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June 22, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
01:01:48
Mastering The Playbook Of The Left

Charlie delivers a sermon at Godspeak Calvary Chapel Thousand Oaks to expose the radical, Alinskyite tools the left is employing to overtake our culture and dismantle America as we know it, seemingly in a matter of weeks. Charlie also offers...

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Pastor Rob's Church 00:06:13
Thank you for listening to this Podcast 1 production.
Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast 1, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Today, I am going to share with you a sermon that I gave at Pastor Rob McCoy's Church.
You guys are going to love it.
It's timely.
It's important.
And I've gotten some great feedback from it.
So before we get into it, if you guys want to come to our event on June 23rd in Phoenix, Arizona with the President of the United States, go to trumpstudents.org.
That is trumpstudents.org or email us, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
This episode is brought to you advertising free by those of you that support us on CharlieKirk.com.
Help support the lots of hours and hours of work, dozens of hours of work we put into the show every single week.
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Buckle up, everybody.
I think you're really going to be blessed by this.
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.
Hello.
It's been a while since I've actually spoken somewhere.
So it's been a couple months.
Hi, everybody.
Great to be here.
I'm honored to be part of this church.
I finally found a pastor that fights.
It's so nice to see.
Someone who stands for what's right.
Incredible.
And I want to thank all of you for standing with Rob because they tried their best to deplatform, attack that man for doing the right thing.
I was watching from afar in some form of quarantine in Arizona, and I saw the, I watched every week, and I saw the communion service that was held.
I mean, you would have thought that it would have been, it's probably the cleanest room in the history of the planet, right?
I mean, literally, after every time someone sat down, they were disinfecting it and reinforcing.
Unbelievable.
And of course, the media, I think one of the news coverage pieces was pretty, rather fair by their standards, but still the local activists thought that this would be the total cause of the worst things in the world.
But the church is supposed to be an entity, supposed to be a place that takes difficult stands, that takes necessary stands, especially so that we can celebrate Palm Sunday and Easter.
And they took that away from us.
And they took those, you know, those days of celebration.
You know, they just said, oh, that's not essential, right?
But that's why you have Pastor Rob, right?
And Rob is, I could tell you, starting a movement across the country, and I'm happy to play a small part of this, to call out other pastors, pastors that are more afraid that they're going to have five people leave bad comments on their social media feed than actually contending and contesting for truth.
And so Rob's an inspiration to me.
He's my pastor, and I know he's all your pastors as well.
And so we can all learn so much from him because we need people that are activists in every single realm and fight for truth.
So if you are like me, you're probably very unsettled about what you're seeing in the country right now.
And I hope I can offer clarity and hopefully clear up some confusion of exactly what's happening in America.
Because what's happening in the streets of Los Angeles and Philadelphia and Atlanta, I've been dealing with for eight years.
For eight years, I've been running Turning Point USA, a nationwide student activist organization fighting for first principles, free markets, and America on college campuses.
And you probably remember when you guys were nice enough to welcome me to speak a couple months ago and earlier last year, my whole guiding thesis is whatever happens on college campuses will soon happen in the culture of America.
I say it every time.
And there is an untruth that has spread is that, oh, those are just kids on college campuses.
They'll grow up eventually.
Or whatever happens on college campuses won't infect the American culture.
You've probably heard this before, right?
It's so pathologically dangerous and untrue to believe that.
That somehow what happens to 23 million young people on college campuses won't all of a sudden metastasize and grow everywhere.
And so I'm getting more listenership and more people to our podcast than our what we're doing than ever before because people are saying, how is it that they're able to form a sovereign country in downtown Seattle?
So welcome to the 156th country in the world, Chaz.
Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
Interestingly enough, I guess we can always use every moment as a teaching moment.
We now know that nations must have borders, right?
We now know that you must prove who you are to get into a sovereign nation.
They require IDs.
And my favorite part of this whole thing is they say, we're doing this because America's an awful colonialist country.
Like what they just did is a very aggressive act of colonialism.
They just took over downtown Seattle.
So I want to give you an insight into the rules that the left plays by.
Truth vs. Offense in Conflict 00:02:12
Because it's actually public and publicized.
And if we're serious about contending for truth, we'll talk about truth too, we have to know exactly how the enemy operates and the playbook that they use.
But first, let's talk about the necessity of truth.
Because one of the things that makes the Christian tradition different than any other religion is that on the hierarchy of ultimate values, the commitment that what we consider to be Lord and Savior, the thing that brings us all together, is that Christ was the embodiment of truth.
It wasn't that he said true things, like Moses.
It wasn't that he said a couple things that resonated, like some of the prophets.
No, he was truth.
That's why literally in John we call him Logos.
That he is the embodiment of everything that is true.
So therefore, at the top of what we consider as Christians to be the most important thing to contend for, it's that in your actions, in your words, truth must be paramount.
And you must also operate on the inverse of that, that you must not tolerate things that are not true.
That we shouldn't tolerate that things that are so pathologically false to spread without you taking a stand against those things.
And as Rob said, whatsoever is true, but the inverse should also be fought for, that whatsoever is untrue must be challenged.
And so in the last couple weeks, I have been, let's just say, more vocal than usual.
I have been told for the most, let's just say, frustrating reasons, I'm not allowed to speak in the last couple of weeks because of an immutable characteristic that God gave me, being a white Christian male.
I have been instructed by the guardians of the zeitgeist that I'm not allowed to speak.
So I've talked louder than ever before.
And so.
The Necessity of Speaking Truth 00:05:56
Now, mind you, every time I speak, I do not do so disrespectfully or try to offend ever.
You do not seek conflict as Christians.
I get mislabeled as someone who is a provocateur.
That is incorrect.
I say things that are true, and then from there, if you are offended by that, that is not my problem.
But I do not seek to offend.
It is a completely different thing.
And so, first of all, what is being argued right now nationally is that because of the way God made you, however God made you in his image, Imago Dei, you're only allowed to say certain things or not say certain things.
This is against the Christian ethic fundamentally.
The Christian ethic is that, regardless of your skin color, your background, whatever, made in the image of God, that you need redemption as much as the next person needs redemption.
It's not as if that person needs redemption more or you need redemption more.
Now, this is so different than the way most civilizations operated for the last couple thousand years.
The way it worked in the 11th century or in the 8th century was that they would condemn people and they would threaten people, not just you, but your generations beyond you.
It would almost be this blood guilt.
Like, oh, you did something wrong.
It's like, we're not just going to cut your head off, but your children's and your children's children will be banished to the peasant class for the next 500 years.
See, what made Christianity different, and it was embodied through Christ, was that you need salvation even if your father is saved.
Your father, your mother can't save you.
They could pray for you, they could pour into you, they could nurture you, but you're actually a singular unit absent of the unit that preceded you.
And so, this idea of blood guilt or this idea of group indictment of what came before you is so anti-Christian.
We're all in need of redemption no matter what came before you.
And even if your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was Abraham Lincoln, you also need redemption.
That doesn't make you any, that doesn't give you a hall pass being like, no, I'm actually awesome because I come from a righteous bloodline.
It doesn't work that way.
This idea that originally the country was founded on was a Christian idea, but now we're going back to tribalism.
We are seeing 300 years of intellectual and philosophical digression in three weeks or less.
And it's under, it's because we have far too often sacrificed the need to contest for truth for highly emotive pathological arguments.
And I am not diminishing in the slightest injustices that have happened in American history or in the last couple weeks.
Every time I speak about this, I say what happened in Minneapolis was wrong.
That person should be held accountable.
It was a sin, and we should speak out against that.
However, making the illogical jump and then saying, well, the country is actually an awful place.
Like, hold on a second.
One police officer and three cowards that did nothing is not an embodiment or an indictment of a country 337 million people.
In fact, I think we're systemically unracist as a country.
In fact, I think you have to go search and hunt and look for our racism in our country.
In fact, I think most of our dealings, considering how multiracial, multilingual, and multicultural our country is, we're actually a generally decent country to each other.
In fact, I think that despite what the architects of chaos are trying to tell you, that it's a miracle we've been able to actually get along so well as we have in our country for the last 50 or 60 or 100 years, bringing in a million people into our country every single year.
110 different languages spoken across the country.
People from all walks of life.
It's incredible.
In fact, no other country can boast that.
And that story is something we should be incredibly proud of.
Now, it's not, I've never ever said America is perfect.
That would be a silly thing to say.
It would be foolish.
But we are excellent.
It's a different way to rank it.
And to say all of a sudden that we are bitter and awful, and all these different things that I'm seeing the activists purport, first and foremost, it bothers me at a fundamental level because it's untrue.
But secondly, it's ungrateful.
And that's what bothers me probably even more.
Is that there were intentional is that, and I want to speak because we're in a neighborhood here generally that actually is the stereotypical neighborhood that's frustrating me the most.
And it's not the velocity of the activism you're seeing right now that makes you feel like things are changing so quickly are not actually, it's being pushed by upper-middle-class suburban social media activists.
It's being pushed by corporate America.
It's being pushed by places like Thousand Oaks or Westlake Village or Bel Air or Orange County, Santa Ana, Dana Point.
You get the type of neighborhood.
Those are the neighborhoods that are actually pushing this forward.
So here's, I'm a student of history, and knowing history, I think, is one of the most important.
Rules of Power and Privilege 00:12:36
To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.
I don't say I know everything about history.
That would be silly to say.
No one would.
But you have to have an understanding, especially the 20th century history, to correctly make informed decisions for today.
So we don't teach our children 20th century history at all.
In fact, when we teach it, we teach incorrectly, if like kind of a passerby.
I'm talking about Mao's China.
I'm talking about Pol Pot.
I'm talking about Stalin and Mussolini.
The 20th century was a bloodbath.
And it was only 50 or 60 or 70 years ago.
In fact, we have people probably in this community that were refugees from some of these ideologies.
But what were these ideologies?
So there are three huge takeaways from the 20th century that we just have to admit before we make any other public policy decisions, okay?
The first of which, the promise of utopia is a death sentence.
That's like a really good takeaway of the 20th century.
That when you have demagogues that are parading around promising that they can create heaven on earth, that's an assured death sentence.
Here's a good operating matrix, and those of us that are Christians know this.
We can create hell on earth, but we can't create heaven on earth.
It's a very important recognition.
If you want, we can create absolute suffering, because life is already in some form suffering.
But we can never create perfection or some form of heaven.
That's why we have a belief and an assuredness in an afterlife and a creator that gives us that.
And imagine the pride and the hubris it must take, the authoritarian mindset that must set in.
Like everyone else before me got it wrong, but me, I can create it perfectly.
You must not believe in God if you believe in that, which is a whole another deeper conversation.
Number two, the takeaway from the 20th century.
The mobilizing of resentments is guaranteed conflict.
So when you mobilize people based on resentments, you're going to have conflict.
It's going to happen.
When you take one group, like the Bolsheviks, and you turn them against the Mensheviks, it's not going to end well.
And when you have certain demagogues that play into those grievances and hyper-focus on the grievances and then try to use those grievances as a reason to give themselves more power, that is not a good recipe at all.
And I'm not saying that you shouldn't acknowledge that grievances exist.
It's not what I'm saying.
Instead, I'm saying when you mobilize those grievances for a very particular political objective, not good at all.
Finally, number three, and let's just recap.
100 million innocent people died in the 20th century because of these three things.
100 million innocents.
40 million in Mao's China, 60 million more or less in Stalin's Russia, Vietnam, Italy, you know the rest.
Grouping people on immutable characteristics is a gateway to a bloodbath.
This probably is the one that most people agree with and they know to be true.
Saying like, over you, because of how God made you, there's something wrong or right because of you.
That should be a really easy takeaway from the 20th century, right?
That as soon as you get into that type of conversation, you should back away and say, hold on a second, this is not good.
So explain to me how what we're talking about now is any different than grouping people based on immutable characteristics.
I have been told by members of the media and the corporate elite that I have to shut down because I espouse whiteness.
Seriously.
I have activists reaching out to me that say, Charlie, on the far left, you must stop speaking because of your white privilege.
Okay, fine.
That's a tepper conversation on all that.
But even the presupposition of gathering people and organizing them based on the color of their skin is inherently a prejudiced idea of organizing human beings.
Talk about my character, my language, my worldview.
Talking about the melanin content in my skin would be a 1,000-year devolution back into tribalism that so many people sacrificed so that we could have a society where that is supposed to not be the primary, if not at all, reason how we organize human beings.
So we're dealing in this idea right now, and the idea of white privilege is completely opposite of the Christian ethic.
It is.
It's totally, it's opposite of everything that Galatians 3.28, where your skin color, your class, it's all immaterial.
In the eyes of God, you're all children of Christ.
That's a Christian idea.
But the left doesn't, most of them don't even believe in God.
Now, before I get into the rules, because it's very important of how the left operates, I do want to say that one of the other reasons I love Rob so much is that he also contends against other pastors.
And to see how many pastors and churches have voluntarily now participated in this sensationalist moment in American history has been so disappointing.
In fact, I've been part of this tangentially where pastors have been liking my social media posts.
Then they come out and they say, oh, I don't really like that guy.
I apologize.
He's awful.
Like, well, I didn't ask you to like my posts, okay?
Thank you.
And then the church gets divided over it, throws me under the bus.
Big pastors, big churches.
I'm talking about 60,000 member churches, right?
No stand for truth, more worried that they might get run out as a pastor.
And I was like, so what if you lose your pastorship over that?
I mean, wouldn't it be more important to stand for truth?
And that's one of the things is that once you surrender yourself to a commitment to tell the truth in every instance, to contest for truth, because knowing the truth is helpful.
Maybe for you, but if you just tell the truth, if you just know the truth and you're just in your room all day long, that's awfully selfish, actually, when you think about it.
See, so the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, it gets mislabeled by certain Christians as like this quasi-hippie dialogue.
Seriously, like you're a flower, you're a bird, like it's all this, right?
They're totally mislabeled.
When in reality, it was Christ expounding on the, as Rob calls it, the moral app that God gave Moses, like the laws are what you shouldn't do.
Christ then dealed in the positive.
Here's what you can do if you actually contest for truth.
Here's what you can create.
And we don't really materially know what that is, but it is, it's, I'm going to stand declaratively and say this, this whatsoever is true, I'm going to contend for.
Now, knowing truth, helpful, awesome.
Fighting for truth, hard, different things.
There's a price to the second one.
So I know a lot of people that know truth, but contesting for it, everyone has their own calling and their own way to do it.
Now, the problem is that some of these churches don't even know the truth.
That's a whole different conversation, which is a deeper, deeper, deeper thing.
So I've been contesting with the left for years, as you know.
And there's a book that many of you have heard, and I want to dive into it, which is probably the most important piece of literature around the idea of organizing and effectuating leftist social change.
Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis about this book.
Barack Obama learned under this person.
I know a lot of you people know about this, but it's helpful if you know the 13 rules to hear it again.
And it's helpful if you have no idea what I'm talking about.
So the book is called Rules for Radicals.
It is written by Saul Alinsky.
He was a Chicago community organizer.
He trained Barack Obama.
Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis that I mentioned at Wellesley.
She was a Goldwater girl until learning about Saul Linsky.
Now let's just start.
This is not a secular document.
Start with that.
The first thing it says in the book is I'm going to dedicate this book to the first rebel, to Lucifer, the first fallen angel.
It's the dedication to Rules for Radicals.
So this book is circulated, taught, poured into by every radical leftist.
I think maybe two Republican members of Congress can name me two of these 13 rules.
This is their Ten Commandments.
Okay?
So we have Ten Commandments that act for us to act morally, right?
Don't lie, don't steal, don't covet, treat people honorably, treat your parents honorably, all of that.
Their rules are about how to deconstruct things around them.
What would motivate someone to do something like that is a five-hour lecture I'm happy to give at a different time.
Okay.
This should, I think, start to click for you when you start to hear these rules.
Okay, number one, power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
Rule number one.
So the radicals always try to present as if they're bigger than they really are.
And that's true.
So that should first give you hope that there's actually not as much support behind what they're saying as what there is.
Now, mind you, he wrote this literally in there of how to effectuate Marxist change in America.
Rule number two, never go outside the expertise of your people, ever.
Now they violate that rule, especially recently.
They're sending people on television talking about abolishing the police and that if you even ask about it, it's violating their privilege.
We'll get back to that one.
Rule number three, wherever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.
So take us off our home turf, right?
Contest with us where we're not comfortable.
Rule number four, this is a good one.
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
So what do they do?
Hey, church, I thought you said you want to help the least of these.
Hey, church, weren't you called to action for the disadvantaged?
That's how they use the book of rules that we care, and they incorrectly apply it against the organism they're trying to destroy.
Number five, ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
Is that ever true?
Ridicule, mockery, intense attack against any person.
How many of you have probably lost friends and all because of ridicule, right?
The mob comes after you, like instantaneously.
Rule number six, a good tactic is one your people enjoy, like stealing televisions in Long Beach.
A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag to the purpose.
Okay.
Oof.
Number eight, keep the pressure on.
They're committed to daily going after the specific purpose.
Number nine, the threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
That should give you comfort.
This is what they operate on.
They make it seem as if they have a bigger sword than they really do.
Rule number 10, the major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain pressure.
It's a little bit more of a complicated one, but basically everything is about applying pressure on what they call the enemy.
Number 11, this is a very interesting one.
If you push a negative hard enough, it will break through on the counterside.
Abolish police, abolish police, abolish police.
All of a sudden, it breaks through on the counterside where people are like, well, maybe we should.
Contesting with Biblical Purpose 00:09:26
Maybe we should.
Number 12, the price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
Number 13, this is the one that's probably the most applicable to today.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
These are the 13 rules that the radical redefinitionists are using every single day.
So our rules are a little different because we serve a higher purpose than this.
But understand, the only thing that can confront these correctly is contesting for truth.
See, all of these work really well If you have decentralized, disorganized individuals that are not together fighting under the same type of message or unity.
And so you have, they think they have a moment right now to effectuate massive, massive social change.
And they're probably right.
The lack of backup that I have seen in the Christian and conservative circles in the last three weeks has given me more angst about the future of America than any other time in the history of the country.
Now, I'm comforted by scripture where Rob said, no, no, you don't understand.
This is like Gideon's army.
It's like, always the perpetual optimist, right?
No matter what it is.
You know, the thing about Rob, we'll be totally surrounded.
And Rob will turn to me and he'll say, you know the best thing about being surrounded is?
I say, what?
He's like, you could shoot in any direction.
Amen, right?
So the good thing about us feeling surrounded is no matter what we do right now, we could do something.
If you have a why, you can figure out the how.
It's a very important lesson that I've known.
The why of what we're fighting for, ultimate truth.
The hierarchy of the battle and the necessity for that struggle is the story of Western civilization.
What makes the power grabbers and the autocrats and the merchants of chaos, what makes them nervous, is a church that rises up.
That's it.
It really is.
Now, the church is supposed to be the last stand of liberty and freedom.
This is exactly why they have funded billions of dollars into the American church to the nicest word I can say is deceive the Christian community to believe things that are not true.
I think it was Christianity today.
I get a confused Christian post.
Christianity Today yesterday says that the church should step up and pay reparations to black people of generations.
It's Christianity today.
So I have so many questions about this article that they wrote.
First of all, how is that consistent with the Christian ethic?
First of all, the Bible tells us if you have sinned, first and foremost, atone to your Creator.
You need ultimate redemption.
Seek it and surrender yourself.
Secondly, atone to the person that you have disadvantaged.
Go to them.
Look at them in the eyes and say, I've sinned against you.
Third of all, if you actually want to effectuate big social change, you go do that.
Don't go tell somebody else to go do that for you.
Don't go say, hey, politician or bureaucrat B, go make the world a better place.
I'm going to go surf.
That's not the way the Christian ethic works.
It's, you go down to Skid Row and go sacrifice a weekend.
It's not, you can't delegate your willingness to change the world.
How many of these activists that have been marching in the streets do you think actually have an organized life?
How many of these activists that have been burning down buildings, these rioters, do you think are willing to say on a daily basis, things are not going the way I want them to go and I take responsibility for that?
Do you think that is a sentence that is said by them a lot?
How many of them do you think say, I surrender totally and completely to a sovereign, merciful God that sent his son?
How many of those people do you think say that?
Probably very few.
And I don't want to generalize, but I've battled these people for long enough.
I think it's fair to say.
All that being said, what is so critical and what's being contested for is I know all of you agree it's spiritual.
It obviously is.
But with the church being winnowed down and pastors running to the hills because a couple people said mean things to them, which, again, is so perplexing to me because some of these pastors, and some of them are massive pastors here in Southern California that I've seen, huge pastors that were churches I thought were great.
And, you know, they come up and they say, you know, if you don't accept Jesus, you can go to hell.
It's this awful, you know, totally, really good Bible teaching.
And then they're telling me they don't want to offend their congregation.
I'm like, you just told them if they don't accept Christ, it's eternal damnation.
Like, how does it get more offensive than that?
It's like...
Like, definitionally, using any form of logical decision-making matrix, forever burning, is probably worse than talking about whatever you're afraid of.
Like, I just, it's, and really what it comes down to, in my personal opinion, is that there's some in the Christian community that are just totally afraid to contest for it because of a lack of fluency or a lack of literacy in that particular topic.
And or there is this incorrect assumption that the church can operate in its own quarantined bubble.
Get that?
That somehow this here is only about one thing, which is we're going to try to get people to be eternally saved.
The most important thing, by the way, totally agree.
But as Rob says, create disciples, not converts.
Discipleship is a lifelong pouring in.
And what I have found is this.
The reason why this church is packed more so than ever before, why people are seeking out our platforms, is Christians are looking for this more than ever before.
Because they're not getting organized thinking from their pastors.
They get the salvation totally, and they start reading their Bible, and they start to see that there's a solution to chaos all throughout the Bible.
Because that's really the story of the Bible, is we're going to create something, it's going to get destroyed, go to chaos, go back to God, he'll recreate it.
It's basically this repeating pattern, right?
And it's an overgeneralization, but that's basically the story that repeats itself all throughout the Old Testament, right?
Like, I'm going to give you a king, he's going to screw up eventually, Israel gets shattered, go to the wilderness, atone, reorganize yourself, I'll give you Israel back, and then you're going to screw it up again.
And like, that's the story, by the way, archetypically, that's your story too.
Seriously, that's your story every single day.
Like, I'm going to get myself organized, showered, we're ready to go, go to work, and life hits you, and all this, go to the wilderness, I don't know what I need, I got to go back to God, we're going to do it all over again, right?
And what the New Testament does is it answers the riddle of the Old Testament, which is like, how long do we have to do this thing?
And that the New Testament answers from a psychological perspective is you don't.
Just surrender.
Like, there's a reason why he came.
It's the ultimate answer.
It's the ultimate, it is the ultimate gift because you no longer, you have to understand that this earthly building and rebuilding and chaos and wilderness, it's never going to get you fulfillment.
It's never going to get you the ultimate answer.
And so knowing this to be true, and I know that we have more services, so I don't want to speak for too long.
But knowing this to be true, we as Christians have to contest more than ever before.
And so to kind of go back to what I was saying about some of the megachurches and people that were posting there and what they were doing, I find that it's somewhat predictable.
Substance Over Style in Activism 00:15:20
And human beings operate in patterns.
The American Revolution was fought by less than 3% of the citizens of the country.
In fact, 30% actively helped King George.
30%.
30% did nothing.
And so it only takes a small group of dedicated individuals, but it was Bible-believing, scripture-understanding people that rose up against King George in that phenomenal great leap forward that created Western society as we know it.
And so I'm not totally making an equivalency that we're at that moment right now in American history.
But we're definitely on the way.
That's, I think, fair to say.
Now, in closing, and then I'll let Rob come up.
I don't know what I'm at with time and everything, but we'll figure it out.
Okay.
So in almost closing, I guess you should say.
And I call a lot of this woke Christianity, by the way, which is kind of a playoff of mere Christianity, right?
So if you don't know what the term woke means, how do I best describe this?
It is a leftist term to try to say someone who really understands the issues of the struggle of the left.
And I'm probably being very generous in my description of that, right?
But it's someone that radically and fundamentally thinks that what needs to happen in the country is fundamental definition, redefinition and destruction.
So here's what I'm doing, and then we'll take it wherever we want, right?
So you guys know I fight on college campuses every single day.
I do two podcasts a day.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
Two podcasts a day.
Rob's my guest today on the podcast, so you guys can check it out.
It's his fourth appearance on the podcast.
He's just, he's a, he's a bounty, he's a continual blessing to the country, and I think more people need to be made aware of Rob, and they are.
So that's good.
But understand this.
Where does all this activism, where does all of this go next?
Goes to my place, college campuses.
So all of this energy is going to go to every college campus across the country.
So I look at root causes.
How would anyone think of trying to create a sovereign nation in Seattle?
Well, it's no different than when I dealt with University of Vermont or Tufts University radicals that stormed the president's office and they created their own sovereign student community.
Understand the root cause of all of this is our either abdication or how complicit we have been with higher education's role to destroy our country.
And I know those are fighting words, but I wouldn't say them unless I know they are true.
We've been sending our kids there for a couple decades, and we wonder why they become radical leftists and they no longer believe in God.
And if they're not part of that, praise God, right?
However, I've seen it happen so many times.
We send our money to our alma mater, thinking that somehow it's going to continue to educate the next generation.
Well, it helps them build bigger buildings so that they can teach hatred of our country in bigger rooms or something.
And so that's what I'm contesting for.
That's what I'm fighting for every single day.
And it's going to be a battle.
I mean, this fall will be the most dangerous semester ever for Trump supporters and students.
Our students will get hospitalized.
Our students will have their lives put in danger.
The media will not cover it.
Christians will be under attack.
More people will retreat to the hills.
But we knew this was coming.
That's what we signed up for.
That's why those of you guys that support me, I do what I do so I could take the arrows and the lashings and all that stuff, metaphorically, of course, sometimes literally, but that's Bryce's job, not my job.
So, and that's where we're at.
And the cultural conversation is going to come to a head on our campuses.
We need more fighters.
And so, but that's okay.
If you're not in a place to fight, I understand.
There's three types of people.
And Dennis Prager says this quite often: there's the people that are on the opposition or the people that do nothing.
So just forget those people, right?
There's the fighters and the people that help the fighters.
So never diminish that in the Revolutionary War, the people that were donating supplies, running the supply chain, were just as instrumental to the actual revolutionaries on the front, on the front line.
So be someone that helps the fighter.
Here's my call to action: spend more on cultural political engagement every single year than you do on coffee.
That's all I ask.
And so, if you spend more on cultural political engagement than you do on coffee, if every Christian conservative did that, the world would be a better place.
So we have a little bit of time, and Charlie and I enjoy doing this together, so we're going to do a question and answer.
Great.
And we're motivating.
We can take four questions because we have four books.
Okay.
And these are signed by Charlie.
So if it's a really good question and it's not lengthy and you're not bloviating, you'll get a book.
So we'll do that.
And then one last thing is: you know, you were talking about the Revolutionary War, and you had John Hancock who signed his signature so big King George could read it, or so the wives tale says.
And then you had Thomas Paine, who wrote The American Crisis, and then George Washington.
Hamilton or Hancock never wore the uniform of the Continental Army.
Thomas Paine was an agnostic at best, an atheist at worst.
And then George Washington.
But all three were necessary for that revolution.
And the thing I so appreciate about Charlie and Turning Point USA is they are a secular 501c3, but they do more for leading folks to the Lord than the majority of churches in America because, yeah.
Young people are hungry for the truth and also for a future that has hope.
I mean, this is now, if you've been alive for 21 years on this earth, you've now survived your seventh global warming flooding.
You know, the world's coming to an end.
But what Charlie and Turning Point USA and all those students do is Galatians 3 says that the law is a school teacher, a guardian, to point us to Christ until faith comes.
And when they lay that out on college campuses, students come and then they want to know the source of that liberty.
And every single time, that's the profound gift that God has given Charlie.
And so one more round of applause.
Thank you, Charlie, for everything.
You want to get some questions?
We had a question back here.
Yes?
George Floyd.
And I've been in healthcare my whole life, and I'm concerned that the community, the situation that happened I felt was absolutely tragic, and the police officer was wrong, but they made George Floyd, who had a very long criminal past, a hero.
And the community is the United States.
The question is, why?
Why have they taken?
I'm not going to comment on that.
I encourage you to look at Candace Owens' latest video.
Thank you, though.
All right.
I don't have that many books.
With the education the way it is right now, how do you see us going about turning around the college campuses as parents?
Yeah, the college campuses will never be turned around.
So they are two prized possessions of the American left.
So you have a decision.
Everyone will make independent decisions, right?
So you have a couple ones.
You have to ask yourself, does my kid need to go to college?
And if so, I have a good reason.
And that's fine.
I'm not anti-college.
I think that if you want to be an engineer or a lawyer, it's a terrific place.
But going to go find yourself, you'll lose yourself.
And that's a very important thing to know.
Secondly, there are some phenomenal schools out there.
I have a project at Liberty University, the Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty.
I encourage all of you to check it out.
Liberty is terrific.
And Hillsdale is great, amongst other schools.
So there are some good ones, but they're less than 1%.
Let's just put it that way.
Third is ask yourself the question: what if?
What if they didn't go?
What would that life look like?
And I think more, and I'm actually probably writing my next book on this because I think so many people, I think that provocative question needs to be asked.
But for example, I do three to four hours a night, and Erica will tell you this, my girlfriend, who's terrific, three to four hours a night of studying, watching lectures, diving into great books.
If you think college will give you a thirst for knowledge, maybe, but we live in a world where all that information is free and online in real time.
It's more about the motivation of the individual.
And so if it's about getting the credential, totally get that.
If that credential matters to you, then admit it and say, I'm going for a piece of paper.
But if you think you're going to be enlightened, that's not the place to go get enlightened.
The question here was: say it again.
How do we go around trying to change the college campus?
How do you change the college campus?
I know the other three questions.
I don't know why I can't remember yours.
Yeah.
I answered that.
You just answered it.
Okay.
And the other one is: unless you went to one of the really good colleges, I really encourage you to divest your gifts from colleges.
I really do.
The other question was: how do you speak to young people?
Because we have a number of folks that, you know, their kids are wayward.
Sure.
What's up in that?
How do you get them woke?
Well.
Don't want that.
In a good way.
Yeah.
I have a contrarian opinion here, and it's worked for me, which is I don't pander, and I lose people because of that, but I think the evidence shows it's actually a very effective strategy based on what we've built and what I've done.
And I think this is part of the magic of why Bernie Sanders was so appealing, is that people would rather have you take very firm, authentic stands that are rooted in a way that you can explain it.
I'm not saying Bernie was good at that, but there was an appeal to him that it was like he came, it was almost as if he was a 1960s revolutionary, that there's almost like this archetype of he's going to fight for me that he was embodying.
And however, with young people in particular, I think that there just needs to be a very firm commitment to I'm going to defend truth and data and science and statistics.
And if that doesn't convince them, then I hope they'll eventually come around.
But I think the best way, and the best communicator in the history of the world was Christ.
And his linguistic dialectic is asking questions.
It was inquisitive.
And that was his way of effectuating change, was being a grand inquirer, just asking people, why do you believe that?
Where do you get that authority from?
I think far too often we get into explaining and we should get into asking.
Yeah.
And another answer to Charlie's good.
Watch his, when he goes on campus, just look at the YouTube videos because he does exactly that and ask some questions.
I will say one other thing, though, which is I learned very early on that rarely will people remember what you say, but they will remember how you say it.
And substance, unfortunately, in the world we live in, I shouldn't say unfortunately, it's just the way it is.
It could be a good thing or a bad thing.
Substance matters more than less than style.
Style matters a lot.
You raise your voice.
Are you able to have this?
And I do my best to stay calmer than the person I'm always communicating with, to have that kind of conversation.
I don't always live that out.
That's a tough thing when you're in the battle of heated ideas, right?
But that's the one thing: there will be dismissiveness.
There will be, let's just say, people will not want to engage with you if you automatically just have the hot, if you just get very heated.
Understandably, though.
A gentle answer turns away wrath.
Yeah, amen.
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.
We had a question here in regards to who are the heroes through these last few events, in your estimation.
Who are some of the heroes that have risen to the surface?
Yeah, well, they're going after this guy horribly, Tucker Carlson.
So he's great.
Yeah, they're trying to cancel his show.
And they may be able to do it.
I hope not.
I pray not.
Yeah, it's a developing story, but he's definitely taken a firm stand on things, and they're misrepresenting his words, which is predictable.
Candace Owens, who started with us at Turning Point USA, is terrific.
And she's amazing.
The first time I spoke with Candace is at UCLA.
She was with us for two years, and now, obviously, she's going to huge heights, and she's been so incredible and so needed.
But the answer is there aren't many.
That's not an exhaustive list, so there are heroes out there that I'm not mentioning.
Rob's been a hero.
Pastor Jack has been a hero.
Jack Hibbs, Pastor Jack Hibbs.
But the long and short of it is there when I believe that in times of crisis, cowardice is a sin.
I really do.
Especially for people that are in positions of trusted thought leadership and moral leadership.
So, our lawmakers have been so disappointing, in my opinion.
I have been on the phone with far too many congressmen and senators that have given me these bloviating, long answers as to, I don't know what it's like to have constituents, I don't know what it's like to be attacked.
I'm like, that's a good one.
Systemic Gaps and Political Trust 00:09:10
But look, I would much rather, once you surrender to the truth, you're almost like a ship at sea, and wherever that takes you, it's where it takes you.
And there's actually something freeing.
Yeah, it's actually the most freeing thing in the world, by the way.
Because John 8:32 says, know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
And that verse has meant more to me in the last couple weeks than ever before, because, yeah, they could take away everything from me.
They could take all my podcast advertisers, they could burn down my building and all that, but I'd still be free because I know that I was so disciplined in what I said and the truth I was talking, speaking about.
And I'm so careful with what I say because words carry so much meaning.
And in fact, my biggest fear is that I'll say one sentence that is something I don't actually believe.
And I talk 100 hours a week, so it's inevitable to happen.
So I have to be ready for it.
But that's the one thing: we have people that are slaves to not, they're metaphorical slaves to not allowing the truth to set them free.
And there's something where it's like, well, what if you were kicked out as the pastor?
What if they took away your home?
What if for them, that is an incomprehensible earthly sacrifice for them.
For them, it's like, no, if I lose re-election, I cannot tolerate that.
Like, if I lose, and you don't have to be foolish, we're not asking you to go on a suicide mission, right?
And the irony of this, and Rob will reinforce this: if you actually stand for truth, you're actually rewarded, which is like the craziest thing, right?
It actually, once you true, not you just say it, but you truly surrender, like they could take it all away, and I'm okay with that.
Typically, you're actually rewarded more so than ever before.
And that's what so many of our leaders refuse to recognize.
It's true.
We had a question.
We have two more questions.
The one over here was: how do we get our young people involved in the media, like with Benny?
Yeah.
Well, look, Turning Point USA.
So, am I allowed to share about Mikey?
Is that okay?
Whatever you want.
Okay, sure.
I didn't want to put on spot, but Turning Point USA has become like a really amazing place for high schooler and college kids, not just through the chapter model and what we're doing, but also through what we're doing in Phoenix.
And so, starting tomorrow, Mikey, Rob's youngest, is working with us in Phoenix at Turning Point USA, which we're thrilled about.
Amen.
And he's going to flourish there.
He's going to do amazing.
And so.
He's doing a gap year two, three, four.
Yeah.
And this is why I love Rob.
I love Rob, and I've never met anyone as much of this.
It's just a crazy thing.
It's like someone who says something, and then they actually do what they say.
No, it's unbelievable.
No, seriously.
It's Rob at a sushi dinner a couple months ago where Rob's like, yeah, I totally agree that college is broken and parents should have more of a gap here.
Heard it a thousand times.
Next thing I know, hey, Charlie, can Mikey take a gap year with you?
I'm like, are you actually doing what you said?
Because I've never seen this.
Usually it's a disconnect.
Like, I agree.
We need more gap years.
My kid's going to Yale next year, so it's not really going to work for him.
So, you know, and but anyway, I applaud you, Rob.
It's awesome because more parents, I think, need to have that kind of trust.
Thanks, Charlie.
It's amazing.
We had a last question.
I don't know if I want to end on this.
The comment was having a nation that elected Barack Obama to two full terms, and even here in Thousand Oaks, where we were T.O. Strong supporting our police officers, racism didn't seem to be an issue up until, like it is every election cycle.
How do we explain, with 13% of the population being African-American, black Americans, and yet Barack Obama wins with an overwhelming white vote?
And I know that the left dismisses that, but this idea of systemic racism is...
Yeah, and look, that's a common example used.
It's a pretty good one.
I would say that, look, even more broadly than that, I think it's generally...
Here's a better example, I think, right?
So racism is the idea, systemic racism, is that our structures and our laws disallow anyone that is not in the predominant racial category, white individuals, from succeeding.
That is the presupposition.
Look, the richest individuals in America per capita at the highest income are Indian Americans, Indian Americans that have immigrated from India, second of which is Taiwanese Americans, third of which is Vietnamese Americans, fourth of which is Korean Americans, fifth of which is Chinese Americans.
White Americans are $70,000 a year, average income.
The Indian Americans, $128,000 per year.
By the way, I think that's an awesome thing.
Amen.
And I think what's so awesome is that it actually proves we're not systemically racist, because the Constitution was not written in Hindi.
It was not written in Korean.
It actually shows that it's a document that allows anyone from anywhere across the world to be able to succeed.
That's the greatest stress test of our system.
Now, I'm not saying that there are not communities that have been disadvantaged, but equating disadvantagement with systemic racism is a huge jump there.
So if the community is a black community and they're not doing well, perhaps it's because of a set of public policy measures that were passed.
So for example, not dismissing the effect that Jim Crow had really had on the black community.
And that resulted in the 1960s of 22% fatherlessness rate, 22%.
However, once we ended Jim Crow and we passed the Civil Rights Act, fatherlessness went from 22% to 77%.
So wait a second, the fatherlessness rate increased as we got less racist.
How did that happen?
In fact, black incomes went down as we got less racist.
How did that happen?
Well, then there might be another reason then.
I'm not dismissing that there are not individual racists in society.
Of course there is.
That would be the silliest thing.
And by the way, there's sin in the world.
By the way, no political party is the only party that has racism in them, by the way.
I mean, just ask the governor of Virginia, who still hasn't told us whether it was Blackface or the KKK hood he was wearing in that picture, right?
It's not, I mean, there's no party is more righteous than the other in that category.
I would make the argument.
The history of the Republican Party speaks for itself.
That's a different issue.
But I'll say this, is that if you look at it fairly and broadly, and you go travel the world and you ask people what do they think of America, not what the elites tell you, but it's a place where they know that they can succeed.
Very interesting.
First-generation African immigrants actually outpace their earning capita from Nigeria or Senegal or South Africa than white Americans, about $77,000 a year after about 10 years in the country.
Well, that would dismiss the idea of systemic race.
We're really talking about is how we allowed a set of public policy measures and very bad local governance over 40 years under the guise of us making good decisions where we subsidize single motherhood.
See, we think we're helping single mothers, but we're not.
Where we say we want to help single mothers.
Well, okay, but you're actually having government agents go knock on doors and make sure a father's not in the home.
That's basically what ends up happening.
Secondly, we have, in my opinion, we have deindustrialized the inner cities and we sent a lot of those jobs overseas and our manufacturing base all but evaporated and disappeared.
And so you calculate all this together, you're like, well, maybe there's other contributing factors to that.
And again, I think that there is, it does a disservice to actually improving these communities to actually say, what can actually improve?
The final thing I'll say is the education piece as well.
We have put black American kids through an unbelievably broken, immoral pattern of public sector teaching, where if you go to 13 black majority schools in Baltimore, 13, they can't find one fifth grader that can read or do math at grade level.
Not one.
No teachers will be fired.
They will all get raises.
The principals will be in touch.
There will be no demanding for any of that.
Now, if the Black Lives Matter movement really cared about Black Lives Matter, they would be peacefully organizing outside the school board saying 13 of the schools can't teach our kids to read.
They can't do math.
I think the ability to read our founding documents is actually a civil right.
I think if you can't read your rights, then you've actually been done a disservice by your government.
And so to close that point is there are structural issues that have happened.
Civil Rights and Founding Documents 00:00:53
I think a ignorance of that would be not historically correct.
However, to attribute it to a singular sin and then mass apply it to everyone because of their skin color, that's a tactic designed to turn us against each other.
Yeah.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
If you guys want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.
That's tpusa.com.
If you guys want to come to our event at Turning Point Action on June 23rd in Phoenix, Arizona, it's trumpstudents.org, trumpstudents.org, or email us freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
God bless.
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