Unpacking the Maniacal Witch Hunt Against Donald Trump with Attorney David Engelhardt
Ahead of Independence Day, Charlie is joined again in studio—LIVE from WABC in Manhattan, by Pastor and Attorney David Engelhardt to analyze the true legal implications of such a bizarre criminal charge against the Trump Organization. After unpacking the case and where the litigation goes from here, David and Charlie give a comprehensive overview of why all Americans should be thankful to live in this beautiful country headed into the 4th of July weekend.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Perp Walks vs Boardroom Deals00:10:40
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Hey, everybody.
Today in the Charlie Kirk show, we go through in great detail the Trump indictment, rising crime in New York City, and also we briefly touch on the American founding and independence.
You guys can listen to more of that on Monday when we drop our Ask Me Anything episode.
Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
That's charliekirk.com slash support.
And if you want to get involved with Turning Point USA and join us in Tampa, Florida, go to tpusa.com slash SAS, tpusa.com slash SAS.
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.
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We're going to get into some breaking news here with the indictment against the Trump organization.
And one of the most stunning and alarming indictments that I have ever seen.
As we celebrate independence, we need to ask ourselves the question, are we currently living under some form of totalitarian, authoritarian tyranny?
And when you read this indictment and how the opposition is willing to use criminal power to go after people that they don't like their politics, it just begs the question, how do the truths of the Declaration ring true to what we're living through right now?
And then later in the hour, we're going to be joined by Pastor David Engelhart, again, from New York City, who's also a lawyer and attorney to go through the indictment.
And then I'm going to go through in great detail kind of what is the, what does the Declaration stand for?
And also what happened on July 3rd, July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.
We don't talk about that.
But maybe you didn't know, but July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd were the three days of the Gettysburg battle.
You see, Abraham Lincoln didn't give the Gettysburg address until I think November 19th.
We didn't get a fact check on that, 1863, almost four and a half months later.
But Abraham Lincoln, when he talked about America's founding, he was pointing directly to the same time that the Battle of Gettysburg occurred.
But first, let's get into the indictment here.
David, say hello.
Hello.
Good to be here, Charlie.
And David, did you get a chance to read through the indictment of the Trump organization and Alan Weiselberg?
Yep, all 15 counts of the indictment I had the great pleasure of reviewing.
So you're a lawyer.
What's your initial reaction?
And you're a resident of New York.
You pay taxes in New York?
Yeah, I would say my initial reaction is witch hunt.
And I mean that in the context of, if you remember last year, the DA, the Cyvance, and Letitia James, they were saying that they were going to find this was the wording they used.
They were going to find fraud as related to bank applications.
Remember that they were inflating the amount of money the operations.
Right.
And then insurance companies that they were defrauding.
And these were the big, like major corporations.
This is a scheme, a conspiracy across the whole board.
And what they found is a single guy that didn't pay taxes on benefits received.
There is no benefit.
If you read the indictment, there's zero benefit to the Trump Corporation.
Now, the Trump Corporation is named, but if you actually think through it, they're not saving any tax money.
I mean, they're paying for whatever these tertiary benefits to the employee, but they're not saving money by paying for these benefits.
They would either have to pay salary plus payroll tax, or they would pay the exact same amount on the apartment.
There's no incentive for the Trump organization to shoot themselves in the foot.
This indictment should be a fire alarm for all of us.
We knew what they were willing to do.
And regardless of your politics listening to this, you might love Trump, you might not like Trump.
It's completely irrelevant.
Instead, as we are here in New York City looking at the beautiful streets here, hey, I see somebody without a mask on.
Very rare.
Actually, two people as we watch people walk down the streets.
Oh, he's very rare.
This guy has two masks on.
As we watch the streets in New York, I feel as if we are living in enemy-occupied territory here in New York.
And I don't say that lightly.
It's almost as if the rule of law and the way that we go about treating our fellow countrymen is that if you live in New York City or the state of New York, they will use whatever political power they have to destroy your life.
So, what's happening right now reminds me of a man named Andre Vyshetsky.
Do you know who that is?
I don't.
He used to run the show trial operation for Joseph Stalin.
And show trials back in Stalin's Russia was a series of public prosecutions against political opponents.
And he had the most famous quote.
And his quote is something that is referenced in cocktail parties and in law classrooms across the country, which is, you show me the man, I'll show you the crime.
Right.
And if you show me a man like Donald Trump who has gone through two years of exhaustive investigations, criminal investigations that they said, we don't know what the crime is, but we're going to try to find it.
Letitia James campaigned on this.
And then they had to perp walk this man who is the CFO for the Trump organization.
And if you read this indictment, they act as if he is smuggling children into New York City.
They act as if he is running a gun-running operation, or if that he is trying to launder money from the third world, you say, Oh, wait, he didn't pay his taxes because of some sort of benefit that he received.
So, just so you guys understand, the main thrust of the argument is that he was given cars that he was not paying tax on.
Now, what I find interesting, though, is how do they know those were not company cars?
Right, exactly.
Exactly.
Also, if New York City was not his residence, who's to say that that was not imperative for him to be able to do his job as CFO of the Trump organization?
The point is, under certain accounting principles, some of these things very well could be argued as legitimate deductions.
Now, when you get to living expenses, it gets harder, obviously.
But the argument could be made that was not my residence.
You know, Mr. Trump wanted me in the city, and this was part of one of the benefit packages.
And if they weren't declaring it as income, that's on them.
That's not on me.
And then also, let's talk about remedies.
They are now using criminal prosecution for something that very well could be figured out in an afternoon in a boardroom where the state of New York and say, look, we see what you were doing here.
You have one side of the story.
We have one side of the story.
Pay us $400,000 and that's a settlement.
Have you ever seen, David, the criminal process used to try to remedy tax payment issues like this?
No, and I think it was one of the Trump organization lawyers, Ron Fisher, who said a fringe benefits tax case has never been applied this way.
And even the New York Times said it was either yesterday, the day before that, you could not imagine another corporation in New York City having files, charges filed this way.
The funny thing about his residence here versus his residence in Long Island is this is a normal New York City corporate officer situation.
There are specific rules.
In New York City, if you don't live here for 184 days of the years, you can say, I don't live in New York City.
There's a three-part rule.
Are you domiciled there?
Do you live there more than 183 days?
And is it your place of permanent residence?
Well, it sounds like Long Island has been Weiselberg's state, you know, permanent residence.
And if he's a smart finance guy, he knows that and he knows he needs to spend 183 days so he doesn't have to pay the taxes.
So, Charlie, like if you actually look at just the New York state tax liability that Weiselman has over the entire period of 15 years, it's 100 grand.
This is not one.
This is barely one salary of one of the 10 attorneys on the teams going after the Trump organization.
And, you know, they keep saying $1.7 million over and over and over in the indictments and make it sound like he stole.
But it's also over 12 years.
Right.
And you're running a multi-billion dollar business and you're talking about fringe benefits for the CEO.
And you know what's amazing as we're here in New York City, and I say this as a conservative, the people that crashed our economy and manipulate the financial banking laws all in Wall Street, none of them went to jail after 2008.
None of the people that were on the phone with the Treasury, on the phone with Goldman Sachs, on the phone with the FDIC, crafting together all of these very specific bailout packages that were playing games with people's deposits.
None of them went to jail.
None of them had exhaustive investigations from the New York Attorney General.
But instead, we now have to see Donald Trump's CFO get perp walked at the New York Attorney General's office while every one of the other legitimate financial criminals here in New York City, they're wealthier than ever before.
I was in the cab on the way home last night and the cab driver said to me, well, Donald Trump has killed 100,000, a minimum of 100,000 people.
So I'm glad the Trump organization.
Hunter Biden Deep Dive Needed00:05:55
People believe that.
The people in New York City are happy with these indictments because they think Trump is a mass murderer.
And I said, well, didn't he, wasn't he the guy that originally tried to stop travel from China?
And he said, no, that was just a show.
That was a play.
It's just a total joke.
There's such a cognitive dissonance in the people of New York that only listen to left-wing media that actually truly believe that the Wuhan, the Chinese virus was the fault of Donald Trump, who has not been more opposed to China than any other leader we've had in the last 10 years.
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We were just asking the question: what is the potential benefit to the Trump organization here that was being alleged in the indictment?
And I think that's the main question for any reasonable person that reads through the 25 pages of the indictment.
If you get away from the millions of dollars, blah, blah, blah.
There's a general rule, Charlie, in business law called the business judgment rule, which means a business will not intentionally harm itself or damage itself because it functions on the basis of profits for itself and the holders, owners of that corporation.
And so when you look at what the indictment tells us, it tells us that it's taking certain dollars and then it's giving them to Weiselman for fringe benefits.
And it's instead of giving it to Weiselman as payment, if it was just payment, they would have to pay, you know, a social security tax, Medicaid, Medicare, whatever that body of taxes is.
Instead, they're paying it for a car or an apartment or whatever.
And therefore, the Trump organization is guilty criminally because they paid in one manner and not the other manner.
But it's still a loss for the Trump organization, either way.
So, according to the business judgment rule, they would never do something to shoot themselves in the foot purposely.
It's insane.
And so, what this has basically opened up is this question of what laws do you choose to enforce and against whom to the state of New York?
Because if this is now the case, I guarantee you, in a city of 8 million people, you got at least 80 to 90,000 people that are cheating significantly on their taxes or not even filing returns altogether.
I mean, there are people with the IRS that go five, six, or seven years without filing a return.
The IRS comes and says, Stop doing this, pay a big penalty.
And that's usually the path forward.
Instead, they are using an abuse of the fraud statute, unlike anything we have ever seen before.
This sets a precedent that if we don't like your politics, we are now able to open up endless investigations into you, make you spend millions of dollars in legal fees.
Meanwhile, Peter Strzzok walks free, Lisa Page walks free, James Colmy walks free, Hunter Biden walks free.
How about Hunter Biden's taxes?
I would love to see his taxes.
I'd love to see a deep dive by the AG of New York City into Biden's Hunter Biden.
Do you think Hunter Biden ever got a fringe benefit?
Do you think he ever spent a couple weekends or a couple months in somebody else's apartment, maybe in New York City?
That very well could have been taxable income when he was living here.
Do you think that Hunter Biden ever, do you think he perfectly filled out his taxes?
Actually, no, he's under federal investigation for tax fraud, but we all know how that's going to end.
Hunter Biden will never be indicted.
He will never go to jail because the way it works in our country is that if you're a Democrat, you get complete and total immunity.
It's called progressive immunity, not herd immunity, progressive immunity.
If you're a conservative, though, you are guilty until proven innocent.
And when I saw Alan, is it Weiselberg or Weisselberg?
Yeah, walking as like a perp walk with his hands behind his back as if he is some sort of first-rate mob boss criminal.
Right.
And then he had to walk through and everyone was photographing him through this walk of shame.
I thought to myself, New York City and New York State, you are going to pay a price for this.
Man, I'm not, this is not like there's some sort of retribution.
The attention you are putting on this while New York City becomes Gotham City, that will manifest itself in something very significant.
Yeah.
And unfortunately, for most voters, they're still voting in droves for Democrats.
I mean, you have Adams, who hopefully will get elected as a former police officer.
And if that happens, maybe they'll bring more police back into the city and back into the subways because the crime rate, as we spoke about yesterday, has dramatically increased in New York City because we have an administration right now that's not focusing on the most important things.
What are the most important things?
Safety.
That's one of the most important things.
New YorkPost.com.
Did you know that 70% of the shootings in New York City in 2020 are unsolved?
Police Back in NYC Subways00:04:32
Wow.
70%.
So 70% of any time there's been a firearm discharge in New York City.
We don't know who did that.
But all of a sudden, we now, the focus of the law enforcement arm of the city of New York is not about solving the 70% of unknown shooters and murderers.
No, it's about whether or not Weisselberg was in an apartment that he didn't perfectly pay for.
And instead of sending a letter saying, can you guys just solve this?
We know what you were doing here.
Or maybe there was a legitimate business purpose.
Instead, it's, no, we are going to make you suffer.
And even if you are a Democrat listening to this right now in the car, this should terrify you.
It's just a matter of time until Republicans respond in kind.
And that is not a good thing for our country, but it's a necessary thing.
Somewhere in some state across the country, you're going to see some attorney general that's going to say, you know what?
You guys just crossed the Rubicon.
We are going to start investigating every single Democrat nonprofit.
And by the way, it's long past time we start doing that.
That's right.
But all of a sudden, if you're a Democrat chuckling at this and you think that there's not going to be, you know, an equal and opposite reaction, you're naive.
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Really quick before we get into July 4th, Independence Day weekend.
Do you know there's over 155, according to NBC News New York, 155,000 untested rape kits in New York City?
But at least we got Weisselberg, at least we knew Weisselberg used a company car.
Do you know that shootings are up 64%?
Is that right, David?
That's right, 64%.
The New York Post said yesterday, 64%.
But at least we know that Weiselberg used a company car.
Do you know that there were 12 shootings overnight in New York City?
But at least we know Weiselberg used a company car.
That's right.
You see, the priority of the ruling class is not the well-being of black children in Brooklyn or Harlem that are shot on the way to school.
No, it's whether or not they punish people that threaten their political power.
This is what we're seeing now in New York City.
Jefferson's Unalienable Rights Today00:13:32
We're going to keep on monitoring this story, but at least we know everybody.
We don't know who the rapists are.
We don't know who the 70% of all shootings in New York go unsolved.
But at least we know that Weiselberg used a company car.
So this weekend, we celebrate one of the most important days in human history.
And I want to explore this with you, David.
It's very important.
And it's now a day that is under major accusations from the intelligentsia, the enlightened, the postmodern folks in our country, which is the Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1776.
So I want to read from it.
And it's very important that we understand that this was not just a document for the time.
It was a document for all time.
It starts with: when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with one another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them.
A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation.
Let's stop right there.
When in the course of human events, what does that mean?
It means this is a universal principle.
It means that when Thomas Jefferson was writing this, he wasn't saying that, oh, this is just for 1776.
No, he said, this is a moral right for all human beings.
Professor Harry Jaffa, who was the professor for Dr. Larry Arn from Hillsdale, he argued that the Declaration of Independence was the second most profound moment in this idea of self-governance from Moses coming down from Mount Sinai.
Because this was not just a political document.
This is a document that talked about who are we as human beings and how should we be governed.
In fact, Thomas Jefferson made the argument that government exists simply and solely to protect you as God made you and there are certain laws that you are able to operate in.
I want to say this again.
The laws of nature and of nature's God.
David, what does that mean?
Yeah, so the laws of nature and nature's God is, I mean, first, God is creator of all things.
And second of all, that he creates us in an environment which allows freedom, allows what we call the pursuit of happiness, not the pursuit of narcissism or self-indulgence, but for me to be able to pursue my dreams and goals in life without being taken by a tyrannical government, without being treated in an unequal way.
And that's the second clause of the Declaration, right?
That this is the number one thing we hold to be self-evident, that we're created equal.
You can't, because of a political bent, treat this party significantly different than you treat this other party.
And that was happening and it's happening again in our current political climate.
What makes America so beautiful is first, this idea of liberty bounded by basic laws.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
So this idea of self-evident truth is a Lockean idea.
John Locke, who is heavily influenced by Aquinas and Augustine and by Aristotle, there are three social contract theorists that all happened around the same time.
They all lived in the same time, basically.
They were contemporaries, to use the philosophical term.
And that would be John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Hobbes.
Thomas Hobbes believed that human nature, that we were nasty and we were brutish and short to one another.
And therefore, we need a dictator type like tyrant to govern ourselves.
Hobbes was right about human nature.
He was wrong about the prescription for that human nature.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a French philosopher.
He heavily influenced Karl Marx and this idea of the romantic writer and romantic literature.
Rousseau valued the primitive over the civilized.
He valued the infant over the adult.
He prioritized the adulterer over the loyal spouse.
Confessions, written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was actually the second best-selling book in the 1800s in France.
His idea of a social contract was that his most famous quote was not that all men are created equal and that they're endowed by their creator.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, no, no, no, no.
All men are born free and they live the rest of their lives in chains.
Basically, he was saying that private property and commercial society, that is actually keeping people handcuffed.
So there's this tension point between John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where John Locke said, who are you in the state of nature?
What do you got?
You have consciousness?
Do you have thought?
Do you have the ability to own property?
That is worthy of protection.
So anything that is built was built by those things.
It was built by your ability to reason.
And then it says in the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson all but just copied John Locke with this, that we're endowed by their creator.
So creator, by the way, has a capital C in the Declaration.
God is mentioned four times in the Declaration of Independence.
We'll get into that in a second.
With certain unalienable rights.
What does that mean, David?
Yeah, unalienable rights are rights that you can't have taken away from you.
They can't be separated from you.
This is part of Locke in the second treatise on government.
He says property itself is something that you invest your life into.
So when someone steals something from you, they're not just stealing your hat or your shoes or your car.
They're stealing a piece of your life because you've invested your years to have that and your life exists inside that property.
And that can't be taken away from you without appropriate process of law.
Then it says life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Now, the original draft said property, which was part of John Locke's original thesis.
Now, I want to stop really quick because there is this idea that our true birthday was 1619.
It's being put forward by the charlatan and the dishonest, let's just say, quasi-intellectual Nicole Hannah Jones, who has just been granted tenure at University of North Carolina and she wrote the 1619 project, amongst other things, despite intentionally misinterpreting the documents, the founders.
So her whole argument is that the American founding was actually about defending slavery and racism.
Nicole Hannah Jones, I will write you a personal check of $10,000.
And I know you're a grifter, so you love money.
If you can find me one original source document of any signer, of any founding father that ever wrote robustly about connecting the American founding to slavery, I will write you a personal check.
You can't find it because you made it up.
You did not use original source documents.
You did not use quotes that are attributed to the founders.
In fact, if you look in the private journals and musings of every single founding father, Thomas Jefferson included, they abhorred slavery.
They did not say, are we going to get rid of slavery?
They asked, how are we going to get rid of slavery?
And I'll prove it to you.
Vermont abolished slavery in 1777.
Nine out of 13 of the original colonies by the Constitutional Convention by 1787 had already abolished slavery.
The Declaration was a universal call of what a human being is in relationship with that government.
It wasn't until the Democrat Supreme Court Dred Scott decision, 7-2, the two dissenters were Republicans, did they say the Declaration doesn't apply to black people.
The Dred Scott decision was one of the most immoral and evil legal decisions ever made in the history of the world.
But this is a really important thing that when we look at the Declaration, we look at our founding, this was a call for all of humanity.
So it gets to the question of what is a human being, which is something the other side cannot answer.
The other side says, well, a human being is what I choose it to be.
We believe a human being is the speaking being, as Aristotle would say.
Nature is the norm, that we are the reasoned beings.
That makes us different than dogs and dolphins.
The Constitution does not apply to butterflies.
It is a human document, and it says it right here.
It says that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, not among elk, not among moose, not among dolphins, but among men deriving their powers from the consent of the governed.
That idea of consent to the governed comes down to one word, permission, that the government needs our permission to use force.
You see, what Thomas Jefferson was doing here, he was a big thinker, is he was completely inverting human beings' relationship with government in real time.
He said, you know what, King George, you're actually at the bottom of the hierarchy.
The top of the hierarchy is the creator.
And then those rights are transcendently passed down to the equality of all human beings.
Then government springs out beyond that.
You see, this idea of the divine right of kings, which obviously King George believed in, was the opposite, was that there was a hierarchy of the human being above one another where Thomas Jefferson said, no, we're all equal with rights under our creator.
And therefore, King George, if you're in that position of authority, we have to give you that permission.
We have to have some sort of system to either vote for you or to collaborate or to cooperate.
You're not just there through blood right.
What Thomas Jefferson was doing here in the Declaration of Independence was the most articulate and effective indictment of the blood right to ancestral rule.
That's a leap forward, the likes of which is just so mind-blowing because it was an act of courage and one that was filled with clarity of wisdom that I argue was actually transcendent.
And Thomas Jefferson was tasked with this project by the fellow signers, 56 of them, where they said, hey, Thomas Jefferson, TJ, can you put all these ideas into one?
But there's something that people miss, which is this was just merely an extension of the demand of the people that was laid by the preachers of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield and many others.
And there was a committee that was formed.
The chairman of that committee was Benjamin Franklin.
And they said, hey, young Thomas Jefferson, take a stab at this.
Dr. Larry Arn from Hillsdale, he famously has said, you could only really become a master of three things.
You can know a lot of things.
You can only become a master of three things.
For him, it was Aristotle, Lincoln, and Churchill.
My goal in life is to become a master around the time of the American founding.
That's one of my goals in life.
I think I found my passion with that of what did Hamilton believe?
What did Madison believe?
What did George Mason believe?
And it's just so important and it's being so intentionally misrepresented because almost all of these conversations of the destruction of our country go back to a misunderstanding of the philosophical roots and the ambitions and the dreams of the founding fathers.
So I want to go back to this, David, really quick.
Can you walk through what was the landscape like of the church and activist pastors right before the Declaration of Independence?
Was there a citizenry that was demanding this great leap forward to self-governance?
Yeah, you mentioned in the previous segment, Charlie, the shift between the divine right of kings, subjugating law, reinterpreting law, living under the tyranny of ever-changing laws, and this famous pamphlet called Lex Rex that came out and started shifting the ideological landscape through pastors.
And Lex Rex meant that Lex, that's the Latin word for law, and Rex is the Latin word for king.
So Lex was above Rex.
So it wasn't that the king was above the law, that he could interpret it any way he wanted, but actually that the law was above the king and the king was subject to law.
In that pamphlet, it's John Knox, I believe, is one of the ideological kind of seed bearers of that movement.
He was saying that the kings of the Old Testament always ended up doing corrupt things.
That's why the law has to be fixed and permanent because it doesn't change and apply differently to different groups of people.
And we just talked about the Declaration of Independence.
One of the axioms is equality under the law.
And this is something in the Summa that Thomas Aquinas said.
He said, Summa Theologica.
That's right.
He said, when there are a thousand laws, when there are innumerable laws, it creates the opportunity for tyranny because you never know what law you're breaking.
And the tyrannical can apply whatever law, just like you said, the fascist dictators boy said, you show me the man, I'll show you the crime.
Well, that works in an environment where there's a million laws and you don't even know if you're breaking those laws.
Andrei Vyshevsky, Mark Cicero famously said, the more laws, the less justice.
James Madison famously said, if the laws become too voluminous and too counted and too plenty, justice will disappear.
I'm paraphrasing, but that's basically what James Madison said.
James Madison, the author and the father of the American Constitution.
And then finally, as you say, Andrei Vyshevsky, show me the man, I'll show you the crime.
You pass a bunch of laws professionally.
It then all comes down to who's enforcing it, who's in charge.
Redecare Our Moral Right00:00:57
And if you get a carve-out, that means you're a friend or an ally of the party.
But if you're a dissident against the party, like Donald Trump, they will crush you.
And on this July 4th weekend, I hope all of you take time to go reread the Declaration of Independence and then listen to our podcasts and think deeply: are we near a precipice where we have to redeclare our moral right to self-govern?
And those are very weighted words.
I'm not calling for anything violent, obviously.
I'm saying, but do we have to redeclare this idea that we have a moral right to be able to charter our course and to be able to build a partnership with our leaders?
It feels awfully antagonistic.
Where if you don't hold the party line, they will crush you the same way King George did to the American Founders.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.