Charlie Kirk explains why guilt is current driving force of our politics on 'Tucker Carlson Today'
Stuck in the Past: Charlie Kirk says conservatives are holding on to outdated ideas. The Turning Point USA Founder talks to Tucker about the future of a movement that is struggling to find its identity in a post-Cold War world.
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk spoke with Fox Nation's Tucker Carlson on Monday about how American politics is increasingly centered on various constituencies and how they deal with their own, or subject others to, guilt.
Kirk said on "Tucker Carlson Today" that when he travels to college campuses he tries to get the attendees out of the now-typical collegiate debate of "oppressor vs oppressed" – which he called "boring" and not constructive.
"It creates deeply unhappy activists, which is exactly what our universities create," he said. "So then conservatives play into this kind of oppressor-oppressed thing by not being able to deal with the guilt that they feel because they went to these universities."
Listing off various monikered "guilts" of the present-day – White guilt, wealth guilt, corporate guilt – Kirk suggested that it is difficult to find real "meaning" in politics rather than other aspects of life, such as religion.
"It's taken the place of theology," Carlson interjected.
"Right," Kirk replied. "So a society without meaning will find meaning -- and we found it in expiating our own guilt."
Kirk said that American culture has been moving away from maintaining organized religion in its prominent place, giving Christianity as an example.
"A true Christian, after they go through either a church service or a deep reading of the Scriptures – you're freed from that guilt: whatever guilt that might be - of wronging your neighbor, or being of a certain complexion that society says you shouldn't be, because you go straight to the source; your Creator," said Kirk.
"So that's the mechanics of Christianity that have worked so well for the last couple thousand years, that you don't owe some penance to society because of the melanin content in your skin."
"So you remove the mechanics of Christianity," continued Kirk.
Kirk noted that in Evangelism, that mechanic is attending worship and evangelizing with other people, while for sects like Roman Catholicism, that process is of receiving the Eucharist.
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In that regard, Kirk argued he and the millions of others who still hold religion in a high place in their life are already regularly freed from the guilt that drives much of politics because Reconciliation does what the activists want their politics to do.
"And then, of course, atoning to your neighbor --- going to your neighbor and saying, ‘you know what, I wronged you. Will you forgive me?’ --– All of a sudden you are freed of whatever you might have done."
Left-wing Democrats, by contrast, offload their guilt through "massive public policy measures, activism, the confiscation of wealth, and the elimination of private property," he said.
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