In this special Sunday episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, Charlie joins Pastor Greg Farrington of Destiny Church in Rockland, California for an extensive discussion about what courage looks like in a time wrought by draconian edicts by Democrats like Newsom, Cuomo, and Whitmer. And, in the face of such unconstitutional tyranny, Charlie asks: where is 'Christianity Inc.?' Finally, Charlie makes a compelling case for political activism among congregations and why there is only one party and one movement that exists in America today to represent the values of the Church.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Lucky to Have Charlie Kirk00:02:35
Hey, everybody.
Today I wanted to air a speech that I have given in Rockland, California, where reporters couldn't possibly believe that I spoke to 1,400 people in person, no social distancing, no masks.
It's a great conversation.
Please consider supporting us at charliekirk.com/slash support, which makes this conversation and so many like it possible.
This conversation was actually done with my friend, Pastor Greg Farrington from Rockland, California at Destiny Church.
You guys are going to love it.
Buckle up, everybody.
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.
Charlie?
I love a good old-fashioned name like Charlie.
Thank you.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's two Scottish names.
Charles Kirk.
Charles Kirk.
Well.
Kirk means church in Scottish, actually.
It does.
Wow, I learned something.
Well, you're going to learn a lot.
We owe a lot to the Scots, actually, that we could do a whole sermon on that, but it's probably.
For the Scottish.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting.
A lot of our philosophy, a lot of our civilization was inspired by the poorest country on an island that no one ever knew about.
Adam Smith, William Tyndale, who is the English translator of the Bible, who was actually burned at the stake.
I didn't anticipate to go through Scottish history today, but I'm happy to do that with you.
Braveheart, right?
Well, it's actually really interesting.
So I guess here we go.
Yeah, I'm actually, I can trace my bloodline back to part of the Klan that William Wallace was in.
And William Wallace was, of course, a fighter and really kind of started the birth of Western civilization.
And that's, yeah, exactly.
We Scots are very disagreeable by nature.
We want to arm wrestle right now.
Yeah, exactly.
And so I'll finish the Scottish portion of our conversation right now.
But the American founding onto actually the people that have served most in the military are disproportionately Scots-Irish.
There's been literature written about this.
And so we always love a good fight.
And so that's great.
That is great.
The Irony of Closed Churches00:09:22
So as we found out first service, we don't have enough time to do everything that we need to do.
And I'm just kind of the guy that's trying to direct the conversation.
They didn't come to hear me.
They came to hear what God has given you.
This phenomenal gift of your intellect, your ability to reason.
And so I'm just kind of set the ship in one direction and I'll let you just go.
So as we said, we've been open 26 weeks since May 31st.
Yeah, praise God.
We've done that.
And in your estimation, as you travel the nation, there are pockets of people who are saying, hey, we're going to do what is right.
Biblical mandate to open, you know, First Amendment right together.
So as you've seen pockets of people who are emerging, but the vast majority of pastors have shrunk back in this moment.
They haven't opened their doors.
Why do you think that's so?
Yeah, it's a question I struggle with.
I said this in the first service, and I'll say it again.
The kind of grace side of my interpretation of this, I'm kind of, I'm running low on grace for some of these pastors that still haven't opened up their church.
You know, when I started speaking, and Shannon Grove has heard me give this speech, you know, in June and July, I said, maybe you guys should open your church now.
You should open.
We're in November.
Yeah.
We know how this virus operates.
We know what it's done to people.
We know how people need the physical assembly.
We need that suicides are up, mental health, depression, spousal abuse.
We know the cost of our reaction to the virus, the lockdowns.
And yet, in this moment of crisis, the American Christian church, large in part, and there's exceptions: Rob McCoy, Jack Hibbs, James Cadiz, Juergen.
There's some great pastors here in California, but they're definitely the exception, not the rule.
And the rule is an incredible epidemic of cowardice in the American church.
And I use that word intentionally.
And it tells us a couple things.
It tells us that a lot of these pastors are solely focused, ironically, on just budgets, baptisms, and buildings.
Three B's.
Yeah, the three B's.
And that's kind of the way that American Christianity has always framed their profit motive.
What's really interesting is that if they actually opened their church, they would actually have more baptisms and bigger budgets and be able to buy more buildings, which is the great irony of the whole thing.
Is that a lot of these pastors say, well, I'm afraid of what my congregation will say.
And it's just, they're supposed to be the leaders in this moment, right?
They're supposed to be the shepherds, and they're not.
And so I asked this question: if a pastor hasn't opened their church, why are you a pastor?
I mean, come on.
Why are you a pastor if not in this moment?
And you're called for the moments of controversy and crisis to make clarity out of confusion.
That's why you are a pastor.
And we have completely just forgotten and forsaken the entire idea of liberty and responsibility.
No one is being forced to be here today.
You come knowing the risks of this virus, knowing your own health situation.
You know that there's a chance that you might interact with someone that is a carrier, and you're willing to take that responsibility.
That's what liberty is all about.
It's so different than the European model, which is where you completely surrender to civil servants and bureaucrats and politicians.
And as soon as we just turn our back on American liberty, which is what we're doing in our country, and the American church will not actually communicate where liberty comes from, because liberty is not man's idea, it's God's idea, then we're in a very troubling moment in America.
And the American church has missed the greatest evangelistic opportunity in the history of our country the last six months.
They have.
And the American church, first of all, they were very quick, many of them, to speak out in favor of BLM Incorporated, critical race theory, and poorly crafted political positions.
Yet they wouldn't dare challenge Gavin Newsom.
Whereas today, a judge in San Diego has said strip clubs are essential, but church is not.
They say abortion factories can remain open.
They say that marijuana dispensaries can remain open.
They say that you can go to home improvement stores.
And yet, the assembly of believers is something that they deem non-essential.
There's a reason for that.
Is that when you have millions of people in the state of California that are gathering around an agreed concept that Gavin Newsom is not the most important authority in our life, that bothers them.
And it does.
And so the unstated principle of American Christianity always has been that we have a vertical relationship with power that is beyond even the earthly governmental structure, that it's a God-first governing structure, right?
And so this bothers the central planners and this bothers the leftists so much because it puts barriers and limits on their power by definition.
So Gavin Newsom becomes incredibly less important the more you go to church.
We don't say that enough, right?
So, when you go to church and you're celebrating Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, you're appreciating the inerrancy of scripture, and you're worshiping a loving God, Gavin Newsom just kind of becomes a little bit of just kind of a speed bump on the road to your life, right?
Where he belongs, by the way.
And so, and I'm singling out Gavin Newsom intentionally because we're obviously in California, and he's just the typical ruling class politician.
Goes to the French laundry, no mask, no social distancing.
Wiley, you are not allowed to have Thanksgiving.
It's just the perfect picture of the kind of country they want to create, which is rules and orders that you have to live by, but the rulers actually don't have to.
But what the American church doesn't understand, and part of it's because of really, how do I say this correctly?
Seminaries that have been teaching bad politics and bad theology, youth pastors that have been believing and infiltrating a lot of these churches and teaching young people bad theology and bad politics, and then senior pastors that have no courage of their convictions to actually communicate to their church, what are we supposed to do in politics?
Should Christians be involved in politics?
And if so, how do we encounter with this?
And so, now this testing moment came for the American church in 2020.
And you passed it, and you guys passed it, and Rob McCoy passed it, and Jack Hibbs passed it, and so many, but 99% of American churches failed miserably.
Where not only did they not open the church, not only did they not communicate the truth of what's really happening here, they did something even worse.
The only political statements a lot of these churches did was to pander to the most malevolent political forces in the country, where it's around racial politics and insurrectionist forces and looting is essential and all this total nonsense that we saw in the last six or seven months of our country.
And so, if Christians founded this country by being activists in the pulpit, this country was founded by activist pastors in the first great awakening, which preceded the founding of our country.
We don't talk about this enough, but it was Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards that were talking about how human beings need to take responsibility for their life and that King George is not the ultimate authority.
King Gavin, King George.
You get the comparisons here, right?
And so, and that's all of a sudden when people started to think that way, they started to dive deeper into, well, if all of a sudden we get our rights from a loving and good God, all of a sudden there's a natural law that is not within what the British Empire tells us, then why exactly do we have to listen to King George with all authority?
Because just because he has the divine right of kings, which is an unbiblical concept.
And then the American founding ensued.
And so the inverse is now happening.
It's the exact opposite is now happening.
So the Christians that started this country and kept it alive in the first, second, third, and fourth great awakening, there's at least four great awakenings.
Some people say there's been five or six.
Let's just say four.
Now all of a sudden we're seeing the opposite, which is the great silencing of the American church.
And instead of actually stepping up, instead of actually leaning in, opening their doors, and where we could have saw an awakening that would make Billy Graham's revival look like, you know, a little blip on the radar, we have now decided and surrendered and agreed that we are not essential.
That, and again, I say this generally, you guys being the exception, but just be honest, and you guys know this, you're in the 1% of 1% of churches, right?
99% of all churches across the country are not doing this.
They have no courage to their convictions, and they're not being courageous in this moment.
Well, then the country will then decay.
That's the honest truth, is that the guiding principles and the behavior that starts a civilization and maintains it, when it fails to maintain, then it will absolutely disintegrate.
And don't be surprised all of a sudden when the church is cowardly and then you see increases in suicide, depression, alcoholism, spousal abuse, businesses, all of a sudden, the moral order that kept this entire experiment going, when they stop speaking and stop assembling, of course you're going to see the country start to go into chaos, which is exactly what we're seeing.
Blaming the Virus for Decay00:05:09
The biblical worldview of the church is that he's going to build his church and the gates of hell will not prevail.
It means we're aggressive in our approach.
We're not the prey.
We're the predator.
But we're going after on that.
My wife says it this way: that we're part of a nation that is under God, not under government.
And I believe that that is true.
That we're under God, not under government.
So the government kind of kicked down the doors of the church in March and April and stepped right inside the church and say, hey, we're going to give you the dictates because of this thing called COVID.
So we want to talk a little bit about COVID, right?
And because it's re-emerging, you even said in first service that, you know, we thought maybe they'd go away after the election.
No, it's just getting more, you know, prevalent as far as the fear piece of it.
And so COVID, it's a real virus.
It's a flu.
It's very contagious.
But there is a political agenda behind it.
Can we talk a little bit about COVID and where you see it going?
Yeah, I'll do it in a tighter way than earlier because we spent like 30 minutes on it earlier.
But look, of course it's a real virus, and it was probably manufactured in a laboratory in China.
It was either intentionally or unintentionally released, but it was definitely covered up by the Chinese communist government and definitely spread with intentionality across the planet.
That we know for sure.
They didn't allow inspectors in.
They didn't allow the WHO, who they even control, to tell the truth about it.
But we have to be very careful in our language.
And I think that one of the main reasons why America is in the condition that it's in is because of the sloppiness of how we communicate.
And we have to be much more precise in understanding that words matter.
I mean, you go back to the Bible.
One word had such weight that it could make you go to war.
It could make you go to peace.
I mean, words really have significance.
And one of the great disservices that we've done to young people is we act as if words don't have weight.
So when we talk about the state of the country, we have to be very clear about what the virus has done and what our reaction to the virus has done.
Those are two completely different things.
They're categorically different.
And so the virus is one frame to look from.
And there's a lot more complexity to the data.
For example, some people are dying with and then from the Chinese coronavirus.
Those are two completely different things.
Some people have other pre-existing health conditions.
And this was, you know, this triggered responses to it, right?
The other part is this, which is what was our reaction to it?
So our reaction to a very real virus and a very real threat was probably doing the worst thing we could have possibly done.
Instead of heroically stepping up and protecting people that were at risk, we put infected people into nursing homes and then we shut down the schools, which was the worst thing we could have possibly done.
Instead, we should have told young people, your schools are not closing, your proms are not getting canceled, your homecomings are not getting canceled, and you have summer sports, and some of you might get infected.
However, you have a much higher chance, if you're a young person, of dying from an accidental firework discharge than from the Chinese coronavirus.
It's true.
And by the way, I want to be very clear.
That is not the case if you're 65 and older and overweight and you have a pre-existing health condition.
You should take a different sequence of choices.
You should make a different sequence of choices.
And that's part of liberty responsibility, being self-aware and saying, I'm not 18 years old.
I do have an underlying health condition.
I'm going to make different choices.
However, what we've done is intergenerationally robbed young people for no reason whatsoever.
Zero.
And so then people say, well, they might go see their grandparents.
Well, then that's a completely different argument.
And having young people be able to go to school amongst themselves or have social clubs or sports is different than young people visiting nursing homes.
Like that, that's not the same argument that we're making.
And what we've seen is an almost beyond alarming, shocking, stunning, and chilling escalation in teenage suicide, social isolation, antidepressant medication.
And we are going to have decades of untangling the problems that we did.
I want to be very clear.
The virus did not do that.
We did this.
And so you could blame the virus for a certain component of it.
Very real suffering, all of that.
But then 90% of the problems that we are now going to have to sort out for the next couple decades is self-inflicted because it was fear-based, anti-scientific.
They say we have to trust the science.
They've never trusted the science.
They trust the scientists they like.
It's a very big difference.
They find a couple scientists they like and they trust them.
And again, here's the here: in order to make a good choices, get yourself informed.
That's it.
We have supercomputers in our right-hand pocket.
Just learn about it.
Go read the Dana study where it says there is no correlation between mask wearing and the spread of the virus.
In fact, people that wear.
Again, but if you think they work and you have other studies, that's fine.
Clarity in Confusing Times00:15:15
That's what liberty is all about.
I'm not actually here to shame you into whether you're wearing a mask.
That's actually not my point.
I actually really love liberty because maybe you have a certain condition where it does help you.
Just don't make me wear one.
That's the whole thing, right?
Like, don't impose it on me.
That's a completely different argument, right?
And so, and I mean that with all seriousness: that if you have a certain condition and you do have data to reflect it, wearing a certain thing or taking a certain thing or not going to a certain thing, then we shouldn't get in a position where we shame people or do that.
That's not what it's about.
That's not Christian.
That's not it.
But at the same time, it's not compassionate.
At the same time, don't use an authoritarian, totalitarian position to say that every single human being must do what I think is correct.
And I see, even though, because there's really conflicting and in fact, different studies that have come out about this.
And so here's where the church really needs to step up right now.
And every single church should have its doors fully opened and trust their congregation to make the choices that you guys are all experiencing right now.
That if you're okay with gathering inside and worshiping our God, then you should be able to have that right to do that.
This has been the greatest violation of religious liberty in American history.
Amen.
So it's interesting to me, you know, God's ways are not our ways.
But, you know, I'm not saying that God was in charge of this at all.
But in a country, China, that silences the church, they sent a virus to America where we're supposed to have liberty, but it silenced the church.
There's a spiritual correlation between the two.
And there's a political agenda attached to silencing the church.
And we have been very vocal.
In fact, I've been criticized by my peers, pastors, even saying I'm just preaching to a base of people, calling us cowards, because I believe everything's political now.
Of course it is.
Everything is political.
So when you come inside the church, we cannot divorce ourselves and the people separate for separation of church and state and all that stuff.
But I don't believe that we're in that hour right now.
I believe that we're not in a peacetime moment.
We're in a wartime moment.
And the church has to engage in the public square.
So we have done that.
Rocks have been thrown at us.
Names have been called.
What should be the church's response in this moment to engaging in the political arena?
Well, first of all, I want to encourage you and your church.
You'll be blessed by taking the political stances that you took.
You will.
And I want to tell you that.
And I'm going to tell you why.
Any pastor that does not engage in the political arena might as well take his scissors to their Bible.
Take out the story of Esther and Mordecai.
Take out Nehemiah and Jeremiah.
Take out Daniel and Joseph.
Take out Moses.
Take out every example of God's chosen people influencing secular government.
All throughout the Old Testament, God's chosen people were called to influence secular government for his purpose.
Also, every single pastor needs to go get a pair of scissors and take out the great commission that everyone likes to reference, but very few people actually understand.
On this rock, build my, we say church.
Let's dive deeper into that.
You said a term that actually better describes it.
Ecclesia is the term that is used in the Koigne Greek.
And now, for those of you that attend church with great regularity, you'll be able to really dive deep into this kind of deeper theological point here, which is so incredibly consequential.
So, in the writing of the New Testament, written mostly in Greek, almost all in Greek, and Jesus spoke Aramaic, when William Tyndale translated the Bible back to the original manuscripts.
William Tyndale, who was killed and burned for this translation, by the way, because the Bible was almost all in Latin all across Europe.
So, why is that important?
Well, the good Scottish people only spoke English.
English was the peasants' language, everybody.
English was the barrier because the only way they could get the word of God was from a priest who understood Latin, who then translated it for them.
So, William Tyndale is like, I'm going to cut out the middleman.
I'm actually going to go on the most ambitious and illegal Bible translating project in history.
So, William Tyndale did just that.
He ended up getting his life for that.
And that was right before the King James translation came out, right in the early 1600s.
But one of the most significant breakthroughs, and again, I mean, no offense to any Catholics here because this is a fundamental disagreement that we have with the Catholic Church, which is what is the church?
What is the hierarchy?
Where does it come from?
Is this word ecclesia?
It's actually one of the most important words in the entire Bible.
And Jesus said, On this rock, build my ecclesia.
He didn't use synagogue or temple.
And so I started, and my pastor Rob McCoy got me onto this, and I started to do deep thinking of what was an ecclesia.
So an ecclesia was a well-known political gathering that Greek citizens used to hold.
They were like city council meetings.
An ecclesia was a political meeting that Greek provinces would hold around the political well-being of their area.
Now, when they would gather, everyone had a vote.
It was the closest thing to a democracy that we can think of.
But they also unified around two big words in Greek: eleutheria and isonomia, which means freedom and equality.
Think about it.
So Jesus goes out of his way to use this term, ecclesia, or the equivalent of it, not synagogue, not temple.
I would make a very good argument that Jesus called us to be in that public square.
Amen.
To called us to be actually caring for the welfare of our nation.
And any pastor that doesn't get involved in politics, explain to me in Jeremiah where it says, pray for the welfare of which the nation you are in.
How are you supposed to reconcile that?
And their explanation is that politics divides.
And I say, well, again, you're going to need to take out that pair of scissors again and cut out the part where Jesus said, the word of God came here not to unite, but to divide, to take father against son and sibling against sibling.
I'm paraphrasing, of course.
But this kind of hippie Jesus that we teach sometimes, where it's like Jesus was nothing but for the birds and the feather, like, and the, and the flowers.
Like, there were plenty of harsh teachings that Jesus talked about hard truth for a few in a time of crisis.
And Jesus was truth.
He didn't just say true things.
He was the embodiment of truth.
And what I think has happened, which has been an unfortunate sequence of events for Christianity in one sense and fortunate in the other, is that Christianity has kind of become the predominant culture in our country.
And so they're afraid of losing it.
And so institutional Christianity or Christian Inc., as I call it, which is some of the megachurches in this area, they're like, if I start all of a sudden talking about political stuff or civic government, I might have 10% people walk out.
That's the point.
The point is to say things that might be disagreeable.
Love it.
And what ends up happening is this, and this is this unspoken invisible handcuff that all of a sudden pastors come under, right?
So Adam Smith had the invisible hand.
I coined the term invisible handcuff, where these pastors all of a sudden work from a political correct framework where they're like, I can't comment on elections.
They give some tax status reason.
It's nonsense.
That's not true.
But then all of a sudden they're like, well, I'm afraid I'm going to offend people on this.
First of all, the Bible says very clearly what type of government that we should have.
The Bible says very clearly how we're supposed to interact on everything.
And what I find to be so flummoxing is a lot of these churches, they'll tell you how you should marry, how you should parent, how you should save your money, how you should work, how you should communicate, how you should travel, how you should eat.
I saw a biblical series a week before the election, one pastor was like, the biblical diet.
Like, really?
That's important.
That probably could have waited until December.
Okay?
That's important.
But yet, no comment whatsoever on how to vote.
And I think it's so unbiblical, and it's rooted in ingratitude.
First of all, that we do live in the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world.
We just do.
And it's also rooted in this idea that there's no clarity for the times.
That's what other pastors, well, it's kind of messy, right?
Where they say, you know, both parties are bad and there's really not, you know, a better option.
Okay, so first of all, better and perfect are two completely different things, okay?
I'm not saying that there's a perfect option, but yeah, I would say that the party in California that passed SB 145, right, Shannon, which decriminalizes pedophilia in this state into law.
And by the way, your local churches here that didn't speak out against SB 145, they'll be judged by their creator for not saying anything about pedophilia.
They will.
And I just want to, just so you guys know, and most people in the state don't know, in the midst of a pandemic, all the problems, Gavin Newsom goes out of his way to pander to the pedophile lobby, passes SB 145 that decriminalizes pedophilia in this state.
It's in law now.
Most people don't know that.
And the church basically did nothing to rise up against it generally.
And yet pastors a week before the election were like, well, there's really no difference between the two parties.
Okay, there's one party that believes that life begins at conception.
There's one party that believes in post-birth abortions.
There's one party that believes in this evangelistic commitment to transgenderism.
And there's one that believes there's only two genders and that God created man and woman.
It's basically that simple.
There's another party that believes in open borders and doing nothing against child sex trafficking.
There's another party that's actually trying to do something about it.
I could go on, right?
There's another party that believes church is essential.
There's other party that believes that strips club is essential.
Okay, again, not exactly a perfect fit.
Plenty of Republicans that don't know what they're doing.
I got that.
Do not tell me there's not a better fit, okay?
The Republican Party is absolutely the better fit.
Real quickly, how can a local church like this be involved?
You mentioned in my office, what you should suggest we do.
Yeah.
And so I think there's this myth and this lie that sometimes conservatives have, which is what I do doesn't matter.
And man, if Mike Garcia pulls this off, 50 votes or 20, if he does, I could say that every single person that did something in that district absolutely mattered.
I mean, so, first of all, we're already seeing increments of very tight races that are being decided by 20 votes or 30 votes and all that.
But also, I'm a big believer that everything that you do must be a reflection as if your personal action can actually make a macro difference.
And as soon as you lose that belief, then your entire civilization will crumble.
And it's a great, we call the greatest generation the greatest generation for a reason.
They were, of course, the most heroic generation.
They served in war, but all of them had this belief, which is a biblical belief, which is why they believed it, is that my singular commitment to the war effort, whether it be on an assembly line or as a medic or storming the beach of Normandy or fighting an Ibojimi, Iwo Jima, my singular commitment through death or through sacrifice or through it's actually going to make a broader difference.
And that's a really poetic and beautiful thing that we've lost.
We've lost it, where most people actually think what they do makes no difference whatsoever.
And that's exactly why we're in the state that we're in.
It doesn't matter if I get drunk the night before, someone else is going to cut up the slack.
It's this widespread irresponsibility that has set in.
So what does that have to do with the church and with politics?
Is that in this church right here is every single one of you needs to take responsibility for the type of country that you want to live in and also the type of civic engagement.
And so I say commonly that churches have prison ministries, marriage ministries, youth ministries, financial counseling ministries, music ministries, sports ministries, but almost no churches have any sort of political ministry.
So think about, and some pastors completely disagree at this, and I would love a chance to interface with them because they're just wrong.
And I think I can make them, and I think I can make them see why.
But what do you think causes most of the confusion in families today?
Seriously.
So the one thing that is going to be the unspoken or spoken piece of conflict is the one thing that your church will not tell you how to think about.
Think about that.
But here's the point: the church needs to offer clarity in confusing times.
And when you have married couples, when you have 15 and 16-year-olds in your youth ministry, go to youth ministries, and they say, hey, when I go on TikTok or when I go on Instagram, all I see is BLM stuff.
What are we supposed to think about that?
And when the youth minister says, oh, we don't get into that, first of all, the young person will then lose respect for the point of authority from that youth minister.
Secondly, they'll be less likely to join the church in the future because there are no longer a sense of clarity or information.
And third, they're going to believe whatever they're told because the church doesn't take a stance on that.
And so if the church doesn't take a stance on politics, then what do you take a stance on?
Exactly.
The entire country, whether we like it or not, whether you signed up for it or not, has an incredibly heavy amount of consequences based on political beliefs that you have and how you exercise them.
So in California, this gathering is deemed illegal by Gavin Newsom.
In Tennessee, that's not the case, right?
Post-birth abortion, transgenderism, SB 145, all of it.
And so the church needs to get way more involved in politics, not less.
And we need to do it through a biblical lens, always referencing scripture as the main driving force, understanding history.
All of you as Christians Have a higher degree of responsibility for how you're going to interface.
And I say this to all of our students at Turning Point USA: is that never is it permissible for anyone to engage in ad hominin attacks or slights against a person of a different political opinion or to get more heated or just get angry.
They might get very angry, but you shouldn't and you shouldn't insult them.
Instead, you should look at them not as an obstacle but as an opportunity.
And I mean, if every single person did that this Thursday, it'd be an amazing thing.
And so the church, I think, churches across the country need to hire civic pastors that can counsel the church individually on questions that they might have around politics.
So, for example, people in this church, I'm just guessing you guys have someone that does marital counseling here, right?
I'm guessing.
And you could probably, you know, sign up for it or you have classes and all that.
It's the same with politics.
People have a lot of confusion about politics.
Building Something New Now00:12:25
I get it.
It's really confusing.
Can I trust this source?
Is this person correct?
What about this data study?
And that's great stuff.
The church should be at the center of that conversation, right?
People should be coming on Wednesday or Thursday nights and asking the same sort of questions they ask about financial planning, right?
They should be like, hey, I don't get this healthcare thing.
Like all my Christian friends on the left say that Republicans hate poor people because they want to take health care away.
Great.
Let's do a 30-minute deal on that.
That'd be really helpful, right?
People say I'm only pro-life because I'm pro-birth, but I don't care about people all across the rest.
I'm sure you guys have heard this before, right?
Happy to build that out now.
The point is that the church should be taking an authoritative role in that conversation.
And if we do, then we'll start to see things get a lot better.
So I got five minutes, and I want you to speak on this because I'm not the smartest guy in the room, and I'm not stupid either.
Okay.
Donald Trump won the election.
I believe that with all my heart.
I believe that he won the election.
Tell us what you know about voter fraud.
Yeah, I mean, I built this out at length in the prior service.
And so, look, it was a red wave everywhere except for four cities.
I mean, we won 28 out of 28 toss-up and competitive House seats.
We flipped three state legislatures.
We flipped one governor's mansion.
We won every single competitive Senate seat except two.
And the ones that we won, we won decisively: Susan Collins by 12 points, Tom Tillis by two points.
And so, Donald Trump won more black and Hispanic voters than any candidate since a Republican candidate since 1960.
He won the Rio Grande Valley that a Republican has not won since 1906.
He won Beverly Hills, okay?
He won Beverly Hills.
And so, as I start to, and I've spent dozens of hours poring over this data, happy to go through it at length.
We don't have time to do it.
But all of a sudden, I started asking questions very publicly, one of the few public people in the conservative movement that have actually decided to kind of call nonsense on exactly what has been told here.
And this idea that there's no widespread voter fraud is just, it's one of the most sloppy programmed lies that is ever being told.
This idea that when you have 170 million people participate in something as taking over a $4 trillion government for four years that will control the entire geopolitical trajectory of the planet, that all of a sudden everyone's going to stop cheating.
People cheat on everything.
Cheat on taxes.
They cheat in monopoly.
They cheat in poker.
They cheat in traffic.
They run red lights.
Like people do lots of different cutting of corners.
But when it comes to voting, all of a sudden, everyone acts perfectly, right?
As if there's no organized crime units that won't try to actually influence an election.
And look, there's a multi-trillion dollar money laundering industry in this country.
There's child sex trafficking industries in this country.
I mean, this idea that there are not criminals that would try to influence our election is so contrary to logic and reason.
And there's so many different ways to do it.
For example, here's just a great example, okay?
In Georgia, in 2016, there were 240,000 absentee mail ballots that were sent out, okay, in 2016.
There were 1.3 million that were sent out in Georgia this election, okay?
So, and again, all I do is I ask questions, and I also point to data.
So, what assurances has the Georgia Secretary of State given us that they were prepared for a tenfold increase in mail and ballots to check for fraud and signature requests this close because they were not anticipating it a year ago because of the pandemic?
What measures did you put in place?
And if you just ask those questions, you get called a racist, right?
No, no, okay, I got it.
You had 240,000 ballots in 2016.
Now you have 1.3 million.
Did you expand your staff?
Did you check every signature?
Did you make sure that dead people weren't voting?
Did you cleanse the voter rolls?
Did you do all those things?
Because we're seeing numbers that make no sense, right?
We're seeing Joe Biden do worse in every urban area across the country except for urban areas.
We saw a 1,774% increase in 90-plus-year-olds for voter registration in Pennsylvania in the midst of a pandemic.
Okay?
We have seen, for example, Joe Biden in Dane County, Wisconsin, where University of Wisconsin-Madison is.
The campus is basically closed and shuttered, got 65,000 more votes than Barack Obama did, even adjusting for population increases.
So if you start asking these questions, all of a sudden you get called an awful person.
You can't do that.
But we know, and it's been covered in the New York Times in the year past.
They used to actually be really interested in this because they were afraid Republicans were going to do this.
It's called ballot laundering or granny farming.
And it's where you register a lot of developmentally disabled people at nursing homes through people that have a high incentive structure to try to get extra ballots and then submit them and you drop them off in these drop boxes anonymously wearing a mask so you can't tell who's dropping them off.
And then they get cleaned into the system.
And you might say, well, there's not enough to do that.
You don't know that.
It's like saying money laundering was not enough to impact the American economy.
That's an argument they used to make.
So in the 60s and 70s, when drugs really started to become prevalent in our country, the people that were against the money laundering investigations were like, money laundering's on the edges.
It's not that big of a deal.
As soon as we started to investigate it, we realized it was like a $3 trillion a year industry in our country.
Cleaning dollar bills through laundromats and restaurants and cash-run industries.
Until we started to look into it, we realized how complex this was, right?
And we already have the whistleblowers in Wisconsin that say that all of her developmentally disabled patients were forced to vote for Joe Biden.
This just came out a couple days ago.
We have the Nevada Native Project where they were literally handing out gas cards for ballots and they posted it on Facebook, which is a violation of federal law.
We know this.
And this doesn't even get into the voting tabulation problems and the lack of oversight and Dominion voting systems and Hammer and scorecard and all that sort of stuff.
But here's the significance of this.
Whether we're right or not, and I know we're on to something, the question is how much and only an investigation can tell us, is that about 60 million people think this was a fraudulent election.
That's actually a really, really bad thing for our country.
It's really bad.
Now, back in 2000, I know we're running out of time, but back in 2016, when the Democrats thought that that election was stolen by Russians, which was absolutely untrue, what did we do?
We said, that's a bad thing for our country.
Let's look into it.
So we appointed Mueller, and we looked into it, and they ended up having this roaming prosecutory authority that indicted all of Trump's friends.
But the final conclusion was, no, Russia actually didn't impact the outcome of the election.
Why did we do that?
Because being the bigger and better people, we were like, it's not a healthy thing for 40 million people to think that the Kremlin influenced this election.
Because we actually had this romantic idea of America that the Democrats actually wants what's best for America.
And now all of a sudden, you have 60 million people that think that this thing was fraudulent and stolen.
And instead of answering our questions, of which I have about 5,000 of them, we have stacks of papers.
We've been doing these live streams.
I could do, again, I could do a three-hour speech on it.
And I encourage all of you guys to check out our podcast if you have any questions about this.
Instead of answering our questions, they say, there's no evidence.
Shut up.
You're a racist.
You're a bad person.
And just let him get inaugurated.
And here's where this is headed.
If we don't have answers to our questions, you're going to have 60 million people that think the entire process is invalidated.
And we don't know where that heads.
I just know it's not good.
We don't know what the ramifications of that is.
We don't know, people say civil war and all that.
I think that's a sloppy thing to contribute to the conversation.
It might be a lot more nuanced and also a lot less predictable.
Might be people that just say, I'm never going to vote again.
That's a bad thing, right?
That's a really bad thing.
It might be 20 million Republicans that say, we're not going to pay our taxes anymore.
Okay, that would be kind of bad.
We don't know.
Like there's a sequence of unpredictable events that could unfold, none of which are good.
And so those of us that actually believe in reason and data and evidence, we would love an answer as to why there was a 1,774% increase for 90-plus-year-olds registering to vote in Pennsylvania six months before a pandemic, mostly in August, while the pandemic was raging in Pennsylvania.
Who is doing that?
Have you looked into it?
And the Bureau and the DOJ is nowhere to be found.
And there's this massive institutional distrust that is growing where people are saying, not only do I not trust the system, now I don't trust my government.
I don't trust my justice system.
I don't trust the colleges I send my kids to.
I don't trust the products I buy from these companies.
I don't trust the pharmaceutical or vaccinations that they want to push upon our public.
And so what ends up happening is you're going to have 60 or 70 million people in the country that basically are just saying to anyone that has any sort of power, I don't trust you or anything that you stand for.
And just play that out in your mind where it goes.
It's a very unhealthy thing.
And so they say they want to heal the country.
Okay, you want to heal the country?
Then just answer our questions.
That would be a really great way to do that.
Maybe there are answers.
I don't think so.
I believe with all my heart, God is not done with America.
God is not done with this nation.
There's more for what God wants to do in this nation.
So I know it's really hard.
Two minutes.
Give these people hope.
Yeah, and so I will.
And so I'm going to tell you kind of what I'm doing.
And I refuse to be nothing but optimistic.
I'm very realistic about the challenges that we have.
And I think we have to be.
However, this is the greatest opportunity to build something new.
I actually think that we're entering a building moment in America right now.
And building is hard.
Building takes planning.
It takes support structures.
It takes defending what you're building away from attackers.
But what do I mean by that?
A liberal podcaster said something so interesting the other day that I was listening to, and he said, There are zero institutions that I trust.
I said, you're exactly right.
He said, I don't trust any institution that has massive power in America.
And I thought to myself, that's unbelievably depressing, but it's actually the opposite.
It's incredibly exciting.
It's an opportunity to build institutions using biblical ideas to build new things.
And so since the entire, you know, it's kind of a barren wasteland of colleges that are going to burst, of churches that no longer stand for anything, of media institutions that are crumbling that we thought we could once trust that all of a sudden are completely backwards and wacko.
So now we have to enter a phase of we're not even going to care about what happens to those other institutions.
Gravity will take care of that.
People are already starting to defect.
Their ratings are down.
They're purchasing less of those products.
The question is, what are we going to do in this moment to first and foremost to support the good guys?
There's this, and it's going to take longer than two minutes to do this.
I'll do my best.
But there's this, and I want you to think very carefully if you've done this.
And if you have, you should really pray about it, which is there's this irresistible pattern that happens on the internet that anyone that has any form of success, there must now be a perpetual ridicule industry that goes after them.
Anyone, a podcaster, an artist, a musician, a pastor, that all of a sudden starts to break through and have any form of success, there needs to be a greater volume of people to tear that down.
What are we doing to actually support the good guys right now?
Because there are good guys.
Like Sean Fuched, or I can never say his legendary.
Sean, who's great.
Again, I don't agree with everything he says theologically, but he's definitely doing something good.
He's under vicious attack.
Let's defend him.
How about some of the truth tellers right now?
Here's the point is that if we actually rise up and build something new and support the good guys and defend right now, the way that the current trajectory is is the current power institutions are crumbling and they're crumbling really, really quick.
This is the greatest opportunity for Bible-believing Christians to lean in and to build new.
And with that, I think America's best days are ahead.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Please consider getting involved with Turning Point USA, where we play offense with a sense of urgency to win America's culture war at tpusa.com.