In another edition of Monday's 'Ask Charlie Anything,' Charlie answers the questions listeners send to him at Freedom@CharlieKirk.com, including: "Do you have a girlfriend?" "Is America an inherently racist country...
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
The Overton Window Shifts
00:14:03
|
|
| Thank you for listening to this podcast one production. | |
| Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast One, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcast. | |
| Hey, everybody. | |
| Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, I take your questions. | |
| It is Monday, so I take your questions. | |
| I want to thank those of you that are supporting our program at CharlieKirk.com slash support. | |
| By supporting our program and chipping in $5, $10, $50 a month, you allow us to have the best guests in the movement and do two podcasts a day on weekdays at charliekirk.com slash support. | |
| That is CharlieKirk.com slash support. | |
| I want to thank those of you that continue to send in your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| And if you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com and listen to our episodes over the weekend. | |
| We had some great ones. | |
| AMA, it is Monday. | |
| I take your questions. | |
| Buckle up. | |
| Here we go. | |
| Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. | |
| Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses. | |
| 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. | |
| Hey, everybody. | |
| It is Monday, which means that I am taking your questions. | |
| Freedom at CharlieKirk.com, Freedom at CharlieKirk.com. | |
| If your question is selected, you get a signed copy of the New York Times bestseller, The MAGA Doctrine. | |
| So all you have to do is email me your questions in at freedom at charliekirk.com, and I am reading straight off your questions. | |
| I want to thank those of you that support our program at charliekirk.com slash support. | |
| CharlieKirk.com slash support. | |
| We've got some great questions coming in. | |
| Let's start with this one. | |
| Hi, Charlie. | |
| I appreciate all you do to bring honest conservative journalism to America. | |
| I've been listening to a lot recently. | |
| I know you talk multiple times how the left has been rapidly moving the Overton window. | |
| Do you think there's ever a way to move the Overton window back in the other direction? | |
| If so, how would we as conservatives do that? | |
| Thanks, Megan19 from Virginia. | |
| Well, first of all, Megan, thank you so much for the question. | |
| You went a signed copy of the MAGA doctrine, and please email us to redeem it. | |
| So look, the Overton window, we talked about, I think, my goodness, probably a month and a half ago. | |
| So thank you, Megan, for the good memory recall. | |
| And we talked about the Overton window as a way to judge political ideas. | |
| It's a way to basically be able to measure certain ideas that go from once unacceptable in the general population to public policy. | |
| What is the spectrum that it actually goes on? | |
| And the Overton window argues that things can go either direction. | |
| So to answer your question, absolutely. | |
| And so here is the actual spectrum of the Overton window. | |
| It goes from unthinkable to radical, to acceptable, to sensible, to popular, to policy, to popular, to sensible, acceptable, radical, unthinkable. | |
| And so basically, the Overton window can move both ways. | |
| The left likes to use the Overton window as a measuring stick to try to get things that were once completely unthinkable, that were so radical, that were sort of the mainstream into public policy and popular. | |
| What's really interesting, though, is if you look at the Overton window, since we have last talked about it, especially when it goes from something that's unthinkable to policy, let's take defunding the police. | |
| The left has actually leapfrogged a couple of these steps. | |
| So it's supposed to go from unthinkable to radical to acceptable to sensible to popular to policy. | |
| Well, they took something that was unthinkable to radical to policy. | |
| Defunding the police and abolishing the police was never actually sensible. | |
| It's actually still not very popular, but now it's policy. | |
| You see, the left has taken an unprecedented and very risky move here to use the power that they have in urban cities such as Minneapolis, in New York City, in Los Angeles, to defund or eliminate the police altogether, which they're trying to do in Minneapolis or Seattle, where they don't actually go through the hard, arduous work to persuade their population around what might be best for their people. | |
| Instead, they go from something that's unthinkable. | |
| I mean, the fact that two years ago we would be even discussing abolishing the police, it's out of the zeitgeist, which means spirit of our times. | |
| And then they use the power that they have and the little momentum that they might find within some radical base to actually implement it into policy. | |
| Now, we talk about this a lot on our program, which is how the left is willing to use their power to actually try to convert people. | |
| Whereas we as conservatives try to convert people to try to give us more power to give us a mandate to do what is right to give people more freedom. | |
| The left doesn't see it that way. | |
| The left thinks that if they're able to do something, eventually that will be able to persuade people. | |
| I see it both ways, but it's very, very dangerous. | |
| So, for example, according to Gallup, it says black Americans want police to retain local presence. | |
| This is gallup.com, August 5th, 2020, by Lydia Saad. | |
| Their public polling shows that black Americans are a bit more likely than most other groups to see police locally, but still, 81% want police to spend the same amount or more time in their area. | |
| And so, again, we as conservatives try to persuade people in the public arena so that we are able to protect constitutional freedoms. | |
| The left, much more Machiavellian, they will use any sort of majority or any sort of power that they have to try to get people over to their side, whether by force or whether by policy, and eventually, if by total fiat, persuasion. | |
| Now, this Gallup survey is very interesting because you go back to the question about the Overton window, which again goes from the spectrum is unthinkable to policy, is black Americans don't even support what the media is telling them that they support. | |
| So, what's basically happening is you have a group of ruling class, predominantly white liberals, that are putting forth public policy measures that almost no one in the country supports. | |
| This, first of all, according to this poll, is a huge opening for President Trump. | |
| 81% of black Americans want police to spend the same amount or more time in their area. | |
| And so, if you actually look deeper into the polling, it is white Americans that think that the police should spend less time in black America. | |
| Even though white Americans don't live in these communities, this is a white liberal imposition onto black culture and the black community, where 81% of black Americans want the police to spend the same amount of time or more time. | |
| More time, 20%, same amount of time, 61%. | |
| So you add those together, they're perfectly fine with the number. | |
| Interestingly enough, 20% of Asian Americans want the police to spend less time in their communities, whereas only 19% of black Americans want them to spend less time in their communities. | |
| So BLM Incorporated is not even representing the black community at all whatsoever, even though the black community has more frequency of which they see the police because black Americans commit more crimes. | |
| And we have gone through the reasons for that. | |
| It's not because of the color of their skin. | |
| It's because of socioeconomic challenges, mostly of which black America's family has been completely devastated. | |
| And because of that, black Americans commit more crimes generation after generation. | |
| We should be unafraid to talk about why black America is committing more crimes and also that black America is unfortunately one of the most dangerous parts of American society. | |
| And there's nothing insensitive by saying that. | |
| In fact, I think the more honest, the more forthright we are about crime in America, the more likely we'll be to actually solve these issues. | |
| So Megan from Virginia, the answer is absolutely yes. | |
| We have to take certain things that are in public policy and actually move them to the unthinkable. | |
| A great one is abortion. | |
| I'm very pro-life. | |
| I believe in the sanctity of the individual. | |
| I believe in the protection of the innocent. | |
| And so something right now that is policy, abortion, is not even that popular. | |
| Actually, recent polling done by Gallup shows that America is trending pro-life, especially amongst younger voters, believe it or not. | |
| It's actually a winning issue. | |
| When conservatives run on life issues, conservatives win on it unless they're in California or New York, the abortion capitals of America. | |
| So conservatives should absolutely try to bring things that are in policy and eventually reverse it and bring it to something that's unthinkable. | |
| Conservatives get a lot wrong and Republicans rarely fight. | |
| But one of the issues that we actually have won on, and one of the issues that we have actually been successful on moving the Overton window, is the issue of firearms and weapons. | |
| This is an issue that throughout the years, the American people have actually grown in the direction of conservatives, not in the direction of the gun grabbers or in the far-left-wing statists or collectivists. | |
| It was policy, absolutely. | |
| However, it has now grown to be popular. | |
| We have seen such a massive surge in gun purchases. | |
| According to the New York Times, Keith Collins and David Yaffe Balany, April 2nd, 2020, quote, about 2 million guns were sold in the U.S. as virus fears spread. | |
| NPR.org, July 16th, 2020, by Chris Arnold. | |
| Sales of guns to be first-time owners rise amid COVID-19 pandemic. | |
| So the window can absolutely move in both direction. | |
| And just to reinforce that point, in just seven months of 2020, we have sold more guns than all of 2019. | |
| So the window can move both ways. | |
| And we as conservatives should not be completely dismal or pessimistic that the left always is able to move the window in their direction. | |
| They're better at it than we are, but they also have more of a backfiring component to it because they are willing to go from the leapfrog of unthinkable to policy just when they have one more vote than we do. | |
| I'm not saying that's a good idea. | |
| I'm saying sometimes it does work because then people see the public policy and they don't have the motivation to try to reverse it or to try to upend it. | |
| It's a great question. | |
| I'm happy to dive into it deeper. | |
| I encourage all of you to check out a visual of the Overton window. | |
| Type it into your search engine, which is hopefully something other than Google. | |
| We'll get into that later. | |
| But I encourage you guys to check out the Overton window. | |
| The visual of what I'm talking about is very instructive and very, very helpful. | |
| Next question from Molly. | |
| She says, hey, Charlie, so as a Christian, I have kind of an interesting question. | |
| I'm a huge Trump supporter, and it makes me cringe to think of Biden or any of his cronies in office. | |
| However, I know that God is ultimately in control and his purposes will prevail. | |
| In the Bible, there are numerous instances where God uses an evil leader to work out his purposes. | |
| Is it possible that if Biden is elected, God forbid, that it may be for God's doing to use him as a tool for his ultimate purpose in the end? | |
| I hope I am wrong in that Trump gets another four years in office, but at the end of the day, even if he doesn't, I trust the Lord, and as scary as it may seem, I hope that this is all part of God's sovereign plan. | |
| For Trump supporters who are not Christians, I don't know how they could find any solace on this. | |
| Anyway, just a thought. | |
| I wanted to get your take on it. | |
| Thanks, Molly. | |
| Molly, you win a signed copy of the New York Times bestseller MAGA doctrine. | |
| It's a phenomenal question. | |
| There has to be a point where we surrender to the sovereignty of God. | |
| And so if Joe Biden wins, I will admit and say that it is God's sovereignty and God wanted it to happen. | |
| That is not an excuse not to try to effectuate positive change. | |
| The great Wayne Grudem, who is one of the top theologians on the planet, I've had an opportunity to meet him. | |
| He actually lives in Phoenix, Arizona. | |
| He's probably one of the most accomplished theologians ever. | |
| He is a pro-Trump theologian, too, and he supports Donald Trump's policies. | |
| He has a terrific new piece out where it's an open letter where he defends Donald Trump to one of his listeners. | |
| It is called Letter to an Anti-Trump Christian Friend. | |
| We are going to put this on CharlieKirk.com, and it's phenomenal. | |
| And he goes piece by piece on how, yes, absolutely, if Biden ends up winning, then that is the sovereignty and how magnanimous God is. | |
| However, he makes the argument that we must do everything we possibly can to advocate and support President Donald Trump. | |
| And he goes through it in great detail. | |
| This is a top-tier theologian, Townhall.com. | |
| They published it. | |
| Letter to an anti-Trump Christian Friend. | |
| It's phenomenal. | |
| And so we're going to post that on CharlieKirk.com. | |
| I also have a recent clip that has gone viral on our YouTube channel. | |
| And also, I want to encourage all of you, if you have not yet subscribed to our YouTube channel, do you know that we have a YouTube channel? | |
| We have 108,000 subscribers, praise God, and we are growing very quickly. | |
| So I want to use this as kind of a commercial soundbite for you guys just to type in Charlie Kirk to your YouTube browser right now and hit that subscribe button and that little bell that goes with it. | |
| If everyone listening to this right now did that, we will surge in YouTube. | |
| And I know there's a lot of problems with Google. | |
| There's a lot of shenanigans, but it's still a platform that we are able to get our voice out, praise God. | |
| And I have a video there that is going very viral that you guys can pick up, which is why every Christian should vote for President Trump. | |
| And we are getting lots more views out there. | |
| So please subscribe and hit that bell. | |
| And when I am in the Battle Station Chair in Phoenix, Arizona, all these podcasts are also delivered in video form on the Charlie Kirk Show YouTube channel. | |
| But I have been traveling so much. | |
| I've been in Maine. | |
| I've been in Michigan, Florida, Las Vegas, D.C., Aspen, Wyoming, Montana. | |
| I know that the Chinese coronavirus has slowed a lot of people down, but we are speeding up quicker than ever on the Charlie Kirk Show. | |
| And I just want to say thank you again for those of you that make everything we do possible at charliekirk.com/slash support. | |
| When you contribute to us, you pay for our sound editing team, our production team, our promotion, our website build out, all the podcast costs so we are able to deliver the amount of podcasts that we are. | |
| Let's get to a more fun question. | |
|
My Careful Roller Coaster Rules
00:03:07
|
|
| People seem to like these. | |
| Hey, Charlie, I'm currently a student at Florida State University, and I listen to your podcast every day on the way to work. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Since your podcasts are very focused on serious talks and a constant battle of politics, I figured I'd ask you some non-political questions that you can answer like a fast money round on Family Feud so your viewers can get to know you more. | |
| Here you go. | |
| Okay, let's do this. | |
| 10 questions. | |
| Number one, do you like roller coasters? | |
| I do like roller coasters. | |
| However, I don't trust them as much as I used to when I was younger. | |
| I've learned way too much about the skittishness of the architecture and the skeleton of a roller coaster. | |
| Not as big of a fan of roller coasters as I was growing up, but I do like roller coasters generally. | |
| As long as they're properly designed and they don't have too many of the turns that make you go completely upside down, I am a fan, but I'm very careful what roller coasters I go on. | |
| Number two, biggest fear. | |
| At the right height, I am very scared of heights. | |
| I'm not scared of heights if it's 10 or 20 or 30 feet, but if it's right around 100 feet and you have to kind of look over the edge, terrified. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And it's kind of funny when you're at 30,000 feet in an airplane, I'm not scared of heights because there's a lot of science behind this. | |
| You actually don't feel how high up you are at that moment. | |
| It just kind of looks, everything looks so small, so you're not able to grasp it. | |
| But there's that kind of sweet spot height right around 180 to 200 feet. | |
| Not a fan at all whatsoever. | |
| Number three, favorite shoe brand. | |
| I like New Balances. | |
| They're made in America. | |
| I'm not sure their whole stance on BLM Incorporated. | |
| Here I am probably plugging a shoe line that probably promotes BLM insurrection in our country, or maybe not. | |
| So maybe you guys can go find out for yourself. | |
| I'll do an update in a minute on New Balance, and so I'll have my team look it up and see if New Balance has pandered to the racial crowd or not. | |
| And I just went to their website, and it looks like they haven't. | |
| So maybe I can stand corrected. | |
| You guys can email me if I'm wrong here, freedom at charliekirk.com, but it's all made in America. | |
| It's a phenomenal company. | |
| Number four, what shows are you into? | |
| I watch less and less television. | |
| I think almost all television now has an agenda. | |
| However, I do love Seinfeld and Frasier. | |
| I loved the show Ozark. | |
| I watched Jack Ryan, even though it was on the Amazon platform. | |
| Didn't really enjoy that very much, to be perfectly honest. | |
| I like the show, but the fact that it was on Amazon wasn't really, you know, let's say compelling. | |
| I loved Tom Clancy growing up, so that was really kind of instructive and informative. | |
| But look, I don't watch as much television as I once did. | |
| I think most of it's actually garbage. | |
| They don't dive as deep as they once did into television shows. | |
| I do like Breaking Bad. | |
| It's a phenomenal show if you haven't seen it. | |
| The Sopranos and Breaking Bad are similar in a lot of different ways. | |
| Sopranos and Breaking Bad is almost the anti-hero instead of the hero, which I think is very fun and very interesting to watch. | |
| It's actually a lot harder to act. | |
| It's a lot harder to act to do the Brian Cranston acting or the Gandalfini acting than it is to just do the typical hero's journey. | |
| Number five, favorite sport to play and to watch. | |
| Basketball, definitely a play. | |
| To watch football. | |
| I loved playing football growing up. | |
| Basketball is still a sport I love to play. | |
|
Why I Lack Camping Sense
00:05:03
|
|
| I'm still recovering from my back injury. | |
| So as soon as I get completely healed from that, I'll be able to be back in action. | |
| I love watching football, and I sure hope that college football does not get destroyed by the BLM Incorporated Social Justice Warriors. | |
| Man, that would be such a disappointing day. | |
| I love college football, and I love basketball. | |
| Number six, do you date? | |
| Yes, I have an amazing girlfriend. | |
| Many of you know her, and that's all I'm going to say about that, and there'll be more news around there at some point. | |
| Number seven, any guilty pleasures? | |
| I'd say probably my guilty pleasure is I enjoy a 20-minute nap here and there. | |
| I don't know if that's a guilty pleasure or not. | |
| And I think I am actually a pro, I'm pro-napping if it's done correctly in a scheme of a productive day. | |
| I love that like 26-minute nap, like right on the nose. | |
| I mean, if I'm up at 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. doing podcasting and traveling, and I'm on an airplane and I just have 20 minutes to be able to turn off the phone, I can fall asleep in 90 seconds or less, maybe sometimes 30 seconds. | |
| I could just turn it off and turn it on. | |
| So I guess that would be a guilty pleasure. | |
| Number eight, beach or camping. | |
| I love the outdoors. | |
| I travel too much. | |
| I get so little time to actually just enjoy things. | |
| Camping is not necessarily an activity that I would embrace right now. | |
| It just seems like so much logistics poured into one thing. | |
| I mean, I guess if it's done correctly and you're able to really enjoy the outdoors. | |
| But generally camping, if you forget one thing, it could screw up your entire trip. | |
| And I say this as an Eagle Scout. | |
| And look, fishing, not exactly a fan. | |
| I had a great fishing trip last summer. | |
| The fishing was not the highlight. | |
| It was the people I was spending time with. | |
| And being able to get out on the water and just disconnect from the world, camping is not exactly something that I would be overly excited to do. | |
| And the beach, not really either. | |
| I just sitting in the sun stationary is not exactly fun. | |
| When I do go to the beach, though, I like walking the entire beach. | |
| I'll walk like 12 miles on the beach, and it feels like you've hiked 30 miles on the beach. | |
| I do like beach volleyball, but again, back issues. | |
| So there you go. | |
| Number nine, do you ever take a day off without looking at your phone or social media? | |
| Yes, I do. | |
| It's not a specific day. | |
| I try to do this during the summer where I'll just kind of put my phone away. | |
| I've told people this before, but I have deleted Instagram and Twitter from my phone, and I have an amazing team that I just kind of text my tweets to. | |
| I say, here, go tweet this or tweet that. | |
| And it's been incredibly refreshing. | |
| Not have to look at what all the angry, bitter, resentful people have to say, all their deceit and all their dishonesty. | |
| And it's kind of funny. | |
| They think that they're tweeting at me, that I'm going to see it, and they don't. | |
| And so they tweet all these things, and it actually doesn't hit my screen at all. | |
| So I'm a happier person because of it. | |
| And I'll periodically check my Twitter feed to see how things are going externally, but internally, I never look at the comments or look at what people are. | |
| Tweeting at me. | |
| I don't have Facebook. | |
| I have YouTube. | |
| And I don't even look at the comments of YouTube. | |
| And I actually have been able to produce more. | |
| It's why we've been able to do as many podcasts as we do here is I just don't even look at these applications. | |
| I could not care less what the chattering class of prognosticating anti-American Marxists that are very bitter, resentful, deceiving people have to say about me. | |
| Doesn't concern me, and I don't think it should concern you either. | |
| But of course, keep listening to the Charlie Crook show, because that's important. | |
| Here's the last one. | |
| If you were lost in the woods, how long do you think you'd survive? | |
| Why? | |
| And what special skills would you put to use? | |
| I would survive for quite a long time. | |
| I don't mean that in any way arrogantly. | |
| I'm a pretty good survivalist. | |
| I am an Eagle Scout. | |
| I can make a fire rather easily. | |
| I have a very, very good sense of direction. | |
| I do. | |
| There's not many things I brag about. | |
| I am an above-average driver. | |
| I have a good sense of direction. | |
| I have a very good memory, and I am able to dialogue with people quite well. | |
| My sense of direction, even my production team says it's freakishly good. | |
| Mr. Producer, who's terrific and works very hard, we've been lost in Los Angeles, and we kind of be turned around and be like, you have to go here, here, here, here. | |
| And it's just, I have a built-in compass to myself. | |
| I am able to find my chart, my course. | |
| I do not get confused easily. | |
| And if I do not have a specific map, if I do not have a specific area that I know I'm charting, I all of a sudden get a headache and I have to almost get my smartphone out and get my map and I look at it very specifically. | |
| My grandfather was a pilot in World War II. | |
| He was also really ran the old company called Pan Am. | |
| If you don't know what Pan Am is, it was like the airline. | |
| And so I think it's genetic, honestly, within my family. | |
| And everyone that I get a chance to be with when I'm outdoors, they're like, your sense of direction is extraordinary. | |
| I'm like, well, thank you. | |
| And I've been with people, my goodness, where their sense of direction is just, it's just, I'm like, how do you not know exactly where you are? | |
| And it's just kind of built into me. | |
| So I think because of that, the sense of direction, I'd be able to find fresh water. | |
| I'd be able to find north. | |
| I'd be able to get out of wherever I was very quickly. | |
| And I think we should do a special documentary where you drop me into the backwoods and I have to find my way out. | |
|
Cotton's Slavery Compromise Claims
00:09:48
|
|
| And then we're able to put a liberal in the same scenario and see who survives. | |
| And Bear Grillis is a Christian, by the way. | |
| I think Bear Grillis does a nice job. | |
| He's a great guy. | |
| So let's take a question from a liberal listener. | |
| God bless you for listening. | |
| Hi, my name is Aaron. | |
| I live in Arkansas. | |
| I'm a liberal who loves Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Elon Omar. | |
| However, I like staying up to date with your content because it gives me an opportunity to see the other side of the argument. | |
| My question is about something I don't think you've talked about and think would be good to address. | |
| Recently, Senator Tom Cotton of my state, Arkansas, said some pretty outlandish things about slavery. | |
| You've been pretty outspoken on how much you like Tom Cotton. | |
| This is correct. | |
| I don't think I need to quote what he said as you keep yourself well informed. | |
| So I'm sure you know already. | |
| So how do you think this justification of slavery sounds to African Americans? | |
| And do you think that what he said about slavery is being a necessary evil just because it led to the creation of America is a good argument. | |
| Full cotton quote in context, which he's talking about, let's read the quote or he. | |
| Aaron can go both ways. | |
| So I don't know if it's a he or she. | |
| It is actually written in the masculine. | |
| So I will say that it is a he, but I don't want to assume anyone's gender. | |
| How's that for the inspiration of your person you like, AOC? | |
| Okay, here's what Cotton said, Tom Cotton. | |
| We have to study the history of slavery and its role and its impact on the development of our country, because otherwise we can't understand our country. | |
| As the founding fathers said, it was a necessary evil upon which the union was built. | |
| But the Union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to ultimate extinction, Cotton told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette in an interview that was published two Sundays ago. | |
| So in full context, what Senator Tom Cotton is talking about is in order to keep the entire Union together, in order to not have the southern states immediately and instantaneously form their own country, there were negotiations that were committed to that eventually the plan was always to eradicate slavery. | |
| Despite what many people will tell you, and Senator Cotton was articulating this very correctly, was that in order to keep the Union together, to eventually abolish slavery, there had to be compromises that were given. | |
| So for example, some people like to point out the three-fifths compromise, and they say, oh, look, we thought of black people as sub-human beings. | |
| That is a lazy, sloppy way to interpret it. | |
| Instead, the slave-owning South, they wanted to count every slave as a full human being. | |
| You might say, well, what's wrong with that? | |
| Well, they don't want to give them voting rights. | |
| No, no, no, no. | |
| They did not want to give them citizenship, true citizenship. | |
| They simply wanted it for electoral representation. | |
| They wanted it for electoral representation so that they could make slavery the law of the land. | |
| You see, the way the union was formed, they eventually came to a compromise of three-fifths so that the southern states will have some sort of political check against them and they couldn't make all of America a pro-slavery nation. | |
| Thomas Jefferson, despite owning slaves himself, actually was the first president in 1807 when it was legally permissible under the United States Constitution to ban the new importation of slaves into America. | |
| Vermont in year 1777 abolished slavery completely after being inspired by the Declaration of Independence. | |
| George Washington signed a slavery prohibition, the Northwest Ordinance into the Northwest Territories, that the new Northwest Territories were slavery free. | |
| The Founding Fathers, especially the Founding Fathers that were the true architects of the republic that we love today, it was never a question of if we were going to abolish slavery. | |
| It was how are we going to abolish this couple thousand year old sin. | |
| What Senator Tom Cotton said is absolutely correct. | |
| That he said necessary evil upon which the Union was built. | |
| That's his choice of words. | |
| I would basically say it a little bit different, and I'm not disagreeing with the essence of what he's saying. | |
| Instead, what I would say is kind of a point deeper, or a better way to put it in my own mind, is the compromises that were made to keep the union together actually ended up abolishing slavery over the next couple hundred years post-that than it otherwise would have if the south would have formed their own nation. | |
| And this is a very important point. | |
| So this article was published about his efforts to target an initiative by the New York Times. | |
| The initiative, of course, was the 1619 Project Curriculum, which proposes that schools reframe U.S. history by marking the nation's founding in 1619, the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia. | |
| Cotton, however, told the Democrat Gazette that he's proposing legislation that would withhold federal funding to schools that embrace the curriculum. | |
| And I agree with that. | |
| So to your question, the specific question from Aaron, and thank you for listening as a liberal and a Bernie Sanders supporter and a AOC supporter and an Elon Omar supporter. | |
| Thank you for listening. | |
| We appreciate that so much. | |
| We love different ideas and we love dialogue. | |
| We love the collision of different worldviews. | |
| You say here, how does that sound to African Americans? | |
| Well, more generally, I think that anyone, despite their skin color, would be offended if Tom Cotton was defending slavery, which he was not defending slavery. | |
| What Tom Cotton was defending was the very specific political compromise that was necessary to abolish slavery. | |
| Tom Cotton is repulsed by slavery. | |
| Tom Cotton thinks that slavery was reprehensible. | |
| But if the Union would have self-segregated themselves at the Constitutional Convention and would have said to the South, secede, you have your own Southern nation and to the North, we have our own Southern nation, then the states of South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, which were slave-owning states, what would it have taken for them to abolish slavery? | |
| With the advancement of the cotton gin, which actually made the abolition of slavery much harder, believe it or not. | |
| The cotton gin actually made the demand for slaves much more, not less. | |
| The cotton gin was actually the greatest exponent on the demand of slaves, but there was no more importing of slaves allowed, which is what put a lot of the southern states in a very tricky and difficult position because Thomas Jefferson signed the abolition of new slaves into America in March of 1807. | |
| So therefore, once the cotton gin came around, the entire issue of slavery was kind of resurfaced. | |
| And I'm not saying the Civil War was solely because of slavery, but it was partly because of slavery. | |
| There's a lot of literature that is written that says that slavery played no role. | |
| I don't find that to be the case, actually. | |
| There's a very provocative book that makes that claim. | |
| I'd love to have him on the podcast. | |
| I have a more nuanced view. | |
| I think it was one piece of a broader question around northern versus southern sovereignty. | |
| And it was a piece around exactly what the North identified as core fundamental values and the South. | |
| And so I think it did play a role, but also I would recognize there were multiple decades of tension that were building up between the North and the South. | |
| And so look, I think it's very important that we look at the founding of our country with the correct amount of nuance and criticism. | |
| We should be critical that some of our founders own slaves. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| We should also be proud that those very same founders that had that kind of inherent contradiction, which we as human beings know exists, were also able to abolish the new import of slaves while also owning slaves themselves. | |
| Even Thomas Jefferson in the Virginia House of Commons, before he became president of the United States, tried to abolish slavery in the state of Virginia. | |
| So this was a moral dilemma that our founders absolutely wrestled with. | |
| See, the picture that we paint our founding fathers with is as if they were completely supportive of slavery, no matter what. | |
| It was something they wanted to continue, they wanted to advance, and they wanted to spread throughout the lands. | |
| That's not true at all. | |
| They were remorseful of slavery. | |
| A lot of them owned slaves, and they even knew it was wrong, and they released the slaves on their deathbed, like Thomas Jefferson. | |
| They went out of their way to make sure no new territories or states had the evil, sinister practice of slavery. | |
| They were a transition period, a monumental great leap forward from the tyranny and the bondage of slavery, which, by the way, predated America, that unlike Senator Tim Kaine, who said America invented and perfected slavery. | |
| I can't believe he said this. | |
| Let's actually play tape of that. | |
| Play tape. | |
| The first African Americans into the English colonies came to Point and Comfort, Virginia in 1619. | |
| They were slaves. | |
| They'd been captured against their will. | |
| But they landed in colonies that didn't have slavery. | |
| There were no laws about slavery in the colonies at that time. | |
| The United States didn't inherit slavery from anybody. | |
| We created it. | |
| It got created by the Virginia General Assembly and the legislatures of other states. | |
| It got created by the court systems in colonial America and since that enforced fusion of slave laws. | |
| It was, we created it. | |
| And we created it and maintained it over centuries. | |
| So unlike what Senator Tim Kaine just said, that America perfected and invented slavery, it's not true. | |
| Slavery was around for 5,000 years. | |
| As long as there's human beings, there have been human beings being bought and sold by other human beings. | |
| It was America. | |
| The American founding was the great leap forward. | |
| It was the breaking point of the sin, the unspeakable sin of human beings owning human beings. | |
| And yes, albeit it was not completely a perfect separation. | |
| And some of us look back and we say, how could they have not done it so seamlessly? | |
| Well, don't look back with any sort of cockiness or ubris that you think we have today that they weren't thinking back then. | |
| There were plenty of abolitionists, even at the American founding, but they wanted to keep the entirety and the totality of the union together. | |
| And good that they did, because it actually ended up leading to the liberation of more black Americans that were in slavery if we wouldn't have otherwise negotiated that. | |
|
Final Thanks and New Balance
00:01:14
|
|
| deal. | |
| So thank you for your question, Aaron, and thank you so much for listening. | |
| I encourage you guys to listen to our sister episode today. | |
| Please email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com. | |
| Subscribe to that YouTube channel and consider supporting us at charliekirk.com slash support. | |
| And I just want to continue to build what I said earlier. | |
| New Balance did come out with a statement. | |
| In fairness, it was probably one of the more vanilla statements out of all of corporate America's apology for how awful we are as a country, which of course is not true. | |
| So I just want to make sure that I just contribute that New Balance wasn't without any sort of demerit in this, but I'm reading the statement. | |
| It is a lot better than what Nike or Adidas or their other partners did. | |
| Please consider, again, subscribing to our YouTube channel. | |
| Please subscribe to this show right now. | |
| Type in Charlie Kirk Show. | |
| Hit subscribe. | |
| But if you guys want to win a signed copy of the New York Times bestseller MAGA Doctrine, we are sending out 20 signed copies of the MAGA Doctrine. | |
| If you subscribe to our YouTube channel with the bell, if you do that and screenshot it and email us, that'll get you 20 signed copies of the MAGA Doctrine. | |
| You're not going to get all 20. | |
| We're going to send out 20 more signed straight to you. | |
| Thank you guys so much for listening. | |
| Please get your friends to subscribe to this program. | |
| God bless you. | |
| Talk to you soon. | |
| Thanks so much. | |