During their first-ever podcast conversation in December 2021, Jack Posobiec and the late great Charlie Kirk discussed the contradictions of modern American life, focusing on material abundance alongside rising social despair.
“We live, even, you know, with everything else going on right now, can you think of a society that's more affluent than ours?” Posobiec asked, pointing to modern living standards. He noted that while conservatives often dismiss abundance as a given, acknowledging it has increasingly become taboo. “Now if you want to go down to, like, where based conservatives are, we're like, so what? And that's all of a sudden a thought crime.”Posobiec emphasized that the material conditions of modern life remain historically unprecedented. “How do you have a society, how do you have grocery stores full of food,” he said, adding that even excluding the pandemic, “we have a jobs market that is generally very, very good.” He added that “the average middle class person today has things that the monarchs of the 1500s couldn't dream of.”
Kirk jumped in with examples. “Like electricity. Like ibuprofen. Couldn't dream of it,” he said. “Just like, I have a headache. Good luck trying to solve that 500 years ago.”
Despite that prosperity, Kirk pointed to worsening mental health outcomes. “The psychiatrists' offices are full, the therapist's offices are full, you can barely get them. The morgues are full,” he said. “Everyone's getting on some medication or another. So, we're depressed. We're upset. Suicides are on the rise.” Kirk then posed the central question: “And yet, we also live in such a time of abundance. How do you square it?”
Kirk argued the two trends were connected. “I think they're directly correlated,” he said, attributing material growth to the abandonment of social and moral restraints. “The abundance was made possible quicker because we decided to forsake a lot of moral guardrails,” he said, citing offshoring industry to China, reliance on screens, and the failure to discipline or raise children.
He added that difficult conversations were deliberately avoided. “We never, ever wanted to have a conversation about children being born out of wedlock, or fathers not in the home, or the destruction of the church, or the nonstop propaganda campaign against American Christianity, which is everywhere.”
Posobiec responded bluntly: “Who needs any of those things? That doesn't contribute to the GDP.”
The discussion then turned to Jordan Peterson, whose popularity Kirk said stemmed from his willingness to address widespread misery. “This is why Jordan Peterson was so popular,” Kirk said. “I think people get Jordan wrong… I have a lot of respect for him.”
Posobiec gave his opinion, saying “I like Jordan, but he is quite Canadian. I'll put it that way.”
Kirk acknowledged Peterson’s shortcomings but quickly came to his defense “I really have no patience for a lot of the criticisms towards him,” he said, referencing Peterson’s compliance during COVID restrictions. “It's like, Jordan, you literally write about not complying with tyrannical regimes.” Kirk said Peterson resonated because he identified the problem clearly. “He pinpointed people were miserable,” Kirk said, adding that Peterson “gave people a reasonable platform to believe in ancient texts and religious structure.”
Posobiec made his own position explicit. “I believe every word of the Bible. Totally true. Inerrancy of scripture,” he said. “I believe in Jonah, the whale, the sea being parted. The whole thing. It's not allegorical. It's literal.”
“Based,” Posobiec said, with. Kirk responded that such belief aligned with historic Christianity. “And you believe the same as a Catholic, or you should,” he said.
“The sea literally was parted,” Posobiec reiterated.
“No, of course it was. Obviously. Absolutely,” Kirk replied, before clarifying Peterson’s approach. “Jordan didn't make a claim on that. Instead, he said, what is the deeper philosophical, psychological reason you should care about this?”
Posobiec challenged modern skepticism. “Explain to me how people writing the Bible thousands and thousands of years before any of this science or psychology or the et cetera was studied, and they got it all right.”
Kirk answered simply: “Because it's the word of God.”
