Ask Charlie Anything 66: Was America Built on Stolen Land? Is Europe or America More Moral? And More
On this special episode of Ask Charlie Anything live from the 2021 Young Women's Leadership Summit in Dallas, Texas, Charlie takes your audience questions as well as some submitted by attendees of the conference. Questions this week include: Was America built on stolen land? What, if anything, makes the America form of government more moral than Europe's? Are there valid comparisons between what's happening now in America and what happened in the Russian Revolution or Mao's China? That and much more! Submit your questions for a chance to win a signed copy of Charlie's book "The MAGA Doctrine" by sending your questions to Freedom@CharlieKirk.comSupport the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Denouncing Heritage and Politics00:12:09
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Hey everybody, happy Monday.
It's our Ask Me Anything episode where I take questions from listeners from you guys, freedom at charliekirk.com and also some of our attendees at the Young Women's Leadership Summit here at Turning Point USA in Dallas, Texas.
If you guys want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com, tpusa.com.
Email us your thoughts.
As always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to get engaged and get involved with the great movement that we have here on this program or get in support of us, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
I take a lot of your questions such as was America built on stolen land?
What is the proper way to view our history?
What should conservatives fight for in this moment?
And much more.
And is what's happening right now resembling the Cultural Revolution?
That and more.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
We are here at the Young Women's Leadership Summit, Turning Point USA, in Dallas, Texas.
Amazing amount of energy and enthusiasm.
I'm telling you, when women start to take ownership for a nation, watch out.
That maternal instinct kicks in.
This is our home.
You're not going to do this to us.
The ballgame is over.
I'm waiting for that moment.
I'm starting to see that happen more and more.
So I'm going to get to one of the questions here.
Lisa says, Charlie, do you see any comparisons between what's happening now and what happened in the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Revolution?
And that actually ties perfectly to this question, this tape I want to play, Cut 75 in a second, of this parent who testified, I think it was Loudoun County Schools, wasn't it?
I think it was Loudoun.
And she grew up in Mao, China.
And she points out all the identical traits behind the Cultural Revolution.
So maybe you know what Mao's Red Book was.
Well, Mao's Red Book was required reading for every single child and then eventually adult in China to walk around with quotes from Mao Seitong that literally deified him.
Maybe you know about the Mao's Red Guard, where people that went around and they spied on private conversations and journals of citizens.
And if they said anything against Mao, they would be tried and executed.
The Cultural Revolution was a complete deletion of history, of books thrown down memory holes, to use an Orwellian term.
And there are some similarly eerie resemblances.
And then you should ask yourself the question, why are there so many identical patterns?
Well, that's easy to answer.
But first, listen to this parent who testified at a school board meeting, who shows that we are going down the same road as the Cultural Revolution, CUT 75.
I've been very alarmed about what's going on in our school.
You are now teaching, training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history.
Going up in Mao, China, all this seemed very familiar.
The communist regime used the same critical theory to divide people.
The only difference is they use class instead of race.
During the Cultural Revolution, I witnessed students and teachers again turned against each other.
We changed school names to be politically correct.
We were taught to denounce our heritage.
The Red Guards destroy anything that is not communist.
Oats, statues, books, and anything else.
We are also encouraged to report on each other, just like the student equity ambassador program and the bias reporting system.
This is indeed American version of the Chinese communist, the Chinese cultural revolution.
The critical race theory has its roots in cultural Marxism.
It should have no place in our schools.
That clip is so amazing.
I want to post that clip on our Instagram.
It's so amazing.
It's unbelievable.
What she said is the reporting system is exactly what happened in the Cultural Revolution.
If you guys know anything about what's happening on college campuses across the country, of which I am a critic of, we are incentivizing and paying students to spy on their fellow classmates if they are not adequately agreeable to the equity climate.
The Cultural Revolution was a socio-political purge that happened until 1966 for about 10 years, launched by Mao Cedong.
It got rid of any sort of remnants of the idea of private property or a traditional transcendent order.
It even got rid of some Confucian ideology.
Of course, it contributed to the great Chinese famine.
And this was all part of this great leap forward.
This is this constant indulgence in this historicist Hegelian lie, the German philosopher of historicism, that we are all marching towards perfection and eventually we're going to get there.
We just got to get rid of everything bad around us.
It's not people that need to be improved.
It's not people that need to make better decisions.
It's not people that need to have self-government or have a constitution over themselves.
No, instead, it's the system.
Mao Zedong might be the greatest mass murderer in world history alongside Joseph Stalin.
It's a competition.
We don't know the exact numbers because there were hundreds of square miles of graveyards of bones they had to dispose of.
Well over 10 million urban intellectual young people were sent to the countryside and were never seen again.
But this idea of social control seems to always seem to rear its ugly and evil and pernicious head.
It's because human beings do not change.
A smaller and smaller group of people desire and lust to control more and more.
And what we saw in the cultural revolution as articulated by this amazing parent, this incredible parent in Louden school system is now coming here.
And the only way you can fight back against it and the only way we can fight back against it is early and preemptively.
As soon as you see it, we must have bold and dramatic action.
Almost every single person that lived through Mussolini or Stalin or Mao can tell you that they wish they would have done more earlier.
Early action matters.
If there's only one thing you remember that I say, it's early action matters.
You can preempt a lot of this if you mobilize when you start to see where it is headed.
Because if you don't, then it might be a moment where it's far too late.
I want to take some questions here from some of our attendees at our Young Women's Leadership Summit here.
They have submitted them to us.
Here's a really good question.
It's, Charlie, I have a lot of friends who are Christians but put little to no effort into their politics or their views.
What is the best way to encourage fellow believers to be involved in politics or at least educated on what they believe?
Faith 18 from the California Baptist University.
So I bet she's around a lot of Christians that are serious about their faith, but not so serious about government.
Well, the most important thing you can do in your life is give your life to Jesus Christ.
The second most important thing is to make sure you can do the first thing.
In China, do you think churches are flourishing in China right now?
No, Mao went after every single place of worship and of faith.
You see, the church is not able to exist in a dominant atheistic, status, secularist environment.
The cultural revolution was intent on steamrolling people that believed in a transcendent order.
So if you believe in that, then you must contest.
You must contend for the freedom to be able to do that.
Deuteronomy 6 goes through the laws that man must live by.
Jesus Christ said the greatest commandment is to, of course, put the Lord your God first, always.
The second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself.
And he says, on those two things hang the laws of all the prophets.
And what he means by, there's many different interpretations of that, but if you do not have the civil framework to be able to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, because we're all going to be in prison and you're not going to be able to even flourish or have any sort of capacity to live, then how are we even able to spread the gospel at all?
And some people say, Charlie, that's never going to happen here.
They've said that before, and it's already starting to diminish.
We're already seeing religious conscious disappear.
We're already seeing pastors go to prison.
We saw the church lockdowns last year, which are one of the greatest measures of unconstitutional, I would argue, illegal and immoral actions of government.
We have Canadian pastors still in prison.
Is the gospel spreading in North Korea right now?
We have a North Korea story we can share soon.
Someone send me something like that.
If we do not contend for the framework to be able to spread the good news, then can the good news actually be heard as salt and light to all people?
Now, some Christians don't want to get involved in politics at all because they say that it's messy and they don't like it.
Well, the Bible has a lot to say about civil government.
The Bible has a lot to say about the ecclesia getting involved in the public square.
But more than anything else, I believe that we are commanded to bring the truths of the gospel and of the Bible to everywhere we possibly can.
And if we're just going to be indifferent about government, about civil government, about the consent of the governed, then I believe that that's a major missing piece, a serious missing component.
So what can we do to educate other people on this?
Well, we try to do that here on this podcast, so I encourage you guys to send this to your friends that might be on the fence or might not be interested at all.
But more than anything else, also read Vishal Mengel Waldi's book on the book that built your world.
Know about the faith and the reverence of our founding fathers.
Read The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk from Burke to T.S. Eliot.
Read Edmund Burke.
Holy moly.
Get deep into this three-tied knot about honoring those that came before us and preserving what we have now, hopefully, and then giving something to the next generation that's not born yet.
Your question was, how do we encourage fellow believers to be involved in politics or at least educated on what they believe?
It's a clear call to action that if they sit idly by and do nothing and they just say, hey, I don't really care what government does, well, then government's going to care about you.
They say, well, we want separation of church and state.
That's nowhere in the Constitution.
It's nowhere in the Declaration.
It's nowhere in the Federalist Papers.
It's a single letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1803 to the Danbury Baptist Convention.
But even if that's true, then why don't you keep the state out of the church?
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This film is terrific.
America Built on Stolen Land00:07:46
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They have amazing things to choose from.
Salemnow.com.
Here's a good question here.
It says, Charlie, how do you debunk or push back against this idea that America was built on stolen land?
Well, if you go back to the history of colonial America, it's actually really fascinating.
I encourage everyone to go read the Mayflower Compact.
The Mayflower Compact was one of several documents that inspired the American founding.
The Magna Carta to the Mayflower Compact has a direct connection to Common Sense by Thomas Paine, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights.
They all have a transcendent theme of worshiping the divine, naturally granted rights, self-government, independent judiciary, checks and balances.
Started with the Magna Carta and the Mayflower Compact, which is really interesting because there's about 123 people that signed that.
Producer Connor can check that out.
I think it was 123.
I remember it because I said it.
I remember it.
I said, I'm going to remember this.
I think it's 123.
I could be wrong.
That came over and they actually signed the Mayflower Compact before they ever came to shore.
They came and they were blown way offshore.
They went to Plymouth Rock.
I think they thought they were going to Virginia.
Mayflower, the Mayflower came, I think, in 1620, if I'm not mistaken.
Now, the first lie is that American settlers and pilgrims, they're called pilgrims because they thought they were going to New Israel.
Again, we call people that go on a pilgrimage either on the Hajj, which is the Islamic word for it or the Arabic word for it, or if you're going to Israel as a Christian or a Jew, but we call them pilgrims because they were coming to America because they wanted to create new Israel.
That's one of the main reasons they left in the first place because of religious persecution under the monarchy in Britain or in the British Empire.
So they come to America and the slave trade predated American colonialists coming, the British colonialists of Roger Williams and the reflections on the Plymouth Plantation, which is a terrific piece of literature that I encourage all of you to read.
So when they came to America, it was 41 people.
So it was 41 people.
I think it was 123 because three people per family.
It was 1620.
And so when they came to America, the slave trade predated them.
The slave trade was actually really a practice of the Spanish and the Portuguese and the British.
It was not brought by American pilgrims.
So they came to America and it was largely a vacuous land.
There was not much here.
Now, Senator Rick Santorum, who's a great guy, I really have a lot of respect for him.
He got in a lot of trouble for saying something that was largely true, by the way.
He just didn't say it correctly.
He didn't say it as precisely as I think he wanted to say it.
Where Senator Santorum said that the pilgrims came here and nothing was here.
All he had to say is the pilgrims came here and basically nothing was here.
That's all he had to say.
And it's true.
So there was indigenous people, and they had a tradition and they had custom and they had some form of regular order.
Now, number one, here's a couple lies about the indigenous people.
And then I will perfectly admit that the way that we treated indigenous people and Native Americans in certain scenarios was less than desirable and something that we should not necessarily be proud of.
With that being said, there's a lot more nuance to this history than it's taught in school.
Number one, Indigenous people fought amongst themselves incredibly brutally.
These were not necessarily always peaceful people.
The term scalper actually comes from the Iroquois fighting the Sioux, fighting the Navajo, fighting all sorts of indigenous tribes fighting each other.
They were brutal to one another.
So the fact that the white man came in and we were the reason that all of a sudden all this conflict happened is not true.
Number two, the idea of private property was a completely unknown concept to Native Americans.
Private property is a biblical concept that came from literally Abraham contracting the first ever real estate deal done in human history that we know of, where he goes to Hebron and he's like, look, I want to have a place to be able to bury myself and bury my children and grandchildren.
Can I buy Hebron?
You can still actually go visit Hebron today.
I have.
This idea of private property then continued from there of that I can keep what I own and do what I enjoy the fruits of my labor.
A man does not work.
He does not eat.
It's repeated many times in the scriptures.
So this idea then manifested itself in what we know as private property.
That's why John Locke wrote about life, liberty, and property.
Now, the provocative thing, which happens to be true, which we say here on this program, is how could you possibly steal what was never owned?
The founding fathers and Americans that came here, there was nothing to steal because it was not owned.
Now, this argument that there was mistreatment of Indigenous people and there was abuse of power, I'm perfectly cool with that argument.
In fact, I have a soft place in my heart for any person that wants to preserve the land of which they are in.
I like that argument.
I think that's an argument for the defense of Israel, and it's also an argument for the defense of America today.
Do I think that a lot of this could have been brokered more peacefully?
Of course.
Do I think we should have killed the entire American bison population to try to starve Indigenous people?
No, that was foolish.
That was wrong, and that was evil.
However, this idea that was completely stolen is just not true.
These colonies were formed in Massachusetts and Connecticut and Rhode Island largely on religious principles, Pennsylvania, mostly Pennsylvania Dutch and Quakers, on an idea of self-government without ever impacting most Indigenous and Native American populations.
In the next segment, I'm going to get into more of that history.
But you cannot steal what was never owned.
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Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
I'm learning about a new podcast trend that I am not going to do, which is eating on your podcast super close to the microphone.
Is that how it is?
It's terrible.
We're not doing that.
And if you want to just continue to hear clean audio quality, truth, a little bit of humor, wit, wisdom, with high energy, high pace, activist calls to action, that's the place to go, the Charlie Kirk Show.
We're taking your questions here, freedom at charliekirk.com.
I'm going to continue this.
I'm going to finish this question here about how America was built on stolen land, which is just not true.
Went through some parts of that.
But also, the largest expansion of America was done as a real estate transaction.
The largest expansion of America was the Louisiana Purchase purchased from the French government.
So you got a problem about imperialism or colonialism?
Go complain to the French.
Which, by the way, in a bizarre turn of events, the French government is way more conservative than our own government.
Emmanuel Macron is talking about how French culture is terrific, about how the French language is awesome, about how he wants to deport illegal aliens, about how postmodernism is destroying France.
French Culture in Oregon00:10:39
Now, I'm a little bit salty about this because a lot of this actually came from France.
Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all these philosophers that might say, Charlie, who are those people?
That's okay.
I read them for you so you can enjoy a life, hopefully, of wisdom and truth and happiness, not worry about this entire nihilistic diatribe of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
He wasn't as much of a nihilist.
They call him a romanticist, but he was anything but that.
In fact, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I think he wrote a book called The Confessions.
Can we double-check that, Connor?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a French philosopher who was in this tradition of social contract theorists.
The first social contract theorist was John Locke.
The second was Thomas Hobbes.
Then it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who heavily inspired Karl Marx.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the second most popular book of the 1800s.
It is The Confessions.
The second most popular book of the 1800s, where he glamorized adultery.
You want to know why Europeans have a culture of adultery, which they do, by the way.
Most Americans don't know this.
Almost every male in Europe cheats on his wife, and the women know it too, and they're perfectly okay with it.
Most people don't know about this.
It's totally accepted.
It's perfectly mainstream.
I saw it actually happen in Spain.
I visited once, and they're like, oh, yeah, that's his mistress.
I'm like, oh, okay.
It's this Rousseauian belief.
And by the way, it's totally evil and awful.
But you're not allowed to say that because in France, there are all these postmodernist, pleasure-seeking, very unhappy people that have, they love to retreat and whatever.
Anyway, so the French culture is one that's completely different than ours.
And so we purchased land from the French.
Going back to that question, we purchased land from the French in the largest ever real estate deal in the Louisiana purchase.
I love talking about the Northwest Ordinance.
I enjoy talking about the Northwest Territories.
I think it's a really good moral argument about how the first expansion of the American country outside of the original 13 colonies or states was actually one that was free, that allowed self-government, and that allowed this kind of idea of expanding westward and building something significant.
So, no, America was not built on stolen land.
It was built instead on settled land.
We settled.
Now, if we would have gone into a bunch of cities that were major metropolises, like let's say we just went to Athens.
Let's say we went to Jerusalem and we said, you know what, this is ours.
No, that's what the Babylonians did to the Jewish people.
That is what the ancient Greeks used to do.
That was stolen land.
Alexander the Great went to places that already had functioning civil government.
Not to say that the Native Americans didn't have functioning civil government, but they did not actually have government.
They did not have elections.
They didn't have private property.
Native Americans had some form of hierarchy, but they just had a different way of governing themselves.
And I'm not going to say it was worse or I'm not going to say it was better, but I am going to say that it was definitely incomplete to how human beings, I think, are meant to live on this planet.
Obviously, because I have a different religious view than Native Americans do, who have a much different, have a much more, let's just say, naturistic view.
That's probably the best way to say it, right?
It's more earth-worship-y.
Again, God bless them for that.
And as trying to right our wrong for some of the things we did wrong against Native Americans, I think the greatest American president outside of George Washington was Abraham Lincoln.
He did some awful things against Native Americans.
Is it more holistic?
Would that more holistic, earth-worshipy kind of?
I mean, I could call it pagan, but that's probably more of an insult.
And there's some things I respect in Native American culture.
I love how they love their land.
I like how they honor their ancestors.
I think that's a really good thing.
There are some other things I don't really like about Native American culture.
Don't have to go into those.
It's not even worth it.
That's not the point of this question.
The point is: where did we come to?
We did not come to this major place as a functioning city-states.
We didn't come to this pre-existing area.
We said, We're in charge now.
Kind of how Jerusalem used to change hands all the time in ancient times.
We came to a largely unsettled, vacuous place, and we built something new.
A place that was rooted in morals and the Judeo-Christian culture that is the United States of America.
So I just got this news alert here, and someone just tie the question together.
They said, Charlie, how do I explain to my friends that America's system is better than the European system?
Here's one way I can explain it.
Breaking right now.
And by the way, that was Julie from North Dakota.
So thank you guys for listening on the Flag Radio Network.
You guys can email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
I'm also taking questions live from our audience here at our Turning Point USA Young Women's Leadership Summit.
Here's how you know America is better.
And it's not better because we have better people or better DNA or any of that garbage.
It's better because we have a better system and a better moral claim to government.
And let me prove it to you.
Breaking right now.
Boris Johnson is set to delay lifting lockdowns from Freedom Day in England to July 19th amid rising cases.
We have 2,500 young women in a room, no social distance.
No, I haven't seen one mask.
Have you guys seen one mask?
There's probably one person with a mask on.
I haven't seen, is that was there one person?
Is that right?
One person.
So there's one person with a mask.
God bless them.
2,400, 999 people without a mask, no social distancing.
And we're fully open.
Europe is not.
Why?
Is it because of the vaccine?
No.
Is it because of hydroxychloroquine?
I wish.
No, it's because the states actually ended the lockdowns.
It's because thanks to our federalist-type system that gives the consent of the governed to the actual voluntary compact of the states that created the federal government, states started to reopen.
They said, I don't care what CDC says, I don't care what Fauci says.
We're going to get this done.
And this momentum of opening was largely driven by courageous governors.
Now, not every state, by the way, has that.
Oregon is still largely locked down.
It's like the last state to reopen, and they have awful virus case rates, go figure, awful death rates, small businesses going under, but Oregon is just kind of Oregon is as close to Spain as I think we're going to get.
That's not even the best example.
It's not even France.
It's not even Italy.
What would Oregon be like?
It's not even like Denmark, not Sweden, not Norway, not Finland.
What would is it Greece?
No, they're way too unhappy to be like Greece.
No, Oregon is just kind of Finnish.
Yeah, I guess that would be right.
But the Finns have great work ethic.
Not to say that Oregonians don't, but the Finns are rather unhappy people.
Anyway, Boris Johnson says we're not going to reopen the United Kingdom.
We're done.
So if you're enjoying your freedom right now, maybe you're driving in a car at WABC on the dial 77.
Maybe you're going to some place that's open.
They do not have that freedom.
Why?
It's because we still, thank goodness the founders gave us this system and we haven't managed to totally fumble it and screw this up.
We still have a system where the states have a prerogative of self-government.
So as the United Kingdom is locked down right now, they're saying their freedom day is July 19th.
It's kind of funny how he doesn't pick July 4th, July 19th.
And for good reason, we're already wide open.
We're enjoying the benefits of a free society.
That's the difference because the United Kingdom does not have states.
They don't.
Now they have provinces.
They call them provinces.
They have four countries, obviously, but they do not have this right to self-determination the same way we do.
And they don't really understand this idea of liberty.
They just don't.
It's a much more subservient culture.
It's a much more, it's easier to control.
It's a more malleable culture.
So if you are tired of these lockdowns, as I am, as I consider them to be probably one of the most unconstitutional immoral central government actions ever taken, United Kingdom is still locked down until at least July 19th, where they value the false promise of safety instead of liberty.
That is one of the most fundamental applicable ways that I can show you that American system is supreme and superior to that of the British parliamentary and non-natural rights granted system that's there.
Next question here.
You guys can email us your thoughts.
Freedom at charliekirk.com.
Wes asks this, Charlie, have you ever taken a stand on something to later change your mind on the topic or only do speak out on things you stand by 100%.
Thank you, sir.
Oh, I've changed my mind on plenty of things.
You should be unafraid to say that.
If I have one piece of advice to young people, let's be open to have your mind changed.
Have a little bit of nuance.
Now, actually, on the really big things, I've actually never had my mind change.
For example, I've never like not believed in God.
Okay?
That has not changed.
I've never not believed that America is an awesome country.
That has not changed.
I've never not believed that our history is anything but heroic and worthy of appreciation.
Have I changed my mind on some issues on, for example, what the actual motives of some of these things are, like mass migration and international trade?
Of course I have.
And those things have been really healthy developments the more scholarship I've done, the deeper reading I've done, the more reflection I've done on these things.
And so if you change your mind on really big things, we would call those conversions.
If you change your mind on smaller things that adjust to your big picture goals and aims, those are more adjustments.
So if you have a conversion, God bless you.
But you better have a really good reason for a conversion.
Those things are life-altering.
Adjustments.
So I would say I really haven't, I guess change your mind.
You could call it whatever you want.
I've had more adjustments.
You know what?
No, actually, we shouldn't have mass migration just for the sake of a bunch of plastic coming from China and cheap labor to appease the Chamber of Commerce.
And I think that, and we had a really fun discussion.
You guys can hear this discussion on our podcast.
I don't know when we're going to drop it, a discussion with Dana Lash, where I believe that one of the top things a society must do is to make sure we have strong, vibrant families, and we need the amount of children a family has to go up, not go down.
That creates a happier society.
It creates a more conservative society.
It creates a more deliberate society.
I think it creates a more joyful society.
And I think the government should get in the business, taxpayers, of trying to have family size go up and actually fix the population collapse occurring in America.
Dana saw it differently.
It was a really good conversation.
It was not a debate.
Let me be very clear.
This was not a debate.
This is a conversation amongst two people who love their country and love freedom and liberty.
And if you guys subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast, you guys can hear that.
And one of the main reasons is I think we actually want the same thing.
Dana wants self-government.
I want self-government.
I don't think self-government is possible without large families.
I think if you have declining birth rate, self-government will never happen and you will be subservient to either the state or a corporation or a false secular pleasure idea.
If you have strong families, it replaces the state.
Large families then become its own kind of city-state.
You know this if you guys have ever seen large families.
If you guys have ever met families that have like five or six or seven people, it's basically like they have their own Athenian democracy.
Strong Families Replace the State00:02:30
Everyone has their own role.
They look out for each other.
They pool their resources.
They kind of have their own code of conduct.
There's kind of like a hierarchy.
It works in this really kind of bizarre way.
Like we don't really care what's happening in D.C. because the Jones family, we have our own rules.
For those of you that grew up with like traditional Catholics where they had like 45 kids per family, it's totally the case.
And by the way, that was actually how the founding fathers envisioned the original form of self-government, is that there would be a family structure to be able to stop you from going on government welfare.
As families have gotten smaller and people have had less children, oh, I want one of each and I'm going to go move to Philadelphia or go to New York, then all of a sudden you've seen government replace that.
When you have a large family, all of a sudden you have a vested interest to want to preserve the nation, to want to all of a sudden have some sort of compelled interest to conserve things that matter.
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God bless America.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
I'm going to take this question here from Macy.
It's super provocative and it's fun.
It makes great radio and great podcasting, but I actually don't know my opinion on this.
I'm very honest with my audience when I don't know where I come down on it.
But I know two people I really respect, like Tucker Carlson and Dennis Prager, have the contrarian view here.
Now, this is actually not the question that Macy is asking, but I'm going to answer the question that I want to answer because it's more interesting.
Not than her question, but it's just interesting.
The Marijuana Push Bizarre00:05:04
She asks, she said that when she was 18, she went and bought a pack of cigarettes because she legally could and it gave her a sense of freedom.
A year later, the laws were changed.
It provoked fear in me that if they could rip something away from me that was already legally in place, what more could they do?
Forgive me if this is a ridiculous example.
It's not.
Fast forward to the last couple of years.
I have been paying, I've seen people playing the biggest game of follow the leader.
I understand government is in place to keep ethics proper.
At least that was the purpose of the founding fathers.
Now the demeanor seems to how much they can control people.
It should be feared, the evils that have arisen publicly in the past year.
My biggest question is, how far do you believe this is going to have to go despite enough fear in the American people to realize that our freedom is dissipating as seconds go by?
Macy.
Great question, Macy.
There's no guarantee people ever wake up.
Just so we're clear.
There's no guarantee that there's this aha moment.
That is rare and it's largely led by courageous people that happen to stand up against it.
It still has not happened in China since the Cultural Revolution.
China is the least unfree country that is wealthy in the world.
It's the largest open-air prison in the world, China.
They pretend they have all this freedom and they allow visitors.
They have censored internet.
They control every microbehavior of their 1.2 billion people.
So Macy, it's a great question.
But let me ask you, let me ask the audience and ask you, Macy, a question.
What is worse for America?
Cigarettes or marijuana?
Now, Dennis Prager believes that marijuana is worse than cigarettes.
I don't want to put words in Tucker's mouth, but I think based on some of his anti-marijuana segments, there might be some belief in that.
Now, I can tell you that cigarettes undoubtedly shorten the length of someone's life.
I think cigarettes are disgusting.
I'm not a fan.
I don't like smoking.
I don't like the smell of it.
Thank goodness I never got into it.
I don't like being around it.
It gives me a headache.
With that being said, I do not like marijuana either.
I can't stand the smell of marijuana.
Now, I do know this, though.
I like what cigarettes do to people in the moment more than marijuana does to people in the moment.
Now, long term, marijuana probably does not have as long impact.
Now, there's a lot of studies, and there's a book by Alex Berenson that talks about the negative impacts of marijuana long-term.
It's super interesting.
I just started working my way through it.
And there is a direct link between violent crime and marijuana and all of that.
Now, there seems to be this over-romantic, romantic, romantic quality of marijuana.
I'm not going to get into that.
What I think is interesting, though, is there a correlation between the spike of obesity, unhappiness, and the complete and total destruction of anyone allowed to smoke cigarettes.
I don't know.
I'm just asking a question.
What I think is interesting, though, is that we've replaced one for the other, and I don't think we've ever had a question or discussion about the downsides.
And so, Macy, you said you bought a pack of cigarettes, it gave you a sense of freedom, and a year later, the laws change.
It does seem a little bizarre, the overemphasis on this cannabis marijuana push over the last couple of years.
Does it make a lazier population less likely to challenge their leaders?
Does it make people less likely to want to revolt in the streets against the plunder of the elite?
Does it make people less likely to be aware of the treachery?
I do know this, that George Orwell and Ayn Rand both said they would not have been able to write their masterpieces, Atlas Shrugged, 84, Animal Farm, Fountainhead, or We Need a Living, without nicotine or cigarettes.
Now, I think that might be an over kind of giving the platform there, but there have been plenty of studies to show that nicotine does give people a form of mental clarity unlike any other.
Now, again, I don't like nicotine gum.
I don't do any of that stuff.
But I know people that do use it.
They are very evangelistic about it to other people.
So, this is a question that you're not allowed to ask as we just tell all our kids, go take weed, everything's going to be fine.
Is that a good thing just to tell our kids to be less attentive, less aware?
Does it kill brain cells?
Does it make them more sloppy, less alert, more ambitious, more daring?
I'm just asking questions.
But I do find these people that have lied to us about vaccines, they lied to us largely about masks and lockdowns, hydroxychloroquine, ivermetkin.
The one thing they can all agree on is marijuana is awesome.
Excuse me while I say, hold on, you fool me once, shame on you.
You fool me twice, shame on me.
Once you tell a lie, all your truths become questionable.
And so, excuse me while I think that there might be something more at play here about this mass marijuana movement that all of a sudden is going to solve all of our problems.
Email us your questions as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Check out charliekirk.com for the latest news and information.
We are here at the Young Women's Leadership Summit in Dallas, Texas.
You guys can watch it on rumble.com, R-U-M-B-L-E.com.
Stop using YouTube because they declared war on our values.
We'll see what happens and how that works for them.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to support us, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
Thanks so much, everybody.
Talk to you soon.
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