How the Church Changed Virginia—Live from Cornerstone Chapel in Loudon County
Charlie speaks at Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg, Virginia with Pastor Gary Hamrick a few days before the VA elections that shook the political universe. The county seat of Loudoun County, Virginia, Cornerstone Church was one of a handful of bold and courageous communities of faith that stood in the gap for the rest of America and helped deliver a red wave that pushed back against the onslaught of cultural Marxism. Charlie and Pastor Gary take the position that churches must make statements of bold moral clarity rooted in scripture and faith if they hope to take back the culture. Charlie posits that the in order to have limited government, you must have the Church; in order to have an orderly society you must have virtue. Complete with Q&A from the 3,000 in attendance, this is a faith-filled message that proved prophetic in many ways. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Turning Point Faith Mission00:09:23
Hey everybody, happy Sunday.
My conversation live from our event, Freedom Night in America, and then I take questions.
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So I'm only going to mention a couple things.
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Make sure you're coming to AmericaFest, everybody.
tpusa.com slash amf December 18, 19, 2021.
I'm going to keep on plugging it because I want to see you all there.
It is going to be the biggest event of the year.
You don't want to miss it.
Buckle up.
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.
Great to be here, everybody.
And we were just kind of catching up backstage.
We had some wonderful events today.
And this is the center of the American political universe right now, Loudoun County.
This is where it's all happening.
And we're going to talk about that tonight.
But I just want to first say, you have an amazing pastor here at this church.
You really do.
And as we tell the story of moms and dads stepping up in Loudoun County, you start to see some common themes that this church, proclaiming the gospel, teaching the word of God, doing what it tells us to do in Romans, to proclaim what is good and hate what is evil.
All of a sudden, you realize that this church has played a major role in that.
So I just want to encourage you and commend all of you because as believers, we're called to do that.
Be salt and light and to proclaim the good news and also refute evil where it rears its head.
And I believe this church has played an integral role in that.
And so I'm honored to be here for that.
Thank you for that.
Appreciate that.
So, Charlie, we're going to be having a conversation tonight.
The way that I've kind of explained it to our congregation is that, you know, there are so many things happening in our culture today, but you have started Turning Point Faith as kind of a leg of Turning Point USA because you see, as I do, the importance of the church integrating the church's voice, the evangelical Christian community, and what is happening in our culture.
And so we're going to be talking about all these hot topic issues.
We're not going to leave any of them on the table.
There may not be enough time to talk about all of them, but we're going to touch on the important ones for sure.
And we're going to be talking about these also from the standpoint of what's the biblical lens to kind of how do we handle these different issues and what do we what do we do about Them and how do we try to be this salt and light in our community?
So, so we're not just here to talk about all that's wrong.
We're gonna highlight the things that are wrong that concern us, especially as Christians.
But then we're also gonna be talking about this through the grid of God's word and through a biblical worldview.
So, that's kind of what this is all about.
But explain to everybody, just real briefly, why did you launch Turning Point Faith?
Yeah, look, we're all in the fight for liberty, and liberty is not man's idea, it's God's idea.
And we, as Christians, we are called to do more.
And, you know, I gave my life to Christ when I was in fifth grade.
So, any fifth graders out there, I encourage you to give your life to Christ.
All right, there you go.
Good year.
That was the year 2005 when I was in fifth grade, by the way.
And it was a good year.
Are you serious?
Yeah, that's right.
Oh, man.
And I say it was the most important year in my life when you enter into God's eternal family and you enter into the kingdom of God.
As you get older, that means more and more to you.
And you realize really what grace is and what your relationship with Jesus Christ is.
And I was raised in a Bible-believing church in the suburbs of Chicago, and I was always taught that we as Christians in the church should never comment on what's happening in the news, never comment on what's happening outside of the walls of the church.
We just do the gospel, you know, we try to increase our budget, build bigger buildings, and do more baptisms.
That's it.
And don't question it.
And I bought into it.
And as I started Turning Point USA, I always felt that I had to be outside of the church, never talk about the church.
And then I met my now pastor, Rob McCoy, who's an amazing American, a great man, in Calvary Chapel, Thousand Oaks, California.
He said, Charlie, you're looking at this wrong.
He said, you're trying to set the captives free.
You're trying to fight for liberty and try to make people live virtuous and moral lives.
You're trying to fight for a constitutional republic that is a gift from God and try to motivate God's church to do more in that regard.
And he made a very compelling argument on how the American church founded this country, on how the American church was the leading force for defeating communism internationally and also some of the Marxist forces here domestically in the 1950s and 60s.
And so he was really, he was kind enough to have me speak at his church.
And then I went and spoke at Jack Hibbs' church, another great American and dear friend of mine.
And I thought to myself, wow, what if the church really stood up and proclaimed with courage the way that Jesus told us to in a time where everything seemed to be falling apart?
The church can be the leader at this time.
And then the Fauci virus started in spring of March of 2020 and everything gets locked down.
And I always thought the lockdowns were going down as one of the worst mistakes in American history.
It was bad for everybody.
We quarantined our abused abused with the abusers.
We had children not be able to have connections with their friends.
And for almost no net benefit whatsoever, the forcible lockdowns were a massive mistake.
But what really crossed the line for me is when the church was forcibly closed and called non-essential, while abortion factories remained open, strip clubs remained open, and marijuana shops and liquor stores remained open.
I said, no, this is not, that dog does not hunt.
That is not going to happen.
And so I started to speak at churches across the country at a lot of Calvary chapels bringing this message.
And it was enthusiastically received because I felt that I was positioned as someone who's kind of been in the political cultural space for nine years to try to encourage and motivate the body of Christ to stand for liberty against tyranny as we were being forcibly closed.
I spoke at 50 churches in 2020, and I realized that if there is any hope for this incredible gift that we have been given, as we know, as Western civilization, a constitutional republic of consent of the governed, separation of powers, independent judiciary, and individual liberty and a natural rights doctrine, that hope is the church.
That hope is Christians and believers standing up and rising up.
And we prayed about this and we said, is it time for all the work we've been doing on college campuses to continue, but now grow and see where we can be helpful in the church space and to find pastors like you and Jack Hibbs and Rob McCoy and Greg Farrington and so many others and to support them and assist them and try to be a part of a coalition to try to have the American church take its rightful place as counsel to the king,
as it tells us in the scriptures.
So we launched Turning Point Faith.
It's still in its infancy.
We are having events like this all across the country.
We're doing this monthly in Phoenix, Arizona.
We're doing Freedom Night in America at Dream City Church, where we're doing everything we can to try to turn Arizona back to its rightful place as a moral and righteous place.
And our biggest contribution is we want to be part of a team that realizes, man, it's not going to be secular society that saves us.
It has to be the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It has to be faith-filled Christians.
And I just want to give some examples of this, though, that when we travel the country, we start to see the people that are showing up at school board meetings, the people that are showing up and calling what is good good and what is evil evil.
It's Christians.
It's people pouring into the word.
And if we're honest about our history, every single awakening and revival in America is always led by people from the church for the betterment of their nation, their community, and their family.
It says in Jeremiah 29, 7, one of my favorite scriptures, it says so clearly, demand, which is the Hebrew word, badrash, the welfare or the shalom, of the welfare or the peace of the nation you are in, because your welfare is tied to your nation's welfare.
That's the Lord speaking in Jeremiah 29, 7.
We are called to care about what's happening in the nation that we are in.
And we have been given a gift, everybody, the greatest nation ever to exist in the history of the planet.
And we as Christians must realize how good we have it.
And that if we do nothing, it's going to collapse around us.
And if we do something, not only can we save it, but we can bring it to a level better than it's ever been before.
The Soviet Union Lesson00:05:46
Yeah.
Yeah.
Amen.
So one of my heroes, and I'm sure probably yours, Dietrich Bonofer.
And Bonofer said silence in the face of evil is itself evil, and God will not hold us guiltless.
Not to speak is to speak.
Not to act is to act.
What parallels do you see?
I mentioned at the Pray Vote Stand Summit that I felt like there were some parallels between what's happening in America and what was happening in Nazi Germany.
The right-wing watch, for our friends.
No, they're not.
They're my publicists.
Everything I say ends up on their website.
It's a very, you know, yeah.
And me not as much, but they've put stuff I've said there too.
And one of the things they called me out on was that.
Like, what are you saying?
The parallels.
What parallels do you see?
What is startling to you about the path that America is on compared to what we've seen in history?
I mean, there's a lot of parallels.
And also expand that to the Soviet Union.
Winston Churchill, the greatest man to live in the 20th century, he warned us about how will we be able to manage technological advancements while we have moral decline.
I want you to think deeply about that.
How do you manage things getting quicker and faster and better and yet people getting further and further from what is right, what is true, what is good?
It doesn't end well.
It ends with a small group of unelected scientists calling all the shots of what is right and what is wrong.
The idea of a mad scientist came from 1920s, 1930s, Germany, where they were run primarily through people that thought they could change human nature in itself.
The eugenics movement that actually was here in America in the early 1920s, 1930s was this idea of giving an incredible amount of power of unelected, unknown, unchecked scientists, and they will impart their own morality on the rest of society.
The Soviet Union was similar but was different.
The Soviet Union had a much greater emphasis on the destruction of the family.
And this is a characteristic of totalitarian governments that were all throughout the 20th century, which was trying to destroy the bond between a parent and a child.
What is the only one of the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue, that comes with a promise?
Honor your mother and father so you may live long in the land of which you are in.
This is exactly why they're trying to destroy the bond between parents and children here in Loudoun County.
A certain person running for a certain office in a certain state says, Of course, parents don't have a say in their children's education.
Now, why would he say that?
Now, let's go deeper.
Why?
It's because families keep you free.
So simple, obviously.
Families are strong.
You don't need government programs.
Families are strong.
You don't need some public sector bureaucrat teaching your ninth grader sexual education.
But if families fall apart, it makes government stronger.
The Soviet Union realized this.
The Soviet Union went on a deliberate campaign to try and destroy the nuclear family, and they were largely successful in doing this.
In Mao's China, in the Cultural Revolution, they paid children and trained them to turn in their parents if they were anything but completely loyal to the state.
And this is where the church needs to not just, you know, say what is right, what is wrong.
We have to intervene into the public square and say we will not allow families to be destroyed at the expense of the state.
And so, but this is a really important point, which is that the history of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, they say, oh, it's repeating itself, but why?
It's because human nature doesn't change.
That's why we know this.
Anyone who reads the Bible and gets past Genesis 3 realizes that we are broken by nature.
You don't have to overly complicate this, but the left in this country believe human nature is malleable.
It is changeable.
We believe that there is a default coding within who we are as human beings as broken, sinful, nasty, brutish, short.
Now, this is why the Constitution is just as relevant, in fact, more relevant today than it was in the 1780s.
And there's an accusation that is commonly thrown at the founding fathers: oh, what are you going to honor a document that's 240 years old?
And now, we as Christians should take offense to this because you know what they're going to say next?
What are you reading a book that's 2,000 years old?
Now, why should we honor old things?
Well, if those old things are full of wisdom and they are true, it's because the Constitution was not written for the time, it was written to stand the test of time because it was an observation of how human beings are in their state of nature.
And so then we can all of a sudden say, Oh, how are tyrants?
How do they operate?
Well, they do a couple things.
Aristotle said there is an amazing book in book five of the politics of Aristotle 2,500 years ago, book five, chapter 10.
He said, Tyrants make people unfamiliar to one another.
I wonder what they did in the last year to make us unfamiliar to one another.
They keep the schools and gymnasiums closed.
2,500 years ago, he wrote this.
Because it is the habit of a tyrant to make sure that you distrust your fellow citizen, that dialogue, communication, and community disappears, and one person is able to have a say over the collective.
Now, why is that just as true today as it was 2,500 years ago?
Because not only are we able to say how human nature was 2,500 years ago, but we know how dictators, tyrants, czars, and Caesars operate.
They try to make you distrust your fellow man.
They try to make you not want to have some sort of connection to a transcendent order, try to have objective morality.
And so, yes, the similarities of the 1930s, 1940s Germany, or 1960s China or 1960s Vietnam are incredibly similar.
Why Conservatism Needs Christianity00:15:59
And here's the other thing.
We must dismiss ourselves of this lie.
I hear it all the time.
It'll never happen here in America.
It'll never happen here.
Five years ago, if I spoke here at this church, I would say that we had forcibly masked our four-year-olds, that we would have people take vaccines against their will for a virus they already are naturally immunized against.
If I would have told you we'd have locked down our country, but we would allow rioting and protesting happening in the streets, you'd say that would never happen here in America.
Now, all of you are alert and you're aware of what's happening around you, but we must have the humility that even though we are the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world, the same tyranny, the same despotism, the same sort of destruction that happened internationally, it can happen here.
Yes, it can.
And it's up to us to stop it.
Yes, it can.
Charlie, I want to ask you, you know, sometimes the accusation against Christians who are politically savvy and culturally involved is that, you know, you guys are crossing the line and, you know, keep church in the church, keep politics out of the church, and you guys shouldn't mix the two.
I mean, we had candidate Yonkin came by last Sunday and, you know, we welcomed him.
The sheriff was here and it was Faith and Blue Week and I brought him up and honored him.
And the sheriff's Facebook page lit up because people said, how dare he go into a church?
He's an elected official and the separation of church and state.
Speak to that nonsense.
Yeah, sure.
So I injected my opinion there.
No.
You led the questionnaire, Gary.
How's you?
You led me in the right direction.
So, yeah, let's start with this.
First of all, any Christian that says you should not comment on politics, you shouldn't care what happens in government.
They got to get a pair of scissors and cut out a lot of parts of their Bible.
They have to cut out the parts of the Bible where God's people were trying to influence their secular government for his purpose.
How about Esther, Mordecai, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, Joseph, just to name a few of people, Daniel, that were trying to influence secular government for God's purpose.
It's all throughout the Old Testament that the people of God were trying to be counselors to the king.
So let's just start with that one basic fact.
And also, in one of the most famous scriptures, Jesus took his disciples up to the Caesarea Philippi, and he asked the question, who do men say that I am?
And the dialogue continues.
And many people believe it says that Jesus pointed to Peter and said, on this rock, build my church.
But the original Greek word that actually the original translator was killed, Tyndale, was killed for actually discovering this.
He said, on this rock, build my ecclesia.
Now, ecclesia is a Greek term that literally meant community, political gathering.
It was a term used in ancient Greece where the citizens of a certain area would fast and pray, come into a room like this, and they would worry about what's happening in their local community.
They would even vote in an ecclesia.
Now, mind you, the word that Jesus used was, you know, on this rock, he did not say, build my temple or synagogue.
Instead, Jesus Christ commanded us, the disciples of him, the followers of Christ, to not have compartmentalized Christianity, but comprehensive Christianity, to care about all things that are happening around us, to care about the moral decay, to care about the instruments of government.
So this idea that we as Christians should just not care about what's happening in government, it's not just wrong.
It's unbiblical.
That's right.
Let's start with separation of church and state.
So I'm sure you guys have heard this from your wonderful pastor before, but repetition is the soul of memory.
Which is.
Give it, preach it.
Thank you.
Which is nowhere in the U.S. Constitution does it say separation church and state.
It was a single letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Convention, and he's even misquoted in the context of the letter because Thomas Jefferson himself even allowed churches to do religious ceremonies in the Supreme Court building.
Let's pretend, though, for argument's sake, that let's pretend that there was separation of church and state.
Let's just play it and say this.
Let's play by their own false book of rules.
Then why don't we keep the state out of the church?
Who are they to say that you have to take a vaccine against your will?
Who are they to say that you must lock down your doors of the church?
Who are they to say that you have to preach a certain word here?
Hold on a second.
I thought you wanted to separate your church and state.
That's not true.
What they're really saying is, Christians, we're afraid if you get involved and try to take over the local government.
Christians, we're afraid that with your influence and your numbers, you try to run for local office.
They're trying to intimidate you.
They're trying to suppress you from actually taking your rightful place as counselor to the king and being leaders in your local, state, and federal elections.
And they're doing this through an unconstitutional and immoral stance while they're trying to say, just stay in your place.
Hold on a second.
They violated that kind of non-aggression principle when all of a sudden they started to go through into the public schools and teach the graphic and portographic sexual education that they're doing in Loudoun County schools.
They violated that principle when they started to go after kids and say, you know what?
There is no God.
And if you dare say there is a God in my local classroom, they'll be graded differently.
They violated that principle when they have to take, they tell public school teachers here in Loudoun County that you must call men girls and girls men.
They violated that principle.
And so instead of us trying to negotiate on their own book of rules, which is not even a correct book of rules, we must say this.
We as Christians must understand the founding fathers said clearly, John Adams said, this constitutional republic was made solely for a moral and religious people.
It is wholly inadequate to the people of any other.
That this type of government that we have does not, it's not just nice if Christians get involved.
It demands Christian involvement.
That's right.
This government falls apart if Christians are not involved.
Now, if you want to go live in a collectivist type society, if you want to go live in France or Spain or Italy, where the government is the most important thing, then fine.
Christians don't have to get involved there.
They could show up on Easter or on Christmas.
But if you want to actually have limited government, then you must have big church.
If you want to have small government, then you must have Christians involved at every level.
Why?
It's because when you have small government, it's hard.
You must have virtue.
You must have people that know what is right and know what is wrong.
You must have strong, volunteer community charity-based institutions.
These are difficult things.
And if we want to go the way where government runs your whole life, where a small group of unelected tech oligarchs are the most important things in American society, then so be it.
But here's what they really fear, and here's why they posture and they do this.
They know that the untapped power and potential of the American church is the greatest threat to their tyranny.
They know that when the American church and Christians, as demonstrated by this Loudoun County example, when all of a sudden that Christians start running for school board, Christians start showing up to these meetings, they lose control.
They know that when moms and dads show up to these local school board meetings and say, hold on a second, why are you teaching CRT to my children?
Hold on a second.
Why did you cover up the rape of a ninth grader and then transfer that student and lie about it again?
We're not going to put up with this anymore.
And the American church is not going to tolerate it.
Now.
Now, those of you who are standing should run for the school board.
That's where the rubber meets the road, though.
Because the last thing that I want, and I'm sure others want, the last thing is that we just want to be painted as just angry Christians.
And we love to quote the verse about Jesus turning over the tables.
We don't want the reputation of being against stuff.
So you have to be for things.
Like, if you want to voice your objection to things, then you have to also be willing to step up and be involved, which is part of what we're talking about here, too.
One of the biggest things I hear, Charlie, and then after I ask this, we'll start to take some questions.
So, if you want to ask a question, go ahead and get in lines at the microphones.
But please, a little word of instruction: it's not an opportunity to pontificate.
Don't come to make a statement, don't come to say you're running for something.
You know, we ask a question, and you know, we want to be able to answer questions.
So, otherwise, we will tase you.
Yes.
But in love, in love.
Yes.
Completely in love.
And we'll share Jesus on the way down to the floor.
But here, so here's my question to you, though.
My question to you is: how do you, what's your advice to Christians, the evangelical church, about how to be against things that conflict with scripture and a biblical worldview and still somehow try to win people over in the argument?
Yeah, this is really important.
I try to do this the best I can.
I don't always succeed.
We're all imperfect.
We're all sinners.
I have a tendency to debate a lot of people on the left.
Maybe some of you saw my recent debate, the abortion debate.
It was kind of a circus.
And for him, not for me.
It was great for me.
It was a lot of fun.
You guys should check it out.
We're going to University of Vermont, by the way, tomorrow.
I think the rioting has already started.
It's like ahead of time.
It's like they're just trying to get it out of their system.
I'm not kidding.
It's going to be quite a scene to see.
Is Bernie going to be there?
He was an invited speaker, but I don't think he's.
He's giving free college tuition.
That's right.
Somewhere.
Somewhere in the world.
All right.
No, he was the former mayor of Burlington, and he won't be there, I don't think, tomorrow.
We're going to University of Oregon next week as well, which will be even more interesting.
So, yeah, I know.
And so this is important, which is: look, Jesus was 100% grace and 100% truth, which is do not have a heart to seek to offend.
But if someone gets offended by you telling the truth, that's their problem, not your problem.
And people say, Charlie, how can I, what can I do?
What can I do to actually make a difference?
Be the same person in public that you are in private.
Be the same person with your friends that you are at work.
Now, that's tough because some people might lose their job because some people might get ridiculed and mocked, and you might get targeted on social media.
I fully understand that.
But in everything you do, try to make people understand the style of what you're doing is deliberate and factual.
It's not incendiary.
It's not over the top.
But let me be very clear: never waver in the truth.
And I'll give you an example.
It'd be very easy if I went to college campuses and I tried to water down my message.
Now, I'm very clear that men should not participate in women's sports.
I'm very clear that God created man and God created woman.
And for whatever reason, the other side gets so incredibly upset on the transgender thing.
I really don't care.
This is a non-compromising issue for me, which is that biological standards, the science is behind us, the scriptures are behind us, common sense is behind us.
And dare I need to give any more example in the last week of kind of how these exit how this can go wrong.
And I'll also give you another example.
I don't compromise on life when I go to these campuses.
That I say that life begins at the moment of conception, and we should not apologize or waiver on that issue.
And so, and you know, some people say that I should water it down, or you're not going to win over the people at the University of Vermont.
Like, okay, to win them over, I'd have to make quite a lot of adjustments to my worldview.
But the truth is a tricky thing.
It's actually an amazing thing.
It has a way to defend itself once you let it out.
And I'm of the opinion that one of the reasons we've been losing the last 20 to 30 years is that we have been trying to pander and water down the truth to try to win over the world and not defend the word.
And that does not mean you have to be insulting or incendiary.
And there's people that come to my events, and there are people that have had abortions before.
I don't try to judge them or try to castigate them.
I try to tell them the gospel of Jesus Christ.
But if they asked me directly, do you think I made the right choice?
I would say no.
I wouldn't waver on that.
However, I will say that women that have had abortions, I think they're largely victims of an abortion industry that lied to them.
And many of them had no idea what was actually being done to them at that time.
So a lot of it's stylistic.
It's also word choice.
It's dictionary.
It's how you present yourself.
But my number one goal is not trying to pander or try to have people in the middle or try to people say, you know what?
You know, he really didn't say much, but I kind of like the way he said it.
Instead, I want people to say, you know what?
Everything that Charlie did, he stood for truth.
I disagreed with him, but he came at it in a factual and a reasonable way.
And I think that's the best way to try to go about doing it.
Not insultingly and try to also have a lightheartedness about it.
Try to have good cheer and try to win over people in that way.
But I just want to reinforce this.
Never water down your message, everybody.
Do not ever, in any instance, try to say something you don't believe because you think it's going to win over a different type of audience.
That right there is a massive negative.
I think it does more harm than good.
Yeah, agreed.
Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back and forth.
I'm going to go microphone and then they're sending me some of these questions that were texted.
And then I'll go to this microphone and so we'll just kind of go around.
So go ahead.
Yeah, please keep the questions short so we can get as many in as possible.
Go ahead.
Okay, so I think what you've been saying is that the first priority is God and then we have conservatism.
But I've also witnessed some conservatives feel like they need to be Christians just because that's what conservatives are or that's where values come from.
So how do we actually fit Christianity in conservatism?
Is that we need to witness the gospel to people through conservatism while also not falling prey to thinking that we should be Christians just because we're conservatives?
Yeah, I haven't experienced that as much, but I'm sure it's out there.
So yeah, look, I'm very clear.
My life's work is in the second most important thing that you can do.
The most important thing you can do is give your life to Christ and win souls for Christ.
It's the number one most important thing.
The second most important thing is to make sure you can do the first thing.
Yeah.
My life's work is to make sure churches can remain open, that you don't have to get vaccines against your will, that your children don't have to be taught curriculum that's against your values, to make sure that homeschooling is allowed and legal in the law of the land.
That's my life's work.
And I make no qualms about it.
It's not as important as the kingdom of God.
But it is important to make sure all of you know that sometimes the second is needed for the first because there's plenty of examples right here on this planet where this gathering would be illegal.
Now, let me say this, though.
It's not up for us to try to fit Christianity and conservatism.
You try to fit conservatism in Christianity.
Christianity is the most important thing.
The word of God is the most important thing.
The founding fathers understood this.
If you go to the founding documents, the document that is cited the most as inspiration by far is the Bible.
55 out of 56 of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Bible-believing, regular church attending Christians.
This country was founded by Christians, by people that were filled with the word of God.
We call them pilgrims for a reason.
Usually you call people pilgrims when they go to Israel.
We call them pilgrims because they came to a new land trying to start a new covenant, trying to start a new covenant with God on earth, saying that we want to worship you in all ways possible, starting something ex nihilo, which means out of nothing, where they birthed a new civilization.
And when you read the writings of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, of Jonathan Mayhew, of George Whitfield, of Jonathan Edwards, the original pastors and the people in colonial times that actually inspired the American Revolution, you realize that this constitutional republic that we have with the Constitution of the United States that was ratified and started in 1787 after the Constitutional Convention, we the people, these are ideas that are so profoundly biblical that the failure for us to recognize, I think, is a big mistake.
Federal Government Mandates00:12:45
But I want to just make sure that I reinforce this point.
The most important thing for us and for the church is to win people over for Jesus Christ.
And if anyone here tonight that might follow my commentary and might not have given your life to Christ, we'll have an opportunity.
I think we're going to do that tonight.
Of what is the gospel?
The gospel in four words is Jesus took my place.
Three words, him for me.
Two words, substitutionary atonement.
One word, grace, which is no matter how good of a life you live, no matter how many boxes you check, we are all in need of the sacrifice and the gift that is Jesus Christ and you accepting Jesus into your life.
You will be born new.
You'll be made a new person.
And with that, you will be able to enter into eternal life with Jesus Christ, the most important decision you can make in your life.
You're right.
Well said.
So, Charlie, a lot of questions about the vax mandate.
So one person texted in, they know that you're fighting to protect schools from the mandate.
You know, the real issue is the mandate.
People can have a personal conviction about the vaccine.
The real issue is government overreach, tyrannical things, a mandate.
And so the question is, are you aware of anything happening for federal employees and contractors?
We talked a little bit about this earlier, you and me.
What's your advice there?
Yeah, this is a tough one.
I mean, we launched our no-forced mandate vaccine mandate campaign back in July, and we were ahead of the curve.
Unfortunately, it's just been an overwhelming deluge of mandates.
And so let me, I don't care if you've gotten vaccinated.
It's really not my business.
I'll tell you my personal medical history if you really want to know.
I'm not vaccinated with the Fauci virus vaccine.
I don't plan to get it.
And if you decide to get it, fine.
That's your own decision.
I really don't care.
If you decide not to get it, then you should never be forced to get it against your will.
It's very simple.
And I just want to add one thing, though, that I think one of the greatest injustices in American society has been the suppression of treatments that are proving to be rather compelling.
And regardless of your stance on the vaccine, the fact we're not even allowed to talk about ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, vitamin D, aspirin, monoclonal antibodies, I think has been one of the great injustices.
Even a discussion about it, it gets clamped down on social media, news media.
It's a total travesty.
And so for federal workers, I'm afraid to say there really is not much hope in sight, minus some judges intervening, which I do hope happens sometime soon.
And it's been a real learning lesson to see how few conservatives have stood up at this moment for people that are forced to get the vaccine against their will.
So many people in the U.S. Senate and Congress say, what's the big deal?
Why don't you just go get it?
And they really don't first understand the overwhelming tyranny that's embedded in this.
They don't understand the truth of why so many of us are trying to reject it.
I don't think they've ever heard about natural immunity before, which is a major issue.
And so as long as I have a platform, I'm going to continue to advocate for this.
And make no mistake, everybody, a lot of people on the conservative side, they're getting paid off by Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson and Moderna and AstraZeneca.
This has been, in my opinion, a refiner's fire.
We have seen who on the conservative side really cares about individual sovereignty, the rights of the individual, and also pushing back against this overwhelming leviathan that is trying to force you to get vaccines against your will.
And let me just say this with the children.
I think it is immoral and it is evil to force children to get this vaccine.
And that has to be the line that we do not let them to cross.
And so, you know, I just informed our congregation this morning that the State Board of Health is allowing public commentary until midnight tonight, folks.
Make your voices known because they want to issue a mandate that all K-12 students and teachers, public and private schools, must be vaccinated and no religious exemption.
Also, explain, educate people real quickly, and then we'll go over here to this microphone.
But we talked earlier about how the executive order applies to federal employees and to government contractors, but not go ahead and talk about OSHA.
Yeah, this is an important distinction.
As of right now, there is not an executive order through OSHA for private companies.
It does not exist.
It's simply a press release.
There is an executive order for federal contractors.
So you might work for Boeing that technically is a federal contractor, right?
You might work for, I know that a lot of people in Northern Virginia work for these companies, which is why I'm saying this.
You might work for Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.
Therefore, you're a federal contractor.
Even if you work for Southwest Airlines, you might be a federal contractor because 5% of their business is a federal contractor.
That's where the mandate has applied, and there's a lot of kind of wiggle room there.
But right now, if you are working for a private company, and I know this because we're going to sue because we have 195 employees at Turning Point USA, and you're not going to tell me how to run my business Biden regime, like that's not going to happen.
And it's not going to happen.
That if that order does come down from OSHA, that we'll sue immediately.
The order doesn't exist.
The OSHA language has not yet been created.
It has not been there.
Now, it might come anytime soon.
It might be impending.
I don't think so.
I think they know that the courts would overturn it, and they're trying to dictate policy by press release and the threat of it by creating confusion by doing a big press conference and not even having a follow-up policy by saying, like, oh, we said it, therefore people think it's law, even though there's no executive order behind it.
And let me be very clear why that executive order was written.
It was written as an intervention into the labor market to bail out big business.
I say, what do you mean by that?
Big businesses were about to lose their best workers and they were going to go to smaller businesses and mid-level businesses that weren't mandating the vaccine.
So big businesses, you know, think Goldman Sachs, think JPMorgan Chase.
They called up Biden through the Chamber of Commerce and they said, hey, we need you to bail us out and you need to make it seem as if all businesses were going to do this.
Therefore, we don't lose 20% of our employees.
Because they were about to have a labor shortage of their best employees at top businesses that were about to leave and go to competitors.
It was going to create an unvaccinated, non-mandatory, mandatory vaccine, competitive labor market.
This was a move of crony capitalist, anti-competitive measure to try to make those of you that are being forced to get the vaccine at private companies think as if you have no choice.
And a lot of companies fell for this.
A lot of companies like, oh, it's mandated.
Be like, show me the executive order.
Show me the OSHA order.
Now, again, if you are a federal contractor or a federal employee, that is a real order.
I don't have great news for you in that way.
But if you're a private business, if you're a 200-employee accountant that doesn't do work for the federal government, not a federal contractor, it does not apply.
Now, there might be county-level stuff.
There might be state-level stuff, but you cannot hide behind that at the Biden level, at the national level or the federal level.
By the way, it's just unconstitutional in every way, shape, or form.
And sense one, is it your employer's business to tell you what to do with your most intimate medical history?
Could you imagine the outrage if all of a sudden that I or Gary or anyone went to their employees and be like, oh, yeah, by the way, I need to see all the medication you're taking, and you're not allowed to take birth control if you work for me.
Could you imagine the outrage that would happen in America?
That of course it would be overwhelming.
And so we actually have more job applications than ever before.
It's like, oh, wow, at Turning Point USA, you're not going to force a vaccine.
Can I come work for you?
We have thousands of people applying for jobs, and I'm going to defend the rights of my employees.
It's not my business to ask what their medical history is.
And we still need to be a nation of liberty.
You make the decisions and pursue the virtue that you see fit, which is at the most fundamental level.
Your medical decisions absent some weird creepy boss being like yeah, you must take some vaccine, because I tell you it's like.
No, actually.
No, that's not the way this works is stop asking questions.
Yeah, I mean our own Leesburg TOWN Council, our own Leesburg TOWN Council just this week made it mandatory for Leesburg town employees.
And wasn't Rob Mccoy, didn't?
He wasn't he also mayor of?
Yeah, he was, he was.
Somebody needs to run for mayor somewhat.
I'm telling you, mayor is one of the most powerful positions in America that people overlook.
Mayor is an incredibly important position, including city council.
Now, the problem with those is you have to stay till like 2 a.m, going over like the circumference of oak trees at these meetings.
Right, it is.
It takes us, it's a special type of punishment to sit through a Leesburg government city Council meeting.
You're like oh, my goodness, this is what I signed up for.
Yes okay, it's called duty, it's called service and do it okay for the greater good.
Okay, gets the next question.
Good evening, Charlie.
Thank you for being here this evening.
My name's Mike Hart and my question has to do with a reference you made to the techno-oligarchs.
If I made the pitch that the leftist political power center is not in Washington Dc, that's right, and it is in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where a certain governor recently won in a runoff.
Would I be accurate?
And if so, how would we influence that or counter that, that political power in on the west coast?
It's a profound question.
We have two governments in our country, one we elect and one we log into, and which one's more powerful?
They both actually have more power in different ways, but I think currently our tech government is more powerful.
The federal government is able to put you in prison, that is true.
But if the if the federal government walked in today, like they did with moms and dads, with the school board meetings, with the Department OF Justice, like they're domestic terrorists, like yeah right, we were part of that memo.
By the way, at Turning Point Usa, according to the National School Board Association, they said, use the Patriot Act against Turning Point Usa because they have a school board watch list.
See, we get unfazed by this.
We say, weren't you already using the Patriot Act against us?
Like, I guess you weren't.
So that's a little heartwarming.
Um, I guess it's like, whatever, we already know.
We're living in a police state, you know.
It's just a matter of time of trying to stop it but yes, at least I get a lawyer when the government comes after me.
Yeah, when Google comes after me, there's no right of recourse, redress or grievance.
When you try to sue these companies, you just disappear into tech oblivion.
Google has thousands of people that work for them and all they do is try to manipulate google search to try to have you and your children spend more time staring at their screens, to try to control your social behavior and your political Viewpoints.
The federal government takes off Arbor Day.
Like, not exactly, I mean, I know some of you work for federal government.
You're probably very hardworking people.
Awesome.
Great.
Please, like, tell your fellow people not to work as hard.
I don't want the federal government to work hard.
I want them to be slow because what they're doing is bad.
Okay.
I know.
I know that.
Not everyone.
Okay.
There's some wonderful.
I just lost half my church.
Thanks a lot.
No.
By the way, when I say that in Texas, everyone's like, standing ovation.
When I give that speech in Northern Virginia, it's like, ah, yeah, sure.
I forget where I am.
That's right.
I forgot.
It's the wealthiest county in America near the kingdom of Washington, D.C. Remember that.
High income, high capital, steady stream of taxpayer dollars come into here.
Which is true.
And it's not an accusation.
There's some phenomenal people that work for the federal government.
But we all know there's plenty of things that are happening in the federal government that should not be happening.
But the tech government has no check and balance against it.
Zero.
With the federal government, you could do hearings, subpoenas, oversight committees, budgetary process.
Congress doesn't use that authority as often as it should, but the tech government knows all of you are here tonight.
They know all of the music you listen to.
They know your credit card behavior.
They know where you went on vacation.
They know your political beliefs.
They can track you in real time.
We're supposed to believe they're not going to abuse that power.
Now, I make the claim, and I'll prove it, that Biden was not elected.
He was implemented.
And I'll go through this.
Our second government that you lost, man.
Exactly.
The second government that you log into in Menlo Park, California, the CEO of Facebook put $420 million in this last election through the Center for Technology and Civic Life and changed the way we did elections in this country in the most partisan intervention in our elections in our nation's history.
That is an unprecedented infiltration into how we do elections by actually hiring the people that count the ballots in many swing states in Gwinnett County, Georgia, in Fulton County, Georgia, in Antrim County, Michigan, in Maricopa County, Arizona.
Breaking Up Tech Giants00:03:18
That sort of power, that sort of funding into our democratic process is wrong.
It's unconstitutional.
It should be illegal.
And so what do we do about this second government that's been created?
Well, this was my biggest complaint out of congressional Republicans that served in office back when all three chambers of power were there.
Instead of cutting corporate taxes of Facebook, Google, and Twitter, why aren't you trying to restrain the power of these tech companies that are dominating our lives?
By the way, they're making your children less self-confident, less loving of the Lord, less likely to have functional relationships.
I'm going to say something super provocative, but I say it at every place I speak at a church.
Parents, your children should not have a smartphone till they're 18 years old.
I know, I lose half the room.
I want to bring back the jitterbug.
Do you remember the jitter bug?
The jitter bug.
The big phone, like, so some parents say, well, you know, I need a way to get in touch with my kids in case there's an emergency.
Get life alert then, okay?
Like, seriously, push a button.
I need my parents.
Like, I need to text with my kids in school.
Guess what?
10 years ago, I was in high school.
10 years ago, I didn't text with anyone in high school.
It was great, delightful, wonderful, fulfilling.
It was the most amazing experience there was in existence before these awful tech machines that control our lives.
Let's just for a moment give our children a gift of going back to that type of existence.
Stop giving these companies all the data, the control over your children.
I'm telling you, you want to get freaked out?
Apple, Facebook, and Google have hundreds of full-time people, hundreds of neuroscientists on full-time payroll earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that get five, six, and seven-year-olds that come in and they do experiments on five, six, and seven-year-olds and how to get them more addicted to these devices.
You know, they treat your children like lab rats.
You know if they can get your kid staring at an iPad at a restaurant.
I say this lovingly.
And Gary, you know that I say this.
If you are the family that goes out to the restaurant and you hand an iPad to your child, stop doing that, please.
I say that.
Please stop doing that.
And I'm telling you, you have no idea the damage it's doing to your children.
It is making them tech-obsessed, screen-dependent, less likely to be able to communicate with their fellow citizen or their fellow peer to their generation.
And so all that put together, what do we do about it?
Well, the biggest thing we could do is stop using them as much, right?
But we should sue them.
Our elected officials need to go after them.
We need to break up these companies.
We need to go after them with antitrust lawsuits.
And more than anything else, I think we need to have a total step back of do we actually want this tech tyranny of staring at our phone all day long, being constantly anxious?
I don't know about you, but 99% of my interactions with this thing is anxiety-driven.
It is.
It's the next feed.
It's the next thing.
I deleted all my social media apps off my phone.
It's one of the most freeing and amazing things that I did.
And these people, they have a different vision for our country.
It's a godless country.
It's a technocracy where the tech companies control everything.
And so there's a variety of things we can do about it, including using political power to restrain their influence over American society.
Well, now I know why you rarely text me back.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
Next question.
That's hilarious.
Rational Speech vs Secular Religion00:15:21
My question is, have you always been a strong Christian and conservative?
And how do you like speak to your family and friends who like disagree with your beliefs?
It's a great question.
Thank you for that.
And thanks for being here.
I've always been a Christian, but I was afraid to speak out for my faith.
Not afraid, but hesitant the first couple years at Turning Point USA because I believed that they were at odds with one another.
And now I'm open about everything.
And I try in some ways to hopefully show you guys it's okay to do that.
And for some people, it's harder to be a Christian.
For other people, it's harder to be a conservative.
It depends on kind of your environment, of where you are.
The answer is no.
And when I was first, when I was in the couple early, the early stages of starting Turning Point USA, it's like, man, I don't want to offend people by sharing my faith.
And maybe we could be conservatives first and Christians second.
That was a mistake.
That we should always proclaim ultimate truth, that there is a creator.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, that we're made in his image, mind, body, spirit.
That we are here to try to connect people back with the ultimate promise, which is Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior.
How do we talk to our families and friends?
Well, the first way is by first and foremost talking, which is dialogue comes from two Greek words, dia, which means through, log, which is logos, which means rational speech.
The moment we stop having dialogue or having rational speech, we stop being fully human.
Now, this is a very interesting question, which is what makes a human being different than a French bulldog?
Now, some of you will laugh.
Well, if you have a baby and you have a French bulldog, they actually behave kind of the same for the first six months.
They're on the floor a lot.
They need a lot.
They need to be tended after.
But then after six, eight, 12 months, one of them starts talking.
And the other one never will.
Now, I want you to think about this.
There's two creation stories, and they both say the exact same thing in Genesis and in John.
In the beginning was the word, and the word was God, and the word was with God.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and God spoke it into existence.
That's interesting.
In John 1, it says rational speech was there, was with God.
In Genesis 1, it says he spoke it into existence.
We are the speaking beings, everybody.
Our ability to speak is what makes us fully human.
Aristotle called us the speaking beings.
What does that mean?
That means we're able to make sense of a chaotic world using rational speech.
If I ask one of you to go in the other room, I say, hey, can you go grab me a pencil?
Even if you're five years old, you'd say, oh, that's a pencil.
I can grab it.
You may have never seen that pencil before, but you know the type of thing that is.
That is called the common noun miracle.
Only human beings can do that.
No other being on this planet can make sense of the world.
And all of a sudden, you bring a three-year-old to a farm.
You say, that's a cow, that's a pig, that's a horse.
You bring it back three weeks later, they'll say, oh, that's a cow that's pig, that's a horse, even though it might look a little bit different.
For human beings, this is light work.
This is called organizing things in common nouns.
It's how we're able to call what is good and what is evil through speech.
And so when it says, in the beginning was the word, the word was God, the word was with God, that word word was logos.
In the beginning was rational speech.
And rational speech was God.
And rational speech was with God.
This is why the founding fathers understood the first thing they must protect is what?
Our ability to talk.
Our ability to talk is what makes us fully human.
And our ability to be able to look at who we are, oh, wow, that's an interesting point.
And actually, it makes us more moderate.
It makes us less radical.
It makes us more prudent.
This is how we learn.
And this is exactly why they want to have us stop talking.
The less we talk, it goes back to Aristotle chapter 5, book 10 of the politics.
Tyrants want to make you unfamiliar with one another.
It wants you to stop talking.
As soon as you stop talking to your fellow countrymen, your sister, your brother, your mom, your dad, even someone who disagrees with, well, then you're going to start to think things that might not be true.
Oh, they believe this.
Have you talked to them recently?
Have you had dialogue?
You want to be fully human?
You want to live out how God is.
Remember, we're made in the image of God.
Got to keep talking.
We have to keep on trying to pursue what is truth through our conversations.
And that's a gift that God has given us.
It truly is.
Jesus himself, he was the ultimate communicator.
He went into places where he was hated at an absolute core and proclaimed truth.
And no matter what, they were never able to trip him up.
And so I just want to encourage you and all of you that might have liberals in your life or people on the others, might be liberals here up tonight, by the way.
Glad you're here.
And my people on the other side, don't stop talking.
Bring them towards truth.
Ask questions.
It was the greatest way that Jesus communicated by asking, who do men say that I am?
What's the right way for man to live?
This is the fundamental way of how we communicate and how we're able to use God's greatest gift to us, which is in the beginning was the word and God spoke it into existence.
We need to keep talking.
And with that, we'll bring people to truth.
Yeah.
So someone asks, why do you think, why do you think, what do you think of the growing number of Americans willing to become more convinced that communism is better than capitalism?
There's a rising trend, especially among millennials and Gen X and Gen Zers, that socialism and communism is better than what we have in America.
Yeah, I'm going to give the non-politically correct answer, which, by the way, if you want the definition of politically correct, it's that which the left hates.
It's that simple.
So it's very simple, which is the less secular, the more secular America becomes, the less free we are.
The less people that go to church, the more people need a replacement for church.
And they need a secular religion.
And that secular religion might be deifying Anthony Fauci.
It might be trying to believe in the government being the center of all community.
It might be in a heavy-hand social programs.
And so, yes, as America becomes less religious, America is the least religious it has ever been at this very moment.
There are more people that are a-religious and non-religious in America than are religious.
And we have always been told to believe that religion is the source of all of our problems.
It's the opposite of the truth.
It's that as we get away from the church, as we get away from community, as we get away from objective morality and a transcendent order, we become significantly less free.
You look at every country.
As soon as you abolish Christianity, the Bible, as people stop going to church, all of a sudden they're going to need a replacement for that.
Oh, yeah, why don't we just give that guy all the power?
Why does the left hate the church?
Because when you guys did worship for 15 minutes here, all of you were acknowledging something politically without you realizing it.
That the ultimate authority in America is God, not government.
All of you were saying that.
That there is, it was in the lyrics.
It said, There is nothing better than you.
That was one of the songs you guys sang.
That means that God is greater than the CDC.
It means that God is greater than AstraZeneca.
It means God is greater than the IRS.
That God is greater than all of the secular earthly structures that you have created.
That sort of recognition of an ultimate transcendent authority is something that the statists, the collectivists, and the socialists hate.
So why are people embracing this?
Some of it is because they need a replacement for the God-sized hole that they have in their heart.
They need to replace it with something.
So they say, okay, why don't we replace it with heavy government programs?
And maybe they've been burned by religion in the past.
Maybe they think that religion is the root of all things terrible.
And these are all misconceptions.
But here is a good thing, and I got this from Dennis Prager.
I think this is phenomenal.
You're in an alley at 2 a.m.
And it's a dark alley, and you see five men approaching you.
You have a choice.
Either you can have the choice that you know that those five men were just at a Bible study or those five men were just at the bar.
Which do you choose?
Every American, if they're honest, would say the five men were just at a Bible study.
Because deep down, they know that if people take the Bible seriously, it betters their life.
No matter, you can say, oh, it's worse for society.
That's not, you know, that's not true.
We know that the fruit of the scriptures create better people and decent people.
And so, look, secularism and socialism are directly tied together.
They know they must abolish our relationship with the Lord and they replace it with a different type of religion.
And look, I'll just kind of get into this idea of like the rise of biblical socialism.
Socialism is directly against what the Bible teaches.
First of all, it's against two of the Ten Commandments: thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not covet.
And not to mention social, embedded in socialism is a belief that you can perfect man, that man can be perfected with more programs, more intervention.
It has a priority in abolishing the family, getting rid of private property, and try to micromanage your decisions.
All these things are against how we are called to be as Christians.
Now, here's an interesting question, if I can.
Do we as Christians believe people want to be free in their state of nature?
Now, the body of Christ has different answers on this, but the Bible is very clear.
Now, after Moses, led by God, led the people of Israel out of Egypt.
Remember, they were in slavery.
It was a terrible time.
They were in the deserts.
I think it's Sinai Desert, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And they were doing okay.
Quail was blown off course.
Manna was dropped from heaven.
And eventually, the people of Israel start to complain.
And they say, who's this Moses guy?
Why are we here?
And I kid you not, a direct quote from the book of Exodus.
They say, hey, Moses, take us back to Egypt.
Yeah.
Because at least we ate meat.
They preferred luxurious slavery over freedom where they did not eat as well.
People don't necessarily want to be free.
What the business we are in is trying to set the captives free, set the captives free from spiritual darkness, set the captives free from government tyranny.
Set the captives free from moral chaos.
And we must recognize that more people want to be taken care of than want to be free.
And if, boy, if that was one lesson after the last year and a half, that should be one thing.
Lock it down.
Wear two masks.
And my favorite thing with the vaccine is get vaccinated because of me.
I say, I'm sorry, what?
I have to get vaccinated for you.
I thought that's what the vaccine is supposed to do.
I thought it's supposed to protect you.
No, you must get vaccinated because of me.
It's like that's a really interesting new moral argument.
And if I may say one other thing, did you notice that the most effective way that they were able to shut down society was they say, hey, we need to shut down society not because of you, but because it protects other people.
Did you notice that?
Yeah.
That they made a moral argument.
Now, this is a very interesting thing.
They didn't do that because they actually thought you cared about other people.
They did that because they knew that most people didn't want to live with the guilt of spreading something to other people because secular society doesn't know how to deal with guilt.
We do.
We do.
We ask Jesus for forgiveness.
Secular society lives with the guilt for the rest of their life in turmoil and chaos and self-pity.
Yeah.
First time, by the way, quarantining of the healthy.
Ever.
Yeah.
I mean, it's contradictory to scripture, too.
Go ahead.
Hi, guys.
Hope you're doing well tonight.
God bless you.
I just want to say, Charlie, you hold views now that two years ago you would have called right-wing extremist.
I'm just curious how you reconcile that with people like Nick Fuentes, who held your views before you that you ended up kind of defaming.
Yeah, it's funny.
I heard he was like really big into the Taliban.
So that's kind of a weird view.
I hate the Taliban.
So, yeah, I think we all hate the Taliban.
I think that's probably a good position, right?
So, yeah, I don't really know how to answer that.
I believe in the inerrant word of God.
I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
And also, I want to say this: that I have been more outspoken, though, about social conservatism.
And someone asked me, said, Charlie, why is that?
I say, you know what?
Getting married is a great thing for a young man.
I said, as soon as I got married to my wonderful wife here, all of a sudden you realize that we as conservatives need to protect the true, the good, and the beautiful.
That we as Christians and conservatives need to be called to try to tell young people to get married, to be in relationships loyally, and make God number one.
And also, we should be advocates for having big families and for having lots of children, that that is a moral good for society.
And I just want to say this: that we as conservatives and Christians should reject people in the conservative movement that do not want to talk about social issues.
People say, Oh, I don't want to talk about pro-life stuff.
I don't want to talk about the transgender stuff.
I don't want to talk.
No, we must understand that the most important things are making sure that we defend laws and we defend ideas that are consistent with the natural law, that are consistent with a transcendent order.
These are things that are so critically important for all of us.
And let me say this for the young people in this room: which is reject the lies of secular culture.
But they're like, oh, you know, go make your job first or, you know, go into society and like go hook up with as many people as you can.
That's all a bunch of garbage.
Go find someone who loves the Lord and go marry that person.
And we as Christians must be advocates for that in every single capacity.
And so I just want to say that I've been pretty thrilled since we got married back in May.
It's been a great thing for me.
And I encourage every young person.
And then other young people, and this is Gary, this is on you now.
You ready?
Yeah.
It's people.
It's old people too, by the way.
I'm deputizing Gary right now.
You love this.
Young people say, Charlie, how do I find other Christians?
Pastors out there, you need to be every single Sunday making marriages happen.
No, seriously.
No, you need to be.
No, this is true.
You need to be connecting people.
You need to say, hey, you know.
I always say, flirt to convert.
No, but no, but this is very important.
And where you need to be connecting people.
You need to say, you meet you and you meet you and you meet you and go get married.
And so I'm sure there's some singles out there.
I can't meet him.
I can't find a man or I can't find anyone.
Well, it's on you guys.
So congratulations, Gary.
Got a lot of work.
Thank you for being here tonight.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Go ahead over here.
Earlier tonight, you brought up the non-aggression principle.
Yes.
What are your thoughts on that?
And what is its biblical basis?
Yeah, no, I did say that.
So the non-aggression principle is sometimes used by libertarians as a way to try to argue and advocate for non-government interference.
I won't go too far into it.
It's kind of more of a philosophical thing.
But I said that in the context of saying the other side with the separation of church and state, they violated leaving the church alone, is what I'm saying.
And my own personal opinion is that if you're in, and I believe this is biblical, if you're in a place where the church is being persecuted and Christian values are being persecuted, we are not called to roll over and take it.
Romans 13 and Authority00:03:32
So actually, this is really important.
So how many of you have heard?
Sorry, I'm looking at the texts that are coming in.
I'm listening to you.
He's setting up marriages, everybody.
Okay?
Yeah, my phone's blowing up now.
Marry me.
Yeah, marry me.
Marry me.
Come on, Gary.
Yeah, yeah.
You're welcome, by the way.
Thank you.
Yeah.
No, but I say this, and I'll do two tangents.
That the church that's the best at that will see their attendance explode like you wouldn't believe in Northern Virginia.
Okay, I'm done with that.
All right.
Romans 13.
We've all heard this argument by pastors before, right?
Yeah.
And I want to give you a new way to look at Romans 13 that I think is very interesting.
My friend Bob McEwen, who's here, by the way, Bob and Liz.
Bob here.
Yeah, Bob's European.
Former Congressman Bob McEwen.
Bob McEwen, everybody.
He's a great American.
Yeah, thank you, Bob.
So Romans 13, I'm paraphrasing, and Gary, you could fill in what it says, but it says, God puts leaders in authority, and they are there for your good, and you must submit to those rulers.
So this is a really interesting thing that in America, in a constitutional republic, who's the authority?
God is the authority.
You're right.
But the document says the people are the authority.
So if you read, and this is for every pastor out there that hides behind Romans 13 as a reason not to challenge government, government is not actually in charge.
You are.
So government needs to submit to you.
It's a totally different way to read Romans 13 because some people read it very simply.
They say, oh, the sovereign is, you know, Governor Ralph Northam, right?
Or whatever.
You know, that's the sovereign.
Like, no, actually, the sovereign is the people.
And you know who's violating Romans 13?
Is the Biden regime is violating Romans 13.
It is the local officials who infringe on your rights.
Now, if you lived in communist China, that would be a different argument.
But as you live in the Constitutional Republic that we live in, the people are the sovereign.
The people have the power.
And so if this is, and Jonathan Mayhew, who is the number one pastor who inspired the American Revolution, according to Adams and Madison, said, obedience to tyrants is disobedience to God.
And so we as Christians are commanded, as Daniel disobeyed the orders to disobey God, where when he was told to disobey God, what did he do?
He didn't just disobey the orders.
He opened up his window and made sure everybody saw he was disobeying the orders to continue to praise and worship God.
And that's actually how he ended up in the lion's den is that we are called to be faithful to the Lord.
As it says in Acts 5, Gary, which is that we must obey God, not man.
That we must put God first.
And if a government official ever gets in the way of your religious beliefs, your deeply held convictions, or what is good, what is true, what is beautiful, as it says in Philippians 4.8, whatsoever is true, whatsoever is noble, whatever is good, ponder on those things.
That's right before one of those popular verses in the scriptures, Philippians 4.13.
I can do all the things through Christ who strengthens me.
So let me just kind of say about this, which is in the part that we're in, I use the non-aggression principle in this framing, which is we as Christians must understand that they, the government, they, the oligarchs, they, the tyrants, are violating our rights.
They're violating our freedoms.
And we have no biblical obligation to submit to them.
They must submit to us.
Good.
Religious Exemptions Explained00:02:07
All right.
Let's keep going.
Yes, ma'am.
Hello.
Thank you for coming.
I'm a student at Liberty University College of Osteopathic Medicine, and religious exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine are not being accepted currently.
So we are being prevented from continuing in our curriculum.
What advice do you have for those of us who wish to go into healthcare professions but are under this medical tyranny?
Yeah, so I want to just make sure I'm understanding this because I've had ties with Liberty and I think very highly of them.
And I know a lot of people that went there and literally got an honorary doctorate from Liberty.
Can you just be more specific?
You're telling me Liberty's not granting religious exemptions?
The medical school.
The medical school is requiring you to be vaccinated to go on your third and fourth year clinical sites rotations.
And they're not accepting a religious action.
Were you the one who wrote me a note?
Yes.
So that's what I was reading.
Yeah, no, this is really important.
I don't know how that's possible because Jerry Falwell Sr. never would have put up with that.
I know that very well.
And he's not there anymore.
Yeah, I know.
I'm processing.
I'm trying to, because I know so many people there, so I'm trying not to be incendiary.
So bear with me for a second.
That's so incredible.
I hope they change that policy, which here's the problem: so many Christians are rolling over with this thing.
It's so incredibly disappointing.
The fact that a Christian school won't offer religious exemptions is incredible.
Hello, hold the line, stand firm.
And you publicizing this tonight, I hope will make a difference.
Everyone has a tie to Liberty University.
I would contact them.
That would make a very big difference.
But let me say this.
I know a guy that was willing to get fired at Delta Airlines.
He was a 20-year pilot, a great man.
And just two days ago, Delta Airlines rescinded their mandatory vaccines because they realized that the numbers were against them.
The Cost of Truth00:03:17
So I want you to just hold the line for as long as you can because I think, and I might be overly optimistic here, I pray that we're going to hit a point where they're going to back off a little bit in certain areas.
I will say, though, the healthcare field might be the least likely place they're going to back off.
So I just want, I want you to, I want to be very honest with you on that.
But we have your back.
I'm going to be making a phone call to a couple of Liberty people.
Thank you.
All right.
Let me just...
Yeah, yeah, let me just say this.
We were slated to end at 8:30, but we're going to go another 15 minutes.
Okay, everybody.
Is that all right?
And if, you know, if you have to leave, we're not mandating you to stay.
All right, go ahead.
For me, it is hard to stand up for myself for people who are older than me.
So how do us kids stand up for Jesus more and for America and all these mandates?
How old are you?
I turned 14 today.
14 years old.
Well, first of all, thank you for being here tonight.
And so I'm going to tell you something that's true, but it's hard to hear, but I think it'll bless you.
I don't do hopium, everybody, which is hope and opium mixed together, which is things you want to hear, but are actually really bad for you.
I tell you what is true, and that will actually benefit your life.
So you're going to have to make a decision that you want to be a tough person.
And that will be hard at first because you might lose friends and people will call you names and you'll get mocked and you'll get ridiculed, but it will bless you beyond you could ever imagine in the years to come.
That at a young age, at 14, you say, you know what?
I'm going to say what is true and I'm not going to back down from it.
I'm going to do it with a smile.
I'm going to do it with the grace of the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ, but I'm not going to back away from it.
Now, this is hard because I'm telling you as a 14-year-old, you will be called names, you will lose friends, and you will be kicked out of social circles.
You'll make new friends.
You'll be stronger because of it.
And you will then go on a journey that you'll be truly free.
And I know people here, and I know people watching at home and people that say this, they say, man, I might have a good job.
I might have a good income, but I'm not free.
I have to be somebody different at work.
And that is the ultimate form of torture that I see in America today.
I see a form of torture.
And I'm not accusing, by the way, I'm going to be very clear.
If you are the breadwinner in your house, there's a moral argument to be saying you're going to keep your mouth shut at home to get the paycheck, to feed your family.
I get it.
I'm not accusing you.
But it's torture for a lot of people.
I know there's people here tonight.
You're like, I can't say anything at work or else I would just get completely obliterated.
But the sooner you make that decision, you'll never have that problem.
The sooner you make that decision, you'll be free.
So how do you win people over?
I would highly recommend you get involved with Turning Point USA.
We have some Turning Point USA leaders here.
I think we do somewhere.
Raise your hand.
We have a couple here.
I want to just say this.
These students on college and high school campuses that we have at Turning Point USA, they are American heroes.
They really are.
Because what they're doing at 15, 16, 17, 18 years old, they are telling the world, I don't care what you do to me.
One Hour Homeschooling Plan00:04:43
I am going to say, I know there is a God.
I believe in conservatism.
Throw what you can at me.
That's courage.
And they're saying that in some of the most social pressure situations.
And so I just want to encourage you and say that if you stand for God, you will always be blessed by that.
And read your Bible every single day.
It says in Joshua 1:9, be strong and courageous.
Read over that scripture and pray over that scripture.
And at age 14, all of a sudden, 10 years later, and when you're 24, they're like, wow.
I remember what Charlie said at that one event.
And I'm a stronger person, hopefully a wiser person, and someone that knows the Lord even better because of it.
So thank you for being here tonight.
And thank you for wanting to do that.
Hi, Charlie.
Thanks for coming today.
First of all, I want to say about nine years ago, I was going to this church and I met my wife here.
So Pastor Greg Cornerstone, you're doing a great job with that.
It worked.
My question is: my oldest daughter, my six-year-old, is now going to kindergarten.
We moved to Loudon County for Loudon County Public Schools.
And then all of a sudden, this happens.
I drop her off of the bus, I wave to her, and my heart sinks because I don't know what's going on the next six, seven hours.
I try to talk to her, but sometimes it feels like I'm interrogating a six-year-old, which is kind of hard.
How do I make sure that my influence, my wife's influence, my church's influence, is good on her so that when she's 14, she's like that lady over there.
It's a beautiful question.
So let me give you a couple things.
You might not be in a position to homeschool, and I understand that, but pray if there might be a way to make that happen.
And I'm a massive fan of homeschooling, especially right now.
Now, I'm not saying it's easy.
It's a big sacrifice.
It is a very, and people who homeschool will tell you it's tough.
It's tough work, but it's rewarding.
So maybe that's not you, but you could do it.
You could do it.
Okay.
And so, And I will give an idea for this church, which is creating like a homeschool network of homeschool parents to meet homeschoolers and try to encourage others to do it.
I know of churches that have done it, and it's been a great blessing.
I'm just trying to make a list of all the things I got to do.
Oh, you got it, Gary.
I got a whole list of stuff.
Don't worry.
But here's the one thing you can do that I can give you to do right now, which is every parent can do this, whether you're in public school, private school, or homeschooling, which is one hour a week, call it the Liberty Hour, where you turn off every device in the home.
Maybe it's Sunday afternoon.
You sit down at the kitchen table and you teach.
And you might say, Charlie, I'm not a teacher.
Well, we've partnered with Hillsdale College to be able to, they're phenomenal, for a series of 30-minute to an hour lectures to give you the parent.
You watch the lecture, you take a test, and then you consume the information and you teach it back to your kid.
And so it's charlieforhillsdale.com if you guys are interested to empower parents to have one hour a week.
I can tell you this, my parents did this with me, and I went to public school and people say, How do you turn out fine?
Because the one hour where my parents want, yeah, I know it's the jury's out, Gary, right?
I know.
How do you end up average?
Is what most people say.
How did you end up below average?
Okay, so because my parents taught me geography, history, ethics, civics, outside of that, you, if I want you to think about the compounding interest of this: 52 hours a year, you would sit down with your kids and you become the teacher.
Now, that might be intimidating for some of you.
Take that step.
Take the courses we have for you guys at charlieforhillsdale.com.
And like, let's just take one, for example, for even, you said kindergartner.
So that, you know, you're not going to get into Aristotle yet, right?
But here's an easy one: it teaches you how to teach Genesis.
It's an easy one.
How to properly teach Genesis to a seven-year-old or eight-year-old or nine-year-old.
And then you do that for one hour a week.
All of a sudden, you know what happens?
And this is why I love Sundays.
She'll go to school on Monday, fired up, filled with what her parents just taught her.
And then she'll be defensive of those positions.
She'll say, My family believes a certain thing against what the public schools are teaching.
And so even if you cannot homeschool, do a version of homeschooling.
Carve out one hour a week.
Come on, you guys can all do one hour a week.
I know you can.
Make it a priority.
And you're like, Charlie, I don't know the material.
We're giving you the material.
So we're trying to create a no excuse situation for every family across America to do the Liberty Hour.
I'm telling you, this will prevent the indoctrination of your children, but also the indoctrination of other children when your children are standing up for what's right, when other teachers try to infuse.
And then the final thing: get involved in your school boards.
I know you probably are, but it's so incredibly important.
And I will say this: I don't say this lightly.
It is criminal what the Loudoun County School Board has been doing in this local area.
Balancing Free Speech and Values00:05:47
So thank you for being here.
Appreciate it.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Hey, how's it going?
So I just want to point out really quick: I work in tech, and about two years ago, I got rid of my iPhone.
I've got a flip phone.
And that is the coolest thing I've ever seen.
I'm acutely aware, you know, working in tech of how much surveillance goes on.
And deleting apps is not necessarily going to stop it.
But for any of you who are thinking about, you know, getting rid of that, I would highly recommend it.
All right, to my question.
Yeah, did you have a question?
Yeah, sorry.
To my question.
So you sort of hinted at it earlier.
Technology has a role in the moral decay of modern society.
And from everything from internet pornography, how much that's destroyed families and hormone therapy, right?
So all sorts of things.
There's some benefits too, but conservatives seem to have a strategy that if we just pass legislation to have like free speech laws on the internet, then we'll solve the problem.
But I feel like it was our very values of free speech that brought on the authoritarian left.
Please ask your question, though, because we've got people.
So, I was wondering, like, what is your take on that?
Because it seems like it's sort of a catch-22 where if we make it free speech, then we're just spreading the leftist authoritarianism.
Well, yeah, I get your question.
So, my personal position, and I've been very clear about this, is that we need to have some form of a body that can be agreed upon to slow down the rise of artificial intelligence.
I'm talking more fundamental and just kind of technology advancements to try to make the human being the center of society and not technology.
We are going to cross the Rubicon in about 15 years, might be less, where machines have more power than human beings.
It's coming and we need to do something about it.
This should be bipartisan.
Unfortunately, it's not.
And that I'm more interested in than free speech laws on the internet.
I'm more worried about just how technology is making us more bitter, more divided, more awful to us as human beings.
And so, happy to get into that.
It's more of a nuanced question for a different time.
But if you gave me a choice, you said, Charlie, would you get rid of all the smartphones?
I think that the negatives far outweigh the positives for what these devices have done for American society.
So, thank you.
Appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you.
Sir?
Turning Point USA is the largest youth organization in America.
And in the past, you have said that you support gay marriage.
And as well as I've never said that.
That is not true.
As well as having open homosexuals represent the organization.
Now that we're in a church of believers, do you still believe that the sin of homosexualism is morally relative to Christian righteousness?
Well, first of all, I've never believed in gay marriage, so don't lie.
But I will say this: yes, we do have gay people that work for us at Turning Point USA.
And let me explain.
And so we are a secular organization, and we have just started a new faith initiative.
And I've always been very clear that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that is what marriage is in the Bible, and we should stand for that.
But as a secular organization, someone that works on college campuses, and we get qualified people who love the country, and some, yes, do love the Lord, that engage in a homosexual type lifestyle, we hire them, and they do a great job for us.
And in fact, Donald Trump had plenty of people that worked in his administration that were gay and were homosexual, Rick Grinnell being one of them, the head of the director of national intelligence.
And so I think this is a very important thing, which is that you could take a moral position, which I do, which I've been very clear about, and also build a coalition for liberty and understand that, hey, the Galatians 3 model is that the law is a school teacher to Christ, that we're trying to build a coalition around these things.
But I also just want to make this very clear, which is that I'm an uncompromising in my positions.
But misrepresenting my positions and lying about them is not cool.
And so I hope that you'll adjust that in the future.
So thank you.
But you just to make sure we're clear, you do believe that saying you're a Christian and practicing a homosexual lifestyle is incompatible.
Yes, of course.
And I've been very clear about that.
And starting as a campus organization, you know, we have people that are gay that work for us.
And that is something that has been part of what we've done since the beginning.
I'm not saying that I'm morally acceptable of that in the individual lifestyle.
And so being a secular organization, that is a balance that we must strike.
And I'm very clear when I'm in churches as right now, and I also live it out, I'm married, that marriage is between one man and one woman.
That's what the scriptures clearly say.
Yep.
All right.
I think we have time for one more question.
So when you said that people are saying that the Constitution doesn't matter, does that mean that the saying all people are created equal don't matter?
I didn't quite hear the first part of your question.
So you said that all the people, like the Constitution doesn't matter.
People are saying that.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so does that mean they're saying all God are all people are created equal don't matter?
Well, so yeah, I said other people are saying the Constitution doesn't matter.
I don't.
I think the Constitution is the greatest political document ever written.
Yeah, I think I get what you're saying, At, which is like, what is human equality?
It means that all people are created equal in the image of God, right?
And all people are the same type of thing.
We are all human beings.
I think what you're getting at is kind of the exceptionalism of the Constitution, which really allows the separation of powers, consent to the govern, independent judiciary, and decentralization of power.
But it also is a document that protects your natural rights that are given to you by God and not by government.
And that is a very important thing.
Most people in kind of the left or secular society do not recognize that.
And they say that your rights come from government and there is no God.
Fragile to Anti-Fragile00:03:26
So thank you.
Appreciate it.
All right.
I said the last one.
Yeah, let's go last, last.
Yes.
I'm a student in the public school system here.
And we're really struggling at the moment because even though stuff from the school board hasn't been passed, there's already been CRT and feminist movements integrated into our curriculum.
So how can I practically fight that in the classroom when there's not really a lot of support from teachers and other adults?
What school do you go to?
I go to Woodgrove High School.
Okay.
We got some support right up there.
So we'd love to work with you at Turning Point USA if that's something you might want to do.
But I'm going to kind of reiterate this, which is, you know, sometimes you're going to have to be the fighter.
Sometimes you're going to have to stand at a young age, and that will make you a stronger person.
And also, look around you.
You have a huge support network here tonight of people that want to support you and want to lean into you.
And so let me just say this: that, and for everyone out there, these are the most courageous people out there in high school that they're now making it.
I'm all alone.
I'm fighting against these things.
I think we have to do an even better job of getting into these schools and supporting these young patriots that are fighting for these truths that are experiencing a price for it.
And also say, hey, we're going to be there to support you and to back you when you take these stands.
And so that's exactly what we're trying to do every single day at Turning Point USA.
So thank you so much.
Yeah, and then I'm going to wrap up too.
So yeah, go ahead.
So I just want to kind of close with a couple things.
First, I just want to say this again: this is the center of the political universe in the country.
For those of you that have showed up to school board meetings, God bless you.
For those of you that are running for school board, God bless you.
Those of you that are involved in that, God bless you.
And I want to just say this is such a phenomenal church.
And if we had more churches like this, the country would be in a much better place.
I'm going to do a fully shameless plug just for a second.
Every single day, we do two podcasts a day on our program.
We are talking about Loudoun County.
We're talking about everything from a biblical perspective.
Every single person here has a smartphone.
We're under constant threats of cancellation.
If you decide not to destroy your smartphone, which I highly recommend you do, we'd be super blessed if everyone took out their podcast app and typed in Charlie Kirk Show and hit subscribe.
It really helps us out.
It keeps us prevented from being canceled by big tech companies.
Again, Charlie Kirk Show and your podcast provider.
If you're like, Charlie, I don't know how to do that.
Well, I think there's some 11-year-olds around here that can walk you through the best way.
But we do two podcasts a day.
We work really hard.
We'd be blessed by that.
And then finally, everybody, I am seeing a new resolve and a strengthening of unity from people in the church and people that love this country and love the Lord.
We have to stand by one another.
We are increasing in number.
The more they throw at us, the stronger we get.
We are becoming an anti-fragile movement.
Fragile, you shatter, anti-fragile gets stronger the more stress you put on it.
And I'm telling you, everybody, it's just a matter of time before we turn a spiritual corner in this country.
And I'm so beyond blessed to be fighting alongside all of you.
So God bless you guys.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much.
Talk to you soon.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.