Reclaiming Power: The Right's Institutional Challenge

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And they're loyal because there's a vision. There's a positive vision and they know what they're fighting for and they trust their leaders.

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Those things are all key. Charlie Kirk was able to somehow form something that reflected that, right?

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The left has had this for a while because it took over our institutions. Charlie Kirk was able to kind of inside the left's house, inside the university's, form a parallel institution.

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I mean, Gramsci talks about this with like a parallel hegemony. Charlie Kirk actually started doing something that is like this, that would kickstart our own march for the institutions.

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris for a beautiful Trail Talk morning here in upstate

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New York. It's an early fall day. The air is thin and crisp. The sun is shining, not a cloud in the sky.

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We have some of the biggest turkeys I've ever seen just cross the road. I literally pulled my truck over and I thought this is a good place to do the

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Trail Talk. I'm going to give you a little bit of upstate New York, early fall scenery as we talk about something completely unrelated, which is an issue that the right has had for a long time.

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This would include Christian conservatives and that is wielding power in an effective way. How do we do that?

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I've been talking about that with a friend of mine who has been in conservative circles for a long time, watching, observing, trying to be active.

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I've noticed others who have been battle -weary and battle -hardened are somewhat discouraged.

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Pedro Gonzalez the other day from Chronicles Magazine was basically saying that the right has failed to convince the

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American people that it can govern effectively. The economy isn't where it should be. We're not deporting people as fast as we should be.

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All the victories that the left is having a meltdown over, they're not significant enough.

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I think that's a general temperament among people who have been in the fight for a long time because they know that the damage done to our country has been so drastic.

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To correct it takes a lot of very quick, forceful, drastic action.

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You can only deport so many people. We live in what I would call the remnants of a federal system. There's still federal levels of authority.

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You have the state and the local governments to contend with. You can't just do everything from the executive. You got to wait for Congress, right?

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The courts hold you up. I mean, there's all kinds of barriers and the system was designed that way.

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See, this is part of, I think, the problem that we're facing right now is there are people on the right who just say, well, the problem is the system.

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Problem is maybe the constitution does put too many barriers in the way. We need an imperial presidency. That is the solution.

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Then there's others who want to preserve that localist, federalist, regionalist instinct because that is quintessentially

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American. That's actually what's kept us, in some ways, preserved for as long as we've been going.

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There's just a lot of new kind of outside the box ideas. Some of them actually,

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I don't know how many of them are actually new, but they are somewhat outside the box. When you have monarchists, you have people who think that it would be better for us to completely detach from all these mechanisms and just have an imperial presidency.

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There are also, I mean, you still have your localists. You still have your people who want to return to local power and get big government out of my life.

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You have people who think the problem reduces down to this or that threat.

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It's Jewish power or it's the deep state. You just eliminate the deep state. It all goes away. There's all these

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I would call them somewhat simplistic explanations that might target one threat, but they attribute too much to it.

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That is a situation that I think many people who have been paying attention for a long time are in.

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They don't see a way out. The reason for that, this is key, this is really key.

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The reason for that is because of what's happened over the last century. What's happened over the last century is the left has taken over the cultural institutions.

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If you want to look at it this way, the left is like a foreign virus in a way.

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The virus is granted entry through the cell's membrane. The virus wastes no time releasing its genetic material into the cell.

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This hijacks the cell's reproductive system, forcing it to make millions of virus copies that leave the cell and spread to other parts of the host.

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It is something that can only exist in conjunction with a stable society.

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Civilization has hosted this virus. I mean virus in the sense of it's reliant on the host.

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You have left -wing ideology reliant on a stable government of people going and doing their jobs and bringing home money, and they're able to be taxed, and they have generally stable families, and they have children that grow up to be radicalized.

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All of that is in place until now. Now that's starting to go away.

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Now, I just saw a poll, I think it was yesterday, that the Gen Z -ers, people were saying, oh great, the males want to get married.

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Well, the males were, it was like 33%, something like that. It was in the 30s, were interested in getting marriage and family as a top priority, but for the women, it was below 20%.

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It was crazy. It was just a stark reminder that we're not where we were, and the damage that's been done is going to have ramifications for everyone.

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Left, right, conservative, liberal, doesn't matter what your religion is. It's a civilizational threat that is, if you don't have kids, if you don't replicate yourself, if you don't have family, you don't have a civilization.

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We have these precipices, these waterfalls that we are heading toward.

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They make ideologues out of the children coming from traditional families who send their kids to college or give their kids an internet connection and don't monitor it, and the long and short of it is the right has been left without much of a mechanism for fighting back, and that's basically the issue.

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Where is the training ground for right -wingers to be able to resist what's taking place on the left when the left owns the universities, the political think tanks, at least a lot of the big ones?

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They run the academic institutions on every level, not just universities.

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They have Hollywood. We don't have to go through it all. They have power on most levels.

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Now, where did they not have a monopoly? Well, in 2020, a lot of us thought they may have achieved a monopoly when it even came to election mechanisms, but they didn't quite have it.

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They didn't quite reach it, and that was one place that the left had not achieved a full victory, and the right still had an opportunity through popular will to push back on their agenda, and that is the election of Donald Trump.

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They don't quite have the heart and soul of America, meaning evangelical

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Christians in the Bible Belt, which has been a moral anchor, and they're trying though, and that's been a lot of my work in my books is pushing back on that.

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Don't take this too. Unfortunately, a lot of people on the right don't seem to think it's a worthwhile fight.

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Maybe they watch it as some of them, if they pay attention at all, it's kind of like a

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TV show. There's a lot of drama. It's interesting how many of them are willing to really give their time and their finances, and I know some of you listening to this podcast, you do give your time and finances, so I'm not talking about you, but there's a whole lot of Christians who get hit by the social justice train, and they don't know what hit them.

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They're just not paying attention, and I can't blame all of them for that. We only have so much bandwidth, but the left is so much more organized, so much more aware of the goals that they need to achieve.

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There's much more order in the ranks generally. I'm not saying they've outgunned us at every point at all. I'm just saying because they've taken over our legacy institutions, which had built into them mechanisms for supplying leaders, for following orders, for hierarchy, for ruling, because they have all of those things, they have the academy, they have the media, they have so many of the think tanks, they have access to money, they are able to do things that the right just finds very difficult, and as a result, what's happened is this.

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The right has had to come up on the spot, really, through mostly market forces with their own alternative mechanisms, so the right, they're not going away.

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They represent a lot of people. A lot of people don't want the innovations of the left, so who's going to channel their energy?

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Who is going to take that voice of the people and represent it? Well, it's people on the right, but it's people who aren't going through those traditional mechanisms all the time, or if they do, they end up having to become turncoats, so to speak.

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You go to the Ivy League school, maybe you work in a particular area until it just becomes unbearable, and you finally speak up, or maybe you were part of the left, and you finally realized this was dumb, and you make a lateral move, or a horizontal move, rather.

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You make a horizontal move, and Donald Trump kind of did a horizontal move, right? He went from I'm a businessman,

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I'm an entertainer, to I was never in politics, but now I am. People recognize my name, and it works.

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There was no real mechanism for getting a Donald Trump into that position.

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It had to be a horizontal move. I think that's what a lot of people in 2016 realized when they went for Trump is that, okay, he didn't go through the corrupting ladder you have to climb.

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He went through another ladder that might have corruption, but it's not the same kind of corruption. He's not beholden to the same kind of people.

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Maybe he'll represent us. Maybe this is a chance. Maybe this is a shot, and this is how the right kind of has to live, right?

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Even in the SBC right now, the hope that conservatives have, other than obviously hope being in Jesus Christ, but the on -the -earth kind of political hope that they can actually achieve a victory comes from maybe there's a guy running who's going to turn on the guild.

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They have not been able to achieve victory by getting their own guys in there and supplying those guys with the necessary voters to come out to the convention, so this is a problem in a lot of institutions.

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Now, because the right does not have that particular hierarchy, which is an ironic thing, right?

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The left is kind of like egalitarian. They're against hierarchy. They're trying to destroy hierarchy, but they own the hierarchy.

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They are hierarchical. That's why they can achieve anything. The right is for hierarchy.

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They want legacy. They want tradition, but they are finding themselves outside the gates, so what does the right do in this particular circumstance?

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The right has to still represent people, so it ends up being people who make horizontal moves.

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It ends up being people who are personalities. It ends up being, I mean, who are the big leaders on the right if you had to stack them up?

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Who are the most popular people that are pushing the needle right? Probably a lot of you would choose people who are talk show hosts.

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What am I doing right now, right? People who are, and many of the talk show hosts are basically people who are comedians, people who are entertainers.

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I'm finding there are less and less people who are good at looking at the facts, evaluating, coming up with good commentary.

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A lot of the podcasts are just wrapping paper podcasts. In other words, they are taking ideas other people have thought of and then repackaging them, making them look pretty, sometimes changing them to be able to make them more marketable, but we have very few intellectuals on those levels, and those are the people,

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I mean, you're going to have to need, you need your popular voices. I'm suffering from a problem that the intellectuals we do have tend to have a very hard time getting employed.

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They don't have mechanisms of funding, so they have an option. They either have to go to the left and keep their head down, work for a university or something like that, or if they go to the right and they out themselves, they make themselves unemployable for those kinds of jobs, and now they have to figure out how to survive on the right, and how do you survive on the right when it's mostly a populist organization without the same kind of hierarchy?

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Well, you have to start a podcast. You have to be a popular substack person, so here's the bottom line of all of it, everything

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I'm saying here. The right has an institutional problem.

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We've had it for a long time. We continue to have it, and the big question has always been, do we form new institutions, or do we try to take over or take back the ones that we've lost?

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We have a system that benefits actors, grifters, and entertainers.

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That's what we have, and it's because of 100 years of the left taking over institutions and those respectable institutions that were once trusted, we don't own anymore.

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You can get production value with a couple hundred bucks and just some time on your hands and a computer, and we all think that's a good thing in a way because now we can compete with Hollywood.

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Now we can produce our own high -quality content, yeah, but it also gives people that do have way too much time on their hands and do have certain skills and presentation the opportunity to become leaders because we are robbed of the mechanisms that we once held to give us good leaders.

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It's a competitive market, but that market is mostly driven by edgy comments, getting the notice of people when you say provocative things.

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It's driven by personality. It's entertainment. Politics and entertainment have merged.

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I remember this was maybe 15 years ago when there was a poll that millennials,

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I don't know why I remember this, but it was a while ago. It was during when Tucker Carlson was still on MSNBC.

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That's how long ago it was, but there was this poll that millennials were getting most of their news information from comedians, from Comedy Central, from Colbert, from these guys, and I remember

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I was at my friend's house. I think I was an early teenager, and I think it was my friend's dad says, well, this is the end, basically.

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If millennials, if the young people at that time are going to get their news from comedians, then we have no hope.

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It shows an incredible dumbing down, and you're not evaluating data.

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It's all about jabs. It's about the art of debate is lost because debate is no longer about reasoned discourse, discussing things, coming up with answers, evaluating information.

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Debate now is in this kind of an environment who can get the zinger in, who can get the sound bite in, who can really slam their opponent.

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I think educated people, people who have been trained how to think, look at this, and they're just like, this is terrible.

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This is awful, but this is a good sport for the masses.

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We now, on the right, have made some inroads. We have comedians, I suppose, at least who may have been more center, but now they're more on the right because things have shifted.

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Those are positive developments, but without institutional hierarchies, without people who actually know how to wield power, who are in charge, without adults in the room, without people who have gone through the mechanisms of experience that it takes to actually govern, and I don't mean manage,

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I mean govern, then the right still has a huge, huge problem. I think that Turning Point USA has shown us a way that this can potentially work.

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I think Turning Point USA has shown us a way that this can potentially work because what Turning Point USA has done is they have realized a few things.

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One is the universities are still the places where most of our elites are formed, so you go to the university if you want to influence things.

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You might be able to convert some people or get some people thinking, at least. You can push the needle there.

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That's a really good thing. Now, we had young Republicans before that, but they didn't operate at the same scale, and there's a realization that the universities have also been dumbed down, so you can actually dumb your content down a little bit and still reach some of the students, at least while they're an undergrad.

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That's, I think though, 20 % of it, right? The bigger success story here,

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I think, is coming up with a mechanism that's nationwide, that has chapters all over the place.

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Those chapters are loyal. Loyalty is a big part of this. They're loyal because there's a vision.

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There's a positive vision, and they know what they're fighting for, and they trust their leaders. Those things are all key.

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Charlie Kirk was able to somehow form something that reflected that, right? The left has had this for a while because they took over our institutions.

18:49

Charlie Kirk was able to, kind of inside the left's house, inside the universities, form a parallel institution.

18:56

I mean, Gramsci talks about this with a parallel hegemony. Charlie Kirk actually started doing something that is like this, that would kickstart our own march for the institutions.

19:07

Then what he did is he selected out voices that he trusted on issues.

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Now, because there was already trust in Charlie Kirk, and because he wasn't crazy, that's the best word

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I could come up with, because he was more measured. He looked at information. He didn't make snap judgments all the time.

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He actually genuinely cared about the people he was talking to. He was transparent. He wasn't just behind a microphone.

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He went to places, right? Because of all these different things, he was able to cultivate a kind of deeper trust than even a lot of the large media podcast platforms.

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With that authority, he then could seed some of that. He could use that authority to say, if you trust me, trust my friend over here.

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That was, I think, the main genius behind their conferences. They did so many of them. They did conferences. They did events.

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A lot of that was getting in front of you good experts, good people to, and I'm not saying all of them were, but some of them were.

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They were actually good voices for you to follow on various topics. This was a way to form a new hierarchy, a new group of people who were generally aligned, who were going to remain peaceful with each other to accomplish larger goals, who knew who their enemy was, and who were also able to interact with and reach the supporters that they needed to in the popular sphere.

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That's something that we've needed for a long time. In my life, at least,

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I've never seen mechanisms quite reach that. There have been attempts. You have had

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Young America's Foundation. You've had the Young Republicans. They just weren't able to do quite what

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Turning Point USA was able to do. I remember in the early days of Turning Point, I thought, this is beach, what would

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I call it, spring break conservatism. It's the t -shirts. It's the beach balls. Some of the early things were a little odd to me.

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I just thought, this isn't very highbrow stuff. Is this going anywhere?

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I think I now see the genius behind what Charlie Kirk was doing. Now that we're downstream from that, now that we have, what is it, now almost 7 ,000 requests for Turning Point chapters since Charlie Kirk's death and rising, there is a hunger to get involved with community because people are so deracinated and detached.

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There is a hunger to know what people stand for, what their identity is, where they came from.

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The left is failing miserably. They have our legacy institutions, but they're not supplying any of the needs that those legacy institutions were supposed to supply.

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Now that we have civilizational collapse on the horizon, people are looking in other places. We have a tremendous opportunity here.

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I would say, get involved. Now is the time. Get involved locally, get involved nationally, get involved wherever you can.