An Ex Armed Carwasher’s Take: An Interview with Kurt Schlichter

The following is an interview between The Dartmouth Review (TDR) and Kurt Schlichter (KS), the conservative commentator, author, trial lawyer, former stand-up comedian, retired Army Infantry colonel, and self-described “Ex Armed Carwasher.” Schlichter serves as a senior columnist for Townhall.com and provides biting political humor to his more than 400 thousand Twitter followers daily.

TDR: What impacts will the Department of Defense’s vaccine mandate have on national security?

KS: It’s a disaster right now. We need every good person we have, and we’re throwing people out because of a vaccine for a disease for which the number of people killed is not even a rounding error.

It’s so short-sighted, and it is exactly in keeping with the failed administration. These people have no common sense. They are stupid. All they have are credentials from places like Dartmouth, and they confuse that with real-world experience. I’m very tired of being led by people who’ve never been in a fistfight.

TDR: What impelled Putin to go from just recognizing separatist territories to fully invading Ukraine?

KS: He’s a bad guy. This is the real world. Again, like I said, we’re run by a bunch of people who’ve never been in a fistfight. Have they never met a bully? He’s taking it because he can, and he’s proving he can because he’s actually doing it.

The West is living in this weird globalist bubble where they think everybody is just like them and thinks just like them, except for those bad Jesus gun people out in the middle of America. They meet a guy like Putin, an ex-KGB colonel. He’s a serious guy, and he’s not a stupid guy. Everybody is saying that he’s crazy. He’s not crazy. If he is crazy, what does it say about you that he’s kicking your *ss? He’s meeting all his strategic objectives, every single one of them, and we got that moron [John] Kerry out there babbling about the effect on climate change. This bizarre weather cult is his priority while Ukraine is being crushed and the entire post-war order is being broken.

TDR: You’re from California. Why do Californians keep voting for Democrats?

KS: Because they’re idiots.

TDR: Do you see any future for Republicans in California?

Remember that there’s no hitting bottom with a leftist government. They will never change no matter what, because their whole goal is power. When the Californians maybe reach bottom, maybe they will change.

We saw school board [members] in San Francisco being thrown out by massive numbers because they just weren’t educating kids and instead trying to indoctrinate them. It gives me a little hope that there might be some pushback, but it’s going to be a long time. California is run by typical ruling-class, elitist types who are stupid and incompetent. They are failed.

These people run every institution we have. Here’s my challenge: name an institution that works. Academia, the NFL, Hollywood, the military, what’s the institution that’s really good to go? 31 years ago when I was in Desert Storm, we could look at the military and go, “Yeah, that’s an institution that works. It does not function perfectly, but it functions. It does a good job.” There are no institutions that do that [today], and there are no institutions run by conservatives.

TDR: Do you have any message for politicians like Lindsey Graham, who cozied up to Biden during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation process?

KS: Lindsey Graham represents a dying breed, a breed of Republicans who believed in the institutions, who believed that winning came second because of some amorphous principle that’s always ignored by the other side.

I don’t believe that.

Here’s my conservative principle: I will never allow anything to happen that makes me less free. There’s my conservative principle. And that’s my only one.

TDR: In the conservative movement, there’s a lot of focus on the law. Do you think that this focus comes at the expense of conservative success in other fields?

KS: The law is how we solve problems in this society, or at least how we’re supposed to. And I think there’s a place for it, but you’ve got people like David French—and he’s a ridiculous man—who think that the law is the be-all and end-all.

I’m a trial lawyer. The first thing I do when I get a case is figure out who the judge is. What does that tell you about the law?

TDR: If you were in charge of the American conservative movement, what would you be doing to win?

KS: I would be encouraging a primary, a heavy primary for 2024. That does not mean I’m against Donald Trump. I think a primary hones and sharpens our people.

I think Donald Trump—obviously, he’s the favorite—needs to get a workout. He needs a tough primary where people ask tough questions, [where] he talks about the things he did well—and he did a lot of things well—and he talks about the things he did poorly. And there were a few of those.

What has he learned? How has he changed? How will we do it again? Of course, I’m only talking about Donald Trump now, all the other candidates need that too. Democrats aren’t going to be easy on them, nor should they, nor should we ever expect it. I want a primary where we fight it out and the best man or woman wins.