Ask Charlie Anything 75: Founding Fathers & Drag Queens? What's Up With These Trump Judges? Who is the 'Father' of the New Left? And MORE!
On an Action-Packed, 75th edition of the 'Ask Charlie Anything' series, Charlie answers the questions you send him at Freedom@CharlieKirk.com — including a comprehensive analysis of Amy Coney Barrett's recent, baffling decision surrounding vaccine mandates for college students. Diving into the past, Charlie gives a detailed explanation of the ideological roots of the American Left including answers about its Communist constructors including Saul Alinsky, Angela Davis, and Bill Ayers. All of that, PLUS—Charlie doubles down in response to a listeners question about his statement last week that the Founders would mobilize the Minutemen in response to Drag Queen Story Hour if they ever saw it happening to our kids. Were the founder libertarians in tacit support of licentiousness or were they pious proponents of the moral, natural order? Charlie gives the best explanation of the real roots of America's founding that you'll ever hear. As always, email your questions to Freedom@CharlieKIrk.com for a chance to have them answered in the next Monday edition of 'Ask Charlie Anything' which puts you in the running to win a free signed copy of Charlie's book, 'The MAGA Doctrine.' Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Support Our Program Today00:02:00
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Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show.
Would the founding fathers put up with transgender people, dudes in dresses, reading the children?
I answer to all the detractors.
Also, who is the father of the new left?
It's a very important person you have to know.
And so much more.
Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
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Start a high school or college chapter today.
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Action packed episode.
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.
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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.
Supreme Court Decisions Matter00:08:08
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So let's go to the first question.
Hey, Charlie, what do you think of the recent decision by Amy Coney Barrett in regards to vaccines?
Well, look, in regards to Amy Coney Barrett, I'm not going to lie, I'm very disappointed.
I'm deeply disappointed, but with the reading and the studying I've been doing, we shouldn't be that disappointed, not just about Amy Coney Barrett, but about the courts in general.
Alexis de Tocqueville, who is a phenomenal author, wrote a great book called Democracy in America.
He said that all issues will eventually be decided by the court.
All issues are, in fact, judicial issues.
Now, what does that mean?
Now, the third article of the United States Constitution talks about the judiciary, the Supreme Court of the United States.
And for years, conservatives have put, we have put our trust and our faith in an independent judiciary.
Now, mind you, this has not been a fool's errand.
Some of the Supreme Court victories that we have secured are going to last a lifetime.
But a common talking point amongst upper middle class Republican circles is that the most important thing a president will do is secure the Supreme Court.
That's probably right if the Supreme Court is listened to.
What happens if the Supreme Court is just ignored?
What happens if the Supreme Court makes bad decisions?
A major push by Senator Mitch McConnell throughout the years has been putting, has been trying to put in better judges with prudence to make decisions in alignment to the United States Constitution.
Now, to give Senator McConnell credit, this has been an upgrade versus Trent Lott when he was in the United States Senate.
We have far better judges than Trent Lott when Trent Lott was putting them into office.
So Amy Coney Barrett came out and she's in charge of a certain circuit court.
So the way it works is that every single one of the U.S. Supreme Court justices, they oversee a certain circuit court for emergency appeals.
They could decide to take them, write opinions on them.
It's not a final decision, but they all oversee that area.
They can block it, though.
So U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett refuses to block Indiana University's vaccine mandate for students.
She acted alone and gave no explanation.
Now, she's from Indiana.
She's also a practicing Catholic.
Why the inaction?
Well, it's a couple reasons.
Number one, this is a tough fight.
Don't count on the court to pick tough fights where the political will of a nation is not in alignment.
Alexander Hamilton famously predicted this.
He said, the courts will almost never challenge public opinion.
And we know this throughout history.
I mean, the courts made a terrible decision in the Dred Scott decision, 7-2, 7 Democrats, two Republicans as dissenting, because public opinion was that blacks were not humans at the time, an awful and disgusting and evil decision.
As time progressed and public opinion changed, the courts reversed their decision.
Oh, actually, no, just kidding.
We believe that all humans are created equal.
If they just would have listened to the tenets of the United States Constitution and Declaration of Independence, they wouldn't have had to do some sort of movement in the Dred Scott decision to come to that kind of conclusion.
But instead, the courts conform to public opinion.
How about Griswold v. Connecticut?
Griswold v. Connecticut was around birth control.
It was the last state to fall when it came to the pill.
Public opinion very much in favor of allowing the pill.
The courts allowed it to happen.
How about Roe v. Wade and the Doe case that accompanied it?
Public opinion said abortion should be safe, legal, and rare, and the courts let it happen.
How about Planned Parenthood v. Casey?
Mikey can check this.
I think it was 1992 was Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Famous Justice Anthony Kennedy's interpretive clause.
Life is what you want it to be.
I'm not going to tell you that there's one way to live on the other.
92, 19, I was right, 1992.
The courts conform to the people.
Now, this is something that we as conservatives don't talk about enough.
We think that the courts are going to make sober and fair and unbiased decisions regardless of the clamoring or the chattering class.
Hamilton never thought, never thought this was in the case.
He wrote about this in the Federalist Papers, and he wrote about this in his private journals.
And Alexander Hamilton was actually a ghostwriter for a lot of George Washington's speeches in his second term of his presidency.
Now, the idea of judicial review came in thanks to Marbury versus Madison, which really kind of enshrined this idea that the Supreme Court is a co-equal branch of government.
The Supreme Court has the ability to have a check and balance against tyrants and despots or unconstitutional measures from the legislature.
As we've covered extensively in a previous episode of our podcast, Joe Biden has just basically said, I don't care what the Supreme Court says, I am going to do what I believe is right.
Let Roberts send his army.
Let Marshall send his army, as Andrew Jackson said in Wooster v. Beaver v. Georgia.
A lot of people debate whether he said it or not, but the essence definitely fits Andrew Jackson's persona.
So I guess we're left with this question, what do we do?
Here's a big lesson for conservatives.
We have to cut it with the messianic complex of politics.
What does that mean?
It means we as conservatives like to outsource our hope to other people.
Oh, Donald Trump's going to solve everything.
He's going to come in on Air Force One and the country will be made great again.
That if we just get the right people in the Supreme Court, that's going to turn the nation around.
We know that's not true.
We know that outsourcing our hope to a group of people, if you have your hope in people, you will be let down.
Here's a news flash.
You get a leader like Lincoln and Churchill once every hundred years.
We were lucky to have in one generation both Reagan, Thatcher, and Churchill.
Eisenhower would be an addition to that.
Most of our leaders are gutless wonders compared to Lincoln, Churchill, Thatcher, and Reagan.
So just going all in on one person is doomed to fail.
Just look at the Roman Empire.
You know what happens when you have a great emperor like Marcus Aurelius?
Great emperors usually have really bad kids like Commodus, and the whole empire starts to fall apart.
It can work for a moment, but there's no sustainability to it.
Now, I'm not saying that Amy Coney Barrett or Brett Kavanaugh or Neil Gorsuch are Roman emperors, but they have a lot of power.
And we haven't invested as the conservative movement too much in individuals.
Now, I'm glad the Supreme Court has a majority.
I'm glad that we're going to at least have some sort of a check and balance on Joe Biden's activism.
But we're going to get let down more and more.
Now, maybe things will change, but Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, to a lesser extent, and definitely not Clarence Thomas.
Hillsdale K12 Education Solution00:04:21
Let me make sure I clarify this.
Clarence Thomas is an American hero.
You want to talk about someone who never cares about what the other side has to say about him?
Clarence Thomas.
Clarence Thomas, 10 out of 10.
Alito, 9 out of 10.
Gorsuch, 8 out of 10.
Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, T-B-D.
We don't know.
We all thought Brett Kavanaugh was going to come on the scene because the left slandered him so much.
Well, he's been okay on certain decisions, but not great.
And Amy Coney Barrett has been lackluster at best.
Now, she had an opportunity to intervene and say, experimental medicine cannot be forced upon the students of the great state of Indiana.
And instead, Amy Coney Barrett said, no, it's perfectly fine.
It's perfectly okay for the state to be able to mandate experimental medicine on children.
18-year-old, 19-year-olds, but you get the point.
How is that a limited government value?
It's not.
So to answer your question, and it's a longer answer than the question probably expected.
And thank you for Cynthia from North Dakota for asking that.
The hope must be in your own action.
It must be in truth.
Not just a singular human being is going to swoop in and save the entire thing.
A lot of people ask me, Charlie, how do you know so much about American history?
The answer is not from school.
As many of you know, I did not go to formal college, actually.
I didn't go to college at all.
So my education has been a process.
I've always been committed to learning and diving deep into ideas.
And one source of truth and knowledge has been the greatest partner in that pursuit of learning, and that is Hillsdale College.
American history and civics education, they're quite honestly at a turning point.
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And they have downloadable curriculum for you and your children for free at k12.hillsdale.edu.
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And you could take online courses.
So I, every single day, I do my best to try to schedule at least 30 minutes to an hour to take some online courses.
So I have my certificate.
I have passed the course in Constitution 101, the intro to the Constitution.
I'm about to finish the Introduction to Western Philosophy.
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And they have a new one called The Great American Story that I'm taking, and it's phenomenal.
If you say, Charlie, how do I get my kids to know history?
Literally pay them to take these courses.
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The Great American Story, it's charlieforhillsdale.com.
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Maybe you're more of a World War II fan.
They have a whole course on that called The Second World Wars.
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They have a course on that, Hamlet and the Temptest.
Maybe you're a fan of theology.
They have a whole course on theology 101.
How about on the Greek wars, Athens and Sparta, Winston, Churchill, and statesmanship?
These are free of charge, amazingly rigorous courses that will get you to appreciate the country, what it means to be a human being, where our rights come from at k12.hillsdale.edu.
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So download the 1776 curriculum right now, and you yourself should at least carve out 20 minutes a day to try and learn something new.
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Here's a really good question from somebody.
Protect Against Woke Capital00:04:22
And I'm going to kind of paraphrase it because it was a very long question.
Nathan from South Carolina.
Congratulations.
You win a signed copy of our book, The MAGA Doctrine.
You email that to us.
You email us your question, freedom at charliekirk.com.
The essence of the question is basically this, which is that where do we find our hope at this present moment?
What can we possibly do to try to change things in our favor?
So I think a really important thing we don't talk about enough, I was just having this conversation with some wonderful Claremont Institute people, is we don't talk enough about the vulnerabilities and the weak spots of the left.
We don't talk about where they can be challenged and defeated easiest.
We almost only talk about the disadvantages we're experiencing.
Well, we don't control academia.
We don't control Hollywood.
We don't control Congress.
We don't control the FBI.
We don't control the CIA.
So the question is, what are the weak points of the other side?
Number one, they're unbelievably paranoid.
They're the most paranoid winners, I put that in quotes, that we've ever seen in American history.
They don't really seem content as if they won something fairly and freely.
Here's a lesson.
This is eternal knowledge, not just practical knowledge.
Paranoid people don't rule for long.
Let me say that again.
Paranoid people do not rule for long.
Some of the biggest problems we obviously have is alienation, how they stigmatize us.
They categorize us as insurrectionists.
We're up against woke capital.
But we know the solutions to these things.
We need to create new community and fraternity.
The Republican Party needs to get a backbone and not negotiate multi-trillion dollar infrastructure packages, $1.2 trillion infrastructure packages of the opposition.
Build new actual infrastructure, not this fake infrastructure of nonprofits and groups that are willing to stand up and contest for things.
We need to lift up new leaders.
We already know about all that.
Develop new technology and change the frame of the debate of the conversation we're actually having in the country.
But there's something even more fundamental that needs to happen than all of this.
Is that a war is never won by strictly playing defense.
A war is won by playing offense.
I have hope that we can win because the conservative movement is finally talking seriously about playing offense.
If Joe Biden would have won everything perfectly, fairly and squarely, which of course is not true, I don't think the conservative movement would be in that position.
But when something is stolen from you, all of a sudden you have a completely different mindset.
We are going to avenge what happened to us.
That's a pretty healthy thing.
Now, I want to be very clear.
I do not believe in optimism for optimism's sake.
I do not believe in delusions.
Some people say, well, tomorrow everything's going to get fixed tomorrow.
That's probably not the case.
But I will say this.
I will say that there's a shock coming.
I don't know what it's going to look like.
I don't know where it's going to come from.
But there's a shock and a equal and opposite reaction that's about to get ushered against the American ruling class.
They can feel it in the air.
That's why they're preemptively striking you.
That's why they have all these fake and phony commissions in Washington, D.C. That's why they have to categorize half the country's insurrectionists.
We're going to see this in a variety of different ways.
The school board uprising in America absolutely gives me hope.
It's not a Democrat or Republican thing.
It's not a conservative or liberal thing.
It's a reclamation of power.
That's what conservatives have to start talking about.
We don't like talking about that because we don't like power.
We get very worried that power is going to corrupt.
For us, we'd rather serve at the church, build a business, raise our kids, retire, golf.
These are very important things.
Golf debatable.
But the point is that these are important things for people to do.
But all of a sudden, if we get in the power business, like, you know what?
Secure Your Four-Week Kit00:03:50
I actually want to be in charge.
You know what?
I do want to have a say in the type of education my kids are experiencing.
You know what?
You're not going to mask my kid.
All of a sudden, the left is going to be very, and let me say this again, emphasize this for point, very worried because their church, their golf, their business, their children was just political power.
So whether we like it or not, we're living in a Marxist-created power struggle.
We are in charge.
You are not.
Your children are going to get masked.
And guess what?
Parents are saying, no, they're not.
We're still in charge.
That's something we have not seen in decades.
It is a real life living example of the greatest political document ever written in the United States Constitution.
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I got a question about: hey, Charlie, who's the author of the new left?
Who's behind all of this?
It's a really important question.
Now, there isn't a single person.
You can go to Karl Marx.
You can go to Hegel and the Hegelian dialectic and the long march through institutions and a German historicist view of our experience and our existence.
Understanding Repressive Tolerance00:14:57
But there is one person that every conservative should become familiar with.
Now, I want to give a hat tip to the great Newt Gingrich.
Newt Gingrich did something back in 2012 where he insistently introduced the author and the activist Saul Alinsky into the mainstream of the conservative movement.
When I go to Republican Lincoln Reagan Day dinners, when I go to tea party meetings, which really don't exist anymore, when I go to any sort of function and I say Saul Olinski, I'd say 70 or 80% of the room knows who I'm talking about.
Now, actually, I've been going across the country speaking at churches.
You'd be amazed at how few churches know who Saul Linsky is.
A man who wrote Rules for Radicals, 13 Rules.
We've covered them extensively on this show.
And the dedication of that book was to Lucifer, who he said was the first ever rebel.
You're trying to tell me we're not in a spiritual war?
Oh, Charlie, it's just a bunch of matter versus matter.
No, it's not.
It's a spiritual war.
They admit it's a spiritual war.
Now, the man who is the architect of a lot of the chaos you're living through, the man who is largely responsible for a lot of the academic backing of what we're seeing is a man by the name of Herbert Marcuse.
He was from the Frankfurt School.
He was a communist that was kicked out of the Frankfurt School in Germany, found a safe space in the United States of America.
He taught at Harvard, Columbia, Brandeis, and eventually settled at the University of San Diego.
He was the architect of what is now known as the New Left.
It's very helpful to study history.
We do that a lot on this program.
History can be our guide.
I believe history changed right around 1960 as soon as the new left started to get power.
Students for a Democrat Society, which eventually became Weather Underground, run by William Ayres, a terrorist who became a college professor and still is a college professor at University of Illinois, Chicago.
Bernardine Dorn, they tried to bomb federal buildings, legitimate insurrectionists, and then they became professors to go teach your children because they started to realize and recognize you have to be much more patient than just blowing buildings up.
The kind of wise, aged statesman, I use those words ironically because he was anything but wise.
I guess he was aged, was Herbert Marcuse.
Came from Germany.
He was the man who clarified the adolescence that was inherent in 1960s leftism.
Now, a lot of you might be saying, Charlie, what does that to do with now?
Every single one of his propositions was adopted and has been implemented by the people who are educating your children, running the FBI, running the CIA.
And yes, even Joe Biden and John Kerry are in some ways disciples of Herbert Marcuse.
So Herbert Marcuse wrote a very famous essay called Repressive Tolerance.
Now, if you really want to confuse yourself, go read Repressive Tolerance.
I read it so you didn't have to.
There's a series of these essays that happened in the 1960s where, again, my argument is that this changed things permanently.
The 1960s of black feminism, of second-wave feminism, of identity politics, it changed the way we did American politics for so long that now here we are 60 years later, finally feeling the implemented effects of it.
That's how long it took for us to finally wake up and go to a school board meeting and say something about it.
So Herbert Marcuse wrote a series of books as well.
He wrote a book called One-Dimensional Man.
I'm not going to get into that right now.
He also wrote a book called Eros and Civilization.
Mikey can fact check me out on that fact, just clarify that.
I think it's Eros and Civilization.
Eros, one of the Greek forms of love.
There's Storge, Phileo, Eros, and Agape.
Storge is a love between a mother and a father.
Eros is a romantic type love, a sexual type love.
Phileo is a brotherly love.
I'm oversimplifying this, by the way, just so everyone's clear.
The Greek types of love have been written extensively by Christian theologians for years.
My pastor Rob McCoy talks about this rather eloquently, but I'm summarizing.
But Marcuse said the most important part of human existence is the Eros, the romantic, the sexual drive.
And until we sexually revolutionize society, you're not actually free.
So Herbert Marcuse argued that we are all living in a tyrannical society.
He said this in the 1960s.
He said, we're living in a tyrannical society because, for example, people call themselves men and call themselves women, and no one told them to do that.
That social norms and customs are actually repressing people.
This is why he called it repressive tolerance.
Herbert Marcuse believed in a thing called frame theory, in an unlimited amount of ways to interpret existence.
He believed that as soon as people are able to do whatever they want to do, however they want to do it sexually, then men or mankind will reach its highest level of existence.
This is where we get the transgender debate from, the abortion debate from.
This is where we get the birth control debate from, or argument from.
It's where a lot of these ideas started to germinate.
So Herbert Marcuse wrote this article, Repressive Tolerance, which kind of gave a lot of credibility to what is best known as the Port Huron statement by the adolescent Apparatchic left that wasn't really sure what they were saying, but they knew something was wrong and they were willing to do something about it.
And there's one part of this article that I want to focus on, which I think is exactly where we are headed right now.
There's one part of this article by the grandfather of the new left, Herbert Marcuse, that really we're seeing right now.
Now, before I go any further, Herbert Marcuse had disciples, like Socrates taught Plato, Plato taught Aristotle, Aristotle taught Alexander the Great.
Now, those were all very virtuous people.
Not so virtuous is the disciple of Herbert Marcuse, a woman by the name of Angela Davis.
I have a personal mission to, quote, make Angela Davis famous again.
Angela Davis needs to be known by every American conservative family.
If you don't know who Angela Davis is, you are not playing on the terms of their debate.
Angela Davis is a bitter, angry, need to be careful what other words I use, clever, treacherous, deceitful, yet highly effective academic who is a devout Marxist and communist.
Angela Davis, I think she still teaches in the UC system.
We can check that out.
She was the heir apparent to Herbert Marcuse.
In fact, there's actually videos you can look up online between the two.
So Marcuse wrote this.
He said, where society has entered the phase of total administration and indoctrination, let's stop there.
What did he mean by total administration and indoctrination?
He said, once the civil service and the bureaucracies and the colleges and the media are controlling everything and we've indoctrinated everyone, then this is about to happen.
This would then be a small number indeed, and not necessarily that of elected representatives of people.
He's calling for an oligarchy.
And this is something that I've been trying to warn conservatives about the last couple years, and I think they're finally starting to get it.
Quite honestly, it took years for me to get it.
It's like, shake people.
I'm like, you don't understand what's happening.
A lot of them are finally getting it.
Is that there is this lie in liberalism that everyone is going to be co-equally neutral to your opinion.
What Marcuse talks about in this essay, which I'm not going to get into all the details, is, hey, if we have ideas that we know are right, like sexual liberation and allowing children to be sexually active, which he believed was a moral good.
And you could read his essay, he talks about it, then we should shut up the people that disagree with us.
Why would we give the other side a chance to talk?
Free speech is an aberration.
Herbert Marcuse and all of his disciples said, We need a quote educational dictatorship.
That's Fauci.
That's Joe Biden.
That's Kamala Harris.
That's Nancy Pelosi.
Educational dictatorship.
The experts are in charge.
Uprooting the Western order as we know it.
No, no, no.
We're going to use our credentials.
We're going to use our earned credibility or given credibility to dominate you.
Free speech is a construct.
We're in charge.
You see, we're going to talk about this coming up shortly because there's a question about this around free speech.
And I'm going to really make you think about free speech.
We had Michael Moes on our podcast.
It was a phenomenal discussion.
He definitely made me think deeply about some of these things.
And so did Sohra Amari, who we have a podcast on as well, is what if the left played us on the free speech issue?
What if the left used free speech as a bridge to get to this educational dictatorship that Herbert Marcuse talked about?
People say, Charlie, what can I do to save the country?
How could you possibly know how to save the country if you don't know who you're up against?
Go study Angela Davis, Herbert Marcuse, Saul Linsky.
Mikey reminded me something that I did know.
I didn't forget.
I just forgot to mention it.
Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis on Saul Linsky.
That is exactly right.
Also, Saul Linsky was a mentor to Barack Hussein Obama.
Educational dictatorship is what we're entering.
Another question here from Alan, kind of the similar type thing.
Then I want to get to my drag queen and the founding fathers defense, which I think is really important.
Kind of Alan asks this question: well, Charlie, shouldn't we be the ambassadors of free speech?
Of course we should be.
As long as the other side honors free speech.
If we're the ambassadors of neutrality and they're the ones shutting us up, how do you get them to stop doing that?
A great example I could do is this, and this is something that we got to reprogram our politicians to understand the moment that we are in.
I don't say this stuff lightly.
As I've said, we're in the midst of a power struggle.
We have to understand this.
Rules that are not enforced are not taken seriously.
As I've said before, I've used this example.
When I go and board American Airlines, if I don't wear a mask, I know I will get kicked off the plane and I will be cited.
Rule enforcement.
Now, when the other side breaks the law, they're like, yeah, whatever.
No one's going to enforce this.
Rule, no enforcement.
A power struggle is only actually a power struggle when the other side respects you.
And the reason why they are so hyper-aggressive is they're trying to obliterate us until we wake up and realize that we actually control more governor's mansions than them, that we control more state legislatures than them, that we control more attorney generals than them, that there's probably more of us than them.
They're terrified at the awakening.
That's why they have to shut up Tucker Carlson.
Spy on him.
Discredit him.
Rush an agent.
That's why they have to kick Trump off Twitter.
The only thing standing in the way of their power grab is us realizing we have more power than they do.
They're a mile wide and an inch thick.
Okay, so drag queens.
A lot of people email us this question.
I guess I went viral this week.
I do that every week unintentionally.
I said something rather vanilla that my friend Matt Peterson from the Claremont Institute, super smart guy.
We're going to have him on our podcast very soon.
Said, he said this in one of our sessions, and I didn't steal it because it's just true.
And I should have given him credit.
He didn't really care.
He was actually defending me on Twitter.
He said something, and I wrote it down, and then I said it again on our podcast and our radio show, where he said, look, if Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington saw Drag Queen Story Hour happening in their local library, they'd mobilize the Minutemen.
It's like, of course that's true.
So I said that 700,000 views later on Twitter, people are losing their mind.
And so here's just one example that, again, you shouldn't have to prove obvious things.
I guess you do.
There were laws prohibiting cross-dressing originated in the colonial era, often drawing on biblical teachings and also serving the needs of society that were ordered among gendered hierarchies.
In the late 19th, early 20th centuries, psychologists developed the term transvestite and transsexual to denote individuals who wish to change their gender either physically or via clothing or social comportment.
Now, let me be very clear.
The special perversity of drag queen story hour is not just the transgender part.
That's perverse.
Trust me.
Very, these people need Jesus.
These people need order.
I'm going to pray for their salvation, like that very sad person who's marching around the White House with a dress on, whoever that person is.
The guy in the dress with the long fingernails.
The perversity is that you're doing it to children.
That's sick.
Herbert Marcuse in the new left says that's perfectly fine.
Drag queen story hour should be outlawed in every single library across the country because it preys on children.
That's the whole argument around that.
The founding fathers would have zero tolerance for, first of all, cross-dressing.
Second of all, transgenderism.
Third of all, doing that to children.
Now, some of you might be saying, Charlie, what is drag queen story hour?
Not everyone is as well read into this as we are.
There is a movement afoot in the United States where transgender people, gender-confused, gender-dysphoric people, go to libraries and get licenses or permission, permits, permits is a better word, to go conduct storytelling hour in full drag in front of five, six, and seven-year-olds.
And the debate on the right, and it was between David French and Saurabh Amari, happened a couple years ago, and Saurabh totally red-pilled me on this, is that this should be illegal.
And some conservatives are like, oh, no, no, no.
If you make Drag Queen Story Hour illegal, next they'll come for the church.
First of all, they're already coming for the church.
Second of all, stop making a moral comparison between worshiping your creator and doing a moral good and being a perv at the local library wearing a dress as a dude.
Two totally different things.
But the Constitution protects even the worst cut types of speech.
Founding Fathers Were Not Libertarians00:05:55
Yeah, that's your modern reading of the Constitution.
The Founding Fathers were very clear.
I could read one after the other.
I'll read this one.
We talked about licentiousness before.
How about this one?
Norwich Packet Editorial July 1787.
General, genuine liberty terminates in licentiousness.
It's a conservative position to say it should be illegal to wear drag and prey on little children in the library.
And the founding fathers would agree.
And just to add on to that question, I mean, Paul from New Hampshire asked us this question.
Emailed us freedom at charliekirk.com.
He said, Charlie, what are some more of the examples from the colonial era?
Well, you can go to the Virginia Constitution itself.
Let me tell you about Thomas Jefferson, right?
So Thomas Jefferson was against sodomy laws.
You can have your opinion on sodomy laws.
Now, by the way, most of the sodomy laws were for public displays of sodomy.
People are like, they're going door to door going after gay people.
That's just not true, okay?
Now, you could think whatever you want to sodomy laws, but just at least be honest, okay?
Don't say something that isn't true.
So Thomas Jefferson was considered a moderate, right?
So some of the founding fathers said we should execute and kill people for publicly doing sodomy in the streets.
Thomas Jefferson said, no, no, no.
I have a much more moderate position.
I think we should castrate them.
Just give you an idea of how socially conservative the founders were.
Now, I'm not advocating for that.
I'm not saying that's a good idea.
I am saying, though, the founding fathers designed the system we have with strict moral guidelines because they thought liberty, the pursuit of virtue, was only possible when people had the framework set in place to be able to do that.
This idea of the John Lennon founders, that they were all just a bunch of like LSD dropping, you know, drunks that were totally and completely morally questionable is revisionist.
George Washington was one of the most pious, loyally married, careful, religiously obedient people ever in the American founding.
There's tons of other examples here.
I could read Publius Federalist 16 says here, Federalist number 16, December 1787, ministers of the law land from whatever source it might emanate would doubtless be as ready to guard the national as the level local regulations from the inroads of private licentiousness.
Licentiousness is mostly in the sexual domain or the morally questionable domain, but it means having no guidelines, doing what you want.
And by the way, you can be licentious in financial behavior and licentious in moral behavior.
How about this?
Atticus 4, December 1787.
Of this, I'm secure, that we shall soon have an effective government.
The rich, the wise, the brave, the industrious, and the enterprising.
However, I'm sure they will not be content to lie at the mercy of the idle and the licentious and be prey of happy speculators.
Page after page of how the founding fathers were not just these free-loving libertarians.
No, they believed in moral order because they cared about things that were beautiful, good, and true, and they wanted to preserve the country.
The new way that we read the founders is so deceiving.
Now, was there an element of kind of social libertarianism?
Yeah, Thomas Jefferson embodied that in some of his writings.
By calling for castration and not for murder of sodomites.
Just so we're clear.
Again, not favoring those things.
Just know your history.
Don't pervert it.
I can go example after example here of Constitution at the time.
Fabius, February 1788.
Licentiousness and enthusiasm are the ruling principles of the anti-Federists and Kent Federalists and cannot be doubted, talking about Thomas Jefferson.
By their false alarms of offended justice and endangered liberty, they assume the right of corrupting each other.
Sounds like today.
And like fanatics in religion, working themselves up into enthusiastic zeal.
How about the editorial from the Newport Herald?
The indolent and the abandoned and the offscoring, this is 1788, the offscoring of the earth who have no prospects but in the state of anarchy where marauders, freebooters, knaves, and the licensed are encouraged.
They didn't really like licentiousness.
They wrote about this quite a lot.
The point is this.
You want things that last.
Do you want things that just happen for a moment and then go away?
Well, things that last require rules.
That's why you have rules in sporting events.
It's why you have rules for any sort of institution.
For example, you can't go into church and just start screaming.
You can't wear a bathing suit to church.
Rules actually make certain experiences more desirable.
Now, stupid rules and voluminous rules and laws, as James Madison would say, is an act of tyranny.
That's why you have to use prudence, practical judgment, wisdom, of which our rulers do not have.
Virginia Convention, 1788, Lee said, it was necessary to provide against licentiousness, which is so natural to our climate.
I dread for the more licentiousness of the people than from the bad government of the rulers.
I fear more of people being morally questionable than the rulers going nuts.
Patrick Henry, mixed bag, not exactly an adopter of the Constitution early.
From his then situation, King George could have furnished us with the instances in which licentiousness trampled on the laws.
I don't think I need to make my point any further, but for any of you questioning me, which there were plenty of people emailing me, the founding fathers were libertarians.
I got 17 pages to show you they believed in a transcendent moral order.
Now, their religious personal views varied from the most, let's say, editorialized would be Thomas Jefferson.
The most deist would be Ben Franklin.
But don't question the moral piety of Adams, Quincy Adams, especially.
Washington.
Hamilton, too.
Learning From Historical Sympathy00:04:29
Love getting your questions, everybody.
Freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
Make sure you subscribe to our podcast.
Type in Charlie Kirk Show.
Hit subscribe.
I love talking to you guys and getting your questions.
This was fun.
Share this episode with your friends, how the founding fathers had to mobilize the Minutemen against transgender people reading stories to children, which should be a conservative position.
That is a no-brainer.
That is not speech.
That's predatory behavior.
If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, you can go to tpusa.com where we play offense with a sense of urgency to win the American Culture War.
tpusa.com.
God bless you guys.
Talk to you soon.
So first of all, why study history?
It comes from a Greek word means inquiry, looking into things.
The first book of history was written by Herodotus.
It's called The Histories.
It's a story of the past.
And of course, not everything in the past, significant things in the past, things that we can learn from, things that stand for something.
It's just a piece, really, of this wish that we have to understand.
In his metaphysics, Aristotle says in the first line, the human soul stretches itself out to know.
We like to know.
And one of the things we like to know is we like to know about ourselves.
Because, unlike other creatures, we're not ruled simply by instinct.
We have to choose our way.
Which way should we go?
And then the second thing is we look at others.
And we are unusually well equipped to do this because we can talk.
We can explain things to each other.
We can tell each other about our inmost thoughts.
So history just expands the scope.
And the past is the only thing we can study intensely.
The present is fleeting.
The past is fixed, at least according to the old school of thought.
These days, it's a deconstructionist age.
And what we think is we're our own special time, a development or a progress on previous times.
And that sets up a way to reinterpret those old times so that they fit our categories.
And we tend to look down on them a bit too.
And that seems to me exactly wrong.
Aristotle writes, this alone is denied even to God to make what has been not to have been.
So history, it gives us a fixity that is made up of things that at the time were constantly shifting and hard to estimate.
When we're picking what we're going to do from among various options, we always have two things in mind.
One is, what would be the right thing to do?
And the other is, what is possible to do?
And you know, you can't always do the purely right thing.
Well, if you go back and study the people in the past, they're in the same situation.
And yet, in their case, the whole story is known.
It's not changing anymore.
And you can go back and you can put yourself in the shoes, you know, of Winston Churchill or of Abraham Lincoln.
Those, by the way, are two things that are sublime to do, beautiful to do, important to do.
And you can be with them where Lincoln faces the question, should I let the South go?
Look at the body count.
Lincoln grappled with that question.
You can grapple with him.
Churchill, should we fight to the death against Hitler?
He's offering a deal.
So the point is, there's a lot to know.
And what can you know?
Can you know it's now right or wrong to do what we're going to do in some country where we've had wars?
No, you can just know that a serious man had caution about that.
And what were the factors that he evaluated to make up his mind?
You could look at the same factors.
They may be different today.
But all of that depends on treating history as if it is made by people who, although very different from us in many ways, are yet still people.
The animals that can talk to each other, learn from each other, recognize good and evil, which are all, by the way, we have a course on Aristotle where we explain this.
Recognizing Good And Evil00:00:49
Those are all related.
Our ability to see good and evil and our ability to talk boil down to the same thing.
And so a creature like that, which lives in a perishable body and has needs, how does it steer itself by the ultimate truth when in its needs it's just like any animal?
Well, that's the human test.
And the people in the past had to go through that test.
Good history, then, will be an accurate insofar as it's humanly possible to make it picture of what happened in the past.
There's a sympathy for the people so that one can learn from them.
They made mistakes.
Yeah, and don't we?
Do we live in a perfect world today?
If we don't, then they were grappling with the same thing we are.