.

It got rid of all of the edges that I had spent 40 years trying to sand off, and I couldn't do it.

I needed something with real structure for me.

Some people don't need that, it won't work for them.

Fine, that's great.

Let's, what is it that's pushing us to be better people as individuals

without a gun, without forcing other people to do it?

What is making you a stronger person?

My personal opinion is that

we are facing the troubles that we're facing because we are rejecting God.

I don't believe in an angry, vengeful, send you to hell kind of God.

I don't.

I do believe in a God that is a creator of all of the earth and the heavens and everything that we know, time itself and space, and has set up certain rules.

And just like an electric fence, it's not punishing the cows.

It just is.

If you go too far as a cow, you will hear the electricity as a cow.

You'll hear it before you hit it.

You hit it and you'll get a shock.

That's just something that is.

God's laws are like that.

If we violate, he's not punishing.

It's just the way the universe works.

It's the ultimate justice system.

It really is.

You start living principles that don't work, that go against universal principles and universal truth, it all falls apart.

And that's what's happening to us right now.

Yeah, you choose to sin, you choose to suffer, is one way to put it.

And it's not, and it's not an angry God.

Yeah,

that's very insightful, and it's a deeper theological discussion that we can continue.

I'd love that.

I guess to connect it back to the book, do you talk about how socialism doesn't create good people?

To kind of just kind of expound on what you just talked about, I don't think socialism brings out the best in human beings.

In fact, I think socialism makes people selfish

and actually preys on the worst impulses of human behavior.

Yeah, I don't talk about it in that way because I I wanted to

get somebody who was open-minded somewhat to be able to hear some of these arguments.

And so

I don't think I condemned them that way or condemned the system in that way.

But I think you're right.

I can't think of a socialist

in history that

is somebody that I would want to model my life after.

They tend to go astray because things don't work.

And when they don't work, they become more frustrated and more dark inside.

And if they see themselves as someone in power to change things, that makes them more dark inside as well.

I think socialism in this growth of socialism and the death of God in our society is why we're seeing such a high rise in suicides.

I mean,

there's nothing real here.

There's nothing that you can count on.

There's no purpose without, in my opinion, without a divine plan, without understanding that there's more than this, that it's bigger than you.

And that's what socialism lacks.

So to

connect it to modern times, I agree to kind of what's going on politically.

Joe Biden getting the presumptive nomination.

I actually think in some ways he's much more a Linskyite than Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders actually disobeyed the teachings of Saul Linsky, where he outwardly endorsed the most radical elements of modern

politics.

He would be openly critical of America and he said exactly what he believed.

Saw Linsky Rules for Radicals.

Glenn, you were the first person actually to mention Rules for Radicals that I remember, and then I went on a deep dive, bought the book, read it.

Never forget when I opened opened up Rules for Radicals, the dedication said to Lucifer, the first fallen angel, something of that sort.

It was very eye-opening.

But the one who at least had enough courage, something like the one who at least had enough courage to gain his own kingdom, Satan.

It's like, whoa,

that's a good thing.

Whoa, it's a kingdom of darkness.

Okay.

So that's how we're starting.

But Solinsky talked about that a true radical would dress in a three-piece suit, pretend to be something that he's not, slick back his hair, infiltrate institutions, institutions, not go into the streets and burn the flags, instead use the symbology of a country to take it over.

Joe Biden's entire campaign is about rebuilding the soul of America, is about we got to get back to our roots, which is such a difference, Glenn.

It's such a

deviation in course from the narrative of Alexandria Cazi-Cortez, Rashida Taib,

Elon Omar, Ayanna Presley, and that whole wing of the Democrat Party that says, no, no, no, we have a racist, bigoted, homophobic, backwards history.

We have to get away from it, burn burn it down to the ground, French Revolution style, whereas Joe Biden is actually trying to be much more like Obama was in 2008 until his true radicalism slipped out, where he's saying, no, no, no, we have a lot to be proud of.

We have to get back to our country's roots.

To tie it to modern-day politics today, Glenn,

how do you view Joe Biden in the entire socialist paradigm?

And do you think this is a good thing that Joe Biden is now the nominee?

Do you think that we could take it easy that, quote unquote, the Marxist has been defeated?

How do you interpret that?

I don't even, I mean, I don't think Joe Biden is going to be the nominee because I think, and I don't say this with any glee or

any ill will towards Joe Biden at all.

I think he is mentally checked out.

I don't think he is mentally stable.

And I just can't imagine that

he's going to be able to navigate all the way through the convention and everything else.

I think he's fading quickly.

So I think there will be some sort of a hostile takeover at the convention.

Maybe I'm wrong on that.

If he runs, I think he'll be beaten badly by Donald Trump because

he's not there.

He's just not there.

With that being said,

the interesting thing is if you go back and you look at, for instance, Germany, Germany was this very, very proud nation, and then it was humiliated.

And in a way, this happened to us in the 1980s as well.

It was humiliated, and Hitler was very, very smart.

He first,

in the Weimar Republic, they first kind of got rid of all of the trappings of the old regime.

By the time it came back to Hitler,

Hitler started surrounding himself back with the Iron Eagle and everything else, but

it had been turned and twisted just a bit.

It's like the swastika.

That's a very peaceful

Native American symbol, correct?

But he twisted it.

He turned it.

To show progress, because he was a progressive, he twisted it so it looked like it was moving.

That's the same thing that he did with everything.

And that's the problem with these progressives like Joe Biden is we don't know.

Your generation has never seen America the way America is truly free.

You've never seen it.

You don't remember it.

You don't remember what it's like to walk into an airport and not have to worry about these long lines and trusting our neighbors and not having our government, say, snitch on one another and all of this stuff.

So when someone like Joe Biden comes to restore it, he can twist it just a little bit for progress.

And so all of these images and all of these symbols begin to mean something else.

It's why I've always been,

none of my sets have flags on them.

I tried to stay away from red, white, and blue and everything else because I believe

those images can be twisted so easily.

They all were, I mean, we didn't even have a standardized flag until Woodrow Wilson.

We didn't have a national anthem until FDR.

All of these images were put in by progressives, and they can mean so much to so many people.

We have to stay focused on what is true, and that requires you to go back and do history.

Everything that

AOC and Tlaib and everybody else is doing, they're still burning down

so many people's belief in anything that is true about America and anything that is good.

While you have somebody else taking these images and these notions that no one in the younger set even remembers, and he's resetting them and recasting them.

It's extraordinarily dangerous.

Yes, and I mean, in the hierarchy of priorities, I think Joe Biden's number one priority is the enrichment of his family and the continuation and protection of the corrupt international dealings that he has helped broker.

In the Bernie Sanders hierarchy of priorities, I really truly believe he is a born and bred, angry, bitter Bolshevik who does want to participate in some form of a people's revolution against Western society.

Now, Joe Biden will happily allow that to happen if that means the continuation of his own personal protection and enrichment for the crimes that his son has committed and the actions.

So, therefore, in a lot of different ways, though, Joe Biden could be argued to be more dangerous because he doesn't actually believe anything.

And again, I do tend to agree with you, Glenn, that it's hard to see him go from now to election day without rational voters say, hold on a second.

I thought this was just a placeholder.

I thought this was the equivalent, a political equivalent of a treasury bond.

Like, we were just going to flight to safety until we could figure out things would get better.

And it's hard to see him, people say, debate.

I don't even know if he'll be able to get that far.

I mean, the constant errant confusion coming from Joe Biden is

really, really telling.

So, Glenn,

please.

Here's the thing coming on just a sec.

Here's the thing that I think we're we're missing.

People think that socialism might be on the ropes or whatever.

It's not.

There's a chapter, chapter six in the book talks about

the worst combination, crisis, technology, and

modern monetary theory.

And we talk about the crisis would be joblessness.

And once there's joblessness, technology will start to, they know they will need the government, and the government will know they need them to watch people.

So they will marry one another, and they'll need to flood the system with all kinds of bailouts, and they'll need to do all kinds of these socialist programs with modern monetary theory.

Well, while I didn't know about coronavirus when we set this and locked this for print, That is what we're doing right now.

The Fed is using modern monetary theory, which is just money printing.

It is a socialist dream, a socialist dream.

We just did $6 trillion.

They're asking for another half a trillion dollars today.

Charlie, when somebody says this program is going to cost

$10 trillion a year, it won't mean anything soon.

Yes, and it's even worse than...

It's worse than money printing, Glenn, because at least money printing would have some sort of physical requirement of us actually having to monitor it.

We're money creating, which is even worse.

I know it's a technical difference of linguistics, but if you had to print it, we would actually stop ourselves because you couldn't print this amount of money as quickly.

We wouldn't have the amount of physical infrastructure to actually print $6,100 bills.

And I know that's a silly thing to say for some people, but it would literally take us from now to September of manufacturing plants of hundreds of millions of square feet to do it.

The math has actually been done.

You would need gigatons of ink to do it.

But anyway,

just to give people an idea.

I never thought of that way.

That's really, really good.

So,

thank you.

But I do want to zero in on that.

You talk about in chapter six, Glenn, where you talk about the modern monetary theory and some of the instruments within our monetary system.

I actually want to ask the thesis of the book because I didn't get a chance to ask, Glenn, you say, what happens if socialists get power?

Tell us, Glenn, what happens if socialists get power?

And are we actually seeing some of that through some of our congressional leaders, through what they're advocating for right now?

Let's tie it back to actually the sub line of the book.

One of the intro sentences when describing the book is that Glenn talks about what happens if socialists get power.

Times of crisis is when Marxists lick their chops.

Rom Emmanuel famously said, Never let a crisis go to waste.

He doubled down on that statement three weeks ago in MSNBC.

What happens, Glenn, if these people win?

Well, you're already seeing it.

It's amazing how the left has said that Donald Trump is a tyrant.

Donald Trump is a fascist.

And yet it is the Democratic governors that continue to ask him to take control of the National Guard and send the National Guard.

That's the governor's job, not the president's job, to send the National Guard into their state to tell these corporations exactly what they have to make for the national interest.

That is the definition of fascism.

They don't own the factory.

They just tell the factory what to do.

That's what the left is currently asking.

They are currently telling you to snitch on your neighbors, to turn them in.

You'll get cash if you turn them in on things.

They're arresting people for things that are absolutely common sense.

So don't don't, you don't have to ask, what will America look like if it's in the hands of socialists.

You're seeing it happen right now.

You're seeing also disturbing trends with Google and Facebook and all of these others.

Do you know that Kansas is now

using, and I can't remember the name of it,

a software program that can track everyone in the state of Kansas, their movements, through their cell phones.

They know exactly where everyone is at all times if they have a cell phone.

Since

I wouldn't have thought Kansas would be on the pioneering front of Orwellian social monitoring.

Exactly right.

But it's for the common good.

They can't, the companies in America that are making drones cannot keep up with the orders that are coming in from the local police departments.

These are not your standard, you know, buy it at best buy drone.

This is a military-grade drone.

Sure.

These are

the

orders.

What do you think they're going to do after COVID-19?

They're already changing the monetary system.

They're no longer voting in Congress except for voice vote.

The people who are repairing our roads, they have to go out to work.

They're essential.

The people in the media, they're essential.

But Congress is not essential.

They don't have to go in and vote.

They're just passing this bill after bill after bill, some of the most staggering bills in our history, and no one is there to debate them.

This is what socialism looks like.

Yeah, and I do want to compliment the president in this aspect, where he has been trying to be pushed by the media and the governors

to

essentially go full fascist.

And the president has said, wait a second, there's a thing called the Constitution, a document that I love.

You guys got to figure this out yourselves.

We're here to help you, but it's on you guys, governors.

This is a state-based thing.

And it's as if, and I have a couple competing theories on this.

One of the theories, and I think that they want to set a precedent for a Republican president to use this sort of unilateral quasi-martial law power so that a Democrat could use it in the future.

And I do give the president credit for resisting that and for pointing to the Constitution and for saying, hey, we're a federalist approach.

We're going to go state by state.

We're here to help you, calling on good governors for doing a better job than others.

And the president was even hesitant to use the War Productions Act.

And he hasn't used it as much as some governors have wanted him to.

He's used it with General Motors.

And you could actually make the argument, General Motors is somewhat of a

government existent entity only because of the taxpayers.

Again, I don't love the idea of telling private industry, go make stuff, but again,

I have no love lost for government motors.

I mean, General Motors, I'm sorry.

But I...

I do want to zero in on this, Glenn, because what you're saying here is an erosion of individual liberty, an erosion of individual freedom,

erosion of the First Amendment, erosion of the Second Amendment, erosion of the Fourth Amendment, erosion of the 10th Amendment.

Can you give us something to be optimistic about?

Because it seems as if what you're talking about in this time of crisis, give our audience some optimism and some positivity.

Okay, let me give you a couple of stories here.

First of all,

look how the media and the left have done everything to get rid of hydroxychloroquine.

They've done everything to discredit it.

And the only reason why they are discrediting it is because of Donald Trump.

He mentioned it.

He thought it was good.

So it must be bad.

It must be evil.

He must be making money.

It has failed spectacularly.

They are not making any inground on Donald Trump.

They are only discrediting himself over and over again.

So the mouthpiece, if you will, is getting weaker and weaker and weaker, while I believe the president is getting stronger and stronger in all of the right ways because he's not taking executive power and abusing it like FDR did.

That's a great point.

Let me give you a story about a guy in Massachusetts.

He's a guy who moved from the Azores to Maine, I think, when he was two years old.

His family escaped the socialist dictators in the Azores.

He grew up, he went and he fought in the Navy.

He did his thing.

He became a gun store owner.

They've tried to put him out after 9-11.

They tried to put him out of business and make him close.

He wouldn't.

Then they finally ran him out of business because the insurance companies just kept jacking up the insurance for

the guy who owned the building that he was operating out of.

And so he couldn't afford to stay in.

He reopened a store in 2008.

The coronavirus hit.

He was told by the federal government, here are the recommendations and here are our essential businesses.

Guns were part of those essential businesses.

The state of Massachusetts, the governor said, nope, not guns.

And

he removed the ability of any gun store owner to be able to go in and get some of the federal money because you were being forced to close.

The Constitution states that the government must

give you some sort of remuneration here for anything that

they take away from you.

So they're taking it away.

They've got to pay.

The governor went and scratched it out.

I talked to him today.

He's like, I'm never going to close.

I am never going to close my door.

He said, I meet people out on the sidewalk.

Business is better than ever.

There are people that are standing up.

Look to the governor of South Dakota.

She's remarkable.

She's phenomenal.

She's a great friend.

Phenomenal.

Phenomenal.

This state understands.

This governor understands.

It's the right of the people and the responsibility of the people to take care of their own health.

This idea that people are smart enough to figure it out, to control their own lives, I think the coronavirus is going to go one of two ways.

It's going to make big government evil, big government even more big and evil, and it's going to set the other side and say, ooh, wait a minute, that kind of looks spooky, and they're going to grow as well.

How it ends.

Well, so that's so well said, Glenn.

I actually, I wrote down on this piece of paper, I said, we're either going to have our road to serfdom inflection moment or our wealth of nations inflection moment.

One or the other.

And so it's one where we could have serious renaissance, pent-up demand.

We're never going back to that.

We don't trust the government.

Let's invest in entrepreneurial activity.

We go back to that description of Alexis de Tocqueville where he called Americans restless.

And I do see that, Glenn.

I do see a lot of people that are more committed than ever to take risks and get back in the marketplace and to create the beauty of America.

But I'm afraid, conversely, with that, there might be a portion of America

that might say, hey, this is not so bad.

Maybe we could be in, maybe we could be taken care of.

I remain optimistic.

I think that we actually can see a restoration of self-governance and

of constitutional

ideas.

Please, Glenn, comment on that.

I think that it all depends, Charlie, on whether or not

when we restart this economy, we can get out of the hole of 20 or 30 percent unemployment.

If we have 20 or 30 percent unemployment, people are going to want and need someone to hold them up and help them through that.

And that will change everything.

Whoever is in charge at that point, the programs that they put in, if they are not sunsetted, and I mean dead on this specific date,

will have them forever.

It really

will depend on whether or not we make it, not just through this

crash, but there's a real possibility that this happens again to us in October or November of next year.

If we haven't prepared and we are not any farther down the research lane, if this thing comes back, we could have real, real trouble.

So in closing here, Glenn, I want to give you an opportunity to just fill in any other kind of parts of the book we didn't get a chance to talk about.

But before we get to that, I just want to reinforce to the the audience: Glenn has had such an important impact on my life and was one of the reasons I got into politics and started Turning Point USA

at all.

And I remember his show, it was either 3 or 4 p.m.

Eastern.

It was right after school, so it would have to be 4 p.m.

Eastern, if I remember correctly, with the big chalkboard.

And just so you know, Glenn predicted

before anyone else, the European debt crisis.

He predicted the calamity in Libya.

He predicted the rise of ISIS.

He predicted the negative impacts of illegal immigration.

And these are just the ones off the top of my head.

He talked about the crisis on college campuses, the cultural Marxist takeover,

and was really instructive to a lot of people, especially during the Tea Party movement

back in 2010 and 2011, where there was a lot of anger and people were looking for, well, where do ideas come from again?

And I still think, Glenn, a lot of the conservative movement is very well informed based on that teaching you've done back then and today.

So

I just had to get that.

I had to say that.

So, Glenn, anything else about the book, Arguing with Socialists?

I encourage everyone to go by it.

Anything else you wanted to mention that we didn't get a chance to cover?

No, I don't think so, Charlie.

You're very, very kind to me, and I appreciate it.

Your words are really

very kind.

Thank you.

I think the only thing is this book was written for people like you and the people at Turning Point.

It was written in a way that you have the facts, you have the breadcrumbs, you can go back to the original sources, you can think it through yourself,

and you've got to exercise your mind in all of these and be able to find those sources to be able to make those arguments.

And I think if it's used and really utilized, especially all the footnotes,

I think you can make a huge, huge impact.

My children, my young children's lives and their future and my future depend really on what you do now.

And I think turning point is,

I said this when I spoke

at your

thing in, where were we?

West Palm, Florida.

At SAS.

And I said,

I walked out and I said, you give me hope.

And it's true.

This movement actually really, truly gives me hope that

there is a generation that's coming up that truly gets it.

So thank you for the opportunity.

God bless you, Glenn.

Thank you.

And again, the book is Argan with Socialists.

Get your copy today.

Let's support Glenn.

And Glenn, thanks so much for joining the Charlie Kirk Show.

God bless you.

Gosh.

Thanks, Charlie.

Appreciate it.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.