The Charlie Kirk Show - A Tale of Two Americas
Aired: 2021-01-29
Duration: 58:11

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, The Tale of Two Americas.
[00:00:02]  Is it similar to The Tale of Two Cities?
[00:00:04]  I explore that with my friend Pastor David Engelhart and Turning Point USA's Isabel Brown.
[00:00:09]  If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.
[00:00:12]  I encourage every young person to listen to this right now to start a chapter, get engaged, get involved with Turning Point USA.
[00:00:18]  You can always email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:21]  And if you would like to support our program, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:00:26]  A Tale of Two Americas, a lot to unpack.
[00:00:29]  Buckle up.
[00:00:30]  Here we go.
[00:00:32]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:33]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
[00:00:36]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:39]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:00:42]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:00:43]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:00:44]  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.
[00:00:53]  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.
[00:01:01]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:05]  I'm very excited to talk to you about a new book that is coming out this month from my dear friend, a great American, and one of my top mentors, Jim Holden.
[00:01:13]  He's a best-selling author, a member of the Turning Point Endowment, and a very clear thinker.
[00:01:19]  So listen carefully.
[00:01:20]  Selling in an Anxious World is Jim's fifth book on selling strategies and best practices.
[00:01:25]  This time, Jim brings together research science and observation to identify the leading cause of declining business-to-business sales, also known as corporate culture.
[00:01:35]  I had the great honor of contributing to a chapter of Selling in an Anxious World through my work with Turning Point.
[00:01:41]  I'm in a unique position to observe academic culture within our colleges and relate it to the corporate world, particularly its impact on company culture.
[00:01:49]  In today's world, good company culture requires vigilant protection, which is why this book is so timely and a must-read for business people, sellers, patriots, and Christians.
[00:01:59]  Selling in an Anxious World combines research from extensive deal reviews, examples from Jim's personal life, and Bible references to shine a light on culture, presenting an unconventional guide to solving an unconventional problem.
[00:02:12]  You'll get quick access to whatever topics are important to you through chapter summaries and reference guides.
[00:02:18]  Jim Holden's book is not like any other business book out there.
[00:02:22]  So go to sellingcharlie.com.
[00:02:24]  That's sellingcharlie.com and use the special code Charlie to get a discount.
[00:02:28]  Again, my dear friend, Jim Holden, we're going to have him on the podcast talking about this book.
[00:02:32]  And send me some of your thoughts at freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:02:35]  Again, that's Selling in an Anxious World by Jim Holden, a must-read for everyone.
[00:02:42]  Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
[00:02:44]  We are thrilled to be joined today by Isabel Brown from Turning Point USA.
[00:02:49]  Always happy to be on the show, Charlie.
[00:02:51]  And a dear friend of mine, Pastor David Engelhart from King's Church.
[00:02:54]  Good to be here, Charlie.
[00:02:55]  York.
[00:02:56]  Yep.
[00:02:56]  And also a great mind, and you're really going to enjoy him.
[00:03:00]  And trust me.
[00:03:01]  So we were talking off kind of before, off air here and kind of beforehand, the framing of how we want to take this.
[00:03:08]  And I want to really explore this idea with both of you, The Tale of Two Americas.
[00:03:13]  So I think a lot of what we're experiencing in our country connects back to this thesis of Tale of Two Americas, which is obviously kind of a parallel to the Tale of Two Cities.
[00:03:24]  David, you're very familiar with this piece of literature.
[00:03:27]  Walk us through when it was written, the significance of it, and also how we can connect it to some of these stories we're talking about.
[00:03:32]  Yeah, well, Tale of Two Cities is a Dickens piece written in the 1800s, late 1800s.
[00:03:36]  And Dickens was, he was, he loved the French Revolution, and he was fixated by it for a number of reasons as a UK guy, watching the parallel of two revolutions that were happening, the UK Revolution, the French Revolution, and then we were about to have our own revolution.
[00:03:54]  And when do revolutions happen?
[00:03:56]  They happen when the people are upset, when the broad spectrum of people are upset.
[00:04:01]  And frankly, when the government's not doing anything about it, and they're not hearing the voice of the people.
[00:04:08]  And why?
[00:04:09]  Because they're comfortable.
[00:04:10]  So, you know, we think about our revolution and the monarchy getting taxation and power, and they think it's going to be this way forever.
[00:04:16]  And that's the opening line of that book, right?
[00:04:19]  It was the best of times.
[00:04:20]  It was the worst of times because for people in power, they felt like it was the best of times.
[00:04:25]  And right now, you know, we have 2020 that just went by.
[00:04:29]  Tons of people are out of work.
[00:04:31]  People are broke.
[00:04:32]  People are committing suicide.
[00:04:33]  Yes.
[00:04:34]  But the rich have just had an amazing year in the market.
[00:04:37]  And, you know, the news focuses on the market.
[00:04:39]  How do we do?
[00:04:40]  Let's look at the market.
[00:04:41]  Who does the market affect in the United States?
[00:04:43]  It doesn't affect anybody that like on the day-to-day people.
[00:04:47]  It affects people that have a significant net worth.
[00:04:50]  And so it's the best of times for them.
[00:04:52]  But then for the people that are underneath, it's the worst of times.
[00:04:55]  They're locked down.
[00:04:56]  They're broke.
[00:04:57]  They don't have any economic options to move forward.
[00:05:00]  And you can feel the tremblings of a potential civil war that's starting to brew.
[00:05:05]  And I'm not saying we're here, but I'm saying those support that, by the way, we don't support it in any way.
[00:05:12]  We're just looking historically where things are.
[00:05:14]  And when that happened with the French, it was brutal and bloody.
[00:05:18]  And some of the worst political ideas that were morally unhinged from a standard construct of historic morality came into play and has affected the rest of the world and the history of the world from that revolution.
[00:05:32]  The first line of the book is: it was the best of times.
[00:05:36]  It was the worst of times.
[00:05:37]  Is that correct?
[00:05:37]  That's exactly right.
[00:05:38]  And it's playing the regular people that are going through.
[00:05:42]  I mean, just think of it.
[00:05:43]  Lockdown, you can't leave your house, but us, we're going to be having this, you know, French laundry dinner and we're all going to be having $1,000 plates.
[00:05:51]  It is the best of times.
[00:05:52]  And the Louis Vuitton guy, Bernard Arnault, he's worth $155 billion.
[00:05:59]  And I was going through what is in his portfolio.
[00:06:02]  And it really makes sense why he's able to do so, why he's doing so well.
[00:06:06]  He owns Louis Vuitton, Moet, and Hennessy.
[00:06:10]  So rich people that buy luxury goods, he's going to continue to do well.
[00:06:13]  And his portfolio grew in a year that the economy for the regular person was trash is what happened.
[00:06:20]  And so that's exactly what's at play.
[00:06:22]  And the crazy thing in that first chapter, it says, and the French nation was pumping fake dollars into the economy to make the people happy.
[00:06:32]  And you're like, have we ever heard of a time like that before?
[00:06:35]  Perhaps that fake dollars are being pumped into an economy.
[00:06:41]  And so part of the tale of two Americas is also how the ruling class and the people in charge have reacted to certain crises that they are really worried about.
[00:06:52]  Right.
[00:06:52]  And so, Isabel, we talked a lot about how the market crackdown has happened here on to try to protect the incumbent hedge fund guys.
[00:07:01]  And yet we juxtapose that with something that is quite honestly a bigger issue than GameStop stock, which is the future of our children in our schools.
[00:07:12]  Yeah.
[00:07:13]  The reality is there's this crackdown, not just in the markets, but honestly across the board culturally, when you look at everyday Americans versus the elite class culturally and politically, you're seeing crackdowns on free speech and inability for people to voice their opinions and organize online, especially now we're starting to see that in the marketplace to prevent wealth from accumulating outside of that elite cultural and political class.
[00:07:35]  You're telling people they're not allowed to go back to school.
[00:07:37]  They're not allowed to go back to their jobs.
[00:07:39]  We're going to try to dramatically change what the culture looks like, at least for you, maybe not for us, from an elite ruling perspective, so, so significantly in 2021.
[00:07:50]  We talked a little bit earlier this week about the World Economic Forum happening in Davos, Switzerland this week.
[00:07:55]  And they're literally using the terminology great reset saying there should be no private property.
[00:08:01]  You shouldn't be able to have your own autonomous decisions.
[00:08:04]  We are going to take care of everything for you.
[00:08:06]  And don't you worry, we'll make it sound really great.
[00:08:08]  But it's this dystopian reality that squashes the little guy over and over and over again.
[00:08:14]  And we're not seeing that overall quite yet in the United States and around the world, but we're starting to see steps in that direction.
[00:08:20]  That's right.
[00:08:20]  And so, what are some of the big takeaways then from the tale of two cities?
[00:08:24]  Well, there's a couple of big ones.
[00:08:26]  The biggest takeaway is actually the storyline that's weaving throughout it because this is what we all say when we hear about this kind of stuff.
[00:08:35]  Well, what am I supposed to do about this situation?
[00:08:38]  How am I supposed to respond when there's this estate of people that are being crushed?
[00:08:43]  There's an estate that's living large.
[00:08:44]  What do I do?
[00:08:45]  And that's the story.
[00:08:46]  It's actually that I would say the protagonist, there's a lot of many characters, is a lawyer trying to figure out what he's doing because he's living for himself.
[00:08:54]  His life is narcissistic.
[00:08:56]  He's drunk.
[00:08:57]  He's all about self-consumption.
[00:08:59]  And that's the same kind of spirit that fuels this kind of AOC.
[00:09:04]  You don't have enough.
[00:09:05]  The world is against you.
[00:09:06]  Take revenge.
[00:09:07]  Have the bloodiest revolution in the history of civil revolutions.
[00:09:11]  That kind of gaping desire for justice without an actual moral construct.
[00:09:17]  So this guy, he's a lawyer that's living this kind of consumption life.
[00:09:21]  And then he has this realization that I actually have to give of myself to find real life.
[00:09:27]  And instead of everything being about his own consumption, his own justice, his own rightness, he begins to turn his life.
[00:09:35]  And at the end of the book, he gives his life away for another.
[00:09:37]  And that's how we change things by the individual taking individual action.
[00:09:42]  It's the opposite of the tale where it's woven right now.
[00:09:46]  It's like the group must take group action to stand against group wrongs.
[00:09:51]  And that's not really how we fix things.
[00:09:54]  We fix things by individuals taking individual actions.
[00:09:57]  And we have this setup where groups take group actions when we have people in our political commentary that say the other side are demons.
[00:10:06]  They are the worst, like most demonstrations.
[00:10:09]  The AOC calls Ted Cruz a murderer.
[00:10:12]  He tried to murder me.
[00:10:13]  Right.
[00:10:13]  And so that kind of language.
[00:10:15]  So there's at the end of the first paragraph of the book, and it says, and the authorities of that time spoke only in the highest degree of superlative comparisons.
[00:10:22]  What does that mean?
[00:10:23]  That means everything was extreme.
[00:10:26]  So I'm a conservative.
[00:10:27]  Charlie is a salvific figure.
[00:10:29]  He's an angel.
[00:10:30]  He's got a halo on when he goes to sleep.
[00:10:32]  And the other guy is literally the incarnation of the devil.
[00:10:36]  And that in part happens when you have a society that's been unhitched from morality and they don't have a God and a devil.
[00:10:43]  So they make people in those images and it creates the fuel for the fire for social instability.
[00:10:50]  And when you have that social instability, then demagogues can take over.
[00:10:53]  And they do.
[00:10:54]  And you want to give them power because, and I've heard you say this before: if there is a murderer on the other side, now I'm scared and now I need someone to protect me, which is why crisis always creates an authoritarian regime.
[00:11:08]  That's Hayek's Road to Serfdom, one of the great political treatises on the danger of crisis in society and not protecting ourselves against those dangers by saying, no, we need to act calmly and rationally through crisis so we don't give up our rights assistance.
[00:11:24]  Especially in a crisis, that's when you need to safeguard freedom and liberty more than ever.
[00:11:28]  Absolutely.
[00:11:28]  And so I want to continue to explore this idea of the tale of two Americas because there's a lot happening.
[00:11:33]  The rich people's kids are doing just fine.
[00:11:36]  They're getting educated.
[00:11:37]  They are able to travel.
[00:11:40]  However, working class people are still being subjected to schools being closed, completely, totally shuttered.
[00:11:46]  And there's a massive consequence of this.
[00:11:48]  And part of what we have seen in recent days and weeks is the muscular class, the working class in our country, they're growing a little bit uneasy.
[00:11:58]  And that will eventually materialize in something I don't think we're prepared to deal with.
[00:12:04]  I don't think that our country is all, I don't think we have an experience like this, especially in the digital era, that will be able to handle this in a way to bring us back to a place that does respect private property, entrepreneurship, and the American way.
[00:12:22]  With Turning Point USA and the movement that we have started, I've had the honor of traveling and visiting the college campuses and engage in rigorous debate with the next generation.
[00:12:32]  When you talk to as many students as I do, you see several familiar themes.
[00:12:36]  I see disillusionment with the media, a lack of hope in their job prospects.
[00:12:40]  I hear them claim that they're victims and they deserve better.
[00:12:43]  Whether college students realize it or not, they're forming ideologies that will affect the way they think and treat others for a lifetime.
[00:12:49]  I'd like to recommend a great book to any young person in this time of life.
[00:12:52]  It's called Reflections on the Existence of God by best-selling author Richard Simmons III.
[00:12:58]  This guy never shies away from the hard questions of life.
[00:13:01]  Reflections on the existence of God is a collection of short essays that tackles the biggest question of all: does God exist?
[00:13:08]  This book is well researched and easy to read.
[00:13:10]  One of the most important things a young person can do is to solidify their worldview.
[00:13:14]  Our worldview informs our personal, social, and political lives.
[00:13:17]  It helps us understand our purpose.
[00:13:19]  So I'm challenging college students to ask themselves life's toughest questions.
[00:13:23]  Dive in and get this book today.
[00:13:25]  Reflections on the existence of God.
[00:13:27]  Reflections on the existence of God.
[00:13:29]  Go to reflectionscharlie.com.
[00:13:31]  That's reflectionscharlie.com.
[00:13:33]  Then drop me a line at freedom at charliekirk.com with your thoughts.
[00:13:39]  I'm going to get to some sound here of Charles Payne.
[00:13:41]  Let's go to cut 64 of Charles Payne, good friend of mine, doing a great job.
[00:13:46]  They're allowed to short so much stock.
[00:13:49]  Do you know the amount of stock that was out on GameStop?
[00:13:52]  Let's just say 100% of the shares that are out.
[00:13:55]  Well, they shorted 140% of the stock.
[00:13:59]  So they borrowed the same stock over and over and over, the same shares and sold it into the market over.
[00:14:06]  Their job, their mission was to drive GameStop to zero.
[00:14:11]  Zero.
[00:14:12]  No one said a word on any financial network, particularly CNBC.
[00:14:17]  Let's go to cut 65.
[00:14:18]  Charles Payne talking about why is it okay for hedge funds to want to drive a stock to bankruptcy and make money off of that?
[00:14:26]  But then all of a sudden the masses do the opposite and the world blows up.
[00:14:30]  Play tape.
[00:14:31]  So what happens?
[00:14:32]  Some people get wind of this.
[00:14:34]  These folks that you said, these individual investors, they decide to buy the stock up.
[00:14:39]  They start to pressure the shorts.
[00:14:41]  It's called a short squeeze and it's working and Wall Street is losing its mind and Wall Street now wants to change the rules of the game because a bunch of people with accounts ranging from $500 to $2,500 are taking down the billionaires.
[00:14:58]  David, what's your take on that?
[00:14:59]  I mean, it's incredible how much volatility is available in the market right now.
[00:15:06]  And whenever we have things that happen like this, legislators do what they always do.
[00:15:09]  They legislate.
[00:15:10]  And there's always unintended consequences from fast legislation because of things like that.
[00:15:16]  And ultimately, the market will end up suffering.
[00:15:19]  And the people that are experts in this area will end up getting the best tax guys and the best accountants and the best lawyers to figure out how to continue to make cash in this.
[00:15:28]  And it will limit the other regular people that have the $500 accounts and have the $1,000 accounts to be able to get in the market in the first place because of a whole host of new regulations.
[00:15:38]  And there'll be new fees and there'll be new structures and we'll have new jobs, but they're the kind of jobs that don't add to our GDP.
[00:15:46]  They suck away from it like regulators and clients.
[00:15:51]  Accountants and tax guys that aren't making a product, they're not making a game at a game store.
[00:15:54]  Checking boxes.
[00:15:55]  Exactly right.
[00:15:56]  And so what we have here is the continuing of what America, which America is more concerned about GameStop all of a sudden going up.
[00:16:10]  Let's just be very honest.
[00:16:11]  Executing a short is a very sophisticated financial move.
[00:16:15]  If you have E-Trade or if you have Schwab's account or if you have any one of these apps, a lot of people don't even know how to do a short.
[00:16:22]  I had somebody ask me a couple months ago, Charlie, how do I short something?
[00:16:24]  You know what I told them?
[00:16:25]  Don't.
[00:16:26]  If you don't know what you're doing, don't do it.
[00:16:28]  Because if it goes up, you could lose infinitely.
[00:16:31]  It's a very specific, it's a lot harder than just buying, you know, going long on a stock and holding.
[00:16:36]  It's a lot more common.
[00:16:37]  That's what people should do.
[00:16:38]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:16:39]  Go long and hold.
[00:16:40]  Just long and hold for a long time.
[00:16:41]  Yeah.
[00:16:42]  And good companies with good earnings and good leadership and good products and all that.
[00:16:46]  However, the outrage that we have seen here and the mobilization of the government to go after this goes to show really where the priorities are.
[00:16:55]  And this goes back to one of the key problems that we have in our country, which is how do we finance our elections?
[00:17:02]  How do we actually put leaders into office?
[00:17:06]  Who actually supported Joe Biden's campaign early and often?
[00:17:09]  Where did Joe Biden go?
[00:17:10]  This is a good question for you, David.
[00:17:12]  You probably know.
[00:17:12]  Where did Joe Biden go after he lost Iowa, lost New Hampshire?
[00:17:16]  He didn't go to South Carolina.
[00:17:18]  Right, exactly.
[00:17:18]  He went to New York.
[00:17:19]  That's exactly.
[00:17:20]  You remember that, right?
[00:17:20]  He didn't go to the people in the Bronx, P.S., people in the Bronx, friends in Brooklyn.
[00:17:25]  He didn't go to your houses, right?
[00:17:27]  He didn't go to people in California that live in the suburbs.
[00:17:30]  That's not where he went.
[00:17:31]  He went to the people that are already holding these positions in these states that are passing layer upon layer of regulations that are driving people from the states.
[00:17:41]  So what happens if you extrapolate that to the guy that then rules the country?
[00:17:46]  I mean, just logic, the logical extrapolation is that those kind of layers of rules will happen nationally at the federal level and it will create the same effect that it will want to drive people out.
[00:17:56]  But as Americans, we're the last hope.
[00:17:58]  We're not going to New Zealand.
[00:18:00]  Like we're not hopping up to the top hat.
[00:18:02]  We're staying here and there's nowhere else to go.
[00:18:05]  We can't go with Elon to the moon yet.
[00:18:07]  To Mars or wherever.
[00:18:09]  Joe Biden did not go to campaign in South Carolina.
[00:18:11]  He did a fundraiser on Wall Street.
[00:18:14]  He called in as many favors as he could to keep his fledgling campaign alive.
[00:18:18]  And it was not really, it didn't kind of get resurrected until Clyburn endorsed him.
[00:18:23]  And there was a private Democrat meeting where they said, Buddha Judge and all you guys, you're dropping out and you're endorsing Joe.
[00:18:29]  We're going to ride him to the White House.
[00:18:30]  We don't care how clumsy it is.
[00:18:33]  And that goes to show who's actually running our government.
[00:18:37]  Donald Trump never did those fundraisers in Wall Street.
[00:18:39]  He was actually repulsed by him.
[00:18:42]  They loved Hillary Clinton.
[00:18:43]  They loved the access to government regulators.
[00:18:46]  And so now, when the people start to disrupt their game a little bit, they all of a sudden say, get our regulators and our protection in.
[00:18:57]  Dave Portnoy, who is kind of like the modern day Plato, more wisdom comes out of that guy than most of our leaders.
[00:19:03]  I say that non-sarcastically.
[00:19:05]  He runs Barstool.
[00:19:07]  And amongst other things, he's coming in hot.
[00:19:10]  Like Cut 78.
[00:19:11]  It is one of the most remarkable, illegal, shocking robberies in the history in plain sight.
[00:19:20]  In plain sight.
[00:19:21]  No closed door meetings, nothing behind.
[00:19:24]  Just right in your face, putting a gun in your mouth and saying, give us all your money.
[00:19:28]  That is what Robin Hood, Crooks, Jail, The Citadel, Ken Griffin, Jail, Steve Cohen, the Mets owner, jail, are doing.
[00:19:38]  Right in your face.
[00:19:40]  It's pretty aggressive.
[00:19:41]  Let's go to Cut 77.
[00:19:43]  Nancy Pelosi says SEC and Biden administration are taking a look at the GameStop situation, CUD 77.
[00:19:51]  Interesting, isn't it?
[00:19:52]  I understand that the administration is taking a look.
[00:19:55]  The SEC is taking a look at what that is.
[00:20:00]  But we'll all be reviewing it.
[00:20:02]  But interesting.
[00:20:03]  It's interesting.
[00:20:05]  It's interesting.
[00:20:05]  Yeah.
[00:20:06]  You know, it's interesting to buy a million dollars of Tesla stock like you did as soon as a green energy plan gets passed to the House of Representatives.
[00:20:13]  Let's go to another cut here.
[00:20:15]  I want to get into, we'll talk more about this, but this theme of the tale of two Americas.
[00:20:19]  And Isabel, can you help?
[00:20:20]  Can you help build this out for us?
[00:20:23]  There's been a big increase in suicides.
[00:20:27]  Do you have some of that data to help pack through that?
[00:20:30]  Yeah, I know there was a couple articles we were talking to.
[00:20:32]  Pull that up, please.
[00:20:32]  And so, David, you live in New York, school closures.
[00:20:35]  Have you seen it impact the mental health of a lot of kids?
[00:20:37]  Yeah, there's a massive impact mental health, not just kids, but all throughout New York City.
[00:20:41]  I mean, and you can see that impact with two primary statistics.
[00:20:45]  One is the massive increase of crime throughout the city, murder throughout the city.
[00:20:51]  In New York, it's terrible, right?
[00:20:54]  The numbers have been back and forth between 150K to 500,000 people have left because of what's happening there.
[00:21:02]  But more than that, the reality of crime increased in New York City in part because of the lockdowns and the desire of people to be out and amongst other people and around people.
[00:21:16]  And then, you know, the criminal elements are like, I'm going to break laws.
[00:21:18]  I'm just going to break all the laws.
[00:21:19]  And there you have this weird kind of symbiotic increase of criminality.
[00:21:25]  I mean, I live a block away from Wall Street and a couple of months ago, a Sunday morning, 7 a.m., someone was held up at gunpoint in front of the stock market.
[00:21:34]  That doesn't happen.
[00:21:36]  Like, that doesn't happen in big tourist areas since Giuliani came in and cleaned up the city in like major, you know, midtown Manhattan, downtown Manhattan.
[00:21:46]  But you see crime hectic going crazy.
[00:21:49]  I think they, I think the last stat I saw was 120% up.
[00:21:51]  Murder rates was January for the year.
[00:21:55]  And then obviously that's a byproduct to some degree of the mental health of the city.
[00:22:01]  I totally agree.
[00:22:02]  And New York is unrecognizable now.
[00:22:04]  Last time I went, and the lockdowns, you can't escape the lockdowns if you're a middle-class family in New York.
[00:22:11]  If you are one of the hedge fund people, you just get on your helicopter, go to the Hamptons or go to Aspen or go to Martha Vineyard or whatever, right?
[00:22:17]  Just get out.
[00:22:18]  And that's what they're doing.
[00:22:19]  And they're doing, or they go to Florida and they go to Miami, whatever.
[00:22:22]  Because of lockdowns, all of a sudden, I don't want to have to live in that kind of set of circumstances.
[00:22:27]  And the two Americas that have really been built here.
[00:22:30]  And by the way, the two Americas are not equally populated.
[00:22:32]  Let me be very clear.
[00:22:34]  One of the Americas is a group of people that control our financial institutions.
[00:22:40]  They control our government apparatus.
[00:22:41]  They control the means of communication.
[00:22:43]  And they're really a small group of people.
[00:22:45]  They're powerful.
[00:22:46]  They're wealthy.
[00:22:47]  There's not very many of them.
[00:22:48]  The next America are the people that have to live under the rules and the regulations and the decrees, if I may, from this other group of people.
[00:22:59]  And so the question should be, where does this head?
[00:23:05]  And we don't really know.
[00:23:07]  We just know that it's going to be heading to chaos, disorder.
[00:23:11]  Yeah.
[00:23:12]  And the Pareto effect, the Pareto principle, we know how that goes.
[00:23:15]  The Matthew principle, some people say that the people that are faithful with resources get resources that then are attracted back to them because they're faithfully using it.
[00:23:24]  So they can then continue to use it and grow, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:23:28]  But there's two issues: that if the people that are the stewards of that wealth are immoral people, then it damages all of the rest of the people that don't have that kind of concentrated power.
[00:23:39]  And that's when French Revolution, Tale of Two Americas, in the French Revolution, you had the third estate, the primary populace that was being dominated by the political power and the religious power.
[00:23:53]  And the religious power were just A-O-K-ing, rubber stamping everything the government did and said, it's all okay, it's totally fine.
[00:24:00]  Let's talk about, you know, heaven or let's get our eyes off of the here and now.
[00:24:06]  And it's frankly echoed in our big churches across the nation.
[00:24:10]  Let's not talk about political stuff.
[00:24:12]  Like, if you dare do it, you're a Christian nationalist.
[00:24:15]  And they try to want to stamp you in the forehead with a swastika.
[00:24:18]  And you're like, no, I'm actually trying to care for my community, for the people that aren't the people in power.
[00:24:24]  I'm actually trying to, like Sidney Carton does in the story, lay my life down for the people that are in my neighborhood, that are, you know, in my city.
[00:24:33]  And care for the welfare of the nation around you.
[00:24:35]  Yes.
[00:24:36]  So, Isabel, talk, you have some of those statistics on suicide.
[00:24:40]  In fact, Las Vegas schools are now opening because of the rise in teenage suicide.
[00:24:44]  We've been warding against this on this program, and we were not listened to because our leaders don't listen to us.
[00:24:48]  Isabel.
[00:24:49]  It's really shocking the state of affairs, not just that we're seeing in the United States of America, but around the world when it comes to just this unprecedented mental health crisis for all people.
[00:24:59]  It doesn't discriminate based on your gender.
[00:25:01]  It doesn't discriminate based on your race, regardless of where you live, what class you are a part of.
[00:25:06]  Really, every individual worldwide is experiencing this affront of depression, of anxiety, of hopelessness, and a lack of understanding where to go.
[00:25:16]  You brought up Las Vegas, and I'm glad you did, Charlie, because since last March, there's been more than 3,000 alerts sent to district officials regarding mental health episodes for students in K through 12 schools in Las Vegas alone.
[00:25:29]  And it took 3,000 alerts, including many successful student suicides, for them to decide to reopen schools.
[00:25:36]  We saw youth suicide reach record highs in 2020.
[00:25:40]  It was already increasing at a very steady rate between 2007 and 2018 by a rate of 60% for suicide among 10 to 24-year-olds in the United States.
[00:25:49]  But last year, we saw the highest number we've ever experienced in the United States.
[00:25:53]  And it's not just suicide, by the way.
[00:25:55]  It's record levels of depression, of anxiety, of substance abuse, of people just feeling like they have no community.
[00:26:01]  They have no sense of connection to the world around them.
[00:26:03]  And therefore, there's no other hope for them other than to take their own life.
[00:26:07]  And so we have some sound here that I want to play.
[00:26:09]  And it's from a family.
[00:26:11]  I believe it's right here.
[00:26:14]  Play that tape, please.
[00:26:15]  In the beginning, we didn't know exactly how long they were going to be out of school.
[00:26:20]  So week by week, I just saw changes in him.
[00:26:23]  He's a teenage boy.
[00:26:25]  You know, they need their friends.
[00:26:27]  They need the interaction.
[00:26:28]  They need the socialization.
[00:26:29]  I saw him started to get just, you know, a little depressed.
[00:26:34]  And he took his life.
[00:26:35]  I actually know where he is, where he lived in Illinois and where his family is from.
[00:26:39]  I know that area very well.
[00:26:41]  And this has happened all across the country.
[00:26:43]  And it's been ignored by the ruling class.
[00:26:44]  Why?
[00:26:45]  Well, they say it's because of the virus.
[00:26:46]  And we're all in this together.
[00:26:47]  No, we're not.
[00:26:48]  The ruling class have sent their kids off to either private schools that are open.
[00:26:53]  They have homeschooling options.
[00:26:55]  They have tutors.
[00:26:56]  You want to go see the hottest real estate market in the country?
[00:27:00]  Go to Aspen, Colorado.
[00:27:02]  Aspen, Colorado, which is the playground for the ruling class in America.
[00:27:08]  If you live in Aspen, Colorado, and you just own a fire height, we don't want to own a fire hydrant.
[00:27:16]  I'd take a fire hydrant.
[00:27:17]  A blade of grass in Aspen, Colorado is worth like a million dollars.
[00:27:21]  Yeah.
[00:27:22]  The property values are, there are homes that are selling for $3,000 a square foot in Aspen, Colorado.
[00:27:30]  So you might say, well, what's it with Aspen?
[00:27:34]  Aspen's obviously in the mountains, and it's very nice there in the summer.
[00:27:38]  And obviously, in the winter, it's not in the city.
[00:27:40]  A lot of people are migrating there.
[00:27:41]  They're bringing cash offers, and it's the playground of the ruling class.
[00:27:46]  They're doing great.
[00:27:48]  They had $500 million under contract in one month in Aspen real estate.
[00:27:53]  Think about that.
[00:27:54]  In a small town of Aspen, I think it's Pitkin County, if I'm not mistaken, right?
[00:27:58]  It is, yeah.
[00:27:59]  Pitkin County, Colorado, $500 million.
[00:28:03]  And so we're not all in this together.
[00:28:07]  Right.
[00:28:08]  That family there in Illinois, that amazing young man who took his life, they didn't have the money to go on a Gulf stream and go to Aspen and go buy a new home and make sure they got everything sorted out.
[00:28:19]  They needed school.
[00:28:20]  He loved school.
[00:28:21]  And now J.B. Pritzker, who might be America's worst governor, but it's really hard because you got Cuomo and you got Newsome.
[00:28:28]  J.B. Pritzker is an absolute disaster to our country.
[00:28:33]  He's born on third, thought he hit a triple.
[00:28:34]  He's not a very smart person.
[00:28:36]  He's done nothing but inherited money his whole life.
[00:28:38]  No, he spent $187 million to become governor, to become a bad governor.
[00:28:43]  $187 million of his own money.
[00:28:45]  And he's very vulnerable coming up here.
[00:28:47]  And a lot of people should rise up.
[00:28:48]  I don't care if you're a Democrat or you're a moderate, he's got to go because these lockdowns have broken the soul of our nation.
[00:28:54]  Well, and that's the whole idea that we've been talking about.
[00:28:58]  It's the best of times.
[00:28:59]  It's the worst of times.
[00:29:00]  It is the worst of times.
[00:29:02]  You know, I've talked to so many people that have been like, there's never been a time like this in the history of the United States for my finances, for my family, for my mental health.
[00:29:11]  And then again, we have another class where it is, in fact, the best of times for.
[00:29:16]  And, you know, we look to history to see patterns of where we're at and how to navigate through those places.
[00:29:23]  And if we don't look to history, then we're moving blind through our current set of circumstances.
[00:29:29]  And we have to have people that wake up and say, oh, yeah, you know, our country is about freedom.
[00:29:33]  That's what we're fundamentally founded on.
[00:29:36]  And you cannot have freedom and safety.
[00:29:39]  They don't coexist together.
[00:29:40]  You have to give up some of one for some of the other.
[00:29:44]  Will Durant famously said, you know, freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies.
[00:29:50]  And when one, you know, survives, the other one dies.
[00:29:53]  And we have a nation that has been really happy with safety.
[00:29:58]  And we've forgotten the value of freedom.
[00:30:00]  And that's what Soltzenitson says in the first chapter of the Gulag Archipelago: we have forgotten freedom.
[00:30:06]  We have stopped loving in freedom.
[00:30:08]  And so then we just gave it all up.
[00:30:09]  And you don't realize how valuable it is until it's all gone.
[00:30:14]  That's well said.
[00:30:15]  And the other thing that Solschenitson mentioned in the Gulag Archipelago is that this is all thanks to ideology.
[00:30:22]  That no nuance, no awareness, no capacity to really see what's going on around you.
[00:30:27]  It's simply and strictly ideology that is driving all of it.
[00:30:31]  And in this two Americas that we have, we have the rulers and the ruled.
[00:30:36]  It's that simple.
[00:30:37]  Are you part of the rulers or are you part of the ruled?
[00:30:40]  Here's a very interesting, just here's a way just to test it out: are you able to see government policy written and designed to directly benefit you and quickly?
[00:30:51]  The answer is no, you're part of the ruled.
[00:30:52]  It's that simple.
[00:30:53]  Do you see things on a news channel that reinforce your position of power?
[00:30:57]  Now, mind you, a lot of the criticisms that we're now levying might be misinterpreted as a leftist power struggle argument.
[00:31:04]  No, what's happening is the further reinforcement of a power incumbency that will destroy first principles and freedom and liberty.
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[00:32:22]  I want to get to some sound here.
[00:32:24]  Pelosi Cut69, please.
[00:32:27]  Thanks for having me.
[00:32:28]  What exactly did you mean when you said that the enemy is within?
[00:32:31]  What exactly did you mean?
[00:32:32]  It means that we have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence on other members of Congress.
[00:32:40]  It's absolute nonsense.
[00:32:41]  Bringing a fire I'm going to want to protect against yourself.
[00:32:43]  By the way, wouldn't it be a logical thing to believe that you can arm yourself after there was an insurrection because the security was not satisfactory?
[00:32:53]  You'd think.
[00:32:53]  You would think that that would be a logical way to handle it.
[00:32:55]  But this is a common narrative and that is happening between the Democrats in power, AOC and Pelosi, that are continually saying that they do not trust Republicans, not to vote correctly, not to tell the truth, but they're actually dangerous.
[00:33:16]  Right, exactly.
[00:33:18]  We've been talking about this whole best of times, worst of times, Tale of Two Cities Dickens analysis.
[00:33:23]  And this is a bizarre thing I saw while I was looking through the book recently.
[00:33:28]  The bad guys in the story are this couple named Defarges.
[00:33:33]  And the Defarges, a husband and wife couple, and they own the local wine shop.
[00:33:38]  And the emblem that Dickens is trying to draw is that they are peddling wine to the masses.
[00:33:45]  And they are.
[00:33:46]  They have like their underground revolutionary meetings there.
[00:33:49]  And they're enraging the populace.
[00:33:52]  They're intoxicating them with this language and they're whipping them up to do incredibly brutal acts.
[00:33:58]  And the proverb says really clearly: wine is a brawler, strong drink, a fighter.
[00:34:04]  And it's that idea that this cheap intoxication, that this incredibly intense language, I'm not safe around these people groups, does something to us emotionally because we're made to respond to that kind of intense language.
[00:34:19]  And when you use it cheaply for the purpose of political power, you don't understand, especially when you're standing on a pulpit like Pelosi or AOC or these people that regular people look up to as leaders and they say, oh my God, all of the Democrats are going, excuse me, all the Republicans or vice versa are going to kill me.
[00:34:38]  They're my enemy.
[00:34:39]  And it's intoxicating and it whips people up and it's ultimately incredibly damaging for our populace.
[00:34:46]  That's exactly right.
[00:34:47]  And words have meaning.
[00:34:49]  And when all of a sudden you go to the highest level of hyperbole every single time, it also cheapens those words in every single fashion imaginable.
[00:34:58]  And then you really have no words left to be able to describe the other side if they ever actually go into that form of behavior.
[00:35:06]  Let's just break down for a second the words that they're calling conservatives and Republicans domestic terrorists, violent extremists.
[00:35:14]  They called President Trump Osama bin Laden-esque, whatever that's supposed to mean.
[00:35:19]  They've graduated so significantly from political adversary to you're a deplorable to you're a racist and a white supremacist.
[00:35:27]  Now, you inevitably are going to commit some act of violence against me because of how you think politically or how you voted in the last election.
[00:35:35]  That makes you an extreme terrorist.
[00:35:38]  And the real story that's happening in the country with all of this kind of tied together, which by the way, this entire GameStop AMC BlackBerry thing is exactly the opposite of what the Democrats want to have happen right now.
[00:35:58]  Why?
[00:35:59]  Democrats control government.
[00:36:02]  Democrats control power.
[00:36:04]  The people want something.
[00:36:05]  They're upset at the power structure.
[00:36:07]  They want these hedge funds to be held accountable.
[00:36:10]  And now the Democrats who control government are going to come and swoop in and use the power to crush the little guy.
[00:36:16]  So the establishment, if you will, and both parties are now going to have to transparently defend a broken institution against the people.
[00:36:27]  Democrats don't want to be talking about this.
[00:36:29]  They'd rather continue this narrative that there will be a Republican Party is actually the party of an insurrectionist party, all that sort of stuff.
[00:36:37]  They want to continue that narrative of the tragic events that happened on January the 6th and misrepresent them intentionally.
[00:36:44]  And so this sort of populist moment that's continuing, now it's materializing in markets.
[00:36:54]  We've seen it in everything, right?
[00:36:55]  We've seen it in politics.
[00:36:57]  We've seen it in communication.
[00:36:58]  Now we're seeing it in markets, everybody.
[00:37:01]  What more evidence do you need?
[00:37:03]  It's the exact opposite of what the Democrats want right now.
[00:37:05]  Because now Joe Biden, this is becoming such a big story right now, based on everything I'm seeing and reading.
[00:37:11]  Joe Biden's going to have to address this.
[00:37:13]  And Joe Biden's probably going to say, oh, my Wall Street Treasury Secretary is going to go look into this.
[00:37:23]  You mean the one that has been paid by Wall Street, Janet Yellen, that Wall Street Treasury Secretary?
[00:37:31]  And so, David, I want to just start with you.
[00:37:33]  You're working on a lot of different things right now.
[00:37:34]  You're pastor of a church in New York City.
[00:37:36]  By the way, if anyone's in New York City, you got to go to David's church.
[00:37:39]  It's awesome.
[00:37:39]  What's it called?
[00:37:40]  King's Church downtown between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge.
[00:37:43]  If you're in New York City, you know where the Brooklyn Bridge is.
[00:37:46]  I do.
[00:37:46]  That's southern Manhattan.
[00:37:47]  That's right.
[00:37:48]  Yes.
[00:37:48]  The bottom, bottom.
[00:37:50]  And so tell us what you're working on.
[00:37:53]  So we have church life and rocking and rolling and preaching the gospel and standing for righteousness and our society and talking about actual things that matter, not just your personal finances and how to make your car run smoother, but all of the chaos and try to order our way through this.
[00:38:09]  Jesus was the light of the world.
[00:38:10]  That emblematically is what you need to get through darkness and confusion and not just emotional stuff, but all of the storm that's currently happening.
[00:38:21]  So that's happening.
[00:38:22]  And then as you know, Charlie, I have my law practice and representing my business clients on that side and hanging out with Turning Point and Charlie Kirk, which is the exciting part of my life.
[00:38:33]  It's always fun.
[00:38:35]  And so, David, what do you have to say for Christians that say they shouldn't be involved in politics?
[00:38:39]  Stay away from it.
[00:38:40]  And by the way, we had a really good question yesterday of a woman in South Carolina.
[00:38:44]  Actually, no, is in our supporter call.
[00:38:46]  And by the way, if you guys want to get in our supporter call, all you have to do is support us at charliekirk.com slash support.
[00:38:51]  She says, I'm in South Carolina.
[00:38:52]  I don't know one political pastor.
[00:38:54]  What do you have to say about all that?
[00:38:56]  They exist.
[00:38:56]  I don't know anybody in South Carolina, too, but I actually have a buddy that is at a church in Charleston in a few years.
[00:39:02]  The point is that that's in the buckle of the Bible belt, right?
[00:39:04]  Yeah, right, exactly.
[00:39:05]  And then why do we have a, the grander question is, why do we have a church culture that's decided that politics is irrelevant?
[00:39:12]  Well, I mean, because there's a number of reasons for that.
[00:39:14]  One is an eschatological reason that the church has decided that Jesus is coming back in five minutes, so you don't have to do anything.
[00:39:20]  So you can just buckle up and take off in a couple of minutes.
[00:39:23]  And the other is just kind of what we've been calling the prosperity message.
[00:39:27]  I don't like that kind of terminology, but let's call it the narcissism gospel that it's all about me.
[00:39:32]  It's all about my house.
[00:39:33]  It's all about my marriage.
[00:39:34]  It's all about my cats and dogs and the movies I like.
[00:39:37]  And it's not about being, you know, hit with the truth.
[00:39:39]  Because if you're hit with the truth and then you look at our culture, you're like, man, there's a lot of stuff wrong out here.
[00:39:43]  Oh, and also there's a lot of stuff wrong in here that I need to deal with.
[00:39:48]  I need to clean up my own house before I can turn outward.
[00:39:51]  That's one of the reasons.
[00:39:52]  And I think there's just been a general misunderstanding of politics.
[00:39:55]  Like there was a Roman centurion.
[00:39:57]  He was in the Bible.
[00:39:58]  He interacted with Jesus.
[00:39:59]  And Jesus didn't say, listen, brother, if you want to follow me, you have to lay down your sword, promise never to do anything mean again, you know, kiss all the babies on the forehead.
[00:40:08]  No, in this interaction with the Roman centurion, he said, this guy has more faith than anyone I've ever encountered in my earthly ministry.
[00:40:17]  And he didn't tell him to leave the military.
[00:40:19]  And we don't understand that as a culture.
[00:40:21]  We have this idea that Christians and Christianity is all about kissing babies and, you know, painting lions or whatever the church does these days.
[00:40:28]  And it's not about the articulate, peaceful engagement in our culture in things that matter, like taxes, like, you know, law and all of that kind of stuff.
[00:40:39]  And I do mean the articulate, peaceful engagement and culture.
[00:40:44]  And that's something that we don't understand either because this Christian nationalism phrase is like, if you want to engage in politics, then you take, you know, Trump and you put him on the crucifix, you bow down to him in the morning.
[00:40:54]  You're like, what are you talking about?
[00:40:57]  We're far more nuanced than that in our belief system.
[00:41:00]  We understand that we can stand for a party and a group because they benefit freedom.
[00:41:06]  And Christianity needs freedom in order to flourish.
[00:41:10]  That's right.
[00:41:10]  And what do you think about this idea of the church now becoming a radical social justice exercise?
[00:41:17]  Well, and then that's taking the whole other idea that when we stop getting our marching orders from the scripture and we get our marching orders from academia.
[00:41:27]  And that's what's happened.
[00:41:28]  And there's been a push for the last couple of hundred years to have our marching orders come from academia.
[00:41:34]  Now, why don't we get our marching orders from academia?
[00:41:38]  Because there is a hierarchy of order in the scripture, a thing that, you know, a list of things that are most important and a list of things that are least important.
[00:41:47]  And that means, that doesn't mean the things on the bottom are not significant, but it means there are things that we have to deal with first.
[00:41:55]  And in Christianity, it's, you know, repentance, reconciliation to the cross, and then turning outward to serve other people.
[00:42:01]  And who?
[00:42:02]  The most vulnerable first and then moving our way down the list.
[00:42:05]  That's exactly right.
[00:42:07]  And so as Christians, we're called to pray for the welfare of the nation around us, called to be in the ecclesia.
[00:42:12]  The gospel always comes first, but the gospel should touch everything.
[00:42:15]  That's right.
[00:42:16]  And we as Christians should influence every single sector of government.
[00:42:19]  And the gospel is not just Jesus died on the cross for your sin.
[00:42:22]  That is a shallow understanding of the gospel.
[00:42:24]  The gospel is the entire book of Romans.
[00:42:27]  And Paul is telling the Romans how the world works.
[00:42:31]  He starts out in Romans chapter one.
[00:42:33]  He talks about God's rule in nature and law, evidenced by the way nature functions.
[00:42:39]  And then he walks all the way through into Romans 13 and talks about how we interact with society.
[00:42:45]  That's right.
[00:42:46]  And also, if you read Romans 13 correctly, it is who's the sovereign in this country?
[00:42:52]  We are the sovereign, right?
[00:42:53]  To protect individual rights and first principles.
[00:42:56]  I want to keep building that out with you, David.
[00:42:57]  Isabel, we're getting a lot of questions about this Illinois, a lot of questions about this.
[00:43:03]  Can you just go through this again?
[00:43:05]  I think it's really helpful.
[00:43:06]  And thank you for emailing us, everybody, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:43:09]  Isabel.
[00:43:09]  Yeah, so Charlie, I don't remember if this was yesterday or the day before that we dove into this, but one of you sent us an email, by the way.
[00:43:15]  You can always send us news tips to freedom at charliekirk.com about a really interesting story coming out of Illinois regarding new standards for public education that are going to be legally mandated from the Department of Education and the state legislature.
[00:43:28]  This was sent to me by a former teacher of mine.
[00:43:31]  Really?
[00:43:31]  That's exciting.
[00:43:32]  Not allowed to say who it is.
[00:43:33]  Oh, don't, please do it.
[00:43:34]  This person will lose their job.
[00:43:36]  But they said, hey, Charlie, I taught you.
[00:43:38]  And I was like, of course I remember you.
[00:43:39]  They're like, can you please publicize this?
[00:43:40]  We've gotten.
[00:43:42]  Hundreds of emails from people in Illinois outraged about this.
[00:43:45]  Wow.
[00:43:45]  Well, it's outrageous.
[00:43:47]  So essentially what's happened is the State Board of Education in Illinois has already approved this rule, but now the General Assembly is going to be voting on it on February 16th.
[00:43:55]  And it's this new legally mandated rule called the Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning Standards.
[00:44:01]  Sounds really nice, but when you actually break it down, it sounds absolutely terrible.
[00:44:05]  So legally speaking, should this pass, all teachers in Illinois public schools must, in their words, embrace and encourage progressive viewpoints and perspectives.
[00:44:15]  So I think that's pretty safe to assume leftist ideology and perspectives.
[00:44:19]  That's generally what we know progressive pertains to.
[00:44:23]  And then beyond that, it's more so than just putting that into the curriculum.
[00:44:26]  It's actually implementing things like action civics, defined as taking your students on field trips to protests for gun control or lobbying your state legislature for progressive policies like the Green New Deal.
[00:44:38]  And it really goes into detail here about just how insane this policy is.
[00:44:42]  Teachers have to acknowledge that there's infinity genders that any student can identify however they want.
[00:44:47]  They have to implement critical race theory like the 1619 project from the New York Times into their classroom.
[00:44:53]  And this isn't just history classes or cultural relevance classes.
[00:44:57]  This is stuff like science and math and everything.
[00:45:00]  Homec, yeah, it has to be progressive.
[00:45:03]  That's right.
[00:45:04]  Yes.
[00:45:05]  But the shocking thing, the shocking thing about this is what happens when teachers don't want to do it, right?
[00:45:10]  You'd think that they have some level of autonomy when it comes to teaching their students and providing a neutral.
[00:45:16]  This is the telling thing.
[00:45:17]  Right.
[00:45:17]  They don't have an opportunity to provide a neutral perspective in their classroom anymore because if they fail to go on this full-blown train of progressivism, they are immediately disciplined and maybe even will have their teaching licensure revoked from the state of Illinois.
[00:45:31]  And so specifically in there, you have to mobilize your students for protests.
[00:45:35]  You do.
[00:45:35]  It's called action civics, which sounds so fancy and nice, but it literally means mobilizing your students to go protest and lobby for things.
[00:45:44]  Gun control.
[00:45:45]  Yes.
[00:45:45]  So now Illinois students are being turned into a at-will mobilization campaign for Greta Thunberg.
[00:45:52]  Yep.
[00:45:53]  Got it.
[00:45:53]  That's well said.
[00:45:54]  Well said.
[00:45:54]  Exactly.
[00:45:55]  So a whole army of Greta Thunbergs are happening now in Illinois.
[00:45:58]  Here's a question from John about Illinois.
[00:46:00]  This is a good question.
[00:46:01]  I don't want to make this too much about Illinois.
[00:46:02]  I know we got some friends watching from Illinois in there and some good Americans.
[00:46:06]  I'm from Illinois and I pray for its salvation.
[00:46:10]  He says, what can we do?
[00:46:10]  Illinois has been Democratically controlled for 60 years.
[00:46:13]  It's steadily gone downhill.
[00:46:14]  That's not exactly true, respectfully, John.
[00:46:16]  I have to push back.
[00:46:17]  There's been a ton of Republican governors that were weak and they were cowards and they didn't fight.
[00:46:22]  We've had lots of Republican governors.
[00:46:24]  As recently, did you know that three years ago, Illinois had a Republican governor?
[00:46:28]  Three years ago.
[00:46:29]  Yeah.
[00:46:29]  A lot of people didn't know that.
[00:46:30]  Bruce Rauner, Edgar, George Ryan, who I think might still be in jail.
[00:46:36]  Illinois' got a lot of former governors in jail.
[00:46:38]  I think George Ryan might actually just be out of jail now.
[00:46:41]  You see, in Illinois, we have term limits, one term in office, one term in jail.
[00:46:44]  That's beautiful.
[00:46:46]  I got a whole Illinois.
[00:46:48]  I got a whole Illinois deal.
[00:46:49]  You heard that one before, Connor?
[00:46:51]  Once or twice, one or two hundred times.
[00:46:54]  I got a whole Illinois repertoire, right?
[00:46:56]  I got the whole thing figured out.
[00:46:57]  But no, the point is that, yeah, Democrats have been mostly in control, but we've had Republican senators, Mark Kirk.
[00:47:03]  We've had more Republican congresspeople than Democrat congresspeople.
[00:47:06]  Republicans have controlled the state house and the state senate before and the governor's mansion.
[00:47:10]  Reagan won Illinois in 84 and 88.
[00:47:15]  It was close in the 90s.
[00:47:16]  Clinton started to turn it.
[00:47:17]  The point is this: it was weak Republicans that did this.
[00:47:20]  And I want to get into some of the Chicago teacher union stuff in Chicago and in Illinois.
[00:47:24]  It's super important.
[00:47:26]  The biggest mistake that Illinois governors made, the biggest mistake, it was Edgar that did this, a Republican governor from downstate.
[00:47:33]  His fatal error was when he said that Chicago teachers and Illinois teachers are allowed to strike.
[00:47:41]  It's the big teachers should not have the legal ability to strike.
[00:47:45]  Now, you might say, well, what do you mean?
[00:47:46]  Police officers are not allowed to strike.
[00:47:48]  It's considered a safety risk.
[00:47:50]  So police officers are fired, like they just lose their job.
[00:47:53]  You don't show up, you strike, you're done.
[00:47:55]  It's part of the agreement.
[00:47:56]  We think about it.
[00:47:56]  It makes a lot of sense, right?
[00:47:58]  Police officers start striking.
[00:47:59]  Criminals are going to start.
[00:48:00]  Same with firefighters, right?
[00:48:02]  Teachers, because they have this ability to strike and shut down all the schools, which is bad for kids, bad for safety, bad for health, bad for communities, bad for families.
[00:48:10]  It is their nuclear option, right?
[00:48:12]  They're able to get whatever they want whenever they want to do it.
[00:48:15]  So the Chicago teacher unions, every 18 months, they're like, yeah, we are the highest paid metropolitan teachers in the country.
[00:48:21]  We are the highest paid this.
[00:48:23]  However, we're going to strike and we're going to get even more.
[00:48:25]  And what does everyone do?
[00:48:26]  They give them whatever they want.
[00:48:27]  It's a pure surrender.
[00:48:28]  No one wants to wait out the actual strike because all of a sudden you go a week, you go two weeks, you go three weeks without kids in school.
[00:48:35]  You start to see things really start to unravel.
[00:48:37]  So it was weak Republicans that really contributed to the once great state of Illinois, the downfall of the once great state of Illinois.
[00:48:43]  New York is similar.
[00:48:44]  Yeah.
[00:48:44]  I mean, in New York, we have the rubber rooms that the teachers are so strong that if you're a teacher that's negligent in your classroom, even abusive, I believe, certainly negligent, they will not fire you because it takes, it costs too much money.
[00:49:02]  It costs more money to fire you than it does to put you in a room where you sit on your phone and read the news and play Angry Birds and get paid full salary.
[00:49:12]  How is that not an incredibly corrupt and broken system?
[00:49:14]  And how are we not doing something about it as citizens?
[00:49:17]  Like, ah, well, I guess just that's how it goes.
[00:49:20]  Unions were really helpful at a time in our nation.
[00:49:23]  They were really helpful.
[00:49:24]  And now we've tilted the scale.
[00:49:26]  We've crossed the fulcrum where we're getting actual bullying by unions.
[00:49:31]  And it's not a market demand and it's not rational.
[00:49:34]  And there's not incentive by doing an incredible job, which is what we're seeing in a lot of these charter schools.
[00:49:40]  And then you have all this, you know, fake statistical research that's trying to debunk charter schools that are really the hope.
[00:49:46]  Tom Sowell just came out with a book.
[00:49:48]  Was it last year?
[00:49:49]  His analysis of New York City and charter schools and saying they're really the hope for actual students in New York City that are publicly educated.
[00:49:58]  Well, and by the way, it's the teachers' unions largely that are contributing to this ongoing shutdown of schools when it comes to COVID-19.
[00:50:05]  The science is very, very clear and speaks to the fact that young children in the United States and everywhere else around the world are not really that vulnerable when it comes to COVID-19.
[00:50:16]  They might get sick, but statistically, they are very sick for maybe a day if they really get sick at all, and then they're fine.
[00:50:22]  They've completely recovered within a few days.
[00:50:24]  They're really not at risk to contract the disease whatsoever to begin with.
[00:50:27]  We should be opening schools.
[00:50:28]  If we're really focused on sticking to the science, that's the pathway that we need to be taking.
[00:50:32]  But all of a sudden, you see the same tactic like driving up wages that we see from teachers' unions all the time, every 18 months in some places.
[00:50:39]  Colorado's like that too.
[00:50:40]  That's where I grew up.
[00:50:41]  And now it's all about, well, we just don't feel safe unless you pay us a lot more money and then we can reapply.
[00:50:46]  And the point in the Tale of Two Cities point, to throw it back to the Tale to Americas.
[00:50:49]  Tale to Americas, the solution to the issue was sacrificing your own desire and needs and consumption and safety and pleasure for someone else's safety.
[00:51:02]  And Sidney Carton, at the end of the movie, he gives his life over to the life of this other guy.
[00:51:08]  And that's the journey of a nation.
[00:51:10]  If we want to find ourselves again, we have to once again believe in self-sacrifice.
[00:51:16]  It doesn't mean it's easy.
[00:51:17]  It doesn't actually mean it's safe.
[00:51:19]  It may mean it's not safe, but it's the sacrifice of myself for my family, for those that are around me.
[00:51:26]  I totally agree.
[00:51:27]  And that is the journey that our nation should be on, but really isn't.
[00:51:33]  And it's a journey that should be led by the church morally, and they're abdicating their role to do so.
[00:51:37]  Sorry.
[00:51:38]  Go ahead.
[00:51:39]  Please continue your questions coming in.
[00:51:41]  Freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:51:43]  I made some headlines recently.
[00:51:44]  This question here is about my comments to Lecrae.
[00:51:48]  And Lecrae is a Christian rapper.
[00:51:50]  I never liked his music.
[00:51:51]  He seems like a nice enough guy, but I went pretty hard after him.
[00:51:55]  It really isn't about him.
[00:51:56]  I went hard after him because he decided to go do an election rally with Raphael Warnock and John Ossif.
[00:52:03]  Lecrae's a Christian rapper.
[00:52:04]  And I just basically, I said some, basically, he shouldn't be allowed to perform in churches because of this.
[00:52:10]  And so it's trended on Twitter and all this stuff.
[00:52:14]  And so here's the statement that I'm writing now for a news publication.
[00:52:17]  It says, and I'm just responding to some of the listeners that asked about this.
[00:52:22]  It's basically, while I hold no personal animosity towards Lecrae, and we'd be happy to discuss this issue with him privately, the scriptures are incredibly clear that we are fearfully and wonderfully made and that God formed us in our innermost being and knit us together in our mother's womb.
[00:52:35]  Senator Warnock calls himself a pro-choice pastor, and that makes him complicit in the genocide of nearly 400,000 black babies that are killed every year in America alone.
[00:52:43]  Lecrae nevertheless decided to publicly campaign for this man, and I find that morally incompatible with our Christian faith.
[00:52:49]  I stand by what I said.
[00:52:50]  And so we're getting a lot of questions about that.
[00:52:53]  And again, I don't say this in a place of personal animosity towards Lecrae, but if you're going to be an abortion advocate and call yourself a Christian, I got some problems with that.
[00:53:01]  Yeah, Ali Bestucki, I think, said something like, I'm a pro-hamburger vegan.
[00:53:07]  They're impossible to join.
[00:53:09]  You cannot stand for the death of the most innocent member of a society and call yourself a Christian.
[00:53:15]  It just doesn't work that way.
[00:53:17]  I mean, we're talking about a life in the scripture.
[00:53:20]  We see, you know, John the Baptist jumping up and down as Jesus is coming in his mother's womb.
[00:53:27]  Like the two babies in the wombs are meeting together and John is recognizing it in his spirit and jumping up and down because it's a real individual autonomous life stamped by the image of God.
[00:53:40]  And when Warnock says, you know, I'm a pro-abortion pastor, it doesn't compute.
[00:53:46]  It can't compute unless you say, you know, I'm also a pro-Satan Christian.
[00:53:50]  Like I love being a Christian and I love Satan at the same time.
[00:53:53]  They're both really fun these days.
[00:53:56]  It's completely, they're inherently incompatible.
[00:53:59]  Exactly.
[00:53:59]  And it trickles down to the rest of the church, too.
[00:54:01]  I read a really interesting poll from Pew Research the other day doing a research project for something I'm working on with Turning Point USA.
[00:54:08]  And the vast majority of the Christian church in America is pro-choice.
[00:54:11]  They believe that abortion should be legal in at least some situations.
[00:54:15]  And this poll broke it down by denomination, too.
[00:54:17]  I don't remember every single number, but Catholics are 58% in favor of abortion in all circumstances in America today.
[00:54:26]  That should tell you something of how dramatically the church has changed within the last few decades within our lifetime, Charlie.
[00:54:32]  And just the idea that the church used to be a single issue voting block about protecting the sanctity of life, how quickly that's degraded because pastors and priests have completely abandoned their responsibility to tell the truth to people is so disappointing to see.
[00:54:47]  It's incredible.
[00:54:48]  If you're not even able to impact the lives of those that can't protect themselves, then what good is the gospel?
[00:54:52]  That's exactly right.
[00:54:53]  And so when we look at the world and we say, you know what, my Christianity is only about my relationship with me and God.
[00:55:01]  Like, wrong.
[00:55:02]  That's not how it works.
[00:55:02]  You look at the parables and see what Jesus says.
[00:55:05]  You know, you have the rich man walking by.
[00:55:07]  Exactly.
[00:55:08]  Rich man is walking by the poor man, right?
[00:55:11]  Begging, and he's like, nah, I don't feel like giving you money.
[00:55:14]  And the rich man goes to hell because of his interactions with other people in his culture, not just because he has some kind of moral assent.
[00:55:23]  And we haven't been taught that.
[00:55:24]  We've been taught this kind of, you know, single issue system.
[00:55:28]  Like, if you believe, you're set.
[00:55:30]  Did you say the prayer?
[00:55:31]  You're set.
[00:55:32]  I don't care what you believe about abortion or any other moral issue that's clear in scripture.
[00:55:37]  Don't worry about it.
[00:55:38]  And so then we have, you know, major famous Christian rappers that are like, I'm going to support this pro-abortion guy that's pro-genocide in the womb and not literally not understand why he shouldn't.
[00:55:50]  And the church does nothing to call him out.
[00:55:52]  Exactly.
[00:55:52]  It takes me and whatever.
[00:55:54]  I guess that's what we do.
[00:55:55]  Charlie Kirk, strong church.
[00:55:56]  That's what your name is.
[00:55:57]  Yes, right?
[00:55:58]  That's well, that's right.
[00:55:59]  Charlie means strong, and Kirk means church.
[00:56:01]  If we go back to our Scottish roots, David, give us a trivia question, but don't give us the answer.
[00:56:06]  A trivia question?
[00:56:08]  What do I have in my pocket?
[00:56:09]  What do you want?
[00:56:10]  It's the Lord of the Rings.
[00:56:11]  It's like the Lord of the Rings riddle.
[00:56:13]  Okay.
[00:56:13]  I have a coin.
[00:56:14]  Doug just gave me a coin.
[00:56:16]  Our mutual Chicago friend.
[00:56:17]  Charlie's not from Chicago.
[00:56:18]  He's from California.
[00:56:19]  And I don't know.
[00:56:20]  It's a golden coin.
[00:56:21]  And that's what's in my pocket.
[00:56:22]  I don't know what it is yet exactly, but I'm going to find out.
[00:56:25]  So what's the trivia question?
[00:56:27]  It was a riddle.
[00:56:28]  That was the riddle of what is in my pocket.
[00:56:30]  That was like, it's a...
[00:56:32]  Are you not a Lord of the Rings guy?
[00:56:33]  I am, but it's going way over my head right now.
[00:56:37]  When the Hobbit is in the Hobbit, that's the prefix stuff, though.
[00:56:41]  That real Lord of the Rings can be.
[00:56:43]  No, that's the whole ring of power.
[00:56:44]  That's where he gets the ring of power.
[00:56:45]  He has it in my pocket.
[00:56:47]  What's another trivia question?
[00:56:49]  Man.
[00:56:50]  You ask the audience if they get it right, then they get a signed book.
[00:56:53]  Oh, really?
[00:56:54]  Yeah.
[00:56:54]  So don't tell them the answer.
[00:56:55]  Okay.
[00:56:56]  What are things I know about?
[00:56:57]  We always put our guests on the spot.
[00:56:59]  What are some things I know about?
[00:57:02]  It could be about you, too.
[00:57:03]  Okay, let's, can I, can I have the answer?
[00:57:05]  Can I decide the answer?
[00:57:06]  What's the best pizza in New York?
[00:57:08]  Can I say that?
[00:57:08]  Yeah, sure.
[00:57:09]  Okay.
[00:57:09]  What's the best pizza in the New York?
[00:57:10]  What you think, David?
[00:57:12]  And I'm saying in the top, people think these are in the top three.
[00:57:15]  West Village, classic, Greenwich Village, classic pizza, piece of all time, floppy, beautiful New York pizza.
[00:57:21]  My own personal trivia question.
[00:57:22]  If you guys get that right, alongside a subscription to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast, we just type in Charlie Kirk or hit subscribe.
[00:57:28]  Email is freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:57:30]  I will send you a signed copy of our book.
[00:57:32]  God bless all of you.
[00:57:33]  Stay strong.
[00:57:34]  And Isabel, how do they get involved with Turning Point USA, which every human being should do?
[00:57:38]  Every human being, regardless of how old you are, should get involved with TPUSA this year.
[00:57:42]  If you go to tpusa.com/slash get involved, our team will reach out and get you plugged in.
[00:57:48]  Very good.
[00:57:49]  Thank you guys so much for listening and watching.
[00:57:51]  God bless you.
[00:57:52]  Speak to you soon.
[00:57:56]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:57:58]  As always, email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:58:01]  If you'd like to support us, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:58:05]  And if you'd like to get involved with Turning Point USA, you know how to do it.
[00:58:07]  Go to tpusa.com.
[00:58:09]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[00:58:10]  God bless.