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April 17, 2022 - The Charlie Kirk Show
01:23:20
Becoming Courageous in Christ — LIVE from Grace Church in St. Louis

Happy Easter! Todays episode of The Charlie Kirk Show is a speech he gave to the congregation of Grace Church in St. Louis, Missouri about the relationship between church and state, the moral degradation of society, and why it’s up to Christians to act…or else. 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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Time Text
Easter Greetings and Church Health 00:14:32
Hey everybody, happy Easter.
God bless all of you.
I hope you're having a wonderful Easter.
This is a conversation I had at Grace Church in St. Louis with Wes Martin, the lead pastor at Grace St. Louis.
What a phenomenal church.
What a healthy church.
What a strong church.
A great time that we had together.
I hope you have a wonderful Easter, everybody.
Get involved with TurningpointUSA at tpusa.com.
Email me your thoughts as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.
And please support our program at charliekirk.com/slash support.
And if you want to get involved, it's tpusa.com.
But most important is he has risen.
Have a wonderful Sunday and enjoy this podcast, this conversation that I gave at Grace Church.
Great, great people in St. Louis.
Make sure you subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast and enjoy.
God bless.
Buckle up.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
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.
Well, I wanted to jump in before we jump into the weeds.
There's some people here, believe it or not, because not everybody has access to all the awesome videos and content that you're producing.
But who is Charlie Kirk?
Who are you?
And how in the world did you get to the point where you're at at 28 years old?
Depends who you ask, I guess.
There's a couple different answers to that.
First of all, I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade.
Most important decision I made in my life.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.
So in the state of Illinois.
Now you're going to have to now hear my Illinois deal.
You guys all know this.
You see, in Illinois, we have term limits, a little different than most states.
One term in office, one term in jail.
See?
You guys get it.
They get it in Missouri.
I'll tell you what.
All right.
How about, see, when we asked for our governor's cell number, we born and raised in Chicago, Illinois.
Started this whole effort to try to save America and save Western civilization.
When I was 18 years old, I wanted to get into West Point, didn't get in.
It was the best thing that never happened to me.
God has a plan for all of us.
And I thought I knew what I was doing, and I didn't.
And so I started this effort with no money, no connections, no idea what I was doing when I was 18 years old in the suburbs of Chicago.
And I felt a need, a deep urge that the people of this nation needed to wake up, especially students and young people.
I felt that we were given this incredible constitutional republic and we were making decisions, self-inflicted decisions, to turn this country away from righteousness and towards decay and despair.
And again, it was a clumsy first couple of years starting at Turning Point USA.
I had some amazing support along the way.
The Lord really had his hand on this organization and has had his hand on this organization all along.
And 10 years later, we are now the nation's premier organization for young people, pursuing and defending American values on high school and college campuses across the country.
And, you know, a little bit, I do three podcasts a day, a couple hours of radio a day.
I traveled 330 days last year all across the country.
I've been over all 50 states twice over.
I have difficulty sitting still.
So this is like my third or fourth event today.
I love it.
I'm the most blessed person on the planet because I get to do what I love and know it makes a difference.
I really am incredibly blessed in what I get to do.
And what kind of brings us here was an unexpected detour that has now turned into one of the great blessings in my life.
I was a Christian my whole life.
I don't have one of those stories where you say, you know, I walked away from the Lord.
I came back.
That's actually not my journey.
I know some of you can resonate more with me, and you'll hear everyone's testimony different.
I never doubted God.
I never had one of those things where I looked up to God and said, Are you actually there?
That was never my story.
At certain times in my life, I had more enthusiasm and energy than others.
I think we can all sympathize with that.
But I was always told something growing up that Charlie, that politics thing is fine, but you better not bring it towards the church.
You keep those two things separate.
That was fine.
I was like, okay, no problem.
I grew up in a Bible-believing Bible-based church in the suburbs of Chicago, where it was expositional, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, deep into the word.
I believe in the inerrancy of scripture.
Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior.
I'm unafraid to espouse that on college campuses, high school campuses, podcasts, and radio.
And I was doing that for the first eight years of Turning Point USA, but I was always told, hey, there's got to be this dividing line.
Don't cross that line.
And then my life really changed, and my premise was challenged when a pastor in California spoke at an event right before me, my now pastor, Pastor Rob McCoy, and he talked about how the two are actually never supposed to be separate.
That these are questions of morality, of truth, about what is good, what is true, what is beautiful.
Like Philippians 4:8, that says, whatever is right, whatever is good, whatever is true, whatever is praiseworthy, think on these things.
That's Paul writing.
And tonight we're going to think about these things.
We're going to live out Philippians 4:8 tonight.
We're going to think about the things that are true and praiseworthy and what things are not true and praiseworthy.
And he really challenged me because I was under this assumption that America might have had some Christian roots at one point, but it basically was always a secular nation.
And I didn't believe it as bluntly as that, but I definitely had some of those talking points beat into me, all the while being a Christian and being a constitutionalist.
And I couldn't have been more wrong.
The deeper I dove into our nation's history, I realized that 55 out of 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were Bible-believing church-attending Christians.
I realized that the Constitution is a divinely inspired document that espouses biblical principles of consent to the governed and separation of powers and the independent judiciary.
I realized how exceptional America was from the beginning because of the problem America sought to solve.
And then I realized that it was the church that didn't just inspire, but it was the church that was the reason why America was founded in the first place.
And so that rocked my world.
I grew up in a world where you didn't say that at church, or you get kind of uncomfortable.
You start sitting around like, what is the pastor saying if they're doing that, right?
And I really went into a time of prayer and reflection and eventually repentance because I asked God for forgiveness why I didn't actually push this forward the first eight years at Turning Point USA of everything I was doing.
All the while I was never turning my back on the Lord, but I was trying to be like, yeah, that's not the place, not the time, place, or manner.
And then 2020 hit.
We locked down the church.
We decided it was non-essential, one of the worst mistakes our civilization ever made.
And we'll get into that tonight, trust me, in detail.
And I started to speak at more churches across the country.
And pastors were asking me for advice, me for advice, on how to talk about CRT.
Asked me, what is this wokeism thing, Charlie?
Should we ever comment on this stuff?
And I found that more and more pastors were desiring to speak righteousness into their community and into their congregation.
And so you asked, who is Charlie Kirk?
First and foremost, a Christian, saved by Jesus Christ.
My husband, amazing wife, got married just about a year ago.
When you meet my wife, you'll realize I'm the luckiest person.
I totally out-kicked my coverage.
I owe way under what, let's just say, I'm not qualified for that whole deal when you meet my wife.
He's amazing.
And I'm a patriot, unapologetic.
I love my country.
But I want to make sure that this is very clear.
Look, we as Christians, we believe in hierarchies, hierarchies of order, hierarchies of beauty, hierarchies.
The most important thing in my life is Jesus Christ.
That will never change.
And this is a very important thing.
The church should never get that hierarchy mixed up.
And we'll talk about tonight about how to properly communicate that, where it comes involved in the church.
But if you remain silent on the issues of patriotism and civic engagement, oh, that doesn't matter.
Well, then we're all going to have to open prison ministries, everybody, because we'll be sharing the gospel from somewhere that is not as nice as this room right now.
That's not an exaggeration.
We can go through examples of that.
So that's who I am, and that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
We like the story.
So just to clarify, then, so you have turning point that is focused mostly for like colleges and high schools.
But then a couple years ago, or however long ago, this faith kind of lagged, right?
To where you're focused in mobilizing churches.
So give us some hope.
Like, are you seeing the church begin to wake up and not be afraid to speak into these issues?
I am.
And so, yeah, look, all the different components of Turning Point USA seek to accomplish the same thing in different ways.
We want to set the captives free.
God does not want his people to live under tyranny.
He doesn't want people to live under tyranny eternally or here on earth.
It's not his wish for his people.
It's why he delivered people from Egypt.
It's why he delivered his chosen people every single time from slavery and serfdom.
It's why he sent his son, Jesus Christ.
He wants us to be free.
That's why I'm living.
That's why I'm wearing the shirt right now, live free.
It's God's wish for you to live free, free from sin, free from bondage, free from guilt.
And yes, free from authoritarianism, petty tyranny that tells you what to do with your life when it gets in complete contradiction with your values.
God's wish for his people is for you to live free.
And so, yeah, to answer your question, at Turning Point USA, we started at his high school and college campuses.
That is growing like you wouldn't believe.
More and more young people are attending our events.
They're starting chapters all around this quest for liberty, which is harmonic, by the way.
It is completely alongside in parallel with what we're doing here tonight.
We're trying to talk about liberty, and we're going to talk about it through a strictly biblical lens.
But it's the same sort of thing when a college kid shows up at one of my events, either at the University of Arkansas, which we just did a couple nights ago, or, you know, Auburn, where we just did an event a couple nights ago.
And these kids are searching.
They're looking.
They're looking to see, is there a natural law out there?
Is there any sort of rhythm to the cosmos?
Because they've been told there isn't.
They've been told that there is no God and there is no meaning.
There is no love.
There is no beauty.
So all of us tonight have two things in common.
Every single person here tonight agrees with these two things.
There is a God and you are not him.
Now, the importance of those two things is that the predominant view on most college campuses, they believe there is no God.
And if there was one, I would be him.
Very dangerous things happen at that moment.
So we started this program, TP USA Faith, back in August.
And look, I'm an entrepreneur.
If something doesn't work, I'm not going to keep on doing it.
There's been plenty of projects in the 10 years of this.
I was like, whoa, that doesn't work.
Shut that down, right?
That doesn't work.
I've been blown away since August.
We now have a field team across the country that's working with pastors, working with churches.
And the success, the momentum, the curiosity, the interest of churches that otherwise would have been on the sidelines, they want to say, hey, I want to do that biblical citizenship class.
Or they might reach out to us, say, hey, Charlie, do you have a pastor summit coming up, which we do coming in August, where we're going to have pastors from all across the country come to our summit and hopefully empower them and equip them with the information and just encouragement in general to keep on speaking out on this.
But I'll tell you, there are so many churches that are now speaking openly about these issues and about what's happening here.
And I feel just we're calling this entire calendar year the rise of the citizen.
We are seeing regular, normal, everyday people that otherwise would have just been either complacent or they would have been apathetic.
They're starting to break out of their mold and they're starting to challenge authority and tyranny and reclaim what is rightfully theirs.
And it all starts with the church.
Now, I'm sure there are several pastors in the room or viewing online.
And this whole, I just want to stay here for a little bit longer.
This idea of the separation of church and state, we found ourselves on the front page of the St. Louis Post Dispatch a few weeks ago for influencing, dare to influence the school board elections, which, by the way, are Tuesday, if I didn't mention that earlier.
Tuesday, we're all voting in St. Louis County and St. Charles County.
But you've got a few examples out there of, I know, from Jack Hibbs' church, Rob McCoy's church, of really this idea of having our 501c3 revoked or all of this stuff.
Just speak into that just a little bit more.
Yeah, let's first start on this line, separation of church and state.
It's okay if you believe that's in the Constitution.
I did too.
And then I read the Constitution and my head was spinning.
I realized it's not in here.
So then I read the Federalist Papers.
It's not in there either.
Read the Declaration of Independence.
It's not there either.
Like, where did this thing come from?
So the separation of church and state was referenced once by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Convention, taken out of context, then re-referenced in a Supreme Court decision in the 1960s.
I think it was either the Warren or the Burger Court that said there must be this wall between the church and the state.
So let's just take that at face value for a second.
Let's pretend it is right.
It is the law of the land.
Okay, let's pretend that is what governs us.
Well, then hold on.
Let's keep the state out of the church.
Like, wait, hold on.
Why is it that they can tell the church when they could do Easter or not?
Why is it they could tell the church whether or not you need to wear a mask when you go to worship?
Why were they able to shut down hundreds of thousands of churches across the country?
I thought they were separate.
No, no, no, no.
They always meant the separation to be a one-way separation.
They always meant that the state could do whatever they want to the church, but the church better not question the state.
It was an unconstitutional, immoral, and I believe a tactic of the enemy to try to keep the church submissive and wrongly so.
And so the country was founded by churches being in the public square.
It was saved many times by churches in the public square in the 1820s, the 1860s, the 1950s, the 1980s.
And so there is this fear that the church must remain completely and totally silent.
So there's a spectrum, right?
So you could be as cavalier as Jack Hibbs and Rob McCoy.
Human Nature and Moral Standards 00:10:13
So Jack Hibbs, God bless him, he will endorse candidates from onstage.
He will record it and then mail the recordings to the Internal Revenue Service asking them whether or not they want to make a judgment against his church.
Now, that's that's that's a 10, okay?
I'm not even recommending it.
I'm just letting you know the spectrum out there, okay?
Now, you could kind of do a middle ground where the pastor says, these are my personal opinions, not that of the church, and we're going to tell you what the Bible says.
It's perfectly fine under the IRS code to do that, by the way.
That is safe harbor no matter what.
Or you could just even do something even more vanilla and say, I'm just going to tell you word for word what the word of God says about the 10 biggest issues happening.
I'm not even going to mention the election.
That is 100% safe harbor, okay, no matter what.
So there really is no legal excuse as to why to not do it.
We must understand the enforcement mechanism is the Johnson Amendment, what was put forward by Lyndon Baines Johnson to try to shut up a pastor he didn't like in Houston, Texas for the sole purpose of trying to make the church uninterested and not involved in this.
But let's play this out for just a second.
I think it's important to just take the threat at face value.
So let's say that the church were to lose its tax-exempt status.
The question is, would that momentary earthly penalty be worth pursuing righteousness?
Of course it is.
So the question is, you're afraid of losing a government certificate because you'll only say what is true if the government certificate will remain intact.
That's a bad reason to do anything, by the way.
Now, I'm not saying, don't be, I'm not saying be imprudent.
You don't have to be the, I love Jack Kibbs.
He's such a dear friend.
He's leading the charge.
And by the way, by doing so, he's also creating space for other churches to be able to do a little bit less to use that as a reference point.
And he does it publicly.
He does it enthusiastically.
He says, Charlie, they could take away my tax exempt status tomorrow.
We'll just open up an LLC.
We'll keep the books open to our congregation.
We have backup plans for all this stuff.
Now, I'm not saying that's what you should do.
I'm not.
You have real estate stewards of buildings, legacy gifts.
I get all that stuff.
But I think there needs to be a question of, are you preserving a business model or are you trying to pursue righteousness?
That's an interesting question, right?
And every church board needs to pray on that and fast on that and reflect on that.
But understand, the spirit of fear is not what Jesus has given us.
And so if we are operating every decision under the spirit of fear, well, they might send a letter and they might do this.
You're right.
All of that, we live under a regime that kicks down doors of journalists they don't like.
We live under a regime that calls moms and dads that show up to school board meetings domestic terrorists.
So look, the freight train's coming, everybody.
And, you know, I call some of these people, you know, it's kind of like will-the beast Christians.
It's like, you know, they're walking around and they're like, well, we didn't get eaten today.
And it's like, at least it's not us.
Look, we know what's happening here, right?
It's coming very quickly.
And the only thing that could stop it is courageous and passionate Christians proclaiming truth from the bottom up.
And if you feel like you're losing your civilization or losing your country, you're right.
It is going in the wrong direction.
I see a lot of positives.
We can get into those.
But the only solution is you.
The only solution is the church.
They know that.
That's why they've done everything they possibly can to try to make you afraid, silent, and submissive.
Come on.
I really want us to turn this issue into an issue of prayer.
You know, we have several prayer meetings a week here, and we're praying just for the pulpits of our city to be bold, to be bold and courageous.
Okay, I don't know what direction you want to go.
I have several.
Go ahead.
So politics is also seemingly incredibly moral issues in the day.
So if we don't speak up for the sake of the standard of morality, then it seems as if the political land is trying to establish what morality is for us.
So we have to engage these waters.
And is that an exaggeration?
No.
And so this is an open question, and this is fine, and you should ask yourself that question.
Does the Bible say anything about us caring about our government?
And the answer is, of course.
Jeremiah 29, 7, the Lord is speaking to his people where he's saying directly, you must demand the welfare, the shalom, of the city or the nation that you are in, because your welfare is tied to your nation's welfare.
So let's ask ourselves the question, is that true?
Is your welfare tied to your nation's welfare?
Of course it is.
Pastors are being arrested in Canada for having church.
It's a real thing.
It's happening right now.
If you don't have good government and you stop caring about your government, your welfare will be impacted.
That's the Lord speaking to his chosen people in Jeremiah 29, 7.
So how about the narrative of the Old Testament?
Do we have any examples of people trying to influence secular government for God's chosen purpose?
Esther, Mordecai, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, just to name a few.
In fact, we have a pattern.
We have more than one person that fasted and prayed for the nation that they were in, Daniel being one of the most vivid examples of that.
So the question is, what is politics?
We have an association with something that is messy.
Well, everything that human beings touch is messy, the church included.
We are fallen beings predisposed to sin.
Everything we touch will be messed up in one way, shape, or the other, including politics.
The question is: Should we try to pursue a better politics, a better form of government?
So, some Christians say, Charlie, all form of governments are the same.
How unwise to say such a thing, to say that our form of government is the same as North Korea's, the same as China's, the same as Iran.
Do you know the history of humanity, more people live under the reign of the few than of the many?
We have a brief opportunity where we, the many, get to rule the few.
The question is, which is biblical?
The answer is, of course, when the many rule the few, the few.
We do not believe that leaders are anointed by birth by some sort of birthright.
We believe in the sovereignty of the individual.
We believe that the collective power that we put forward, as enumerated in Kings and in Leviticus, is there only because of our consent.
That is a very difficult principle to enact into government.
And let me tell you why.
The Bible answers the most important question.
Because when you ask yourself, what kind of government are we forming?
Well, you have to ask yourself, what's the raw material I'm dealing with here?
Human beings.
Are human beings naturally good or naturally predisposed to sin?
This is why I get so enthusiastic when the church finally speaks up against this, and I get so upset when the church remains quiet.
If you're not willing to tell your congregation that human beings are predisposed to sin, then stop being a pastor.
It takes like a hundred words to figure out human beings are predisposed to sin in the Bible.
Now, why does that matter?
Well, because in Federalist 51, Alexander Hamilton writes it beautifully, or as it might have James Madison.
I'm sorry.
In Federalist 51, one of the most important sentences that you should ask any Christian that says we don't do that around here.
Human nature never changes.
I'm paraphrasing.
If all men were angels, government would not be necessary.
And if angels govern men, none of this would need to happen.
The Constitution he's referencing.
He's making an indictment of human nature.
He's saying, we know what we're dealing with.
They're acknowledging the fall.
The fall is biblical.
We know it.
We know we are sinful creatures.
And yet, half the country believes that human beings are naturally good.
This is one of the most important questions in our society right now, by the way.
We believe human beings are naturally bad.
So therefore, if you believe human beings are naturally sinful, let's just not use that word bad.
Let's just say sinful.
Then what's the most important thing you can do?
Prevent the sinful people from having power over everybody.
That's logical, right?
Prevent the sinful people from having absolute power over everyone.
So this is a great thought exercise to use a third grader or a fourth grader.
Highly rational and it works.
What's the worst thing a human being can do?
And they'll say murder.
Say, that's bad.
What else?
And they'll go on stealing and all that.
Like, no, no, no.
The worst thing you could do is institute murder for everybody.
It's bad enough to murder one person.
It's another thing to institutionalize it.
Now, even worse than this, one of the Ten Commandments exhibits this explicitly.
Now, we read this wrong because we don't go to the original Hebrew.
The original Hebrew, we would say, is, do not say the Lord's name in vain.
That's not what the Hebrew says.
It says, do not carry the Lord's name in vain.
What does that mean?
Do not do evil in the name of the Lord.
So do not do evil things while saying you are doing it in the name of God.
So it goes to another question.
Do human beings naturally want to be free?
I used to say yes, and I was wrong.
The Bible answers that question for us, though.
When God delivered his chosen people out of Egypt, he didn't want them in serfdom.
He didn't want them in slavery and brought them to freedom.
Amazing miracles parted the Red Sea.
Moses does the incredible.
How do the people of Israel, how do they act?
Well, after a couple of chapters, despite the fact that quail was blown off course and manna came from heaven, the people of Israel started to complain.
And they said, who's this Moses guy anyway?
And I'm paraphrasing, but I'm not far off.
And they say, we want to go back to Egypt, slavery, because at least there we ate meat.
People don't want to be free.
Some people want to be free, specifically people that are born free and new by Jesus Christ.
We demand freedom more in our life because we're free eternally and spiritually, but most human beings don't desire freedom.
So what you're living through in this system right now is so rare, it's so unique, it's so exceptional, and it's fragile.
Because right now, we're living through the Israelites in the wilderness desert.
Who's this guy in office?
I want the stimulus check.
Who's this guy in office?
Just shut everyone down, make them wear a mask, and force the vaccine.
It's human nature, and we have to fight that.
In fact, it takes effort to fight that human nature.
If we just indulged in the flesh and indulge our human nature, we'd sit at home all day and do nothing.
It takes effort to do the other.
Disney, Technology, and Education 00:10:42
And guess what?
It's only the Christian.
It's only the Bible that will show the secular lost world how to fight that fleshly nature.
And I'm starting to see more and more Christians start to do that.
And when churches remain silent on that, just on the issue, do you think human beings want to be free?
Do you believe that human beings are naturally good or bad?
That's it.
That's not a political sermon.
But informing your congregation correctly on that will create a better citizen no matter what.
And yet they remain silent on that.
Or maybe they haven't thought that deeply about it.
But the proper answers to those questions will all of a sudden answer all your political questions correctly.
Yeah, I feel convicted.
I feel that we have to.
No, I really do.
I feel like we have to, as teachers, as Sunday school teachers, as moms and dads discipling our kids, we have to get in the game.
Let's talk about education for a second.
You know, we do have school board elections coming up on Tuesday.
And you're spending time on high schools.
And because, you know, I get feedback from my friends like, no, no, no, no, this is exaggerated.
It's not that bad.
There is not perversion.
That's not happening.
But I think you have a different opinion.
What you're seeing on school and even at the university level.
Well, I mean, this framework, this worldview has to start somewhere.
So where is this happening?
So that's a phenomenal question.
I have a slightly different take.
I think it's being underreported and so misunderstood.
So let's start with one component of this.
And I'm going to take a little pivot from education and go to something that is in the open, that's universal, and that probably half this room willingly or unwillingly is subsidizing.
Okay?
And that's the Walt Disney Company.
Okay?
Let's just start there.
Easy now.
You're starting to step on us now.
Easy.
Let's start there.
If you are unaware of what's happening at Disney, we're going to go through that.
Okay?
So that's a form of education, by the way.
Your children are learning values and morals and right and wrong more from watching Disney Plus than probably at school for the first five years of their life.
So Disney's a $250 billion company.
Disney has benefited tremendously through corporate carve-outs, loopholes.
They have, I think 15 million families subscribe to Disney Plus.
And I'm sure some families in here, I'm not trying to make you feel bad.
I'm not.
We're all victim to get Netflix subscriptions, all that.
I'm going to challenge you to stop doing that tonight.
I will.
We're going to walk through why.
So Disney decided to come out against a very vanilla, very mainstream bill in Florida where Governor Ron DeSantis, God bless his courage, decided to, seriously, decided to sign a piece of legislation that was wrongly labeled the Don't Say Gay Bill.
Doesn't say that in the law at all.
Very simple piece of legislation that says basically that parents should be able to know their children's medical records and history, and that five, six, and seven, and eight-year-olds should not be taught about gay or lesbian sex in schools.
Okay?
Pretty simple.
I don't think this is something that should be wildly controversial.
In fact, it went a step further to say that all sexual matters should be left to the parents until at least 12 years old.
Okay?
So very simple, right?
And the media lost their mind.
We expected that, right?
All these different groups lost their mind.
But then out of nowhere, because Disney World is the number one employer in Florida, 68,000 employees, they thought they could flex their muscle.
So I want you guys to play along here with a thought exercise.
I want you to imagine if Anheuser-Busch decided to try to kill a bill here in Missouri.
It's a big deal, right?
They have a lot of clout here.
That's the equivalent of what happens with Disney decides to speak out in Florida.
So the courage it takes to stand up against Disney is the same as like standing up to Wall Street in New York or standing up to the oil companies in Texas.
You get the analogy, right?
It is a big employer.
But Disney, for whatever bizarre reason, run by this new CEO, Bob Chapik, decided to play into the most insane allegations around this thing, dedicate $5 million to the human rights campaign, which is nothing more than a hate group, and say they're going to do everything they possibly can to repeal this bill.
And it went even further than that.
That's just the first step.
Wait till you hear Saga 2, 3, and 4 of this whole thing.
So Ron DeSantis doesn't care.
He's not in the mold of kind of these other weak knee politicians, signs it in the law, God bless him, and says, what are you going to do?
Everyone already hates me on that site anyway, and kind of holds the line.
But then all of a sudden, you started to see Disney employee walkouts.
You saw all these sort of protests.
And so I watched a couple videos of these Disney employee walkouts.
So I'm going to make a generalization, and it's an open question.
And I want an answer to the question.
How many Disney employees that are protesting this have families?
Probably very few.
So you have the people creating the content protesting against this that probably a lot of them don't have families.
You see them, they're late 20s, early 30s-somethings.
They have a significant homosexual population of people that work for Disney Company.
They're in the arts, whatever.
That's not even a criticism.
It's just a fact, okay?
And so they lose their mind because they believe the media narrative.
So then Disney realizes that they need to even compensate for this more.
So they have a Zoom call five days ago.
You might not have heard about this, where in the Zoom call, they said with all their executives, they have a not-so-secret gay agenda that they're pushing forward at Walt Disney Company.
Here's a couple facts: what's happening at Disney.
By the end of this year, 50% of all of their movies will have lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender characters.
And if there's romantic scenes involved, there'll be gay and lesbian kissing.
Now, what is with this weird and perverse obsession with corrupting children?
Answer.
They always want to try to break the bonds of children from their parents and from their country.
That's the answer.
They understand that if they can, and by the way, this is biblical.
What is the only one of the 10 commandments that comes with a promise and involves your country?
Honor your mother and father so you might live long in the land of which you are in.
You want your country to live?
Make sure your children honor their parents.
Very simple.
So Disney understands if they can break that bond, if they can interrupt that flow of values, they're going to run the country.
Now, regardless of your politics tonight, I'm sure we have people all across the board.
I think it's fair to say that Disney Plus, a $250 billion company, espousing that they have a not-so-secret gay agenda, saying they want more like transgender Cinderellas or whatever.
That's a step too far for all of us.
And I'm just kind of hitting the surface.
There are other things they're doing.
They're no longer going to be calling people in movies boys and girls, but they're going to have the proper pronouns.
They're no longer saying at Disney World, boys and girls, welcome to Disney World.
They're going to say, welcome the person's the Disney World.
They're not taking a stance on whether or not women can become pregnant.
They say they're birthing people at Walt Disney Company.
They're saying that anyone can become pregnant.
This is all things that Disney is doing.
And what's so amazing, and this is something I'm going to be pushing this hard, right?
Because Disney, I believe, this is a great opportunity.
I haven't seen one like this in a long time, where they got rich being the family-friendly company.
They got rich being the family-friendly safe haven.
So now if they want to be kind of the safe haven for all of these incredibly controversial and dare I say, like perverse ideology for five, six, and seven-year-olds, then they're going to have to respond to when 75 to 80 million or 90 million people refuse to buy their products, go to their amusement parks, and their streaming services.
And so you asked about education.
So if anyone thinks it's not that big of a deal, just walk them through that Disney example I just did.
Okay?
Just walk them through that.
So how bad is it in the education space?
Depends where you are.
But before you move on, we got to make sure I heard what you said because you said something very powerful about Disney.
And it is a form of education that is absolutely establishing a narrative in our kids at a very young age.
I mean, just as parents, I got four kids, 14 down to seven.
And I'm just thinking, okay, how many times, you know, just for the sake of time, oh man, you'll put this movie on the tablet, put that on the tablet, put this DVD on in the car.
And we need to get convicted.
There needs to be not, because I'm not, I don't ruha around it so much in the cancel culture part, but we're going to have to cancel them because they're doing this.
What stung me was you said, no, no, no, this is about pushing back on what is seeking to educate my kids.
That's exactly right.
And so education comes from a Latin word, which means to lead forth.
And you want to lead your child forth to righteousness and to truth and to light and to Jesus.
And just ask yourself the question, is 50% of movies Disney publishing with lesbian and gay kissing scenes going to be closer to getting your five or six or seven or eight year old closer to truth and righteousness?
I say no.
I think that's wrong.
I think there's something really perverted with that.
I also think the obsession of trying to push that on children is a whole different level that I can't quite explain.
And you're right.
And I've said this for a while, and I'm glad you brought that up because I need to reinforce this more, which is because of the hyper-technological society, less children playing outside than ever before, which I think is a tragedy.
We used to just go outside.
I know, like 15 years ago when I was a kid.
I know things have changed so quickly.
We just went, we had imaginations, and now these kids are staring at these screens all day long.
It's doing such damage to our children.
It really is.
It's so sad to see.
But look, the teacher, when it's not the teacher in school, when it's not you as the homeschooling, it's the teacher on the tablet.
And Disney has been bragging in their shareholder meetings that they are the leader in family-centered programming.
They're making money off of you.
And now they think they have such a monopoly on this that they'll be able to push their incredibly controversial and I believe degenerative agenda on a seven, eight, and nine-year-old.
And I don't think we should really be shy about talking about divesting from it and doing that.
But yes, it is a form of education.
And there's other alternatives.
There's peer flicks.
There's all sorts of different things you could do.
And I'm happy to go into the Daily Wire's coming out with a new child programming thing.
There's a lot of different ones.
PragerU does some stuff with some children programming.
We're starting to get into it at Turning Point USA.
There's other alternatives to Disney.
But the Disney thing aside, you asked how bad is it in education in general?
Addiction, Racism, and Divestment 00:07:13
That's a universal one that impacts everybody.
It's really bad in public schools across the country.
It's really bad in private schools, largely because of the accreditation agencies.
The National Association of Independent Schools has highly corrupted our private schools, including a lot of our Christian schools.
And what do I mean by bad?
I mean that they're being taught diversity, equity, inclusion from critical race theory, from CRT.
We are teaching five and six and seven and eight-year-olds that race matters, that skin color is important.
That creates little racist, is what it does.
It does not create people to care about the character.
Here's a couple universal principles that we as Christians believe.
And we should be unafraid to talk about them in any setting whatsoever.
We care more about the invisible than the visible, and we care more about what you can change than you can not change.
Those are two things we care about.
So I care about things you can't see.
What are those?
When someone walks in the room, I care more about what I can't tell at a moment's notice.
I want to get to know the person, and you should too.
Not like, oh, I got them all figured out.
They're white, so they have privilege.
What a sloppy argument, by the way.
Like, really?
Like, that's it?
Like, you're worth like your currency?
Is that like, no, I want to know about you.
Like, have you given your life to the Lord?
Like, what are you struggling with?
No, instead, it's like, nope, got you totally profiled.
It's sloppy.
Something the enemy would do, actually.
The second thing is, we care more about things you can change and you can't change.
Do we care about the things that happened prior that can't be changed?
Or the story of, hey, I want to give my life to Christ.
That's the whole program of being a Christian, isn't it?
So the question is: if we had someone that came in and they're like, hey, I need help, would we fixate endlessly on everything they've done wrong?
Like, keep on reminding them every single week, you're a drug addict, you're a drug addict, you're a drug addict, you're a drug addict, you know you're a drug addict, you know that you're a drug addict.
It's kind of depressing.
In fact, they'd walk away.
No, we'd tell them, you have redemption.
You could break free of that sin.
In fact, our whole, the entire promise of Christianity, which is true, by the way, is that you don't have to be who you were.
It's unbelievable, right?
And so, but instead, diversity, equity, inclusion, and all this stuff, it's built on a structure to hyper-focus on the things you can't change.
It's like, okay, we're just going to talk endlessly on what your ancestors, who may or may not have been related to you, did.
And in fact, the way we even talk about the history is wrong, and we're going to make you feel guilty and ashamed.
So here's another good rule for life: any organization that makes you feel guilty after the speech is over should be abolished.
I want you to think about that.
Christianity is the opposite of making you feel guilty.
After a good sermon, you feel free.
You feel redeemed.
Only Satan makes you feel guilty.
Jesus doesn't make you feel guilty.
And yet, the entire white privileged CRT regime is: I have to go feel guilty for the rest of my life because I've had like unrealized racism.
Now, let me be very clear: if you are a racist or have racist tendencies, you got work to do.
You got a lot of apologizing to do.
But just the melanin content in your skin, your mere existence, does not mean you've been expressing, you know, this white supremacist superstructure.
And so this is all throughout our educational system.
It's all throughout our college, all throughout education.
And it's at direct odds with what we as Christians believe.
It says neither slave nor Greek nor Jew.
We are all born one in Jesus Christ.
And so I, and this is really personal for me.
And the reason I think that, you know, God put me in this moment during all this stuff is I've been like super unafraid as like a white Christian, which you're not supposed to, you know, talk about these issues, because I grew up in an America 10 years ago where none of this stuff was a big deal.
Where it's like no one talked about race all the time.
I went to a high school that was 53% Hispanic, where as white people in my school were like 18% of my school, and we had people from all different walks of life in all countries.
We got along with each other.
No one talked about race.
And if someone said something indelicate or immature, you handled it.
You're like, that's not cool.
Stop it.
And that was the end of that.
And it's kind of like immaturity, right?
What happens if you're 16 or 17?
But we had a culture 10 years ago that was built on the promise of Martin Luther King.
And now we're doing the opposite.
And I got to tell you, this is a virus, to use a term we're all very familiar with, that is infecting every major institution in our country.
It's infiltrated a lot of churches.
It's infiltrated the military.
It's infiltrated corporate America.
It's infiltrated Congress.
You can call whatever you want, CRT, diversity, equity, inclusion, wokeism, whatever it is.
It's wrong.
And so, what does it actually mean in practice, right?
So, let's, if I, okay, so let's take it out.
All right, okay.
So, let's take it out of the abstract and into practice, right?
So, some people will say, oh, it's just thought exercises.
It's going through the philosophical muscles of you trying to realize how terrible a person you are.
Okay, let's talk about it in practice.
Here are four or five examples.
At Columbia University in New York City, they have black-only graduation ceremonies.
Over 100 universities across the country have black-only dormitories.
So, we should ask ourselves the question: didn't we fight to end segregation?
But according to Henry Rogers, otherwise known as Ebermax Kendi, who's kind of like the archbishop of critical race theory, he says that we need segregation today to try to fix segregation from yesterday.
Here's a good universal principle, and I will fight on this till I die.
Segregation is evil.
I don't care who does it, segregation is evil.
I'll give you, I could keep on going with more examples.
There's a black-only high school where white kids are not allowed to apply in the suburbs of Portland.
United Airlines has said they want 50% of all their new pilots to be black pilots, and they're going to elevate diversity over competency.
Now, I don't know about you, I'm all for anybody becoming a pilot, but I want to know that my pilot is hired based on the ability to land the plane, not the melanin content in the pilot's skin.
At State Street Capital Partners, which is one of the largest money management firms, you're only allowed to hire a white male through unanimous approval of the hiring committee.
I could go on and on and on.
So, those are real-world implications, right?
So, this is not just textbook, this is not just privilege walks, it's not just, oh, we need to make five-year-olds feel really bad or expand their horizons.
No, no, no, no, this is what it looks like in practice.
In practice, it looks like we have black-only dormitories.
In practice, it looks like in Columbia University, they have black-only graduation ceremonies.
And so, that's where it's not just where it's leading, it's where it is.
And so, this is a direct result of this kind of educational regime that has been pushed forward to us.
But here's what gives me hope, and where I just want to encourage you, right, is that this is deeply unpopular with the American people when they actually learn about it.
Most Americans do believe in this promise of valuing the invisible over the visible.
They believe in the promise of valuing what can change versus what cannot change.
And they believe that the people in charge who are pushing this are radically changing the country that they were raised in and the country they want for their children.
But here's the problem, and it goes to the trans issue, which we could talk about afterwards, because we haven't been controversial enough tonight, obviously, so we can get right into that, which is it's an imbalance.
And the imbalance involves a lot of you.
It certainly involved me for part of my life.
The imbalance is this: 95% of the country believes that black-only dormitories are insane.
Gender Roles and Family Values 00:11:23
95% of the country is afraid to talk about it.
And this is why.
It's because the current people in charge have been incredibly effective.
In fact, they're masters at weaponizing name-calling.
We've not gotten out of the second grade.
We haven't.
They will call you a name, and you'll say, Where do I donate?
I'll put the yard in my sign.
Please stop harassing me.
It's a real thing.
And I'm not diminishing it.
Because some of you are probably going to ask during QA, Charlie, I could lose my job if I speak out against this.
Of course, you can.
That's absolutely true.
They control everything.
I'm not saying that you should get fired from your job.
I'm not telling you should put your family's meals in jeopardy, especially as uncertain as our economic circumstances are today.
But I am going to tell you that if 5 million people value that over telling the truth, and that's how you get the country you have.
That's just how it is.
And so, and I could talk about the trans thing too.
Keep going, man.
All right.
Okay.
You're doing great.
All right.
You're doing great.
Okay.
There's only been one mishap, though, so far.
Did you catch it?
No.
So that can put the yard in my sign, I think.
That's what you said.
It's been a long week today, everybody.
Okay.
I caught that, though, just for the record.
So I'm a yard.
I'm a pretty sharp guy.
It's been a long month this week.
Boy, I've been everywhere.
But I do want to say, though, I am human, I promise.
I do believe we're in an early stage of testing for the church to be able to stand for truth.
Because standing for truth for a long time hasn't been costly.
And we're entering into a time of where it's going to be costly.
And it's a gift, actually.
It's a gift from the Lord to say, you know, if it's going to cost you, we have to understand that God meets us at that cost with a profound grace that touches the heart, it touches the mind to be courageous and bold.
Yeah.
Amen.
And so there's one other issue I want to explore with you guys on that topic of courage, which ties into something that's involving me.
And then we can get to some Q ⁇ A, if that's okay.
And this is something where the church should be just front and center.
I mean, this is something where the church should be the most vocal.
Not a lot of mystery in the scriptures around this topic.
I know it's a question that have a lot of you scratching your head at times that even the top level of our government can't even answer.
What is a woman?
Where a woman, at least I think she's a woman who wants to go on the U.S. Supreme Court, was asked by Senator Marshall Blackburn, what is a woman?
And she said, I can't answer that.
I'm not a biologist.
Now, look, I'm not a veterinarian.
I know a cat when I see one.
I'm not a meteorologist.
I know when it's raining.
I'm not a biologist, and I know a woman when I see one.
I was at least glad to know, at least she was saying a biologist would be able to, hopefully.
Yeah, and I think that's an interesting take.
The problem is a lot of biologists nowadays believe that gender and sex are not related because the entire institutions have been corrupted.
So, look, this is something where the church should be like, wow, do we believe in the Bible?
A lot of churches say they don't.
They say they do, but they really don't.
Bad politics is rooted with bad theology.
Never forget that, okay?
So do you believe God created man and woman, or do you believe that God created man and woman and the 95 other genders, according to Brown University?
And so the church is silent on this issue, largely not this church, but a lot of churches.
And we're living in a moment right now where this is kind of like the premier issue.
And part of it is to distract us, but I actually think the insignificance of being able to answer basic questions allows us to answer complicated questions.
That if we can't answer what a woman is, then we probably can't figure out, and we shouldn't, by the way, get involved in wars in other countries.
This has been my argument the whole time.
And I'm like, listen, you want to go, you want to send troops where?
We can't agree as a society on what a woman is.
And you want to go launch Tomahawk missiles 5,000 miles away in a country most people can't pinpoint.
They're like, oh, they're not related.
Oh, they're totally related.
They're related in that if you can't get the building blocks of your society right, you're not a country ready for war, let alone anything.
And so this is a very important thing.
So God created man, God created a woman.
You don't have to overthink it.
You don't have to be a biologist to talk about this.
So where do we stand with this issue today?
Well, so I tweeted out something where I said Richard Levine was born a man, had a family, 54 years old, had kids, transitioned.
I was probably being overly generous, by the way, when I said that, to Rachel Levine, and is now the woman of the year, right?
According to USA Today.
And so I got banned from Twitter for that.
And so because I deadnamed Levine, if you don't know what dead naming is, I didn't know it either until I did it.
You're not allowed to use the birth name of someone who's transitioned.
It's considered harassment.
So this is the new rules.
Yeah.
So I got banned from Twitter on this.
So then Twitter offers you this opportunity, very Maoist show trial.
So they say, okay, if you delete the tweet and acknowledge you engaged in our hateful policy, you get your Twitter account back.
So I refuse to delete the tweet.
I did nothing wrong.
I'm not going to tell somebody I lied when I told the truth.
And what a hypocrite I would be to come to this church and say, you know, it's going to cost you something while I privately like delete the tweet and go back to Twitter.
It's going to cost you something while I tell my turning point USA students to keep on fighting hard.
It's going to cost you something.
No, cost me my Twitter account for now.
1.7 million followers reach tens of millions of people every week.
Whatever.
We're on pause with that.
Twitter's going to have to decide whether or not they're going to back down.
They probably won't.
I may never get access to Twitter again.
Yeah, big loss for society, right?
Whatever.
But it's going to cost everybody something, right?
It's the little stuff that amounts to the big stuff.
But the more important point is, how do we get to a place where this entire kind of like bully and intimidation group of the transgender people are able to like control whether or not I use the proper name of you were born, even though I used the right name later in the tweet.
And so I just want you to understand, I just want to take pause, and this is where I really want the church to do more because it's because of the church's silence this is happening.
What's happened in the last week?
So we have the Florida thing with Disney and Ron DeSantis, but then also in the last week, you saw someone who was born by the name of William Thomas, who was the 462nd best swimmer, was born a man, and then transitioned to a woman and won the NCAA championship as a woman.
And I would bet there's still people in this room that had never heard that story yet, where a man born as a man competed as a woman and beat other women, went from the 462nd best man and competed as a woman and basically destroyed women's sports as we know it, and it's only going to continue.
And so how does this happen?
Very simple.
What is true?
What's true is what the Bible tells us about everything.
So if all of a sudden the organizations, the pastors who are in charge of communicating that truth go silent, especially on the most important issues, then where's society going to find truth?
Without God and without Bible, right and wrong is merely an opinion.
And that's where we're at.
So we have, so the NCAA meets and they say, well, who's to say that William Thomas can't be Leah Thomas?
And most mega church pastors, too focused on building bigger buildings, bigger budgets, and having more baptisms, which I'm in favor of all those things, but they put the church business model above righteousness, where this church put righteousness above the church business model, and the Lord has blessed this church, I think, immeasurably because of that, is most pastors did not even mention the fact that biological reality in women's sports was completely destroyed in the last couple weeks.
And it's another one of those issues where 95% of the people believe this is crazy and 95% of people are afraid to speak out about this.
And so you get to this moment where the question is, how do we communicate about this?
And look, I want the best for Thomas, this person, right?
William Thomas, Leah Thomas, whatever we want to call that person, right?
I refuse to call Thomas a man.
Oh, no.
I refuse to call Thomas a woman.
Yeah, that's right.
I get so confused.
If you're confused, I'm confused.
Trust me.
I refuse to call Thomas a woman.
Okay, now we got it right.
And the reason being is I refuse to tell a lie, but I want what's best for Thomas.
Counseling, therapy, hopefully a pastoral advice to bring that person to be able to bore anew, right?
Romans 12, 2, do not conform to the ways of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
I believe that mental condition that Thomas has, which is a mental condition called gender dysphoria, can be changed by the renewing of their mind.
The promise of Romans 12, 2 is applicable to all people.
I really believe that.
And so now, the second part.
I don't like cheating.
And you don't either.
And Thomas is a cheater.
And we should not put up with cheating.
So the individual suffering and the plight of Thomas needs to be separate from what society reorganizes for the individual.
Those are two separate things.
So love, compassion, mercy, truth, all that stuff for Thomas as a person.
But that doesn't mean you reorient society for the person who's suffering.
You know what that's like?
It's like saying we got to suspend all driving because there's some alcoholics out there that might ruin it for the rest of us.
You don't do that.
Of course not.
You don't all of a sudden make other people less free because of a small group of people that can't handle themselves.
It's such a simple moral principle.
And so, and I wish more people communicated this in this way because I think it resonates with 99% of the population.
Because it's not about, and I do, I have a spot for all people that are suffering, but Thomas is also making the decision to cheat and to get into the field and to still compete and all that.
But that's always going to happen, okay?
So the question is this.
This was the question when banks were being robbed in the early 1900s.
Who's at fault?
So at first, there were people like, well, the bank robbers are at fault.
No, it's the people that aren't protecting the banks that are at fault.
You're always going to have bank robbers.
You're always going to have cheaters.
The question is, are you protecting the resources?
Are you protecting the women?
So who's at fault?
The guardians of society are at fault.
The NCAA is at fault.
We're at fault for putting up with this nonsense.
And so we have to have a total reframing of, wow, this is a societal question, right?
And I want everyone to get the help they need.
But when all of a sudden your therapy becomes the disenfranchising of other women, that's basically the argument they're making, by the way.
That if this person can't compete against other women, you are basically interrupting that person's therapy.
I refuse to believe that we need to destroy all norms in society to go give therapy to a minority of the minority of population to go destroy the ambitions and the dreams of biological women.
We shouldn't put up with it.
We shouldn't put up with it.
Good.
Okay, we're going to do some Q ⁇ A here for a second.
So we've got two floor mics right here.
I believe we've got a couple of people here that's going to help us man those mics.
Challenging Young Men Today 00:07:49
Where are they at?
Yeah, good.
Okay, let's go ahead and jump up there, if you will.
Here they go.
Here they come.
I want to shout out to Sonny, by the way.
Sonny's one of your guys, but he's one of our local guys here.
We're going to be seeing a lot more of this guy.
Anyways, okay, so a couple ground rules.
We're going to do some Q ⁇ A for a little bit, but look around.
You see how many people are here.
So there's a few things you can't do.
Number one, I'm going to ask you not to come up and make comments.
As many comments as I know, and we love this guy.
We'll just all say it right now.
Charlie, thank you for coming in.
We love you.
Okay.
We said that.
So, and you can start lining up, by the way.
But here's a couple ground rules, okay?
We're not standing right there.
Right here in the two aisles.
Don't make comments.
Let's go right to questions and one question because you can look behind you.
There's going to be a line.
And so if we do two, three, four, five questions, that's not fair.
So you can ask one question.
If you have another one, just simply go to the back of the line and then we'll start there.
Okay, we'll jump right over here with you, Sonny.
We'll go for it.
Does the church have a role in securing future elections?
Great.
That's so, you listened so well.
God bless you for that.
Usually when pastors do that, they get right into like a five-minute rigmarole.
Okay, absolutely yes.
Look, so it's a moral question, right?
So, the way that you put people in power matters.
The way that we give up our power as people to the people in charge, the many giving up their power to the few, the process of which that is done matters.
And so, if there are questions in how that process unfolds, then the church, I believe, must be involved in not a political issue, but an issue of election integrity, from poll watching to doing things the right way.
And I don't think we have time here tonight to get into this.
I just want to highly encourage you to check it out when it comes out.
Dinesh D'Souza's upcoming movie, 2,000 Mules, which is going to be very informative.
If you're a skeptic, I love skeptics, by the way, I do, about what happened in the 2020 election.
Just humor me and watch that movie.
Just humor me and watch the video after video of people coming at 3:30 in the morning, wearing latex gloves with 100 ballots in each hand, stuffing the ballots into ballot drop boxes on video from state video in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, every state that bylaw forbids ballot harvesting.
Just watch it and tell me what you think afterwards.
And you should refer it to your skeptical friends.
But the answer is yes.
The church should be involved, in my opinion, in restoring the integrity of how we put people in power.
Because here's a really bad thing that I'm afraid we're getting close to.
If you don't trust the way we put people in power, then you're not going to trust who's in power.
And then you certainly won't trust what the people in power are doing.
And therefore, you're going to be more cynical.
And quite honestly, the whole system starts to fall apart.
Look, I'll be very honest.
When Barack Obama was elected twice, I believe he was elected twice.
I do.
I believe Barack Obama had a majority support from the people against John McCain and Mitt Romney.
I think Barack Obama was one of the worst presidents in American history.
But I never doubted.
I never doubted for a second that he had approval from people, ever.
It never phased me.
I have a lot of doubt right now.
I have a lot of doubt.
And I believe, whoa, and I believe that the system of how we do elections, from mass mail and balloting to Zuckerberg putting $430 million into our elections, should at least beg the question of was this done the right way?
I want to trust who, I want to say, you know what, I might disagree, I don't like you, but you're there because you did everything the right way and the systems work the way they did.
You should all desire that, by the way.
In fact, I believe our country was less fractured when we said, you know what, not a fan of Obama, but he won that way and so be it.
So it really kind of does beg that question.
Okay, next question.
Hi, I'm a youth pastor actually in Grand City.
I'm just wondering, I've read a few articles saying that we're a generation away from this next generation of Christianity and the church almost being non-existent.
What would be kind of your advice or steps of faith for pastors or people who are practicing faith to kind of step in and bring it in that next generation?
I love youth pastors.
God bless you.
It's such an important job, especially right now.
Seriously.
So thank you for what you're doing.
So for young people in particular, I tell this to youth pastors all the time, the ones that will talk to me, which is not a lot.
A lot of youth pastors can tend to be somewhat woke, unfortunately.
So thank you for being here tonight.
You've got to be relevant to young people.
Look, students want order right now.
They don't know it.
They can't articulate it, but they're living in this perpetual sea of chaos, of moral chaos, of societal chaos, of political chaos.
And the people in charge have failed them at every turn.
We locked down our society unnecessarily.
We locked down our schools unnecessarily.
We told them to get shots for a virus that wasn't going to largely affect them and impact them.
We're dealing with a generation that is increasingly cynical and nihilistic and humanistic.
And so my advice would be that we need to restore young people's faith, hopefully first and foremost, in the natural law, the God that made them and desires to get to know them again, and then Jesus Christ who will wash their sins away new.
And I think it has to be done in a completely different way.
Where I don't think, and this is my own personal opinion, you're going to win over young people by cussing and swearing in your sermons.
It drives me nuts when I see that stuff.
I don't think you're going to win over young people, you know, by just kind of watering down the gospel or, you know, trying to truncate the gospel.
I think the entirety of the word of God speaks for itself.
In fact, I believe in my work, and again, my work is probably more comprehensive in reaching out with young people than probably even most youth ministries, but so be it, whatever.
I would say that a young person would much rather have bluntly spoken truth than well-tailored lies right now, because all they have received is well-tailored lies.
And so, look, there'll be plenty of young people that will go away.
A lot of them will come back.
But boy, you got to throw them a lifeline.
You got to throw them something that they can hatch on to.
And I tell youth pastors this all the time: young men in particular, I can't speak as much to young women.
Young men need to be directly challenged.
We have a generation of grown infants right now in our country.
Of the lost boys in Peter Pan is the perfect example of what's happening with young men in America right now.
Pornography is to blame for this, which is one of the great societal ills that the church really doesn't speak about enough.
There's a lot of different issues that are out there.
What is the challenge that young men need to face?
Youth pastors need to look young men in the eyes and say, it's time for you to be a man.
Stop sleeping until 2 p.m.
Get off those websites.
Stop playing video games.
It wouldn't hurt if you picked up a barbell once or dumbbell once in a while and did something.
And how about you improve your life?
They say, well, no one likes me and the girls won't talk to me and say, listen, maybe they won't talk to you because you don't got your life in order.
You have no self-control.
And they say, well, how do I get self-control?
I'm glad you asked.
It's the fruit of the Spirit.
You're not going to get self-control anytime soon.
You give your life to the Lord, you allow the Spirit to fill you.
That self-control will come.
The number one complaint I hear from young women about young men is young men have no control over themselves.
Number one complaint I hear is they say with drinking or with drugs or with language or behavior.
And look, the results speak for themselves.
We're on the verge of a population collapse in our country.
The least married generation in history, the least children ever be born, most drug-addicted, most alcohol-addicted, most suicidal, most depressed, most anxious generation in history, also the least religious.
So something we're doing isn't working.
The watered-down gospel of trying to be socially relevant, I'm going to put four-letter words in my gospel, and young people are going to like me because I'm doing it on TikTok enough.
Speak blunt and plainly speaking truth.
Write to them, and I think the results will be amazing.
Journalism, College, and Ministry 00:15:37
Thank you.
Good.
I want to ask one other thing.
Wouldn't you ask a question too?
If you could get right up on that mic, our sound guys would really love you.
So thank you for that.
Hi, Charlie.
I am a journalism student.
I graduate next month from Regent University.
Where do you see conservative journalism going?
First of all, we need more conservative journalists.
That's a big deal.
I'm working on it.
So let me tell you: I'm going to speak directly to you, which I rarely do when someone asks a question.
Okay, I try to generalize it, but I think it'll be applicable.
The other side, whatever you want to coin the other side, 99% of their bad deeds don't get reported on.
And so I would encourage you to be a top-tier investigative journalist.
We do not have enough people doing the tough work of investigation.
Now, investigation could be FOIA requests, Freedom of Information Act.
It could be showing up at city council meetings and asking questions.
It could be waiting all day at the airport till your congressman lands and just waiting for them to get off the plane and respectfully asking a question.
It's not done enough nowadays.
In fact, it's kind of reposting the same articles and doing the same things.
So I just want to encourage you: where do I think it's going?
And I don't even want to use the word conservative.
I'm a conservative, I'm a constitutionalist.
Let's just generalize it.
How about like the non-degenerative side of America, right?
Whatever that is.
That's us, right?
Like team reality, non-degenerative.
Woo-hoo, like that's us, whatever.
Great.
Big coalition, right?
Which is this, which is challenge authority, challenge tyranny.
Journalism at its best challenges the powerful.
What have you noticed in the last couple of years?
Journalism not covering the news, but they're covering up the news.
Instead of covering the Hunter Biden story, they actively covered it up.
Instead of challenging the FBI and the CIA, challenging CNN, challenging the most wealthy people, instead of challenging Zuckerberg, who put $430 million, they put your church on the front page of the local newspaper because that's the threat, right?
Yeah, like, yeah, where's your expose on the Zuckerberg money that came into this county?
Like, nice try, right?
Of course, they won't report on it because they view their role as protecting the institutional power regime.
So, every person going into journalist, journalism is super important.
Now, let me broaden it for the room.
So, thank you for that.
Let me broaden it.
All of you could become journalists.
No offense to the person who spent a bunch of money to go to the journalism degree, but so I'm going to, all of you could do this.
All of you can find a story and break it.
All of you can challenge power.
You could put a smartphone in someone's face lovingly and gracefully.
Why'd you vote that way?
Why'd you vote that way?
I don't get it.
Why are you doing that?
You see him at the grocery store.
You see them on the street.
Have the courage to do it.
Don't be a jerk.
Don't make a fool of yourself.
Just ask questions.
Ask questions.
Every single one of you can immediately turn into citizen journalists.
That is one of the great ways to push back against the power that seems just like completely unstoppable in our country.
But I have so much respect for you to go into journalism.
We need better people in journalism.
We really do.
God bless you.
Hey, Charlie, I agree with you wholeheartedly that the church is the answer for the things that you were talking about today.
But by and large, the church culture doesn't seem to really have the ministry and the things going on in the ministry to address those things.
We got like children's ministry, singles ministry, but not things that are really geared to address the things that you discuss today.
Not by and large, anyway.
How would Charlie Kirk consult such a church in helping them to start implementing these things?
What a great question.
That's a terrific question.
And you basically, you took my one-liner right out of my mouth, which is: so we have children's ministries, some prison ministries, we have financial counseling ministries, women's ministries, men's ministries, but a lot of churches don't have ministries to be able to make, to have their congregation make sense of the news or what's happening around them.
So this is part of what we're trying to do at TPUSA Faith and kind of the team that we're creating.
We do a once-a-month thing that can be done at any church at any time called Freedom Night in America, where it's an open setting for questions to be asked, for people to come to get advice from their pastors on these issues.
I'm so incredibly encouraged to hear you guys have a civic engagement ministry.
That's such an important step.
It's awesome.
That's so cool.
And that's not political.
That's just getting engaged and making the decisions that you want to make.
So in the best case scenario, I believe a church should have a full-time pastor where their full-time job is to be the go-to person for every contentious issue.
So that person is the, hey, raise your hand on every Sunday.
You got a question about the trans issue.
You got a question about CRT.
That's the guy.
Schedule lunch or coffee.
And their calendar all week is dealing with your needs, wants, and concerns and clarification.
That's it.
And they're the one that can come to us and be the liaison.
Hey, Charlie, they're asking questions about Jacques Derrida and the roots of postmodernist thinking.
Perfect.
We know how to do that.
How much?
No, seriously, that's my lane.
I live in that lane.
I spend two hours a day reading those books.
I can help.
There's not a question we haven't encountered.
And I'm not saying that braggadociously.
It just happens to be, you know, our expertise.
That actually shouldn't be the expertise of the church.
You got a lot of other stuff to do, right?
You got marriages to keep together, right?
You got young people to hopefully get married, right?
You got children to rise up.
It could be overwhelming, right?
Because it could kind of monopolize.
I actually think dedicating a pastor to that full-time actually makes it so much less controversial.
In the sense where, and you got a problem with it, just talk to him.
You got a problem?
Talk to him.
Talk to him.
You have a reference point.
There's a place for it to grow, to flourish, right?
And also, you're emphasizing that it's a part, but it's not the whole church, right?
That it's a part of the church.
And so I've seen this work wonders at other people's churches.
Jack Hibbs has this.
Rob McCoy has this.
Greg Farrington has this.
Steve Smotherman has this, where they have a go-to guy that just handles it.
So that would be my ideal.
And I think that it's an incredibly important thing.
And then I would encourage doing biblical citizenship classes, which we can help you with.
The TPUSA Faith is helping do all these different sorts of things.
But the willingness is the most important thing.
And this church has the willingness.
And I just want to say, I know this sounds silly, but the fact that you guys are having me speak, it's a big deal in the sense most churches wouldn't get near this.
They wouldn't.
And that says a lot about this church.
It really does.
Thank you.
Hi, Charlie.
So I'm 17 years old, and I've been trying to be very outspoken about my beliefs, been called all the names you can think of, racist, homophobic, transphobic, has had death threats put against me.
And I feel like I'm doing a lot to try and help the students in my high school or high schools around me, but I feel like I'm not doing enough.
So my question is, what is your advice to people like me who can't vote to try and help change the hearts and minds of my very woke generation?
17 years old.
She's wondering about her country.
Be encouraged.
Be encouraged.
Stay the course.
I think you found a few friends in your corner.
I just, I love it.
It gives me so much hope, everybody.
And if you ever come to a Turning Point USA event, you'll see one young person after another that's just on fire for this.
So you've been called six-turb, sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, right?
You know, racist, bigoted, the whole deal.
That's the acronym that could be used for that.
So look, I'm going to give you some honest advice.
You wouldn't want me to tell you anything but that.
So you're going to keep on being called names.
You're going to be kicked out of social circles.
You cannot be openly young and conservative and Christian without losing your friends and without being kind of outcast.
It's not possible.
Okay.
Welcome to America.
We seek to solve that at Turning Point USA, where the Turning Point USA chapter has 150 kids or 250 people.
And next thing you know, that's the most popular thing in the high school or the college.
And all of their tactics don't work and backfires on them.
And we're on pace to have 1,000 high school chapters across the country at Turning Point USA, an incredible accomplishment that our field team deserves so much credit for.
So look, stay involved with Turning Point.
Be encouraged.
But I just also want to say this, which is you're going to be a tougher and stronger person because you're making the decision now to do what is right over what is easy.
The younger you make that decision, the less phased you'll be when all of a sudden it says, well, I'm going to fire if you speak out.
Whatever.
I'm used to it.
When I was 17, I went through it.
And shouldn't we be worried as adults about whether or not we're creating tough and strong young people?
Isn't that the goal?
And so we should want that for our kids.
We should want to have young people speak out with this.
And because I would rather be on the side that has the 17-year-olds that are still standing, regardless of the cultural pressure, than the other side, which is actually they're a very weak movement.
They've never had a fight for anything.
They never had to be called names.
Which one long-term is going to win?
This is the movement that's going to win.
Just a matter of time.
Thank you, and God bless you.
Hi, Charlie.
I remember a while back when I first started listening to you, you were talking about you were writing a book about why your kids shouldn't go to college.
That's right.
I remember thinking, wow, that's really controversial.
But now I have been awakened and I see the need.
And so I'm wondering if you're still working on that.
It's coming out in either August or September.
It's called The College Scam.
And it's intentionally written.
It's written as a 10-count indictment against college, as if I was presenting this to a jury to try to persuade you, because you're right.
Most people think college is wonderful.
I'll riff on this for just a second.
If you follow me, you kind of know this whole kind of deal that I think about for college.
College is right for some people.
I'd say 5% of the population should go to college.
95% should not.
Most people, if you may be a doctor or a lawyer or engineer, most people don't go to college for that reason.
Most people go to college to go study the humanities where they learn to hate themselves, to study sociology, where they learn to hate everybody, or they study some other unspecified thing where they learn to hate the country.
And so the culture that's been created on campus is one thing, but let's just talk about the pragmatic sense of it, right?
Which is we have a generation of young people that are borrowing money they don't have to study things that don't matter to find jobs that don't exist.
And we act as if this entire cycle works, the cycle of indebtedness.
And I'm in the business of hiring young people.
A college degree means nothing, absolutely nothing.
And I know this is, this might be controversial.
I don't, again, you know me well enough to not care and to trust me when I say this, which is if most parents, and this is, this is some, this is the controversial part.
They don't want to hear this.
Most people go to college because their parents are forcing them, right?
Even though it's the students that are the ones borrowing the money.
And so you say, well, Charlie, you know, what should they do instead?
Right?
Okay, well, first of all, gap years are great.
I took a gap year, ended up during a gap decade, okay?
Gap, we have nowhere near enough entrepreneurs in our country right now, nowhere near enough entrepreneurs.
We need more young people to start businesses and take risks.
Instead, we're saying go through this secular humanist mill where they have sex week and they have this degenerative culture.
I'm not kidding.
You think you know what's happening on college campuses.
You play Russian roulette with your kid or grandkids' values when you send them to a college campus.
You may never see them again.
And we have a generation of young people that, you know, they're kind of sick and tired.
They're like, look, I went to college.
I borrowed the money.
I did what I was told.
I studied North African lesbian poetry and my life is not better.
And we wonder why this whole system is so messed up.
I'll finish with this.
And I think this will be applicable: is that we have a war that's been waged on the muscular class in our country.
And we treat the people that work with their hands as stupid.
You might not, but our society does.
We treat them as like the smelly, deplorable Walmart people.
You know who I'm talking about.
The plumbers, the electricians, the welders, the police officers.
You realize that we have a 3 million person deficit in the trades right now in our country?
Why?
Well, here's the blunt truth.
Because a lot of suburban moms and dads didn't want to tell their neighbors that their kid works construction.
They'd rather tell their neighbors that their kid is an atheist lesbian that went to University of Missouri and is working as an accountant at Ernst Young, doesn't share any of their values, but at least they're not working construction.
You know it's true, by the way.
You know that's a big driving force.
And so what are we really doing here?
Answer, destroying a generation for a parent's ego.
That's wrong.
So anyway, it's right for some people.
If every college like Hillsdale College, my opinion would be different.
Colleges are cesspools, very little redeemable value.
I visit them.
I visit over 150 of them.
So yeah, the book's called The College Scam.
Keep an open mind.
When it'll be out, we're going to be publicizing it big time.
Do a whole book tour.
But let's just talk about it from a Christian standpoint.
More Christian families have lost their children to secular colleges than any other institution.
So let's just talk about the future of the kingdom.
College has done more damage to American Christianity than anything else we could ever possibly imagine.
So that's just a teaser.
Thank you.
Two more?
Yeah.
So the next presidential election and your influence on young people is absolutely amazing.
Are you willing, Charlie, to endorse a candidate so that our young people who don't study and understand the candidates like you do, so they'll have a better chance of choosing correctly?
And then more specifically, if the Republican nominations come narrowed down to Governor DeSantis and Donald Trump, would you be willing to verbalize your show?
Too many hypotheticals, man.
We got a midterm election coming up in November, I got to be honest.
So answer, through our 501c4, we ran Students for Trump.
I was probably the most enthusiastic supporter for the president back in his first term.
Too many hypotheticals.
We'll see who's going to run.
Trump's probably going to run, and we'll see if anyone steps up against him.
But he has my support.
If he runs again, he's earned it.
He was a phenomenal president.
And so, and that's not a bash against anyone that you mentioned or anything.
Appreciating Supporters and Future Plans 00:02:00
But yeah, look, we run our 501c4 turning point action.
Turning point pack is coming up.
And I appreciate the kind words about the influence of young people.
Okay, it's getting late.
Last question.
Hey, what's going on, Charlie?
I just want to break the rules for a second and appreciate you.
Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, all you guys.
Thank you.
Appreciate you.
Thank you guys.
My question is going to be a little different than everybody else's.
So my question is: people, we see people coming from New York down to North Carolina and the southern states, from California over into Texas, and they're starting to make these states blue.
We watched North Carolina flip multiple times in the last election.
How do we combat that?
Yes, that's a great question.
So make your state you live in one they don't want to move to.
And so let me give you some words of advice.
When they see guns on the back of pickup trucks, they don't like that.
I'm being honest.
Pro-life laws, they don't like that stuff and all that.
So make it in the image that you want.
And you're right.
You're seeing a big move from the north to the south.
It's happening in record numbers.
So, all right, let me close with just one thing.
So I'm just going to ask you guys to help me out in a free of charge way.
I'm banned from Twitter, which is not fun.
So tomorrow morning at 9 a.m., I'll be back doing three podcasts a day.
So we do three podcasts a day from a biblical perspective.
It's totally free of charge.
If you guys would subscribe to our podcast, it would be amazing.
So here's how you do it.
You take out your smartphone, and there's a couple ways you could do it.
You could go to the QR code on the screen and it will, if you have an Apple phone, so if you don't know what a QR code is, you open up your camera and then it will all of a sudden have a link on the top of your screen.
It will transport you to a podcast page.
Once you're on that podcast page, you could subscribe by hitting the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner.
Pretty simple.
And so I want to deputize all the eight-year-olds who could help everyone around here.
Living as Citizens and Closing 00:03:47
They're trying.
I can see it.
They're trying.
And so if that was, if that's too confusing, I understand.
So you might have a podcast app on your phone.
This helps us so much, everybody.
It helps us prevent from being canceled.
It's a big deal.
When you guys subscribe, it sends a message to the tech companies that millions of people are behind us and that we're less likely to be censored.
We already are banned from Twitter.
And so, again, take out your camera, go there, QR code.
It blesses us.
And then once you're on that page, you hit that subscribe button.
It really helps us out.
So thank you.
Okay, so one last thing in closing.
Is that okay?
Do you have any thoughts?
I just wanted to do, as you close, give us a charge for Tuesday is vote day.
It's a big day here in St. Louis County, St. Charles.
All right, guys.
So let's close on a high note, everybody.
There's so much that we can cover.
So the American founders and framers gave us an incredible system.
Most people ever to live live as subjects or as serfs.
We get the opportunity to live as citizens.
Being a citizen is unique.
It takes you to be active, aware, and alert.
Challenge authority.
Challenge tyranny.
Be in the streets.
Be voting.
Be active.
Be optimistic.
You hear things about the great reset.
You hear what's happening all over.
I see what's happening, though.
I traveled 330 days last year.
I'm on the road nonstop.
There's a common theme, people that are asking questions and showing up at our events.
There are people that have never come to these events before that are starting to show up.
People that are realizing that, I got to do more.
The country's falling apart.
My kids are being taught this nonsense.
I got to get into what's happening.
There's this rise of the citizen that is all of a sudden shaking the ground of the regime and what they think they can do to you.
They are being filled with paranoia.
They're resigning in record numbers.
They're not sure what happens next.
You know, in physics, we learn that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.
And I tell you right now, for all the injustice, for all the tyranny, I'm starting to see you retake the country.
I'm starting to see everyday people start to say, it's still we, the people, that governs our constitutional republic.
The enemy wants you to be hopeless.
The enemy wants you to be cynical.
I know a lot of you do everything you're told.
You watch Fox News, you bought the pillow, you've done everything that you've been told to do.
By the way, promo code Kirk at mypillow.com, okay?
But now it's time for you to pray and fast and do more.
This country is such a gift from the Lord to have a constitutional republic.
The prosperity, the wealth, the freedom that we have.
And we're right on that line.
And if it's not for you, look to your grandkids and say, it's worth it for you for me not to give up.
If not for you, for the 17-year-old that asked the question, I want you to live in a free country.
And here's what I can promise you, that there's thousands and hundreds of thousands, millions of people just like me and just like you that are dedicating everything they got at it.
And I'll tell you what, the Lord is going to honor that.
The Lord is not going to forsake his people when they stand with courage for righteousness.
Now is the time to rise in more ways than one.
I just want to say, what an amazing church.
We are going to win, everybody, and the bad guys are going to lose.
God bless you guys.
Thank you so much.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts.
It's always freedom at CharlieKirk.com.
Thank you so much for listening.
God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.
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