Ask Charlie Anything 51: UPDATE on Radical New Education Standards in Illinois, Registering As a Democrat? America's Christian Founding And More
In an update to an explosive story out of Illinois, the Illinois Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (JCAR) upheld new standards passed by the Illinois State Board of Education, called Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leader Standards. Thousands of you have emailed about these new standards that are the manifestation of Cultural Marxism in the classroom, and Charlie gives you all the information on just how bad this bill actually is. (Please share this episode with your friends in Illinois to start fighting back.) Charlie also further expounds on the Christian roots to America's founding, and then tackles the question: Should you register to vote as a Democrat to help elect the less radical candidate? For your chance to have your question answered in the next Ask Charlie Anything, please email Freedom@CharlieKirk.com Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hey everybody, it's Monday, so I take your questions, the questions you guys emailed me at freedom at charliekirk.com.
I do a deep dive on the Illinois educational standards that have now been passed.
I say something early in the podcast that is not necessarily true.
I say that it passed the House and it gets marked up by the Senate.
It's already been implemented.
I correct myself later in the podcast, so I just want to say that in case you don't listen to the whole episode through.
I talk about was America founded on Christian values?
I touched on this, I think, last week or two weeks ago, but Michelle asked.
I want to make sure I answered her question.
We talk about should you register as a Democrat to go vote for the less radical Democrat in certain states.
And I also talk about Ross Perot and the Reform Party, amongst many other topics that you guys have emailed me, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Big episode in store.
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Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
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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.
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Hey, everybody.
Hope you had a great weekend.
Great to be back in the chair behind the mic.
Last week was an unusual week.
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Okay, let's get right into it.
A significant portion of our emails the last couple weeks have been about what is happening in the Illinois education system.
We were the first program to highlight, expose, and put a light on the blatant indoctrination that is happening in Illinois high schools.
This is a proposed bill, and I'm actually reading from CharlieKirk.com.
I don't know if a lot of you guys know this, but CharlieKirk.com.
We are posting stories there multiple times a day.
And when you guys support us at charliekirk.com/slash support, you allow this website alongside this podcast to continue to grow.
But we have a story that we wrote here, and it's a bill pushing left-leaning politics into the classroom in Illinois has officially passed.
Now, that's putting it very nicely.
That's actually probably as vanilla as I could probably phrase it.
We did an entire podcast on this a couple weeks ago with Isabel Brown from Turning Point USA, and many of you emailed us afterwards.
In fact, we're still getting an email saying, Charlie, what's the status of this?
What's the status of this?
So let's take a step back and tell you exactly what's happening in Illinois.
And many of you live in Rhode Island or California or Oregon.
You say, why does this matter to me, Charlie?
I don't live in Illinois.
Well, first of all, it's happening in our country.
And you have to listen very carefully.
You might not know anyone in Illinois.
You might never plan to visit in Illinois.
You might live in a great state like Florida, where I'm doing this broadcast right now, and you might say, none of this matters to me.
I don't care.
Wrong.
This is our country.
When you hear what's happening in Illinois, which used to be a wonderful state, it used to be a conservative state, state I grew up in, a state that was somewhat reasonable and normal, you will be shocked.
So we previously covered and wrote also on CharlieKirk.com about how the Illinois State Board of Education was passing a bill called, quote, culturally responsive teaching and leading standards.
I actually got this from a friend of mine, a former teacher and football coach, who anonymously emailed us saying, Charlie, don't read my name on air, but I can't believe what's happening here.
You guys got to know about it.
I couldn't believe it when I first read it.
But the new standards that were being pushed by this bill, which when we first covered it was a proposed bill, was to have teachers assess, quote, how their biases affect how they assess tools to mitigate their own behavior, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege, and Eurocentrism.
A prominent advocate, Bettina Love, of critical race theory, she said that white teachers need an anti-racist therapy.
And this bill argued that students need to get involved in the activism in the local community.
This bill would become law, not suggestion, not recommendation, not guidelines, not outline, law, that every student in Illinois must participate in activism, political activism.
So when we first covered this story, it was a proposed bill.
It has now passed in committee in the Illinois State House of Representatives.
I think it's getting marked up right now in the Illinois State Senate.
So let me read part of this bill directly from you.
I'm reading from the ThomasMorrisSociety.org, and this is straight from the bill.
The Illinois State Board of Education Notice of Proposed Amendments.
It goes on to explain what this bill is and the purpose of this bill, to prepare a program, of course, of studying and teaching for school support or administrative field pursuant to the State Board of Education rules.
It continues by going, the number one objective of this bill of what's happening in Illinois is to teach self-awareness and relationship to others.
You see, teachers, as it says, must become culturally responsive.
And leaders are reflective to gain a deeper understanding of themselves and how they impact others, leading to a more cohesive and productive student development.
But this is how they're going to do it.
They are going to know about their students and their lives outside of school, using this knowledge to build instruction that leverages prior knowledge and skills.
It will engage in self-reflection about their own actions and interactions and what ideas motivated those actions.
It continues by saying that understand and value the notion that multiple lived experiences exist and there's not one correct way of doing or understanding something and that what is seen as correct is most often based on our lived experiences.
Let me say that again.
The Illinois State Board of Education that will teach children, by the way, in both private and public schools.
We got lots of emails from people in the Chicagoland area saying, oh, I go, my kid goes to St. Viter, my kid goes to Loyola, my kid goes to Notre Dame, my kid goes to Mount Carmel.
They won't be impacted by this.
Wrong.
This is the state standards.
According to this bill, both private and public education will be impacted.
Now, that might be argued in the courts, that might be litigated.
I don't know how that is possibly constitutional, but that is the current status of this bill, which, by the way, has passed and all it's going to take is a Senate markup and then a governor's signature.
But let me say this again: that there's not one correct way of doing or understanding something, and that what is seen as correct is most often based on our lived experiences.
So, let's pretend you're a physics teacher, and you say, Today we're going to learn Newtonian physics.
And according to these guidelines, it says that there is not one correct way of doing or understanding something.
So, you're a seventh-grade teacher and you say, Today, we're going to learn about Sir Isaac Newton.
Force equals mass times acceleration.
An object of rest will stay at rest.
And someone raises their hand and they say, Well, based on my lived experience, force does not equal mass times acceleration.
Or what if a geography teacher is saying that the capital of Illinois is Springfield?
And someone raises their hand and they say, Well, my experience is the true capital of Illinois is Chicago.
The teacher says, Well, it's objectively Springfield.
Or what if a math teacher says that there's a certain way to do order of operations, that you must follow the order of operations, or else everyone's going to get different results when you do a math equation?
But some kid raises their hand and they say, Well, based on my lived experience, order of operations is a white supremacist, Anglo-Eurocentric, which is a phrase that's used in this educational bill, to advance a phallologocentric patriarchy, and it's racist.
What I've just given you a small window into, what I've just described in non-sarcastic terms, by the way, I am so serious when I say this, is postmodernism running the American Academy.
Postmodernism started with, of course, Michelle Foucault, Jacques Derrida, amongst many other thinkers in the 1960s, who were Marxists from the Frankfurt School in Germany.
They came to America, and they first said there is no such thing as absolute truth.
There's an infinite amount of interpretations of everything: math, science, history, logic, reason, all of these are just tools to keep white people in power perpetually.
Now, what they really were were economic Marxists that hit a nerve in the American psyche of people that were very uncomfortable, for good reason, with some of our racial past.
So, because of that, Jacques Derrida and Michelle Foucault, Herbert Marcuse, amongst others, popularized a way of thinking called postmodernism.
Now, I could do an entire podcast just on this, but what they are now passing in Illinois into law is the 1960s revolution of postmodernism, Marxist ideas, directly into the classroom.
You keep on reading this bill, and it says that teachers must engage in self-reflection about their own actions and interactions and what ideas motivated those actions.
Now, incredibly, you read this bill, nothing about this education bill is about actually teaching people what they need to succeed in life.
It's never about increasing literacy rates.
It's not about making children in the inner city of Chicago more likely to be able to understand the world around them.
Instead, number six of the educational bill that has now been passed in Illinois is: quote, explore their own intersecting identities, how they were developed, and how they impact the daily experience of the world.
Oh, no, but it gets better.
In this bill, it also says, quote, recognize how their identity, race, ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical development, emotional ability, socioeconomic class, and religion affects their perspectives and beliefs about pedagogy and students.
This is a bunch of trash.
You see, when I grew up in Illinois and I went to Wheeling High School, my teachers said, do you know what means nothing?
Your race, ethnicity, national origin, language, sex, and gender, gendered identity, sexual orientation, physical and development, emotional ability, and socioeconomic class.
Now the teachers are being told to do the exact opposite.
Now teachers are now being taught to tell their kids, no, no, no, your race matters.
If you're a black kid, you can't actually succeed in this country.
An unbelievably racist, an unbelievably dangerous thing to tell any person.
It is what Clarence Thomas, who's a black member of the U.S. Supreme Court, calls the bigotry of low expectations.
You keep the expectations low.
You're actually a bigot.
You're actually racist towards that group of people.
The bill continues by saying, educate themselves about students' communities, cultures, and histories.
Critically think about the institutions in which they find themselves, working to reform these institutions wherever and however necessary.
It continues by saying teachers must assess their own biases and perceptions, how they affect their teaching practice and how they access tools to mitigate their own behavior.
I mentioned this earlier, but I'm rereading parts of this because it's mentioned in the bill twice.
Let me say that again.
If you're teaching math, if you're teaching reading, you must now go through your own bias training as if what you are teaching might actually be racist.
Part B of the bill says, quote, that teachers must understand the systems of oppression.
And now let me just take a pause here.
A lot of our podcast listeners are not in Illinois.
This is coming to every single state across the country.
Illinois is an incubator for the rest of the country.
What you are reading here will be instilled and installed into public education all across the country.
They will perfect it in Illinois and they'll export it to other states.
They're already doing something similar in California.
Continues by saying, culturally responsive teachers and leaders understand that there are systems in our society that create and reinforce inequities, thereby creating oppressive conditions.
Educators work actively against these systems in their everyday roles in educational institutions.
Performance indicators, the culturally responsive teacher and leader will be able to understand the difference between prejudice, discrimination, racism, and how to operate at the interpersonal, intergroup, and institutional levels.
Collaborate with colleagues to determine how students from different backgrounds experience the classroom.
And of course, you must know.
You must be aware.
I'm quoting, this is unbelievable.
Be aware of the powers of privilege and the need for social advocacy and social action to better empower diverse students and communities.
It is now the obligation, it is now the requirement of a teacher in Illinois to mobilize their students for social activism and be aware of the effects of power and privilege and how social advocacy can better empower diverse students and communities.
Now that would be bad enough, but it continues by even saying no and understand how a system of inequity creates rules regarding student punishment that negatively impacts students of colors.
Oh yes, telling a young child who might be a student of color, a black or Hispanic kid, to not swear, to listen to the rules and discipline them for that might negatively impact the student for color, but not the white kid.
Unbelievably racist.
Continues to say this, quote, culturally responsive teachers and leaders view their students as individuals in the context of their families and communities.
They will provide parents with information what their child is expected to learn, know, and do at their grade level in ways to reinforce these concepts at home because the indoctrination must not just stop in the classroom.
It must spread all across the community.
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Part E of this bill, quote, leveraging student activism.
Culturally responsive teachers and leaders will support and create opportunities for student advocacy and representation in the content and classroom.
The culturally responsive teachers and leader will, quote, offer guidance, get this, to students on how to develop a, quote, self-advocacy plan to inform decisions and choices.
So it's not just enough to educate children, which, by the way, Illinois schools are some of the worst in the country.
Literacy rates, graduation rates, kids are not reading at grade level.
And while they're trying to teach kids to become activists, Illinois' education system objectively rates 30th according to the NAEP ranking in 2013.
Now, I spent a couple minutes just going through trying to find where Illinois education ranks now.
You cannot find objective education metrics anymore.
They bury them.
With that even being said, though, Illinois has an 86% graduation rate.
So 14% of kids that go to high school won't even graduate.
59% is the ISAT score in Illinois.
It's abysmal.
54% is the PSAE score.
And you go down to the lowest levels in Illinois.
The literacy rate is barely above 50%.
Amazingly, that's not even the worst education system in the country.
How we educate our children is an absolute disgrace.
School choice, parent empowerment, and challenging the public sector teacher unions is the only way to fix education in our country.
But what's the Illinois State Board of Education advocating for?
Part E, leveraging student activism.
I repeat, culturally responsive teachers and leaders will support and create opportunities for student advocacy and representation in the content and classroom.
It'll help students identify actions.
I quote, identify actions that can be taken to apply learning to develop opportunities and relationships for alliances.
Create a risk-taking space that promotes student activism and advocacy.
So for every young person that might be listening to this right now, if this ends up becoming law and you're a conservative student in Illinois, you should tell your teacher that you want to create an action plan to start a turning point USA group at your local high school.
Maybe there's some kids listening to this right now in St. Viter.
Maybe you're in Notre Dame.
Maybe you go to Hersey High School.
Maybe you go to Libertyville.
Well, you should research and offer student advocacy and activism content with real-world implications.
Listen carefully to this.
Your tax dollars in Illinois, and yes, your tax dollars outside of Illinois because federal government money is bailing out the broken Illinois pension system education system will now be going to subsidize the creation of a generation of Greta Thunbergs.
People that are ungrateful, people that have no wisdom, people that are now going to be mobilized for political action in their community.
And that's not even about Greta Thunberg.
I think she was used and manipulated by her parents and self-righteous activists for a political gain and purpose.
It's not even about Greta.
I don't mean to make it about her.
What I'm saying is that the type of activism she engaged in is now the blueprint that they want to employ in Illinois.
We've warned against this for quite some time here on this program, that education is far less about teaching young people how to be or how to interact in the world, and instead it's about training activists.
It's about giving students a toolkit, literally, as it says in this bill, to go destroy the country around them.
It continues by saying, quote, family and community collaboration, culturally responsive teachers and leaders will partner with families and communities to build rapport, form collaborative and mutual relationships, and engage in effective cross-cultural communication.
This entire bill is written using the belief that our country is irredeemably racist, and the only way to fix it is massive social action, mobilizing students and young people into the streets, and also teaching them that they have privilege if they're white in the curriculum using critical race theory.
And then finally, reinforcing that your actions can't actually improve your life.
That the world around you is so broken, the only action you can take is full-scale revolution.
In addition to that, the Illinois State Board of Education with the critical race theory racists and the Democrats that run the state of Illinois have partnered together with this piece of curriculum to teach young people that skin color matters.
I went to Wheeling High School.
53% English is a second language.
Skin color means nothing.
If you think skin color means something, you're a racist.
If you think that someone has privilege just based on the melanin content in their skin, you're a racist.
If you think you're better than someone based on your color of your skin, you're racist.
Black people can be racist to white people.
White people can be racist to black people.
Hispanic people can be racist to white people.
I could continue on and on.
And finally, this bill forces teachers, gives them no freedom whatsoever, gives them no suggestions or guidelines, but forces them to become community organizers.
You see, the left, they are not pleased that Illinois is already a bankrupt, miserable, broken state where Illinois loses a taxpayer every 11 minutes.
They're not satisfied.
They want a complete totalitarian takeover of Illinois to lead the country in misery.
If you're listening to this right now in Illinois, every single parent, regardless of political affiliation, needs to listen to this podcast.
If you're listening to this outside of Illinois, I encourage you guys to text this podcast to your family or friends.
Everything I have talked about here is actually reading the bill, which I'm not even sure every single person that voted for this bill in the Illinois State House actually read the bill.
That every single person on this Illinois Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, JCAR, actually understood this bill.
And so let me be very clear, though.
I'm going to reinforce something.
The JCAR does not require a governor's signature.
The ISBE, the Illinois State Board of Education, passed the Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards in December.
And so then they have this joint, allegedly bipartisan committee, the JCAR, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans from out the House and the Senate.
And they needed eight of their 12 members to oppose the cultural standards in order to block them.
But instead, it passed along party lines.
So all the Republicans voted against it.
Good.
So this will now come into effect in Illinois.
It's happening.
So I correct what I said earlier.
There's nothing you can do about this except get a new governor, get involved in your local community.
But in Illinois in particular, I know this so well, has wonderful people that were never involved locally in politics.
And the Democrats were relentless with public sector teacher unions.
They took over the school boards.
And well-meaning, mostly suburban families that were just raising their kids were not engaged enough to understand that their entire livelihood has been hijacked by the most radical, racist, and I say that word intentionally, forces in our country.
So this is now going to become implemented in the state of Illinois, the Illinois State Board of Education.
You can get a new governor.
You could try to sue about it, but it's not going to happen immediately.
It's going to take a little while to implement it.
But some of you are going to be listening to this program, God willing, 10 years from now and 20 years from now.
And we're going to be watching someone at Stevenson High School, one of the largest high schools in the country, all of a sudden mobilize their fellow students because their teacher told them to go protest climate change.
And when you see that story happen 10 years from now, I want you to remember back to this podcast.
When this was passed and it was a below-the-radar bill, this is going to pass all across the country.
That we must have culturally aware teachers.
Oh, the word, the term they use is culturally responsive teachers.
It's hard for me to even find the words to describe how dangerous, disappointing, and how threatening these guidelines are to our republic.
It will create millions of future liberal activists, create teachers that are incentivized, subsidized, and paid to create more Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Republicans did the right thing and voted against it in the state committee.
They should have done a lot more than that.
Republicans in Illinois have been rather corrupt over the last couple decades and weak.
A very, very bad combination.
If we do not take the education of our children seriously, we will forever lose our country.
So now some of you are saying, Charlie, what can I possibly do?
Go run for school board in Illinois right now and reject these standards.
Say that District 214 or District 211 will not abide by these teaching standards.
Won't happen.
We're going to use our tax dollars the way we see fit.
We are not going to follow it.
I hope this results in a grassroots call to action of the wonderful patriotic people of Illinois that might have been taken it easy before to start running for school board positions across the country, to start running for local government.
This is going to impact all of Illinois, from the very conservative southern Illinois area of Fairfield and Mount Vernon and Salem and Centrilla, Nashville, Greenville, all the way up to northern Illinois, Crystal Lake, Waukegan, even Naperville and Rockford.
The Democrats are a lidless eye.
You know what a lidless eye is?
Imagine an eye that never blinks.
Lidless, the eyelid.
Imagine an eye without a lid.
They never stop staring.
They never stop working.
It is now time for conservatives to take this at least one fraction as seriously.
And for maybe some of your liberal friends that might be listening to this out of state, maybe you're listening to this program in South Carolina or Oregon.
Text this to your liberal friends.
Have them listen to this part of the program where I started up going through this Illinois culturally responsive teaching standard, which is now in, it's implemented, it's done, unless J.B. Pritzker will repeal it, which he won't.
Are Democrats okay with this?
Are they okay with teaching young people skin color matters?
They would have been amazing KKK members.
If you think skin color matters, why?
What makes a white person different than a black person?
Don't give me this nonsense of shared experiences and all that garbage.
There are twice as many white people that live in poverty in America than black people.
Yes, there are more white people, but this idea that every single white person in this country grows up with unforeseen and unprecedented privilege is nonsense.
You want to know the true privilege in our country?
Two-parent privilege.
We don't talk about that anymore.
You know that 78% of all prisoners in our country grew up without a father in the home?
You know that 74% of all children, black children, will grow up without a father in the home?
Why is that?
Because we subsidize single motherhood in our country.
So instead of the State Board of Education going in and teaching young black men to stay loyally married to the women that they impregnate or that they end up getting in a relationship with, we're passing this 35-page bill about, quote, leveraging student activism.
Instead of rebuilding the American family, which, by the way, if the Republican Party was serious about ever winning elections again, we, of course, have to talk about voter integrity, big tech censorship.
But the idea of rebuilding the American family and saying we're going to cut fatherlessness in half and we're going to be a responsible nation again is very, very popular.
Why Republicans don't talk about this is beyond me.
Some of them mention it here and there.
We need a Marshall Plan to slash single motherhood in our country.
And so this is where our education system is going.
Not teaching young people to make good choices, not teaching young people to act ethically.
Instead, look at everything through a lens that our country is racist, bigoted, homophobic, backwards.
It needs massive social revolution and action.
And this blueprint will come to all of your children's schools soon.
I don't care if you live in Wyoming.
I don't care if you live in Idaho.
And if you think you're above this, oh, it's never going to happen in my neighborhood.
I was in Illinois schools nine years ago, where if you dared to say any of this stuff, my Democrat teachers would have called you out for it.
If you would have said that skin color matters when I was in high school, nine years ago, everybody, nine years ago, I was in high school.
You would have been kicked out of the school.
If you would have said America was a racist country, even to the 53% Hispanic high school I was in, the Hispanic kids would have said, what are you talking about?
This is the least racist country in the world.
We love our country.
But now, that very same high school is now going to become a manufacturing facility for liberal activists.
It's going to become a chief exporter of activism.
So what do you do about it?
Boy, if you live in Illinois or across the country and you're not involved in your school board, I'm going to say this as lovingly as I can.
If you can't name every school board member right now, their names, if you can't name every school board member in your local area, and if you've not personally contacted them, then you have not done what the left has done.
Find out their names at least.
Email them.
Email them this podcast and say, do you support this?
Do you support the Illinois State Board of Education?
New notice of proposed amendments, which has now been passed and it's going to be implemented.
But most conservatives and Republicans are too busy building our businesses, going to church, building our local communities, taking care of our families.
I understand that.
I have sympathy for that.
But you're not going to have a country to do all that stuff in very soon because you're now going to have millions and millions of 13, 14, 15, and 16-year-olds instructed by law with your tax dollars to be taught that everything is racist, the country is awful, and then develop a social activism plan to get out in the streets about it.
You guys are smart.
You're a very smart audience.
You guys know exactly where that leads.
Do something about it.
Email me your thoughts on this and what you might be seeing in your states.
Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
In our fast-paced world, it's tough to make reading a priority.
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Next question here from Michelle.
Congratulations, you and a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine.
I'd really appreciate it if Charlie put together a show describing how the aspects of our government, democracy, capitalism, et cetera, were founded on the Bible, giving specific references.
I'm trying to learn so I can teach others.
Michelle, thank you, Michelle, for the question.
We've done a couple podcasts on this.
I'm happy to dive into it even further about how the Bible was the foundation that built our entire country.
It is a fact that if anyone says anything different, they're using revisionist history.
From William Blackstone to John Locke to the Founding Fathers to Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, they were all inspired from the Bible and by the Bible.
What was the verse that the Founding Fathers put on the Liberty Bell?
It was from Leviticus that you might proclaim liberty of which the land that you are in.
The Founding Fathers were Bible-believing, church-attending patriots.
I talked about this a little bit in the program last week.
I encourage you guys to check it out.
But from people like William Bradford, who was a man of God and knew what the original colonial people wanted.
Actually, William Bradford is a phenomenal person to study.
I could dive into this at great length.
He saw the pilgrims originally try communism and socialism, some form of it, and it failed miserably.
And they never went back.
William Bradford was an advocate of private property.
And one of the most important documents that I encourage all of you to know and to understand is the Mayflower Compact.
The three most important documents that led to the American Constitution, which is the greatest political document ever written outside of the Bible, is the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, and the Declaration of Independence.
If you don't know those three documents, then you're missing out.
Now, they don't teach that in our schools anymore, obviously.
We just went through all of that.
They're definitely not going to teach it anymore.
But if you understand the Mayflower Compact, you understand so much about our country.
The Mayflower Compact, of course, was a document that was signed on the Mayflower as the Mayflower was coming to America.
And it was really amazing because the people that signed onto the compact, they did not know where they were going or what would happen to them.
But instead, they created almost this covenantal culture with each other, which was inspired, of course, by the Hebrews.
There were many people that were involved in the Mayflower Compact.
But what's so amazing is that they recognize in the compact that their rights come from God, that their charter is from above, and that they will be good to each other, not perfect to each other.
Now, William Bradford, who wrote an amazing book called The History of the Plymouth Plantation, I encourage all of you guys to check it out.
He articulated a lot of that.
And all the people that signed the Mayflower Compact understood Hebrew covenantal culture, which was a civil body of politics.
This big breakthrough was the consent of the governed, that if we do not agree to this government, it is invalid.
We do not agree to the government of King George.
We're going to go to a rocky, cold, blustery, barren wasteland, which ended up being very fertile land, but in the winter, it was very barren, and start something new.
And what was so incredible about the pilgrims, and by the way, why do we call them pilgrims?
Do you ever think about this?
We don't teach kids this very often.
We call them pilgrims because they thought they were going to go to New Israel.
People who go to Israel are on a pilgrimage, so then they come to America.
We call them pilgrims.
They were trying to create goodness on earth inspired by the Bible.
We call them pilgrims.
You never ask the question, well, why do we call them pilgrims?
We call people that go to Mecca as Muslims pilgrims.
Technically, they're on a pilgrimage.
Pilgrimage I don't believe in theologically, but they're still in a pilgrimage.
If you, as a Jew, go to Jerusalem, you're being a pilgrim.
But all of a sudden, you have Christians going from Britain to America, and we call them pilgrims because they were going to a land that they thought that they could create new inspired by God's teaching, the most important text ever written, the Holy Bible.
So I'm happy to go into it more.
The biggest reason, the other person that you just can't get over, and all the atheists and the secularists and the people that try to say that we are founded purely on reason and not on revelation or the teachings of the Bible, you can't get over William Blackstone.
You cannot get to the American founding without William Blackstone.
Impossible.
He was a devout Christian, and you can't, there's a gap there that many of the secular historians can't fill.
So happy to get into that more.
Thank you, Michelle, but I've done a couple episodes on it, so I don't want to belabor that too much.
Thank you.
Caleb says, quote, Caleb says this, and congratulations, Caleb, you win a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine.
Hi, I'm a 15-year-old homeschooler from Eastern Oregon.
I love what you're doing on your podcast and with Turning Point USA.
In our state, we haven't elected a Republican governor since 1982.
It's true.
Do you think it would be logical to be a registered Democrat and vote in the primaries to pick the less radical leftists?
What are your thoughts?
Thank you.
Well, you're 15 years old and you're wise beyond your years to be asking a question like that.
Wisdom is the knowledge of all things eternal, not just the knowledge of a bunch of stuff.
And we don't teach our children wisdom anymore because we don't teach them the Bible.
Without God, there is no wisdom.
So in the case of the Ivy Leagues, we have a bunch of overeducated, indebted, angry young people that know a bunch of facts about things that are irrelevant but have no wisdom.
But Caleb, you have wisdom.
No, I wouldn't necessarily agree to do that.
I'm not a big believer in camouflage politics, saying you're one thing, even though you might be another.
I'm a believer that you tell people who you are honestly.
Whether or not you tell the truth in the little things, I think actually manifests whether or not you're going to tell the truth in the big things.
So maybe there might be a strategy or a tactical reason to do that.
I personally wouldn't do that.
I personally wouldn't be able to register as a Democrat and vote as a Democrat.
Now, I'm a registered independent because I'm legitimately an independent.
I will vote more Republican, obviously, than Democrat.
I've never voted for a Democrat in my life, but I'm not a Republican.
I tell people all the time, I am a Christian, an American, a constitutionalist, a conservative, then a Republican.
I'm not against anyone that's a registered Republican.
If you listen to this program with regularity, you know that I criticize Republicans probably more than Democrats.
Great question, Caleb.
Next question from Mike.
I'm not sure why nobody talks about this, but the platform Trump ran on appears to be the platform of the Reform Party started by Ross Perot.
It's true.
Trump was a member of that party and once rumored to be a presidential candidate for them.
It should come as no surprise that Trump was able to get real voters to come out for him.
The last time any of these voters came out for was for Ross Perot.
Could you please address the similarities between Trump and Reform Party platforms on one of your podcasts?
Or if you don't know, they are similar, why they are not, Mike.
It's a great question.
Thank you, Mike.
Yes, they are very similar.
So, Ross Perot just passed away.
I actually know his son, Ross Perot Jr.
Great guy.
Ross Perot was a Renaissance man, served in the military, incredibly successful businessman, really, really interesting, fascinating guy.
Ran for president twice.
He ran for president in 1992 and 1996.
1992 was his more successful run for the presidency.
Ran under the Reform Party.
And some people say that Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 because of Ross Perot.
He took away from Republicans.
There's some evidence to show that.
There's also evidence to show that he took away from both Republicans and Democrats.
Ross Perot got around 22% of the vote.
The Ross Perot Revolution was really about talking about how trade and immigration, the current policy that H.W. Bush were pushing forward, were hurting the country.
Ross Perot famously used to say, do you hear that sucking noise?
That's Mexico stealing our jobs.
I wonder who said that later on.
And so Ross Perot was a true American patriot.
He loved his country.
He self-financed much of his race.
The Reform Party was always about taking a non-traditional approach to American politics.
Very, very effective.
People still know Ross Perot.
I've seen Ross Perot bumper stickers.
But Donald Trump definitely followed in the line of thinking from Ross Perot.
More populist in nature, not afraid to call out people in both political parties.
And we miss Ross Perot.
He recently passed away.
But the legacy lives on in those of us that are unafraid to think outside of the box, think creatively, and do so for our country.
I want to thank all of you guys for emailing us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
If you're fired up and you want to do something about what's happening to our country, maybe our conversation on the Illinois State Board of Education bill compel you to action, then get involved at TurningPointUSA, TPUSA.com.
Email us your thoughts on this podcast, especially if you live in the state of Illinois.
I want to hear what you're thinking, what you're doing.
And do me a favor.
Can you text this episode to some of your other friends, maybe 10 of your friends, 12 of your friends, maybe one of your friends, who knows?
About what's happening in Illinois.
The rest of the country needs to know about this.
We can't ignore it any longer.
The longer we kind of just continue to sleep and act as if this does not matter, we're going to keep losing our country.
So I highly encourage you to do that.
And also, if you'd like to support our program, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
Chip in whatever you can, charliekirk.com slash support.
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YouTube was playing some games and some of the social media networks were as well.
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God bless you guys.
Thanks so much for all you do to help our program and our podcast, Big Week in Store.