The Charlie Kirk Show
Revolutionary Questions in Revolutionary Times ft Dr. Larry Arnn
Tue, 06 May 2025
How should our leaders grapple with obstacles like radical judges? How do we ensure America is ruled by its people instead of a small cabal? Charlie and Hillsdale president Larry Arnn dive into America's history and how to fix things when the country arrives at a constitutional impasse. Watch ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What does Dr. Larry Arnn think about America's future?
Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio. It's the Charlie Kirk Show. Dr. Larry Arden sits down exclusively with our friends in San Diego. Amazing conversation. We talk about President Trump. We talk about artificial intelligence. We talk about education. We talk about how the whole world is going to change because of AI and what we can do about it.
Dr. Larry Arden brings ancient wisdom to the modern problems. And I really encourage you to listen to this conversation intently and text it to your friends. You will learn a lot in this conversation. Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com. That is tpusa.com. Start a high school or college chapter today at tpusa.com.
Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here. Noble Gold Investments is the official gold sponsor of The Charlie Kirk Show, a company that specializes in gold IRAs and physical delivery of precious metals.
Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com. That is noblegoldinvestments.com. It's where I buy all of my gold. Go to noblegoldinvestments.com. Dr. Arndt, welcome.
Hey, Charlie, the great Charlie.
Wonderful speech at lunch. Thank you for that.
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Chapter 2: How is AI changing our lives and jobs?
I want to continue a conversation you and I are having backstage about artificial intelligence. And you said something important where you said that in the next year or two, people are going to really realize the power of this stuff and its societal and civilizational implications. What do you mean by that?
Well, it, uh, my truck drives itself and it's not because it's, uh, anybody's writing code anymore. They show it videos. I mean, out of my particular truck, for example, and it's learning and it's learning really fast. And it, you know, uh, I've driven it 1500 miles on it, driving itself at night in the rain, in the dark. It drives better than I do. So that's going to happen, right?
But they're training robots the same way. And that means that in a year or two, I'm going to say to a robot, like, you know, one of my jobs, I'll tell you how it affects my job. I'm like Charlie. I have a plethora of young people that I can torture. And... And, you know, a lot of them come to work at the college. I might very well be succeeded one of these days by some student of mine.
And so, you know, we just beat the tar out of them. But what I ask them to do is not the same anymore. I don't, like, you know, I try not to say, like, there's some things that I have academic knowledge of. Nobody has an infinite array of those things, but there are some that I have. And so if I'm going to write something or say something, I look up to verify.
I learned that from Sir Martin Gilbert, the Churchill biographer. I ask Grok now, and it tells me. And it reminds me enough. If I'm going to write it and publish it, then I verify. But see, here's the thing. I know how to do that. Because I didn't grow up in this age, right? I know how to look stuff up. I know to find out whether it's true or not.
Martin Gilbert used to say to me, you have a good memory, and I have a good memory, but we do not rely upon our memories. Well, what's this going to mean? So the first question, an urgent question at Hillsdale College is, what's this going to mean for young people? And next year, we're going to finalize our plans about that.
And what they are is that they're going to have to sit for two weeks, twice in their four years, with a pen and a paper, and write out everything they know. And in other words... They still have to suffer.
With no iPad.
Right. No device. That's it. In other words, and see, here's a column. An excellent human being is excellent in intellect and character. Character has to do with the disposition toward the hard virtues, the moral virtues. They are justice, moderation, and courage. Courage is the hardest one. You have to develop that. You have to intend it. You have to practice it. You have to read about it, right?
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of AI on education?
Very self-confident. But underneath that, there's obedience. Obedience. And it's like Charlie. Charlie didn't have to learn anything. But he gave a speech for the college a couple, three months ago or something. And I sat there and watched it with great pleasure because the things he's put together. And he didn't know those things when I first met him.
He's done the work, an act of obedience, of giving yourself to something. See, we all have to learn to live like that and live hard like that.
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When Winston Churchill was young, he's a little bit like Charlie. He didn't go to college. He was pretty smart. He once erupted in a speech in response to a hostile question. What is life for but to struggle and fight in noble causes? You see, Donald Trump is like that. Charlie's like that. Every serious person has that in them, right? And we, you know, like when J.D. Vance, I've never met J.D.
Vance, but Charlie knows him. And I was pulling for him to be the Veep last time because he sort of has a vogue going on in Hillsdale among all the hard men and women who run the place. he goes over to Europe and he gives two extremely unsettling speeches. And the one that was simply unsettling was about AI. You have to embrace it. We have to protect our workers, but...
This is, you know, what a tool is going to overcome us. What kind of people are we? I like that. The more unsettling was about defense because what he thought, what they thought he was going to do was ask them to get their defense budgets up.
And he did do that for about three minutes, but then he just offended and frightened them so that he could hardly sit still in the room by saying, it's not clear. We stand for the same thing anymore. Because you're not respecting the will of the people you govern. Well, that's a fundamental issue, right? And that's, I mean, look, don't mistake.
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Chapter 4: How do we ensure freedom in an AI-driven society?
I'm not crazy about that one.
No, I'm not either. Because at some point, you can see, and see, he's never, I'm tempted to look it up, but I'll just quote it to you. If you want to know, you know, read who? Read the Apostle Paul or Thomas Aquinas. Read Aristotle. And you'll find things in there that are so beautiful they make you want to cry. They're just lovely to know them.
And you can, if you haven't studied your Lincoln sufficiently, if it doesn't make you burst into tears once in a while, because it's sublime, you know. So that's a very high human type. Now, Winston Churchill, same thing. He's awesome, you know. I promise you just read it. So he writes this paragraph. in an essay called 50 Years Hence. It's in a book called Thoughts and Adventures.
You can buy a paperback. 50 Years Hence is the essay. And he says, it's about the future. Churchill liked to talk about the future, and he had a great sense of humor about it because, you know, you can never get caught wrong about that. And he says, I read a book the other day that said that, I'm paraphrasing, 15 or 16 millennia hence, a generation had arisen that had conquered nature.
They could live as long as they wanted. They could know much more than we can know. They could travel anywhere they wanted to, including interplanetary. He's writing this in 1934, by the way. Hitler took over Germany in January 1933. This is what's going on in the world, right? They know pleasures wider than any we can know. What would be the good of all that to them?
What would they know more than we know about the answers to the simple questions? Why are we here and what are we for? It is the persistence of these questions that gives the best hope that all will be well. That's the human condition, see? Animals with immortal souls facing those questions.
And our living well consists in facing them well with a sense of God, because God is the perfect being, implied by any perfection we have above the other animals, and also implied by our imperfections. So if you're not doing that, you're not living well, And machines can't live like that. It's not their problem, right? So we can't be replaced by them.
But we have to, like, do you know that George Washington, very serious young man, he wrote down and memorized 112 rules of civility. And there are things like don't chew with your mouth full, don't stand too close to people when you talk to them. There's 112 of them. The last one is labor to keep alive in your breast the celestial fire known as conscience. You see?
And that's what education is about because that's what life is about for every one of us. And so these tools, we will use them. You know, I'm in the world conquest business, just like Charlie. I mean, you know, Hillsdale College has gotten to be very big. It hasn't started growing yet, right? And we're going to teach.
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Chapter 5: What is the role of character in education?
When the government of the United States does something as a government, it does it in one of three places. And those are the first three articles of the Constitution. Well, the formal cause has been revolutionized too, right? So now the laws are not made in the Congress. The laws are made in a controversial number. Scholars can't agree on how many independent agencies, independent of what?
Are they independent? You see, us? Yeah, that's what it means. So, and it, and the government, uh, now consumes it's up from 12% in 1930. Now the government handles 51% of the resources in the economy. Uh, plus it has centralized it radically. That is to say 60 some percent of the 12% in 1930 was in cities and counties and towns. Now that number is 18%. 23% was in the federal government.
Now that number is 63%. So we've taken money out of the economy and we've centralized control over it and it proceeds now in a different way by detailed unreadable rules. So the form, it doesn't function the same way. And that means that it's a fundamental dispute.
It's a house divided just as much as the house divided is slavery a good thing or not, which is Lincoln's problem, or George Washington's problem. Is the king born to rule us by right, or is no one so born?
And what's the question today?
The question today is, shall we be governed? by our consent and toward our rights, or are we subjects of an engineering project to remake the society?
And play that out, do the will of the people, with the unelected judges, for example, these national injunctions.
Yeah, so that's... The perfect example of this. See, that's very fundamental. And it's like, another sign that we're in a time of, a revolutionary time, is that these questions come up that are as long as there's been law. So habeas corpus Latin, present the body. And the basic structure of the Constitution is provided by there being three separate branches.
And in the Declaration of Independence, by the way, God appears four times. Once is each branch and one is the creator, the founder. And the lesson of the Declaration is only in the hands of God would you combine all those branches.
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Chapter 6: How does Donald Trump's approach differ from others?
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So what I think about this right now is, first of all, that... First of all, I think the Congress should get off its duff. Because it can pass an ordinary law by a majority, and Donald Trump, I imagine, would sign it, that says that district judges cannot stop. You know. And it... And... And the law could be that long, right?
And in Article III, what it says is, the judicial power shall be vested in a Supreme Court and such subordinate courts as the Congress may create. And then it says that the jurisdiction, the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court shall be, and there's a list of things, about four things, and such appellate jurisdiction as the Congress shall define.
And that means they have complete power over that. They should stop that right now. And why they don't, it's a mystery to me.
And just to understand that in different words, the injunction is usually just for the district that the offense occurs in, if there will be an injunction at all. So Abrego Garcia, okay, then just enjoin that in Maryland. Instead, they do a nationwide injunction. So something that happens in Maryland then applies to the entire country.
So they're able to judge shop to their friends that they put on. So Biden puts a couple radicals and then a couple judges just take turns in joining the entire will of the people. And that's why what Dr. Arnn is saying is the most important thing. And we talk about this on the program all the time. Who's actually in charge of this place? That's a different way of putting it, isn't it?
It even goes a step further. That's true, but... Go a step further. If Abrego Garcia gets in front of a judge and the judge says, bring him home, well, first of all, that's demanding a positive action by the President of the United States, and there's a limit on how much of that they can do.
That's right.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of young people's ambition?
I will tell you that I'm proud that the two people who wrote that, first, are named Edmund Fairfield and Austin Blair, later the Civil War governor and lieutenant governor of Michigan, members of the Hillsdale College faculty. So we were there, you know. And that was going to crack that nut. But then the Supreme Court of the United States
ruled five to four, led by a man named Roger Taney, the most notorious of all our Supreme Court justices, he was Chief Justice, that the federal government does not have power to do that. And that's rather parallel to the situation today because the Republican Party was born to do a thing and a court says that strips the heart out of your platform. And today,
Donald Trump gets elected saying, we're going to control the border and we're going to send those people home. And the courts are saying, you can't do that.
So how do we resolve it without a war?
The answer is, you read, because it turns out to be handy, that Abraham Lincoln addressed this at length and brilliantly in a series of speeches, especially the one on the Dred Scott decision. And what he said was, It's a divided court. The decision was that Dred Scott, who'd been taken into a free state, remains a slave. And Lincoln said, Dred Scott remains a slave.
Highest court in the land has said so. Sorry about it, but it's true. On the other hand, if a divided court settles the question for all time, then the people shall have ceased to be their own rulers. And that means that Donald Trump will probably have to find a way to go ahead. But he shouldn't do this very much.
I heard an important MAGA guy whom I admire, I won't say who it was, say the other day, as an example to Donald Trump, that Lincoln shredded the Constitution. Well, he didn't. And also, he never said that, because we need the Constitution. And so Donald Trump should have a powerful constitutional argument why in the executive authority he can continue, maybe under this Alien Enemies Act.
But that's what the fight is about. And remember, we all need here the rule of law. I don't want Joe Biden, you know, I mean, Lord, it makes me mad. Congress is talking about taxing college endowments. Well, first of all, that's a transfer of wealth from private resources into the public, and that's the wrong direction. And second of all, I don't want them taxing mine.
And I'm the only one that doesn't take the money from the government that has enough endowment to pay the tax right now, and they're talking about increasing it. Well, maybe that's special pleading. It is, partly. But also, it is the wrong direction. Just don't give them so much money, right? That's what's being effective right now. Withhold the money.
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