The Charlie Kirk Show - America's Fake New Religions: Charlie LIVE at Texas Christian University
Aired: 2023-04-01
Duration: 01:24:17


=== Five Fake Religions Spreading (15:34) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show, TCU, Texas Christian University.
[00:00:03]  I talk about the five fake religions spreading across the country.
[00:00:07]  And then I take questions from the audience.
[00:00:09]  Email us your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and get involved with turning pointusa at tpusa.com.
[00:00:16]  Start a high school chapter, start a college chapter today.
[00:00:20]  Turning point USA is America's best last hope, tpusa.com.
[00:00:26]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:00:27]  Here we go.
[00:00:28]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:29]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:00:32]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:35]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:00:38]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:00:39]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:00:40]  His spirit, his love of this country.
[00:00:42]  He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
[00:00:49]  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.
[00:00:57]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:00]  Please take a seat.
[00:01:01]  Thank you, everybody.
[00:01:02]  Wow, what a group.
[00:01:04]  You got to tell you, by the way, I wore my TCU tie just for the record.
[00:01:08]  Okay.
[00:01:11]  I want to tell you about TCU a couple things.
[00:01:14]  Boy, was I cheering for you guys in the national title game.
[00:01:16]  I got to tell you.
[00:01:17]  I was really, I mean, you guys, but honestly, as someone who is a fan of a team far from here that you would be like, why are you a fan of Oregon Ducks?
[00:01:25]  Because my whole family went there.
[00:01:26]  Just getting the national championship is not some sort of consolation prize.
[00:01:30]  And you beat Michigan, which was hilarious to watch, honestly.
[00:01:32]  So you guys should be very proud of what that football team did.
[00:01:36]  That was an amazing, amazing.
[00:01:37]  I mean that.
[00:01:38]  That's an amazing thing.
[00:01:41]  And it really inspired a lot of people, even though the final game was not what we wanted it to be.
[00:01:47]  I want to also say another thing about TCU.
[00:01:49]  TCU wins an award tonight for the easiest to work with school on our whole campus tour.
[00:01:54]  So good job, TCU.
[00:01:58]  I got to tell you, we had to fight for every inch on some of these campus stops.
[00:02:04]  You know, it is literally at UC Davis.
[00:02:06]  I don't know if you saw the videos of our mostly peaceful campus tour stop up at UC Davis.
[00:02:11]  They're coming with weapons and they're banging down doors and they're smashing windows and assaulting police officers.
[00:02:17]  And I don't think we had a protester here tonight.
[00:02:19]  Did we have a pro maybe there's one here tonight?
[00:02:21]  We'll meet them and say hello.
[00:02:23]  But we had legions of them.
[00:02:25]  You don't look like a protester, but that's okay.
[00:02:29]  Yeah, okay.
[00:02:30]  He has a MAGA hat on and he's calling himself a protester.
[00:02:35]  But you have done Texas very well.
[00:02:37]  I have to say, this is a much bigger crowd and a warmer welcome than when I went to UT Austin last semester.
[00:02:43]  And just saying.
[00:02:49]  And you have a better football team than them, which really bothers them.
[00:02:52]  So I see I'm already losing people on that.
[00:02:57]  And by the way, this was not planned to make all the volunteers wear burnt orange.
[00:03:03]  I felt very bad about that.
[00:03:05]  Did you see this?
[00:03:06]  I don't know whose sick idea that was, but we're going to go to TCU for a campus stop and make them all wear burnt orange.
[00:03:13]  I saw that.
[00:03:14]  I said, this is not good.
[00:03:16]  By the way, they've done a great job, the Turning Point USA Volunteers.
[00:03:19]  It's not easy putting on an event like this this morning.
[00:03:24]  So I'm going to, I'll talk, I'll talk a little bit, and then I want to do some questions and answers.
[00:03:29]  It's just terrible what happened today in Nashville.
[00:03:31]  We could talk about that if you want.
[00:03:33]  I'm going to probably not very talk about that very much.
[00:03:36]  But obviously, we should have in our thoughts and prayers what's happening there.
[00:03:40]  So I'm going to start that from the outset.
[00:03:42]  And then I'm going to make this out of all of our campus stops and tours, the one where I actually defend Christianity the most.
[00:03:50]  And you might not like that, but if you're a student at TCU, I'm told it's Texas Christian University.
[00:03:57]  So I want to make sure I emphasize that.
[00:03:59]  Somebody told me they're trying to change name.
[00:04:00]  Is that true?
[00:04:01]  Are they really trying to do that?
[00:04:02]  Is that a thing that's being floated?
[00:04:04]  I don't know.
[00:04:04]  I hear all these things.
[00:04:05]  I don't know.
[00:04:06]  I'm not going to really make headlines, right?
[00:04:08]  Somebody just was nodding their head.
[00:04:09]  I don't know.
[00:04:09]  But I think it's important, whether you're a Christian or not tonight, welcome.
[00:04:13]  It's not my point to make the case for Christianity for you tonight.
[00:04:16]  What I am instead going to make the case of if you don't have a nation built on a religion that has a strong tradition, what replaces it is really bad.
[00:04:25]  That's the argument that I'm going to make tonight, okay?
[00:04:27]  Is the necessity of Christianity?
[00:04:30]  I believe in the truth of Christianity.
[00:04:32]  We could talk about that in question and answer.
[00:04:34]  But if I can't convince you on that, I can hopefully convince you that be careful what happens when all of a sudden you say God is dead.
[00:04:42]  Be careful what replaces it.
[00:04:44]  So tonight I'm going to talk about the raise, the rise of fake religions.
[00:04:48]  Because the biggest growing group in America, especially ages 18 to 25, 18 to 30, are people that are, they call the nuns, N-O-N-E, not like Catholic nuns, but the nuns.
[00:05:00]  Besides, I have no religious affiliation, right?
[00:05:03]  And it's this nauseating one-liner.
[00:05:06]  And if you're tonight and you believe that, that's fine.
[00:05:08]  We could talk about it.
[00:05:09]  But it's just no one's actually thought about it.
[00:05:11]  I'm spiritual, but not religious.
[00:05:12]  Like, okay, that means you're a narcissist and you really just want to do whatever you want to do in your life.
[00:05:17]  And if you say you're offended after I say that, you've proven my point, by the way.
[00:05:21]  Because you really haven't thought very deeply.
[00:05:23]  What you're saying, though, is that maybe somebody taught me something in a religious school I didn't like.
[00:05:26]  Maybe I have an opinion of religion.
[00:05:28]  That's all fine.
[00:05:29]  But whether you like it or not, you are all inheritors in a Western tradition of things that you consider to be common sense, things that you consider to be normal, that are really the inheritors of a robust Christian tradition.
[00:05:42]  You are all the Christian inheritance that we can call it tonight.
[00:05:46]  And so we are less religious and more secular than any other time in American history.
[00:05:52]  Now, I'm not going to say all of these are because of it, but it certainly, as an opening argument, should press pause and say, wow, does one thing have to do with the other?
[00:06:01]  So we're more religious and more secular.
[00:06:03]  And it is, we have the most depressed generation, suicidal, alcohol-addicted, drug-addicted, and without purpose generation history.
[00:06:11]  Is that all because of the secularization of the country?
[00:06:13]  Probably not.
[00:06:14]  There's a lot of other forces.
[00:06:15]  For example, the lockdowns, which was a massive mistake.
[00:06:18]  One of the biggest mistakes in American history was locking down you, our nation's young people, and to put masks on you and force a vaccine for you to take, even though the virus did not represent a serious threat to your health at all.
[00:06:31]  In fact, you're more likely to die of self-inflicted suicide as a young person.
[00:06:34]  That went up dramatically than from the Fauci Chinese coronavirus.
[00:06:38]  And we decided that we're going to lock you down and make it harder for you to have friendships, go to community gatherings.
[00:06:43]  And many of you were in high school probably when this happened, taking prom, graduation, sports away from you.
[00:06:49]  Really dumb and stupid idea.
[00:06:50]  And actually, it's part of one of the rising religions of the reason we did that.
[00:06:54]  But what I'm going to argue tonight is that when you say that you're not religious, that's okay.
[00:07:01]  But be careful what you actually end up believing might end up being a pseudo-religion in place of you telling me you're not being religious.
[00:07:09]  And there's a God-shaped hole in everybody's heart.
[00:07:12]  And maybe you're super disciplined and you resist every ideology at all times.
[00:07:16]  But in reality, what we've seen is that as America becomes less Christian, is that we do embrace other ideas that are incredibly poisonous and dangerous and creates moral confusion and deep-seated unhappiness.
[00:07:31]  Now, so part of this, I'm going to go through the five that I've identified.
[00:07:35]  And again, the perception of Christianity in America is very, very low.
[00:07:41]  And that's too bad.
[00:07:42]  And there's a lot of, you could, you could list a million reasons for it.
[00:07:45]  And you could list all your objections, right?
[00:07:47]  I don't like the megachurches.
[00:07:48]  I don't like the fact that some of these pastors say these things and all that.
[00:07:51]  But that is actually besides the point of two things.
[00:07:54]  Is it true or has it created a better world?
[00:07:58]  And yes, I believe it's true, but the second one I should be able to win all of you over on.
[00:08:02]  Let's take a very simple example.
[00:08:04]  The fact that children are off limits, okay?
[00:08:07]  Where does that idea come from?
[00:08:09]  The fact that an eight-year-old should not have to be preyed on by a teacher, by another person, by a gender-affirming clinician, by somebody that might try to harm them.
[00:08:21]  Most societies, absent a Christian inheritance, do not believe that children are off-limits.
[00:08:27]  For example, the Taliban.
[00:08:28]  As they say in the Taliban, they have tea boys where they bring them in the afternoon and they rape young boys.
[00:08:32]  If you think that's an exception, happened through Greek times and Roman times.
[00:08:36]  What was different that all of a sudden we consider it to be common sense that if you touch a child, you should then go to prison and maybe even more than prison, the harshest punishment.
[00:08:45]  A very simple teaching from the scriptures that say one of the harshest teachings that Christ said, which is it is better for those of you that have a millstone hung around your neck than for you to touch the least of these.
[00:08:57]  Now, that is built in through hundreds of years of tradition into our songs, into our traditions, into our basic ancestry that you are raised in a nation that you don't realize it's actually a human norm for people to go after children.
[00:09:10]  And I'll prove it to you in multiple different ways.
[00:09:12]  There's three types of people in the world, okay?
[00:09:14]  There's children, there's predators, and the protectors of children.
[00:09:19]  Those are three types of people.
[00:09:20]  And so in order for predators to not be able to go after children, it takes courageous and heroic people to stand up against them.
[00:09:29]  Whether it be in Exodus, whether it be when Jesus was born, there's story after story of this weird pattern of tyrants that want to kill the firstborn.
[00:09:36]  Now, we would never ever do that in our society.
[00:09:38]  Like we would never have, you know, I don't know, abortions.
[00:09:41]  Like, of course, we're more advanced than that, right?
[00:09:44]  Million abortions a year that we have in our country right now.
[00:09:47]  But the point being is that under a certain rubric, we believe that children should be off limits.
[00:09:52]  And we are losing that, aren't we?
[00:09:54]  Look at what's happened with these drag queens.
[00:09:56]  All of a sudden, the state controls your children.
[00:09:59]  As we lose the roots of what actually we consider to be common sense, all of a sudden insane ideas and dangerous and pernicious ideas start to come into our society.
[00:10:09]  I'll give you another example.
[00:10:11]  This example that you should be charitable, that you should give money to the poor.
[00:10:15]  Most nations do not have that as a core value.
[00:10:18]  Where does that come from?
[00:10:20]  As Europe has become more secular, they're one of the least charitable continents on the planet.
[00:10:24]  In Asia, the idea of giving money to the poor, they say, that's my money.
[00:10:27]  Why would I give it there?
[00:10:28]  We are by far the most generous nation in the history of the world.
[00:10:32]  Where does that idea come from?
[00:10:34]  Does it come from the Enlightenment?
[00:10:35]  No.
[00:10:36]  It comes from a Christian teaching that you are your brother's keeper and that you're all made of the image of God.
[00:10:41]  And if you have money, it is not your money.
[00:10:43]  It is God's money.
[00:10:44]  And you must preserve and protect your neighbor from less than desirable circumstances.
[00:10:49]  You might think it's common sense.
[00:10:51]  You might think that it's all that.
[00:10:52]  Oh, people act that way all the time.
[00:10:54]  You are living in the exception and not the rule.
[00:10:56]  And we're quickly losing it.
[00:10:58]  You see, as inheriting this tradition, where all of a sudden we look at it through a new lens and we say, wow, in fact, the less religious we become, the more nasty and the more cruel we come to one another.
[00:11:11]  That's not saying that every religious person is happy and is joyful and is living it out.
[00:11:16]  That's not the point.
[00:11:17]  The question is, what is the standard?
[00:11:19]  And by where does that standard come from?
[00:11:21]  So we have these five religions that I'm going to talk about, which I think is really important.
[00:11:25]  The first one I think is interesting, which is this new religion of tolerance.
[00:11:29]  Now, tolerance is considered to be a value.
[00:11:32]  I don't know why.
[00:11:34]  And you might say, well, Charlie, that's really mean.
[00:11:36]  Like, I have no tolerance for a man who thinks he's a woman to compete in NCAA championships and win a national title.
[00:11:44]  I have no tolerance of that.
[00:11:50]  You can be compassionate.
[00:11:53]  You can be loving, but isn't the most loving thing to have standards that the world needs to be ordered in harmony with the natural law?
[00:12:01]  Instead, if you tolerate evil, you are complicit with evil.
[00:12:06]  And we're seeing that they say, well, Charlie, you're not very tolerant of these trans athletes.
[00:12:11]  I just call them what they are, right?
[00:12:13]  These are men wearing woman face, masquerading as women, trying to appropriate womanhood because they couldn't compete against other men and they're cheaters.
[00:12:25]  That's what this is.
[00:12:31]  And if I have to see another one of these bumper stickers or signs, you know what I'm saying?
[00:12:36]  I don't know.
[00:12:36]  I mean, I saw them in Highland Park a lot.
[00:12:38]  I don't know if you see them in Fort Worth, but I see them in Highland Park a lot.
[00:12:41]  We believe that Black Lives Matter and science is real.
[00:12:43]  It's like religious incantation, right?
[00:12:46]  And when I see these things, the home is like an $8 million house, right?
[00:12:51]  And this is how you should look at it from now on.
[00:12:53]  You say, that's what happens when Christianity dies in your society.
[00:12:56]  They drive by that sign every single day, and that is a religious view.
[00:13:02]  It's an incantation, feels good.
[00:13:05]  I'm helping the world.
[00:13:07]  And it's like, I'm sure you've seen it, just nauseating.
[00:13:09]  It goes one after the other, after the other, after the other.
[00:13:11]  And that's somebody trying to fill that hole.
[00:13:14]  And the issue with the religion of tolerance is that it preys on people's best intentions because they don't want to be deemed as hateful.
[00:13:24]  You understand it's not a binary, right?
[00:13:26]  That you could be loving and firm and not hateful of anybody, but also uncompromising in your standards.
[00:13:35]  And that, I believe the religion of tolerance is actually pushed by some of the least tolerant people in our society.
[00:13:44]  It's people that, quite honestly, are very quick to use political power against you or any sort of power against you if you so want.
[00:13:53]  I could talk about that one at length.
[00:13:54]  Let me go to the second one, which I think is really important, which I don't know if this is the case at TCU.
[00:13:59]  We will find out, but it certainly has captured the imagination, the fervor, the energy, the intensity of the most young people I see in college campuses, which is earth worship.
[00:14:11]  And they call it environmentalism, but it's earth worship is what it is, okay?
[00:14:16]  And it's so interesting to me.
[00:14:18]  And so what do these people believe?
[00:14:20]  I don't want to be unfair, right?
[00:14:21]  But let me kind of summarize it the best I can.
[00:14:25]  Nature is how things should be.
[00:14:27]  We are the pollutants of nature.
[00:14:29]  We are the disruptors of nature.
[00:14:31]  And we should stop or cease human activity or minimize it because nature is, you know, really the supreme or is the ideal, right?
[00:14:40]  Am I probably categorizing it best, right?
[00:14:42]  This is espoused by people like Greta Thunberg and Al Gore and John Kerry.
[00:14:47]  Now, hilariously, they used to make fun of Christians for decades saying that the world was going to end.
[00:14:53]  And that's all these people have.
[00:14:55]  The world is going to end in 10 years if you don't stop all fossil fuels.
[00:14:59]  They're lying, but they also, it's all they have is this apocalyptic alarmism.
[00:15:04]  And I believe it's so immoral to tell an eighth grader who is prone to hysteria as it is that the world is going to end unless we stop driving in F-150s.
[00:15:15]  It's not true.
[00:15:17]  And it creates, I think, really, I think it creates incentive structures where they think they have to be an activist.
[00:15:25]  I mean, these poor kids in elementary school and in middle school that are seeing all this imagery that the ice caps are going to disappear and the warming is out of control.

=== Humans Matter More Than Animals (06:10) ===

[00:15:34]  When in reality, there's a much more prudent way to approach the topic, which always needs to be very simple.
[00:15:40]  What matters more?
[00:15:42]  And that's why earth worship is so wrong because we have screwed up our morality, which is we put animals above humans every single time.
[00:15:49]  And I will prove it to you right now, okay?
[00:15:52]  I'm sure a lot of you have dogs here, okay?
[00:15:54]  If your dog was drowning or a stranger was drowning, how many of you would save your dog?
[00:15:58]  Raise your hand.
[00:16:01]  Couple hands.
[00:16:03]  Okay.
[00:16:07]  Okay.
[00:16:08]  Just hear me out.
[00:16:10]  And you might say, well, Charlie, what if it was Adolf Hitler?
[00:16:14]  I said, stranger.
[00:16:15]  If it was Hitler, I'd drown him myself, okay?
[00:16:18]  Stranger, you don't know who it is.
[00:16:19]  Now, let me ask the question for the people that raise their hand.
[00:16:22]  If you were invisibly sitting on the shore and somebody else was there and it was their dog and your sister, who do you hope they would save?
[00:16:31]  You would hope they would save your family member.
[00:16:33]  The point is this: human equality should transcend our own personal attachment to an animal.
[00:16:40]  Humans matter more than animals.
[00:16:43]  Now, you might say, well, Charlie, that's really cruel.
[00:16:48]  You shouldn't torture animals.
[00:16:50]  You should treat animals ethically.
[00:16:52]  But if the decision must be made who comes first, a hierarchy must be developed.
[00:16:57]  This is things that college campuses used to talk about a lot.
[00:17:00]  And they're not.
[00:17:00]  They just kind of impart this, I think, flawed morality, which is very simple.
[00:17:05]  This is why the Bible is the greatest document ever.
[00:17:07]  It's the word of God.
[00:17:08]  It's so clear, right?
[00:17:10]  It's so clear because God is described in four basic ways.
[00:17:16]  God is above nature.
[00:17:18]  He is not nature.
[00:17:19]  He's not in nature.
[00:17:20]  God is personal.
[00:17:21]  He's moral and he's holy.
[00:17:23]  Now, guess what?
[00:17:24]  Outside of the first one, nature is none of those things.
[00:17:28]  Nature is not personal.
[00:17:29]  Nature is not moral.
[00:17:31]  Nature is not holy.
[00:17:32]  Go into the woods and tell me a morality you could derive by just watching animals interact.
[00:17:38]  You can't.
[00:17:39]  You need a transcendent order.
[00:17:41]  Now, maybe you can tell me a morality, which is that the weak should die and suffer and the strongest should survive.
[00:17:48]  I don't want to live in that world.
[00:17:50]  That's how you get Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union very quickly.
[00:17:54]  You remove that transcendent order, something must fill it.
[00:17:58]  So earth worship is kind of the new thing.
[00:18:00]  And I want to just say this: if you aren't an environmentalist here tonight, that's great.
[00:18:04]  I have no issue with it only if you say that the delta smelt, like in California, or some abstract, abstract tree, matters more than human beings.
[00:18:16]  That's the question.
[00:18:17]  And when it actually comes to fruition, like we see in Europe, where people are freezing and people are having a lower standard of living, or it happens increasingly here with rolling blackouts in America, and they say we can't do this because of some mosquito that you've never heard of might die.
[00:18:34]  That is a bad moral deal.
[00:18:36]  Is that because human beings have a soul that are made in the image of God?
[00:18:41]  Insects do not.
[00:18:43]  And insects should come second or third or fourth even to human flourishing.
[00:18:48]  Okay, the third fake religion as America becomes more secular.
[00:18:52]  This one I could spend a lot of time on.
[00:18:55]  The religion of anti-racism or the cult of diversity.
[00:18:58]  This is a big one.
[00:19:00]  And this one's probably the one that people are the least comfortable talking about.
[00:19:04]  So I'll probably spend the most time on.
[00:19:08]  And I always get these emails.
[00:19:10]  Charlie, how are you so comfortable talking about race?
[00:19:12]  Very simple.
[00:19:13]  You want the magic trick?
[00:19:15]  Don't flinch when they call you a racist.
[00:19:18]  Poof.
[00:19:18]  You could talk about whatever you want then.
[00:19:20]  If you disarm their name-calling, you're free.
[00:19:23]  It's a good lesson for life.
[00:19:25]  It doesn't matter what they call you.
[00:19:27]  It matters, is it true?
[00:19:29]  And if they lie about you, it's completely irrelevant and you laugh and you move on because they're the ones that are probably the bigots anyway.
[00:19:36]  And I'll prove it to you.
[00:19:37]  So the religion of anti-racism is, I mean, we saw it during Floyd Apalooza when we decided to burn our country in the summer of 2020.
[00:19:44]  Like, oh, wow, we're super racist.
[00:19:45]  Let's give $80 billion to BLM and burn Wendy's and crime goes up.
[00:19:49]  Can't do anything because we're a racist country, obviously, because of one awful incident that happened in Minneapolis.
[00:19:55]  Can't do anything about it.
[00:19:56]  And it was a really disturbing train of events.
[00:20:00]  I have a working theory, which is if it wasn't for the lockdowns and if it wasn't for people being cooped up, I don't think the religion of anti-racism would have spread as much as it did in 2020.
[00:20:11]  I think the lockdowns were a prerequisite, almost a bubbling up effect, almost ready to explode like a volcanic eruption where people were looking for meaning.
[00:20:20]  And all of a sudden, these charlatans, Iberma X. Kendi and Robin D'Angelo and all these fraudsters came on.
[00:20:26]  They said, Well, actually, let me tell you about this new idea that in order to be a progressive, we're going to go back to discrimination and back to prejudicing and back to segregation.
[00:20:35]  Like, wow, that's so profound.
[00:20:36]  Like, come to my $9 million mansion and tell my white friends about that.
[00:20:40]  And that's literally what happened, right?
[00:20:42]  I mean, Robin D'Angelo, who's one of the authors who's in charge of anti-not in charge, but she's a big leader in anti-racism, said last week that black people need to separate themselves from white people.
[00:20:52]  At Columbia University, at Grand Valley State University, they have black-only graduation ceremonies now.
[00:20:58]  At Western Washington University and 100 other schools, they have black-only dormitories.
[00:21:03]  White people are not allowed.
[00:21:04]  We are going through the resegregation of America because that's always been their core, right?
[00:21:08]  Racial harmony and a post-racial America was always something they detested because an America that is not divided on race is much harder to control.
[00:21:16]  An America that's divided on race is much easier to control.
[00:21:19]  So these people are power-hungry.
[00:21:21]  They also believe in these ridiculous racist abstractions.
[00:21:24]  But I could go through the cult of the diversity.
[00:21:26]  Also incorporated in this fake religion is just a bitterness towards America, especially the American founding.
[00:21:33]  And this is where the 1619 project comes.
[00:21:35]  And it's such sloppy, one-dimensional, just awful thinking where they say, well, America, you know, the founding fathers had slaves and therefore America is terrible.

=== The Resegregation of America (02:49) ===

[00:21:45]  And that's a thought-terminating cliche, right?
[00:21:47]  You say it, you get intimidated when they say it, and you kind of back away because you don't know how to respond.
[00:21:51]  And the response should be very simple.
[00:21:53]  Every human being that has ever lived has something in common.
[00:21:56]  You're born into a world you did not create, except Jesus.
[00:21:59]  He was actually born into a world he did create.
[00:22:01]  So, but he was more than human.
[00:22:02]  He was divine.
[00:22:03]  All of us have that in common.
[00:22:05]  Therefore, you cannot be judged based on the world you entered.
[00:22:10]  You can judge how the world looked when they exited.
[00:22:14]  The founding fathers entered a world where slavery was everywhere.
[00:22:17]  It was not questioned.
[00:22:18]  It was not challenged.
[00:22:19]  It was institutionalized and defended by the law.
[00:22:22]  By the time that Madison, Jay, Adams, and Jefferson died, slavery was largely abolished in most of the American states.
[00:22:30]  It was written against vehemently.
[00:22:33]  And not only did George Washington say it's a question of if slavery gets abolished, but when slavery gets abolished.
[00:22:40]  Those are people that probably deserve some study and some recognition and some moral credit.
[00:22:50]  And I could go through the facts, right?
[00:22:52]  Whether it be the first ever anti-slavery convention was founded in 1775 by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, vehemently wrote to King George, blaming him for bringing slavery to the United States, the first state to abolish slavery ever in the history of the world, first independent territory.
[00:23:10]  1777, it was Vermont.
[00:23:12]  Nine out of 13 of the colonies by ratification in 87 and 91, the Constitution and Bill of Rights had already independently abolished slavery.
[00:23:20]  There was real moral movement that was happening because the founding fathers decided to embrace a promise of human equality.
[00:23:27]  And then people say, well, the founding fathers fell short.
[00:23:29]  I get so sick of hearing that.
[00:23:30]  I say, hold on.
[00:23:31]  Yeah, they fell short, but they did a pretty dang good job.
[00:23:34]  I got to say.
[00:23:35]  I mean, they entered a world where slavery was everywhere.
[00:23:37]  And before you have your moral high horse, Nicole Hannah Jones, there are more slaves on the planet today than there were back then.
[00:23:44]  There's more slavery happening on the United States southern border than at the height of the Atlantic slave trade.
[00:23:50]  5,000 people a day.
[00:23:53]  And no one wants to mention that.
[00:23:55]  And you might say, oh, well, that's not slavery.
[00:23:58]  Come down to the Rio Grande Valley with me.
[00:24:00]  And I'll show you how the cartels sell people into a form of indentured servitude where they say, you're going to have to pay us back over 10 years, 20 years, 30 years.
[00:24:08]  Go down to Yuma, Arizona, where you see a sophisticated operation, no different than the slave smugglers of the 1600s and the 1700s.
[00:24:15]  Not to mention what's happening in the Horn of Africa, in Libya, in Syria, in China, in India.
[00:24:21]  The human norm is human beings owning human beings.
[00:24:24]  The founding fathers decided to say, stop it.
[00:24:27]  That's a pretty beautiful thing and something that we should all be thankful for.

=== The Religion of Tolerance (03:58) ===

[00:24:34]  So I could go on at length about that, but the religion of anti-racism is only powerful because we allow it to be powerful.
[00:24:45]  Out of all the ones, it is, in my opinion, the least attractive when it comes up against criticism, but it's actually the most dangerous of all five of the new religions.
[00:24:57]  It's the most dangerous because, my goodness, I'll tell you, we're getting to a country where we are trying to wreck the promise of the founding, where agency, choice, and character matters more than ancestry and melanin content.
[00:25:15]  You are disempowering a population when you tell them that your skin color determines your destiny.
[00:25:23]  That is an evil thing to do.
[00:25:25]  Instead, you should tell young people, your choices determine your destiny, and your skin color means nothing.
[00:25:38]  Okay, number four.
[00:25:40]  I won't dwell on this one too much, but it's the religion of power.
[00:25:44]  And it's just a smaller group.
[00:25:45]  This is the least popular of all the new fake religions, but it's mostly people at the top of the ladder.
[00:25:50]  All they care about is being in charge.
[00:25:52]  And you might say, well, Charlie, it's not that widespread.
[00:25:54]  I disagree.
[00:25:56]  I believe we all lived through a multi-year exhibit in human behavior during the Chinese coronavirus lockdowns.
[00:26:02]  I saw stuff about human behavior that I never would have believed years before.
[00:26:06]  And one of the things that I saw is that there's a small sliver of the population that enjoy being cruel to others just because they have a badge and they work at Starbucks and you don't.
[00:26:17]  And I call these people micro-tyrants, that they might be part of the pagan cult of earth worship.
[00:26:23]  They might be part of the religion of tolerance.
[00:26:25]  They might tithe to the church of anti-racism.
[00:26:27]  But what they really get off on is making sure that your mask is properly worn while you're getting a straw.
[00:26:33]  And if not, they're going to use power against you.
[00:26:36]  And I saw a thrill, an excitement, an exuberance, a purpose of these micro-tyrants that made me realize, I said, wow, that's how the Soviet Union operated.
[00:26:47]  Where that it wasn't just Stalin, it was millions of little infantry people that were suddenly super important.
[00:26:53]  Like, I didn't vote for you, barista person.
[00:26:55]  I didn't elect you.
[00:26:57]  I don't know what the check and balance is, but they are mayor of that store.
[00:27:02]  They get to tell you how to breathe.
[00:27:04]  They get to tell you, they have more power than even a mayor has.
[00:27:07]  It's like totally bodily control.
[00:27:09]  And they enjoyed it, a lot of them.
[00:27:11]  No, I know some of you, I probably have a Starbucks barista here tonight.
[00:27:14]  It's fine, welcome.
[00:27:15]  I'm sure there's plenty of people that didn't.
[00:27:16]  I don't mean just baristas, but you know exactly what I mean.
[00:27:19]  You mean people that out of nowhere sprung into the action of my meaning is to make sure somebody else is living up to a stupid rule.
[00:27:28]  And it makes them feel important.
[00:27:30]  And the religion of power is that here's the problem.
[00:27:34]  The more rules you have, the more tyrants you have.
[00:27:38]  You should have short, simple, beautiful, transparent, easy to understand rules.
[00:27:43]  When you have lots of rules, you need lots of rule enforcers.
[00:27:47]  And then when you have dumb rules, you have dumb rule enforcers.
[00:27:51]  Because good people do not want to enforce dumb rules.
[00:27:55]  So then, four, you have to just kind of go into the bottom of the barrel and you say, hey, let's go pry from the earth worshipers to go make sure everyone's wearing their mask.
[00:28:04]  I mean, the fact that people were getting kicked off of airplanes, this is the one, it defies everything that built the West, right?
[00:28:11]  When I think of the West, I think of the fruits of the Enlightenment and the spirit of the individual and the pursuit of truth and challenge and inquiry.
[00:28:19]  Here was, here where we were at the height of the lockdowns, right?
[00:28:22]  Where you have a non-stop flight from Newark International to LAX and they have to sit there for five and a half hours and you must wear the mask perfectly, except when you're eating and drinking.

=== The Worship of Experts (15:31) ===

[00:28:32]  And when you're eating and drinking, the virus is paused, obviously.
[00:28:38]  And when you were in New Jersey or California, the two cities you were flying to, the restaurants were closed because they were afraid of the virus.
[00:28:53]  But if you were in some sort of a tube at 35,000 feet at five hours, the virus is in complete and total suspension.
[00:28:59]  Now, in reality, what did that mean?
[00:29:01]  They knew that they would have a revolt on their hands if they didn't let people eat or drink.
[00:29:04]  So they just made up their own rules.
[00:29:07]  And then they would kick people off the plane if the mask wasn't perfect or if they were just kind of a little bit, you know, disagreed with one of the policies.
[00:29:14]  And you're like, wait a second, I don't have to wear a mask if I have a water bottle, but if I do, and the rules never made any sense.
[00:29:20]  And what was just so interesting, as I know a lot of you fought back against it, but societally is how we took it.
[00:29:29]  And I don't want to read too much into that, but I'm telling you, 100 years from now, 200 years from now, there will be a class taught at TCU if it still exists or whatever.
[00:29:40]  You know, 200 years from now, like how a rational country just lost its mind.
[00:29:45]  Seriously.
[00:29:47]  And I submit to you that if America was as Christian as it was in the 1950s, that nonsense never would have happened.
[00:29:54]  I'll tell you why.
[00:29:56]  I will tell you why.
[00:30:01]  A nation that puts truth as a core value, which is the cornerstone of Christianity, never would have allowed those policies to occur.
[00:30:09]  A nation that believes God is divine never would have allowed government to tell them to do something against their principles.
[00:30:17]  When you have a secular nation, you allow bad ideas to reign because there is no standard to compare them to.
[00:30:24]  And when you have no standard to compare them to, it's whoever's more powerful.
[00:30:28]  Okay, I'm going a little over time on this part, but I think it's important.
[00:30:31]  The last one is the worship of experts.
[00:30:36]  And this is the faith.
[00:30:38]  Yes, Fauci should be in prison.
[00:30:39]  You're exactly right.
[00:30:40]  That is exactly right.
[00:30:51]  You can also call it scientism.
[00:30:56]  It is a false comfort that people get in trusting unelected expert committees to tell them how to run their life.
[00:31:03]  And it's not just in the COVID stuff, which I could talk about at length, just the insanity and the evil of what we saw where loved ones had to die alone.
[00:31:12]  And their wife, even though she already had COVID, wasn't allowed to go in with their 40-year-old marriage and she never saw them again.
[00:31:21]  I mean, just how evil that is.
[00:31:22]  And no one was held accountable and no one was fired because the experts told us.
[00:31:25]  Or they told us that schools would be super sparters.
[00:31:27]  I could go on and on and on.
[00:31:29]  The kids that committed suicide and the mask policies and the fact that we never, and I mean, you want to talk about when I get angry, when I watch the, you know, March Madness and I have to now hear like these commercials about treatments for COVID.
[00:31:40]  We used to talk about treatments for COVID and you guys called us anti-science.
[00:31:44]  We said, wait a second, how about we tell people to increase their vitamin D levels, stop being fat, get exercise, eat better, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine.
[00:31:54]  And you say, oh, Charlie, you can't say that.
[00:31:56]  No, honestly, if we would have told America to lose 15 pounds, that would have been a way better treatment than masking and shutting down schools.
[00:32:03]  Like, okay, if you're overweight and you have comorbidities, then you should stay at home.
[00:32:06]  But if you're a marathon athlete, we're not going to infringe on your liberties or freedoms because some expert tells us.
[00:32:11]  Anyway, so, boy, I get a lot of angry emails when I say that.
[00:32:14]  But it's true.
[00:32:15]  It's a real comorbidity and America is largely overweight.
[00:32:17]  And we need to start talking about it.
[00:32:18]  It's a huge issue.
[00:32:19]  Anyway, I don't get applause when I say that, but it's true and people need to hear it.
[00:32:22]  So.
[00:32:28]  Scientism comes from an unearned trust in people that violate the American principle of power.
[00:32:36]  The American principle of power is that power must be earned.
[00:32:38]  It starts with you.
[00:32:39]  The people comes from God to you, the people, then to communities, states, federal government.
[00:32:44]  And you must go through elections to earn the appropriation of power.
[00:32:47]  Nobody voted for Fauci.
[00:32:49]  He was never elected.
[00:32:50]  He never canvassed.
[00:32:51]  He never had to go through.
[00:32:52]  He was just there in the fourth branch of government, all this power.
[00:32:55]  And expert worship is very tempting because you can believe that people, quote unquote, smarter than you can come in with all the answers, all the solutions, and you have to stop thinking for yourself.
[00:33:06]  You have to stop making your own independent solutions.
[00:33:09]  And this one is not the most dangerous.
[00:33:11]  I think that the DEI one is the most dangerous, but this is the one that is most institutionalized in our government.
[00:33:16]  And I'm very afraid because I mean, whether it be the experts that told us economic forecasting, banking news, the experts that told us on stuff with COVID, the experts that told us on stuff with Ukraine, the experts, and you go through it, you say, wow, these people have a really low batting average and the highest stakes, which is, I don't know, our whole civilization.
[00:33:35]  And the founding fathers saw this ahead of time, which is so simple, that instead of trusting committees or trusting bureaucrats or the Leviathan, that if it's not a proper role of government, send it back to the people or the states and empower you to get informed, literate, do research, and make the responsibility on you, the American people, to actually figure out what is best for your life.
[00:34:01]  And instead, we have over the last hundred years have given up so much of our liberty and freedom to the centralized government.
[00:34:07]  And what do we get in return?
[00:34:08]  We get the government that we've kind of earned, and it's not a good one.
[00:34:11]  It's a group of unelected bureaucrats that have contempt for our nation.
[00:34:15]  And it seems as if, regardless of how wrong they are, the one thing that unites expert worship is they refuse to ever apologize to us.
[00:34:25]  And I think that's what makes me the most angry, is that these people, it would go a long way.
[00:34:31]  I'm not saying this lightly.
[00:34:32]  It would go a long way, I think, for the healing of the nation if Fauci would come out and actually apologize.
[00:34:39]  He would never do it.
[00:34:41]  I don't want to say never, but it doesn't look like in his code of conduct or behavior, if he would actually issue a genuine heartfelt apology.
[00:34:47]  But they don't think they did any wrong, anything wrong, so then why would they apologize?
[00:34:52]  Because all of it, according to them, is according to the plan.
[00:34:55]  So anyway, let me summarize this all and then we'll do some questions, which is we're living through an existential crisis in the West.
[00:35:01]  It's serious and it's real, but the solution actually isn't that complicated.
[00:35:05]  The solution is just restore what built this place.
[00:35:08]  And my contention is Texas Christian University should be educating young people on the five fake religions, on where they come from, the threat, and how Christianity is the solution to every one of these synthetic and poisonous ideologies from spreading across our country.
[00:35:27]  Texas Christian University should be standing up for that.
[00:35:34]  And so Why I will not dwell on why I believe Christianity is true, and you can ask me about that.
[00:35:44]  I think I made somewhat of a case of the danger what happens when you close the book on the thing you're told you're supposed to hate.
[00:35:50]  When all of a sudden you turn your back on the foundation, the moral foundation of your civilization, and you act as if a council of experts can find an ideology to take its place, it's probably not just worse, it's probably diametrically opposed.
[00:36:03]  When Friedrich Nietzsche said God is dead in the 1800s, he was not saying it in a way to celebrate the death of God.
[00:36:09]  He was warning that God is dying in the West.
[00:36:11]  And I'll tell you that he was a little bit of a nutcase in some ways.
[00:36:14]  But the fact that he said that God was dying in the 1870s was almost prophetic.
[00:36:19]  I mean, he saw this 160 years ago, and he issued a warning in the book Beyond Good and Evil, where he said, listen, Westerners, God is going to die in public opinion.
[00:36:28]  The Industrial Revolution is coming.
[00:36:30]  People are going to increase their wealth.
[00:36:32]  All of a sudden, people are going to stray from God, and you're going to have a crisis.
[00:36:36]  And the crisis will be one that I don't think you're ready to solve.
[00:36:39]  And I think he hit it perfectly.
[00:36:41]  His solutions are wacky about how you have to create new values and all this stuff.
[00:36:44]  I think our solution is very simple.
[00:36:46]  Turn around, go back to our roots, put the Bible at the center of education, and we Christians have to fight for what is good, true, and beautiful.
[00:36:53]  Okay, let's do some questions.
[00:37:04]  All right, so let me lay some ground rules here.
[00:37:06]  A couple things.
[00:37:07]  Students get preference, okay?
[00:37:10]  Which should go without saying.
[00:37:12]  And this is a largely favorable audience.
[00:37:18]  If somebody who disagrees with us, you're allowed to go to the front of the line.
[00:37:21]  In fact, we encourage disagreement.
[00:37:22]  Let it be known to every liberal watching that conservatives want people who disagree to let their voice be heard.
[00:37:28]  But let me say one thing on that, which is if somebody who disagrees with me says something you find to be laughable or objectionable, do not mock them.
[00:37:39]  Do not ridicule them and do not interrupt them.
[00:37:41]  Give them an opportunity to say what they want to say and give them respect and give them a platform to be able to communicate.
[00:37:48]  Okay?
[00:37:49]  All right, let's do the first question.
[00:37:54]  What do you think is the most important way to keep Christ at the center of a household today?
[00:37:58]  Most important way to keep Christ at the center of a household.
[00:38:02]  That's a great question.
[00:38:04]  So I have an answer that some pastors disagree with.
[00:38:07]  I think one of the great mistakes of modern America is how we don't honor the Sabbath anymore.
[00:38:12]  Now, I'm not saying that you are tied to the Sabbath as a Christian.
[00:38:15]  I can't make that theological point.
[00:38:17]  I can make the point, though, that God rested, and that's probably pretty important.
[00:38:22]  And I believe the Ten Commandments can be a pretty good starting point for Western morality, right?
[00:38:28]  It's really interesting.
[00:38:29]  I believe the Sabbath, or Shabbat in Hebrew, which literally means stop, I believe it's the gateway commandment.
[00:38:36]  I believe that if you honor the Sabbath, the other nine are easier to keep.
[00:38:40]  And so I could tell you for me personally, I honor a Jewish-type Sabbath.
[00:38:43]  I turn my phone off on Friday night.
[00:38:44]  I turn it back on Sunday.
[00:38:46]  I do not do it because I believe I'm bound to the law.
[00:38:48]  I do it because God, I think, created and revealed it in the scripture in the buffet line of blessing that I then can live a more beautiful and complete and full life.
[00:38:56]  So I'm not saying you're bound by it, but I think you're missing out if you don't do it.
[00:38:59]  I have a better marriage because of it.
[00:39:01]  I work harder because of it.
[00:39:02]  I have something to look forward to.
[00:39:04]  It is a cathedral in time where I believe time can be holy for an entire week.
[00:39:08]  My team knows they can't contact me, but that means they got to fit it in the rest of the six days.
[00:39:12]  And it makes my walk with Christ deeper and more fulfilling and easier.
[00:39:17]  Let's think about it.
[00:39:18]  In a time and there's a competition for attention at every single turn, we have screen time, Instagram, Netflix, and all that.
[00:39:26]  Wouldn't it just be rational?
[00:39:27]  Let's take the theological point aside.
[00:39:29]  Rational to put away the phones and just say we're going to focus on the family, on our marriage for one single day.
[00:39:34]  And they might say, well, Charlie, why do you do Saturday, not Sunday?
[00:39:37]  Well, for a couple of reasons.
[00:39:38]  Sunday is the Lord's Day.
[00:39:39]  That's my day to go to church and to have communion, to community, and be with fellow believers.
[00:39:44]  This is different.
[00:39:45]  This is stopping from everything in the outside world.
[00:39:47]  This is about pouring into people in my own close family relationship, and nobody in the outside world can contact me.
[00:39:54]  And by the way, I think it's really important that we recognize and we realize that those that honor the Sabbath are happier.
[00:40:03]  They are less likely to have depression.
[00:40:06]  less likely to have anxiety.
[00:40:08]  And so that's an answer I have.
[00:40:10]  I think you have to, things that you work at, you get more of.
[00:40:13]  Things you emphasize, you get more of.
[00:40:14]  So remove the distractions.
[00:40:16]  Have one day where you remove yourself from this modern, busy, secular, broken world and put Jesus first.
[00:40:22]  That's my answer.
[00:40:23]  Thank you.
[00:40:31]  Hi, so how do you suggest we inform those close to us against these five fake religions or these pseudo-religions without outright bashing them or tolerating their corrupt ideology?
[00:40:40]  Because as a Starbucks barista person, I face this a lot.
[00:40:44]  Are you a barista?
[00:40:46]  God bless you.
[00:40:46]  I apologize if I offended you, by the way.
[00:40:48]  No, it's okay.
[00:40:49]  I agree with you.
[00:40:50]  Oh, thank you.
[00:40:51]  I have to say, one out of ten baristas give me a wink and a nod, and I appreciate that.
[00:40:57]  And by the way, that's hard.
[00:40:58]  That's tough work.
[00:40:58]  It's not easy on your feet all day.
[00:41:00]  And so God bless you.
[00:41:01]  Look, I don't know how persuasive I was tonight.
[00:41:04]  You guys can be the judge of that.
[00:41:06]  It's not my only job to be persuasive tonight.
[00:41:09]  People say, you know, people criticize me and they say, Charlie, you know, you're not changing hearts and minds.
[00:41:14]  That's not true, by the way.
[00:41:15]  We have plenty of testimonials and people tonight can attest to that.
[00:41:18]  But my foremost goal is to have clarity so that you can understand the topic.
[00:41:25]  And I think persuasion actually comes naturally when people can understand what's really going on.
[00:41:30]  And so, look, I think you should just root everything in God's word and you should ask, does it hold up against God's word?
[00:41:36]  So let's go to earth worship, right?
[00:41:38]  If somebody says that I care more about the raven, you know, in the sky than a human being and they say they're a Christian, they would never say something that bluntly, I hope.
[00:41:46]  But you can ask, what is the scripture to support that, right?
[00:41:49]  All throughout the first 11 books of Genesis, it is repeated, the earth is there for us, that we take dominion over the earth.
[00:41:55]  So you see, we have to understand that the Torah, the first five books of Moses, were written in a time of polytheism and paganism.
[00:42:02]  And so there are some not so subtle refutations all throughout the Torah where they're jabbing at the kind of consensus view, if you will.
[00:42:10]  This idea of monotheism, one God who speaks things into existence, is a profound, world-changing view that you have one God that is not in nature, but above nature.
[00:42:24]  You must understand that when the Torah was written, the river civilizations used to worship the sun or worship the river or worship the dirt or worship the sky.
[00:42:33]  The Hebrews had something different to say.
[00:42:35]  They said, no, there's a God that's above all of that.
[00:42:38]  And so that would be my recommendation is just always have God's word as the center of refuting any of these fake religions because when you study God's word and share it, it never turns up void.
[00:42:46]  Thank you so much.
[00:42:47]  Appreciate it.
[00:42:52]  And again, if you disagree, you're allowed to go to the front of the line.
[00:42:54]  Our team will help navigate that process.
[00:42:56]  Yeah.
[00:42:56]  Forgive me if I stutter a little.
[00:42:58]  I'm not very good with public speaking.
[00:42:59]  No problem.
[00:42:59]  Thanks for being here.
[00:43:00]  Thank you.
[00:43:01]  I don't disagree with everything you say.
[00:43:03]  I only disagree with one main point, which is the whole environmentalism thing.
[00:43:06]  I myself am also a Christian.
[00:43:08]  I've been a Christian for 15 years, grew up in the faith, was apostate, turned back to Christianity.
[00:43:14]  Welcome home.
[00:43:14]  Thank you.
[00:43:15]  My one question, more so of a clarifying question, is what you've said is that in Genesis, which is true, that God did give his followers and creation, us being human, dominion over the earth and to take care of things and that every plant is good and that every animal is for our help and for our feeding and well fruits.
[00:43:34]  However, with things such as being concerned with the environment, such as like our production of certain things, like I'm saying, I agree with a lot of the points you say, like we should continue to use fossil fuels.
[00:43:45]  That's definitely a good resource that God has provided to us.
[00:43:49]  However, with things like littering and pollution, as we saw in East Palestine, it's definitely a big concern because if God gave us dominion over creation, should we not take care of his creation to honor him as his creation is a reflection of him and his intricacy and divine?

=== Prioritizing What Truly Matters (15:26) ===

[00:44:03]  Well, so no, that's not true.
[00:44:05]  Nature is not a reflection of him.
[00:44:06]  We are a reflection of him.
[00:44:08]  It never says that nature is a reflection of him.
[00:44:10]  That is not true.
[00:44:11]  I understand what you mean.
[00:44:12]  I don't mean to put you on the spot because you're coming at it from a great point.
[00:44:14]  But yes, it is designed by God, breathed by God, but the actual creation of nature we don't find God in, right?
[00:44:20]  So we don't look at a mountain and say, like, wow, that's what God's going to look like, right?
[00:44:23]  But we look at a human.
[00:44:24]  I know you didn't mean that.
[00:44:24]  I just wanted to make sure that's clear.
[00:44:26]  But no, I mean, never am I ever pro-pollution or pro-littering.
[00:44:29]  The question should be why, though, right?
[00:44:31]  And I think you have the right why.
[00:44:32]  Most environmentalists don't.
[00:44:33]  My why is because it makes human beings less likely to prosper, flourish, and survive, right?
[00:44:39]  My why is not because the river is polluted.
[00:44:41]  That's bad.
[00:44:42]  But if human beings live there, then it's an insult straight to humans.
[00:44:46]  Right, exactly.
[00:44:47]  I think we're agreeing.
[00:44:48]  Yeah, of course.
[00:44:49]  There's a doctor, not a medical doctor, but a PhD doctor that I listened to, Dr. Tyrone Hayes, and he talked about atrazine in the water, which is the chemical that turns the freaking frogs gay.
[00:45:00]  He was, yes.
[00:45:01]  You're a lot more base than I think you.
[00:45:04]  He was talking about that, and he was talking about the importance of if this has this detrimental effect on frogs, what does it have on people?
[00:45:10]  No, I hear you.
[00:45:10]  And so I love nature.
[00:45:13]  I want to make my position very clear, okay?
[00:45:15]  I love being in the mountains.
[00:45:16]  I believe God gave us nature to also enjoy the splendor and the beauty, to point up and aim high.
[00:45:22]  I think sunsets and waterfalls and rivers are all great if we understand the proper placement of that, right?
[00:45:29]  Left without the scriptures that can quickly turn into pagan Native American earth worship, right?
[00:45:35]  Which is bad morally and bad societally, right?
[00:45:39]  And so anyway, we're agreeing.
[00:45:40]  Thanks for being here.
[00:45:41]  Appreciate it.
[00:45:41]  Thank you so much.
[00:45:42]  Thank you.
[00:45:48]  All right, so this question is a little bit off topic.
[00:45:50]  It relates to Biden's recent executive order.
[00:45:52]  It makes it harder to get guns.
[00:45:54]  So I want to ask: how do you believe we can further prevent the government from infringing upon our Second Amendment rights?
[00:45:59]  Yeah, it's a timely question with what's happening today in Tennessee.
[00:46:03]  So everything in life is a choice and a trade-off.
[00:46:05]  Anybody who tells you differently is an infant.
[00:46:08]  And so you have to prioritize things that matter more than others.
[00:46:12]  This is why I love Aristotle.
[00:46:13]  He talks constantly about hierarchies, right?
[00:46:15]  He talks about the hierarchy of the good, the hierarchy of choices, the hierarchy of behavior, the hierarchy of character.
[00:46:20]  And so when it comes to firearms or guns, we must first ask the question of why.
[00:46:25]  Why do we have a Second Amendment?
[00:46:26]  It is not for hunting, but I do love hunting.
[00:46:28]  Do we love hunting out here, everybody?
[00:46:30]  Hunting is very important.
[00:46:33]  It is not even for self-defense, but that's very important.
[00:46:36]  Defending your home, defending your family is a moral good.
[00:46:40]  The unpopular to say, but morally correct reason we have a Second Amendment is so that free people can defend their rights given to them by God in case government becomes tyrannical.
[00:46:50]  God forbid that ever happens, okay?
[00:46:53]  Now, I fully acknowledge that comes with a cost.
[00:47:00]  The cost is this.
[00:47:01]  If you make that argument that people should be able to own firearms against a usurptatious potential tyrannical government, you're going to have negative externalities.
[00:47:10]  You're going to have gang shootings.
[00:47:11]  You're going to have mass shootings.
[00:47:13]  The question is, how do we minimize it?
[00:47:15]  And the question is, how do we reduce it to almost zero?
[00:47:17]  And we have never had that proper conversation.
[00:47:19]  For example, if banks and sporting events have armed guards, every school in America should have armed guards sitting 24-7 at the school.
[00:47:29]  Period.
[00:47:29]  End of story.
[00:47:32]  If airports have armed guards, schools should have armed guards.
[00:47:35]  And so you must come after it morally clear.
[00:47:38]  I will never say that we'll get gun deaths to zero because we live in a broken world and we live in a place where there's a lot of nut jobs and a lot of evil people.
[00:47:46]  But the choice that I'm unwilling to make, I am not willing to say we get rid of all of guns.
[00:47:51]  Why?
[00:47:52]  Because even more evil than an isolated incident there and an isolated shooting there is a tyrannical government that wants to exterminate its citizens.
[00:48:02]  And so that is the way we must talk about guns.
[00:48:05]  Reduce and minimize the criminality and the shootings through prudent and proper restrictions, which most of the times mean good people with a firearm to protect against a bad person with a firearm.
[00:48:18]  And so how do we make sure the government doesn't come after our guns?
[00:48:20]  We need constitutional carry in every red state.
[00:48:22]  I think Texas finally has passed it.
[00:48:24]  Am I right about that, which is great?
[00:48:26]  But you need your politicians to stop tap dancing around the issue.
[00:48:30]  They're afraid to make the argument I just made because the media mocks them.
[00:48:33]  Lean in.
[00:48:34]  The 20th century has showed us time and time again, 150 million people were murdered because they took the guns away.
[00:48:41]  We must be clear why we have a second amendment.
[00:48:43]  The second amendment protects all the other amendments.
[00:48:45]  Thank you so much.
[00:48:51]  Hi, I'm Tyler.
[00:48:52]  I'm 14 and homeschooled.
[00:48:54]  Oh, it's great.
[00:48:54]  Thanks for being here.
[00:48:55]  It's great.
[00:48:59]  I was just wanting to know what's your opinion about school vouchers and school choice.
[00:49:03]  You know, I got that question earlier.
[00:49:05]  I'm very in favor of school choice.
[00:49:06]  I have no idea how popular it is here in Texas.
[00:49:09]  Every state, yeah, it's like mixed opinions.
[00:49:11]  And I'd love to learn why, because that's an unusual sentiment.
[00:49:15]  And maybe someone can get in line and tell me why.
[00:49:17]  So that would be interesting, right?
[00:49:19]  But because in most states, it's a lifeline and is kind of like an escape pod out of government-run schools and teacher unions where kids can't read and they're teaching woke DEI nonsense.
[00:49:31]  I come from a state with the most robust school choice measures in the country, Arizona.
[00:49:36]  And I could tell you, it's worked wonderfully.
[00:49:38]  We have classical charter schools popping up all over the valley.
[00:49:42]  We have more kids that are studying Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and with no DEI departments and no woke nonsense.
[00:49:48]  And the money follows the child.
[00:49:50]  It is the most robust school choice package in the country.
[00:49:54]  I'm not here to tell Texas what to do with your schools because the way you fund schools is very unusual versus other states.
[00:49:59]  So you guys can figure that out.
[00:50:00]  But let me offer you, I don't mean that negatively.
[00:50:03]  You fund it through property taxes, which not every single state does, okay?
[00:50:05]  So you guys can figure it out.
[00:50:07]  Not every state funds through property taxes.
[00:50:09]  I know that's a crazy thing to think of.
[00:50:10]  They have thing called income tax.
[00:50:11]  I know you guys don't have that around here.
[00:50:13]  But here's what I will tell you.
[00:50:14]  Number one, in the city of Chicago, they went through 40 schools.
[00:50:18]  They could not find a single kid that could read at grade level.
[00:50:21]  I think school choice is a pretty good idea for those inner-city Chicago kids that are our fellow American citizens that are being crushed by the Chicago Teacher Union.
[00:50:30]  Same in Baltimore, same in Washington, D.C. Anything that drives the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association nuts, I usually think is a good idea.
[00:50:40]  I'm very against the cartel, not the Sinaola cartel, the teacher union cartel that has done such damage to our kids.
[00:50:47]  So look, you guys figure it out.
[00:50:49]  I'd love to hear the argument why it's a bad idea.
[00:50:51]  That would be a new one because conservatives for years have been the pushers and the advocates for school choice.
[00:50:56]  The only reason I could think that it's bad is two.
[00:50:58]  Those of you that live in zip codes where you paid up to try to go to a better school, you're afraid that all that money you paid in property tax will be null and void because of somebody that doesn't pay as much in property tax.
[00:51:08]  Okay, I could understand that argument.
[00:51:10]  Number two, it could be that Bill Gates and Zuckerberg come in with a bunch of woke charter schools and they use the school choice voucher system to then push critical theory and Common Core.
[00:51:20]  Okay, I could possibly see that.
[00:51:22]  The risk of those two things is insignificant compared to mass illiteracy that's happening in the inner city schools.
[00:51:28]  And maybe in Texas, your inner city schools are amazing.
[00:51:31]  I can tell you that in Chicago, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, Boston, San Francisco, LA, Seattle, and Portland, they're a moral outrage, and school choice would be a solution.
[00:51:41]  Thank you so much.
[00:51:47]  Hi, I'm Jack.
[00:51:48]  Thanks for letting us cut.
[00:51:49]  It's really cool.
[00:51:52]  First, I wanted to say I was actually really surprised when you kind of told everyone not to boo or shout down.
[00:51:58]  I was a little nervous getting up, but I feel I spend a lot of my time in more left-leaning circles.
[00:52:06]  I don't personally think I'm left-leaning, but I guess people say I do.
[00:52:10]  But when I look on your Instagram and on your social media and other people that would align pretty parallel with you, I feel I'm not seeing a big reconciliation with a lot of the division in the country because I'm a big American fan, but I would definitely like to see us get back to where two parties or multiple parties could be more unified and less divisive.
[00:52:34]  And I'll admit there's a lot of divisive ideology on the left.
[00:52:39]  I'm not going to deny that.
[00:52:40]  But when I look at a lot of the rhetoric with a lot more far-right-leaning people, I don't see a lot of sustainable reconciliation.
[00:52:50]  I just don't see us getting back to a place where there's...
[00:52:54]  I just don't see the work being done on y'all's end by y'all.
[00:52:59]  So let me ask you a question.
[00:53:01]  How many left-wing events do you know that would allow disagreements and encourage them to go to the front of the line and tell the audience not to vote?
[00:53:08]  Probably not a lot, right?
[00:53:10]  I'm actually a really big fan of Sam Harris.
[00:53:13]  And at his events, he always invites people up and encourages them to.
[00:53:17]  Sam Harris is not really a political figure, but he's no, okay.
[00:53:21]  Yeah, not political figures.
[00:53:23]  That's fine.
[00:53:23]  I mean, the point is they don't do that.
[00:53:26]  Let's just be very clear.
[00:53:27]  That's number one.
[00:53:28]  Number two, I think you're onto something, though, about reconciliation.
[00:53:31]  I don't seek to reconcile with people who think men can give birth.
[00:53:37]  Yeah, I don't see that.
[00:53:38]  Or I'll give another example.
[00:53:39]  I don't seek to reconcile with people that believe in black-only dormitories.
[00:53:45]  I want to win, and I want them to lose, because that's an evil idea.
[00:53:49]  Yeah, I understand.
[00:53:51]  And I guess, like, I agree-ish.
[00:53:55]  Yeah, but I just would be curious to see how the rhetoric you send forth.
[00:54:03]  Like, I get the feeling when I look at your Instagram and people similar, I'm seeing a lot of like derogatory statements and I guess a lot of things that are meant to get a reaction.
[00:54:14]  And I think you know that.
[00:54:15]  Well, I mean, I could put you on the spot.
[00:54:17]  Can you give me an example?
[00:54:18]  I mean, I feel like when I saw the whole blackface woman face thing on your that's not derogatory, it's true.
[00:54:25]  A man who calls himself trans is wearing woman face no different than I would wear blackface trying to be a black person.
[00:54:30]  I understand.
[00:54:31]  It's assuming an identity that isn't yours.
[00:54:33]  And I'm not an affirming person of the gender thing, but I also don't see that post.
[00:54:39]  I just wonder, like, what minds you think you're changing, communicating the way you do it.
[00:54:44]  Well, two things.
[00:54:45]  The fact you remember it means I did my job and you didn't keep scrolling.
[00:54:49]  I mean, we remember a lot of bad things about the people.
[00:54:52]  You're in a competition for eyeballs.
[00:54:53]  Number two, it's a plainly spoken thing that is true, that resonates on a deep fundamental level, that we fire people left and right for blackface controversies, yet we allow people with woman-face controversies to win woman of the year and NCAA championships.
[00:55:09]  Why?
[00:55:11]  I guess on that specific, on that specific example, I think it's the intention behind it.
[00:55:17]  I'm not really literate in a whole lot of STEM.
[00:55:19]  But you don't know my intention.
[00:55:21]  Well, no, I'm talking about the intention of the individual.
[00:55:24]  So the person doing blackface or women.
[00:55:25]  Well, hold on.
[00:55:26]  Why does the intention matter?
[00:55:28]  Well, I guess because if you look at someone who's transgender or someone who's, again, I'm not literate in a whole lot of STEM things, but I also know there's a lot of psychological things going on there.
[00:55:40]  It's not completely, I mean, okay, I'm actually evident in STEM.
[00:55:43]  I'm not going to.
[00:55:43]  No, but I mean, so let me just get in.
[00:55:45]  Let me just kind of zero in on this one.
[00:55:47]  The intention is completely irrelevant.
[00:55:49]  It's the action that we must judge, correct?
[00:55:52]  Well, so if somebody robs a bank because they're poor, they should still go to jail regardless if they're poor or rich.
[00:55:59]  If somebody appropriates a womanhood identity, they could say, well, I just wanted to be happy, or I just wanted to win the NCAA championship because I just, I wasn't able to compete against men.
[00:56:10]  We should call them a cheater.
[00:56:11]  So their intent, she said, he said, not she, he said on ESPN this weekend, I just wanted to be happy.
[00:56:17]  Oh, I'm sure there's a lot of happy cheaters out there.
[00:56:20]  That's why we have standards.
[00:56:22]  I feel like you're giving a lot more malicious intent to these individuals.
[00:56:26]  But it's irrelevant.
[00:56:27]  They're doing something evil.
[00:56:29]  It doesn't matter if they think they're doing good.
[00:56:31]  The Nazis thought they were doing good.
[00:56:33]  Every evil force in the history of the world thinks they're doing good.
[00:56:37]  It's, are they doing good?
[00:56:40]  Stalin thought he was God on earth.
[00:56:42]  The question is, are they?
[00:56:43]  Not do they think they are?
[00:56:44]  Can I get like 30 more seconds?
[00:56:46]  I'm sorry.
[00:56:47]  So I've actually been, I mean, this isn't a brag or a flex or anything.
[00:56:51]  I've been spending a lot of time on trying to look at accountability and free will and things like that.
[00:56:58]  I'm religious.
[00:57:00]  I actually am, again, not a brag, but I'm getting my master's at seminary and I got my undergrad in theology.
[00:57:06]  I think free will is essential to religion.
[00:57:08]  I agree with you.
[00:57:09]  But I'm also, when I look at a lot of the relevant neuroscience, I'm beginning to actually struggle with free will.
[00:57:14]  And I'm someone that thinks it's essential and I'm also struggling with it.
[00:57:17]  Okay, let me help you.
[00:57:18]  Let me help you with that then.
[00:57:20]  I was just going to say, I think when it comes to crime, retributive justice in our criminal justice system is dangerous if you...
[00:57:28]  Give me an example.
[00:57:30]  I feel if you, intention is a lot more important than you're saying it is.
[00:57:35]  I don't.
[00:57:38]  Just because you're poor and you commit a crime, it's insulting other poor people that don't commit crimes, saying that poverty is an excuse to crime.
[00:57:46]  I think intention, what I mean by intention is how much control someone had over their decision.
[00:57:52]  I think there's a lot of social, pardon?
[00:57:54]  You're a free being.
[00:57:55]  You have total agency over your decisions.
[00:57:57]  I think a lot of the relevant science is starting to disagree with that.
[00:57:59]  Yeah, so on the quantum level, that's not true.
[00:58:02]  And by the way, the world can be deduced more than a series of cause and effect.
[00:58:06]  You know why?
[00:58:07]  We have this miraculous thing called reason.
[00:58:09]  It's called logos in John 1.
[00:58:11]  Probably studied it in theology class.
[00:58:13]  Logos means you could change and pivot immediately.
[00:58:16]  It means you are not set and bound to the previous atoms that came before you.
[00:58:20]  Reason means you could do deductibility.
[00:58:22]  You can have rationality, freedom of choice.
[00:58:25]  You made a choice to come here tonight.
[00:58:27]  Now, the relevant neuroscience, which Sam Harris is a part of in his book, Moral Landscape, you would say, well, we're all just kind of a combination of cause and effect.
[00:58:34]  What we think is free will is not free will.
[00:58:37]  That's silly.
[00:58:38]  And I'm going to tell you why, because in the beginning was the logos and the logos was God and the logos became God, right?
[00:58:44]  And John 1 is there for a reason to show us that the logos is a properly ordered universe that free beings can point up and aim high, find virtue and eternity.
[00:58:55]  You see, the issue with the neuroscientist argument is that it's impossible to prove, but it's impossible to disprove.
[00:59:01]  Determinism, which is basically what you're beginning to enter into, takes way more faith than believing in free will because you exercise free will every single day.
[00:59:11]  You did so by being here tonight.
[00:59:12]  You do so based on the podcast that you listen to.
[00:59:14]  I believe it's fundamental to a true and proper moral landscape.
[00:59:17]  Okay, thanks for being here.
[00:59:18]  We'll get to the next one.
[00:59:28]  Hi, Charlie.

=== Taking Children Out of School (02:04) ===

[00:59:29]  Thank you for being here.
[00:59:29]  I'm a homeschool mother of four.
[00:59:31]  My 12-year-old is here with me.
[00:59:32]  My eight-month-old is at home.
[00:59:34]  This is the first night being away from him just so I could come see you.
[00:59:38]  I can't believe I'm up here to disagree with you, but I wanted to help you with the school choice issue here in Texas.
[00:59:44]  Maybe it's because Texas is different and maybe there's different situations in different states.
[00:59:49]  But here in Texas, we already have school choice.
[00:59:51]  You can take your children out of school.
[00:59:52]  We have the most freedom with homeschool in regards to homeschools.
[00:59:57]  We don't have to register with anybody.
[00:59:59]  We don't have to tell anybody what we're going to do.
[01:00:00]  We don't have any restrictions.
[01:00:03]  And that's priceless.
[01:00:04]  Can we all agree here that government makes things worse?
[01:00:08]  Government intervention makes things worse.
[01:00:11]  So here, you're right.
[01:00:12]  Property taxes is what pays for school.
[01:00:13]  So what they're telling us is that we're going to pay our property taxes and then they're going to give us our money back in terms of vouchers so we can then take it to a private school, which costs way more than anything they're going to be able to give us anyway.
[01:00:24]  So people that are still private's less than public, but keep going.
[01:00:29]  But they give you a $5,000, even if they give us an $8,000 voucher, which they're not per kid.
[01:00:35]  But even if it was $8,000, you're still not going to a good private school here in Texas.
[01:00:40]  So, I mean, their $10,000 is about minimum.
[01:00:43]  But anyway, aside from that, once it's government money, once I have paid my property taxes and now it's government money and they are giving me my money back, it is government money.
[01:00:52]  They now have strings.
[01:00:54]  They now get to say what I have to teach my children.
[01:00:57]  What, you know, private schools that have freedom of religion right now, they eventually, I mean, maybe not year one, maybe not year two, but eventually they will see that they have the ability to put restrictions on that.
[01:01:07]  You cannot teach this.
[01:01:08]  You have to teach this.
[01:01:09]  So now they're teaching SEL, they're teaching CRT in the public schools.
[01:01:12]  This is how they're going to get it in the private schools.
[01:01:14]  This is how they're going to get it into homeschools.
[01:01:17]  Plenty of states have homeschool restrictions, and this is how they do it.
[01:01:20]  And we've seen it in California.
[01:01:21]  They're doing it in Arizona right now.
[01:01:22]  Well, they're not doing it in Arizona.
[01:01:24]  That's not true.
[01:01:24]  But I mean, I live in Arizona.
[01:01:26]  They're not doing it in Arizona.
[01:01:27]  They're trying and it's not going to work.
[01:01:28]  But we have, so let me tell you, I'm a little confused, though.
[01:01:31]  You would actually get money as a homeschool parent, though.

=== Government Infringement on Freedom (04:56) ===

[01:01:34]  Right?
[01:01:34]  That's there are, they're trying to do that.
[01:01:37]  It's not that.
[01:01:37]  They would create more homeschooling, actually, because parents would get it.
[01:01:40]  And it's not government money.
[01:01:42]  It's a refund of your money.
[01:01:43]  But once it's in the government coffers and it comes back to us, it is not our money.
[01:01:46]  What we need to do is that we can't do it.
[01:01:47]  If you get an IRS tax rebate, it's never their money.
[01:01:50]  It's your money.
[01:01:50]  It's not a lot of people in schools with my money.
[01:01:52]  But no, I mean, when you get a tax rebate from the IRS, it was never their money.
[01:01:55]  They're just sending back your money.
[01:01:56]  That's not how they're doing it.
[01:01:57]  They're not doing it as rebates.
[01:01:58]  They're doing it as ESAs and they're doing it as vouchers.
[01:02:00]  It's still government money that they are gracious.
[01:02:02]  We've got to stop saying there's no such thing as government money.
[01:02:04]  Okay.
[01:02:05]  Respectfully, it's taxpayer money that they use.
[01:02:08]  Tell the government that.
[01:02:09]  No, I know, but I'm just, I'm interested, though, genuinely.
[01:02:12]  So you talk about strings.
[01:02:13]  That's a legitimate argument.
[01:02:15]  Does it say that in the bill?
[01:02:16]  Strings, SEL, and DEI.
[01:02:18]  No, they don't.
[01:02:19]  What I'm saying is, okay, so let's talk to you.
[01:02:21]  So you're saying it's a gateway.
[01:02:22]  You said it could be a gateway.
[01:02:23]  Just like look at our Second Amendment, right?
[01:02:25]  We have it in our famous document.
[01:02:28]  The Second Amendment says shall not be infringed.
[01:02:30]  And yet, look at all the infringement.
[01:02:32]  So it doesn't matter what they write in the law.
[01:02:34]  Once people get a hold of it, once government gets a hold of it, they will infringe.
[01:02:39]  That is what government does.
[01:02:40]  That's interesting.
[01:02:41]  All right.
[01:02:42]  Thanks so much.
[01:02:42]  Appreciate it.
[01:02:48]  Hi there.
[01:02:49]  How are you doing?
[01:02:49]  My name is Keaton.
[01:02:50]  So I just kind of have an environmental related question.
[01:02:53]  Sure.
[01:02:53]  So while I appreciate your opposition to the environmental fanaticism that seems to infect most of the political left of today, my question is kind of that, well, certainly not perfect.
[01:03:04]  Would you say that certain green initiatives are on net positive in terms of either producing employment or reducing pollution?
[01:03:12]  And if not, how would we avoid tangible pollution effects that are happening in cities like Beijing and China where they have such terrible smog and things that actually have true human effects, like you said, were so important earlier?
[01:03:26]  Just give me an example of a green initiative.
[01:03:28]  Yeah, sure.
[01:03:29]  So, I mean, every time when I drive back to my house, because I live in Minnesota, I drive by big solar panel farms, basically.
[01:03:38]  And those provide power, obviously not for the entirety of my state in Minnesota.
[01:03:42]  Correct.
[01:03:43]  It's cloudy a lot up there.
[01:03:44]  It is.
[01:03:44]  It is.
[01:03:45]  And so that, you know, obviously that's an argument against it.
[01:03:48]  But clearly, those types of things have created more employment in the area for people who have to clean them, who have to build them, who have to do all these different types of things.
[01:03:57]  And they provide, you know, as of conservative, I'm very in support of free market like opportunities.
[01:04:02]  And it's provided a challenge to like the monopolization that natural gas has right now.
[01:04:06]  So I'm wondering, you know, given that it could potentially have like, you know, economic benefits and, you know, pollution reduction benefits, do you think it is at all positive or could have positive benefits?
[01:04:19]  Okay, so solar panels in Minnesota, I think, is probably a bad idea.
[01:04:21]  I'll be honest.
[01:04:22]  Like, I don't think taxpayer dollars should go to solar panels in Minnesota.
[01:04:27]  I mean, we could go through example after example.
[01:04:29]  You talk about natural gas monopoly.
[01:04:31]  I think natural gas is one of the most beautiful things we have in this country.
[01:04:34]  We should be using it more and we should be, it's clean, easy to transport.
[01:04:39]  It's incredibly combustible.
[01:04:42]  We're blessed.
[01:04:42]  We're basically the world's leader in natural gas.
[01:04:44]  We just discovered more in the Permian Basin five years ago.
[01:04:47]  It's one of the largest depositories of natural gas in the world.
[01:04:51]  And I mean, solar panels come at a cost too.
[01:04:53]  It takes rare earth minerals to build a solar panel.
[01:04:56]  It's an incredibly expensive process.
[01:04:58]  Electric vehicles come at a cost.
[01:05:00]  It takes nickel, takes cobalt.
[01:05:02]  Cobalt is terrible for the environment, right?
[01:05:05]  So while in a free market, I'm not opposed to people putting up solar panels, but I hate to break it to you.
[01:05:11]  Your examples of solar panels in Minnesota proves the insanity of the green energy fervor because that's a really bad idea.
[01:05:19]  Instead, if some free market person can make solar panels in Minnesota work, that's great.
[01:05:24]  I'm sure you could go like drill for oil in Illinois, but good luck, you know, getting financing on that.
[01:05:32]  The point being is this, is that there's a cost to all things, and there's a prudent medium that I'm sure you agree with that a lot of the fanatics do not.
[01:05:41]  More natural gas and nuclear energy.
[01:05:44]  People never want to talk about nuclear energy.
[01:05:46]  It is incredibly efficient.
[01:05:48]  It's a fabulous, fabulous advance.
[01:05:52]  And so, but people don't want to talk about it because of Three Mile Island, which is legitimate, but it's also an outlier.
[01:05:58]  So as far as the job creation, I find that to be very unpersuasive because I could say right now, everyone has a job to go dig a ditch and fill it back in again, right?
[01:06:07]  Or like go build a bridge to nowhere, right?
[01:06:09]  Job creation needs to only come if there's value being created in the correlation to job creation.
[01:06:14]  And so therefore, if you're exploring natural gas in Midland, Texas or Odessa or in West Texas, you're creating value and those are high-paying jobs that not only help those families and have made Midland Odessa into an incredibly prosperous part of Texas that used to not be as such.

=== Restoring Ethical Monotheism (02:40) ===

[01:06:31]  You guys have been there recently.
[01:06:32]  It's beautiful what's happening out there.
[01:06:33]  It's amazing.
[01:06:34]  And the current regime is trying to stop that, but it's also really good for the country.
[01:06:38]  Using natural gas makes us be able to call shots easier against the people who hate us, specifically China.
[01:06:45]  Thanks so much.
[01:06:46]  Appreciate it.
[01:06:51]  How's it going?
[01:06:52]  I'm a huge fan of yours, Charlie.
[01:06:54]  Thank you.
[01:06:54]  My question is with a growing need to be taught faith-based educational principles in U.S. schools.
[01:06:59]  How do we respond to those who make the argument of freedom of religion or the separation of church and state, especially in regards to public schools?
[01:07:06]  Okay, so I would first ask them, find me where it says separation of church and state in the U.S. Constitution.
[01:07:13]  And what they will do is they will, as a smart aleck, point you to the First Amendment, which says Congress shall make no law establishing a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
[01:07:25]  That's the establishment clause, which means that Congress or America will not have a state-run religion or an official religion, specifically Pentecostalism, Episcopalianism, or Presbyterianism.
[01:07:36]  The word, the phrase separation of church and state, is derived from a single letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Convention, hilariously actually assuring them that the government won't come after them, saying that the government will stay away from you.
[01:07:48]  And it was twisted by the Warren Burger Court in the 1960s and 70s to erroneously, unconstitutionally take prayer out of school, something that never should have happened in our school because then they reinvent this kind of constitutional standard where they say separation of church and state.
[01:08:04]  And so people that say that, Christians say that, first of all, they don't understand their civics.
[01:08:08]  They don't understand constitutionalism at all.
[01:08:11]  But I would just push back on this.
[01:08:13]  I'm not recommending a national church or a national religion, but it is a fact that God appears four times in the Declaration of Independence.
[01:08:20]  The Lord appears in the Constitution of the United States, whether your teacher taught you that or not.
[01:08:24]  It says in the year of the Lord.
[01:08:25]  It says that in the Constitution of the United States.
[01:08:27]  55 out of 56 of the signers of the Declaration were Bible-believing church attending Christians.
[01:08:32]  And as it says in the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bans that have tied them to another, deriving the separate but equal station, goes on to say the laws of nature and nature is God.
[01:08:44]  That is not a God that is polytheistic, pagan, or obviously atheistic because it says God.
[01:08:50]  There was a belief in an ethical monotheistic God at the cornerstone of the United States project.
[01:08:55]  That is a fact.
[01:08:55]  You don't have to think it's the Christian God.
[01:08:57]  You don't have to think it's the Jewish God.
[01:08:58]  But every single signer of the Declaration, including Thomas Jefferson, believed in ethical monotheism.
[01:09:03]  That has always been the cornerstone of the American government.
[01:09:06]  So when I say we need to restore these things, it is around the magnanimous ecumenical idea of ethical monotheism.

=== God in the Constitution (13:26) ===

[01:09:12]  Thank you so much.
[01:09:12]  Appreciate it.
[01:09:17]  We're going to go a little bit longer.
[01:09:19]  You guys want me to keep going?
[01:09:20]  I'm happy to.
[01:09:20]  Okay.
[01:09:21]  So if you disagree, you're welcome to cut and line our team.
[01:09:24]  We'll do it.
[01:09:24]  We'll go a little bit longer.
[01:09:27]  So you touched on how the world is moving so far away from Christianity and how it's becoming really secular.
[01:09:33]  I wanted to know your thoughts on Hollywood and how they're imposing so many satanic ideas through music lyrics, movies, concerts, and even all over social media out to society.
[01:09:47]  And, you know, people like adults and even younger children look up to all these influencers, celebrities.
[01:09:53]  And so what are your thoughts on all these satanic ideas going on?
[01:09:57]  Yeah, you know, I struggle with what is more dangerous people that worship Satan or don't believe he exists.
[01:10:06]  I don't know.
[01:10:07]  But they're both really bad.
[01:10:10]  So yeah, they're both obviously really evil.
[01:10:12]  But that's an interesting question, right?
[01:10:13]  Who's more dangerous to society?
[01:10:15]  Someone who worships Lucifer or someone who doesn't think he exists?
[01:10:18]  I don't know.
[01:10:19]  Okay, but anyway, yes, I mean, Hollywood doesn't really care.
[01:10:22]  There's no price anymore to their outright Satan worship, whether it be Sam Smith or Lil Nas or all of this, with Luciferian imagery and outright satanic incantations.
[01:10:35]  And so what is my opinion of it?
[01:10:37]  If I were to get theological on you, I think that Satan no longer has to hide.
[01:10:44]  And because he is the most prideful and the most rebellious and the least self-controlled, looks at spiritual vessels to be able to show his temporary dominion over that sphere of cultural influence.
[01:10:57]  And we must remember a couple things theologically, right?
[01:10:59]  Jesus in his dialogue with Satan called him the prince of this world.
[01:11:05]  Paul called him the God of this world.
[01:11:07]  C.S. Lewis said we are an enemy-occupied territory, and we must launch a sabotage campaign.
[01:11:12]  And so we must understand that until Christ returns again, which I believe he will return, happy to talk about that as well, is that we are in a place that is currently the dominion of the fallen angel, right?
[01:11:25]  And that is a hard concept theologically for a lot of Christians to reconcile.
[01:11:29]  But I don't think it's any mistake.
[01:11:31]  We're starting to see the outright Satan worship.
[01:11:33]  And when you call it out, you can see the media reporters kind of laugh about it and they almost have delight in it.
[01:11:39]  And so I'm happy.
[01:11:40]  Do you have a follow-up thought really quickly?
[01:11:42]  So it's just like what you were saying, everything they do now is they turn into a joke.
[01:11:46]  Like there's this one movie about LeBron James's house, and there's a scene in it where they go through this whole ritual about like sacrifice and the whole Illuminati thing.
[01:11:58]  But now like media will go through it as it's like funny and it's a joke, but it's literally just right in front of you.
[01:12:04]  So there's two explanations, right?
[01:12:06]  And then we'll get to the next question.
[01:12:07]  The first explanation is that it's Satan trying to rear his head out of a prideful dominion.
[01:12:12]  Or the second explanation is they do it because they think it's going to really infuriate us.
[01:12:16]  They do it as kind of a troll.
[01:12:17]  I don't know, but I do know this: that I don't want to continue to not that, how do I say this?
[01:12:23]  I don't think it should be acceptable for Christians to remain quiet when on the Oscars there is outright Satan worship.
[01:12:30]  Where are the pastors in America at a time like this?
[01:12:34]  If pastors don't mention this, they should resign in disgrace because it's the spiritual war right there on television.
[01:12:41]  Thank you so much.
[01:12:42]  Appreciate it.
[01:12:42]  Thank you.
[01:12:43]  I've got to get to the next question.
[01:12:45]  I'm sorry.
[01:12:45]  Thank you.
[01:12:48]  Hey, Charlie, thank you for being here.
[01:12:50]  I agree with you politically, basically everything, but I disagree with you on something that you said earlier tonight in regards to the Lord's Day.
[01:13:00]  I keep the Seventh-day Sabbath myself, and the more I study it out for myself and see what the Bible says, the less evidence I see that there's indication that the Bible says Sunday is the Lord's Day.
[01:13:13]  And so I don't know if you had any.
[01:13:16]  I think you might be right.
[01:13:18]  Yeah, you could be right.
[01:13:19]  So it's really Resurrection Day is what Sunday is.
[01:13:21]  That's the reason that it has become quote unquote the Lord's Day.
[01:13:24]  Are you Seventh-day Adventist?
[01:13:26]  Yes, sir.
[01:13:26]  Yeah, I could tell.
[01:13:27]  No, it's okay.
[01:13:28]  I don't mean any some of the most beautiful believers I know are Seventh-day Adventists.
[01:13:33]  And that's fine.
[01:13:34]  But the reason that Resurrection Day has become Sunday in the Western culture is you have Good Friday.
[01:13:41]  And boy, I had this down perfectly a couple of years ago, but there's a space of interval that I think Mark in particular shows that he was resurrected on what we now call Sunday.
[01:13:51]  But if you go to the Eastern world, they don't view it that way.
[01:13:54]  They view Friday night to Saturday night as the Lord's Day.
[01:13:57]  Do I have that correctly?
[01:13:59]  Could you say that last part when we're talking about that?
[01:14:00]  Well, no, meaning that in your faith, Seventh-day Adventists, you believe Friday night to Saturday night is the cathedral in time.
[01:14:07]  Yes, sir.
[01:14:08]  I honestly think it's kind of irrelevant.
[01:14:10]  I think it's what if it's Saturday or Sunday, we'll find out when we go to heaven.
[01:14:14]  The question is, what are you doing to honor the divine for a singular day?
[01:14:18]  That's a much more important question.
[01:14:20]  If I could counter, that's okay.
[01:14:23]  Talking about the baptism, or not the baptism, I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself.
[01:14:27]  Talking about the resurrection, Lord's resurrection becoming the Lord's Day.
[01:14:32]  I think in Romans chapter 3, 3 through 6, we see that it's written that Jesus' resurrection and death represents our baptism, that whole process, dying and rising again, new life.
[01:14:46]  I guess I would counter on the point of not coming from a legalistic point, but from we look back at the Ten Commandments and we see the fourth commandment says, remember the Sabbath days, remember it and keep it holding.
[01:14:59]  Because you were once slaves in Egypt.
[01:15:01]  Yes, sir.
[01:15:01]  Yes.
[01:15:01]  And we see throughout the whole Bible of the Sabbath is the time to remember what God has done for us and how he's worked in our lives.
[01:15:07]  But we also see that Genesis in the beginning of the Bible is consistent throughout the Bible.
[01:15:13]  We see God blessed it, rested on it, and sanctified it.
[01:15:15]  And we don't see that any other day.
[01:15:17]  I don't believe there's.
[01:15:19]  I'm very pro-Sabbath.
[01:15:20]  I'm not disagreeing.
[01:15:21]  No, yes, sir.
[01:15:21]  I just, yes, sir.
[01:15:23]  Yeah, I just, whether you honor it with rest or stop in the Hebrew Shabbat on Saturday or Sunday, I don't think is the most pressing theological question.
[01:15:33]  The question is: are you leaving modernity for a day to try to honor the divine and your duties as a follower?
[01:15:40]  I think that's much more important.
[01:15:41]  So thanks so much.
[01:15:42]  Appreciate it.
[01:15:43]  Thank you.
[01:15:48]  Hi, Charlie.
[01:15:50]  I was actually also a volunteer when you wrote UIC.
[01:15:52]  Oh, wonderful.
[01:15:53]  Yes.
[01:15:54]  Yeah, my friend invited me since I'm also from Illinois.
[01:15:56]  And I love that you started off your speech with, it's good to be home.
[01:15:59]  Yeah.
[01:15:59]  I just love that.
[01:16:01]  So I also love that you see a future for Illinois.
[01:16:03]  My parents don't, but I do.
[01:16:07]  So what are your favorite memories growing up in Illinois and Chicago?
[01:16:10]  Well, Chicago is not what it used to be, obviously.
[01:16:13]  I could go through them, but I'll broaden this for the audience.
[01:16:20]  I miss the country I grew up in.
[01:16:22]  I'll actually say some numbers here.
[01:16:24]  It's interesting.
[01:16:25]  I did a whole show on it today.
[01:16:27]  Wall Street Journal poll came out today and said, when I was five years old in 1998, 70% of Americans thought patriotism was very important.
[01:16:35]  Now it's 38%, according to the Wall Street Journal.
[01:16:38]  Same poll, same methodology.
[01:16:39]  You might disagree, but I'll prove it to you in other words, because you might say, oh, Wall Street Journal is wrong.
[01:16:43]  I'm going to sell you some numbers that support this that are hard to disagree with.
[01:16:48]  Community involvement in 1998, 47% of Americans thought it was important to be involved in your community.
[01:16:53]  Now it's 27%.
[01:16:55]  Having kids in 1998, when I was five years old, 59% of America thought it was important to have kids.
[01:17:00]  Now it's 30%.
[01:17:01]  Now you might say, well, Charlie, that's a Wall Street Journal poll.
[01:17:04]  I can't believe it.
[01:17:04]  Patriotism.
[01:17:05]  Military enrollment is down 30%.
[01:17:07]  So that would prove that poll.
[01:17:08]  Community involvement, Boy Scout, church involvement, local groups are all down.
[01:17:15]  So that proves that.
[01:17:16]  Having kids, our birth rate is down tremendously over the last 20 years.
[01:17:20]  And so what do I miss about Chicago and Illinois?
[01:17:22]  I miss living in a country, not a colony.
[01:17:24]  The only thing that went up in the last 20 years that value more to Americans is how much they value money as very important.
[01:17:30]  Money is more important to Americans than having kids, being involved in the community, being patriotic, or going to church.
[01:17:36]  Maybe the scriptures were onto something when they said it was the root of all evil.
[01:17:40]  Thanks so much.
[01:17:40]  Appreciate it.
[01:17:41]  Thank you, Charlie.
[01:17:43]  All right, we'll take a couple more and then we got to wrap it up.
[01:17:48]  Hello.
[01:17:48]  Thank you for coming here, Charlie Kirk.
[01:17:51]  And I'm the president at UT Dallas, but I'm part of a Christian organization at UTD, and they've been kind of, and I've been kind of distancing myself from them because of the fact that they are somewhat going woke in some senses, and they just don't really seem to take a stance on anything.
[01:18:10]  So how would you go about like solving that problem?
[01:18:14]  Yeah, I mean, this is a huge issue, everybody.
[01:18:16]  I mean, I could have spent my whole speech on this, but wokeism, like a virus, has attached itself to the healthy host of American Christianity.
[01:18:23]  And boy, does Dallas have its fair share of woke pastors throughout?
[01:18:26]  I mean, I could name some names, but these people are so off base.
[01:18:29]  You might say, okay, how do I know my pastor is woke?
[01:18:32]  Well, let's first find out if your pastor is cowardly.
[01:18:34]  Did your pastor mention and celebrate the reversal of Roe versus Wade?
[01:18:39]  If the answer is no, you should find a new church.
[01:18:42]  Period.
[01:18:43]  You are led by a coward.
[01:18:45]  50 years of prayer, fasting, tithing, and volunteer activism by Christians to try to stop the slaughter of the unborn in the womb.
[01:18:53]  We finally get it, and most American Christians, pastors, don't even whisper it to their audience, not even a whisper.
[01:18:59]  Resign.
[01:19:00]  You're a coward.
[01:19:00]  You should not be in charge of the ministry.
[01:19:02]  How do you know if you have a woke pastor, a pastor that says, quote, the Old Testament doesn't matter, resign.
[01:19:08]  You shouldn't be a pastor.
[01:19:10]  The Old Testament was actually studied and quoted by Jesus himself.
[01:19:14]  He loved the Torah.
[01:19:15]  And every single Bible-believing Christian should know the Torah.
[01:19:17]  You'll know a lot more about Jesus.
[01:19:19]  He quoted Deuteronomy more than any other book.
[01:19:21]  By the way, that's something the founding fathers and Jesus have in common.
[01:19:24]  They both quoted Deuteronomy more than any other book in their dialogues.
[01:19:28]  Should teach you something.
[01:19:28]  If you don't know Deuteronomy, that's fine.
[01:19:30]  Study it.
[01:19:30]  It's there.
[01:19:31]  Dive deep into it.
[01:19:32]  It takes effort and work.
[01:19:33]  It's not like Proverbs.
[01:19:34]  I'll tell you.
[01:19:36]  You got to get your big boy pants on, right?
[01:19:38]  You got to read some commentaries.
[01:19:39]  You got to go to the original Hebrew.
[01:19:40]  It'll bless you infinitely.
[01:19:43]  But look, how do you know if you're being led by a woke pastor?
[01:19:45]  If they start talking about race, if they start talking about all these different things, I mean, I'm just amazed at how many of these pastors are talking about they need to have racial struggle sessions, about marching with BLM and all this nonsense.
[01:20:00]  And I don't think they quite understand, first of all, that the role the church should have as the ecclesia, the gathering point, the community impact center that should happen.
[01:20:11]  Number two, I don't think they understand politics, which is the highest form of community, according to Aristotle, because it combines morality and sociability.
[01:20:17]  And number three, I don't think they understand Psalm 97, 10.
[01:20:20]  If you love God, you must hate evil.
[01:20:22]  And there's a lot of evil to hate right now.
[01:20:24]  You hating evil done properly can be an act of worship to the Lord.
[01:20:29]  How many pastors are telling you that?
[01:20:31]  No, instead, they say a lot of other different things.
[01:20:35]  You can understand and acknowledge somebody's sin without having to accept it.
[01:20:39]  The woke seems to cross that line.
[01:20:42]  The woke is always worried about turning people away, but that's all they're good at is turning people away.
[01:20:46]  The woke pastors and their churches are crumbling.
[01:20:50]  They're no longer growing or thriving.
[01:20:52]  And American Christianity has never been less popular today than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
[01:20:57]  We need a new generation of courageous pastors to rise up, preach the word verse by verse and chapter by chapter, and not care about budgets, baptism.
[01:21:06]  Well, they should care about baptism.
[01:21:07]  Buildings and baptism for the sake of baptisms, they shouldn't care about.
[01:21:12]  Baptisms are fine, but you should be creating disciples, not converts of all nations.
[01:21:16]  Big difference.
[01:21:16]  Thank you so much.
[01:21:19]  See you on the line.
[01:21:21]  Two more.
[01:21:22]  Okay, awesome.
[01:21:23]  Thank you for being in Fort Worth.
[01:21:24]  We love that.
[01:21:25]  Thank you.
[01:21:25]  I'm Valeria.
[01:21:26]  I'm 22 years old.
[01:21:27]  I'm a candidate for Fort Worth ISD to be on the school board.
[01:21:30]  Great.
[01:21:30]  Good for you.
[01:21:32]  Cool.
[01:21:35]  There's actually quite a couple of more candidates in the room.
[01:21:37]  We just finished block walking before this, but you mentioned that local community involvement is so low.
[01:21:43]  How do we increase those numbers?
[01:21:44]  How do we emphasize the importance of being involved in local government?
[01:21:48]  So I think that if I had to give the biggest piece of critical feedback to conservatives, it is to complain about the macro and to allow the macro to impact the micro.
[01:21:58]  So I just went through all of those trends.
[01:22:01]  And the most important critical way to answer all those trends is, well, then what are you doing?
[01:22:07]  Do you believe patriotism is important?
[01:22:09]  Do you believe having children is important?
[01:22:11]  Do you believe going to church is important?
[01:22:13]  And sometimes you have to put the duty above the expediency.
[01:22:17]  The country does the opposite right now.
[01:22:19]  That's why money is going up in the value and everything else is going down.
[01:22:23]  And it's not easy, but boy, is it fulfilling and it's life-giving.
[01:22:26]  I have to tell you.
[01:22:28]  You know, kind of seeing the excesses of modernity, just always caring about yourself is an awful existence.
[01:22:34]  And it's baked into all of our education system, into our schools.
[01:22:37]  You don't even notice it.

=== Putting Duty Above Expediency (01:38) ===

[01:22:38]  How often do you hear a young person have to say that, I'm going to do the right thing, even though it's the more difficult thing?
[01:22:45]  So how do we start to change community involvement?
[01:22:47]  You are the solution.
[01:22:48]  Just do it yourself, right?
[01:22:50]  And that's where micro action matters.
[01:22:53]  I was shocked.
[01:22:54]  I encourage all of you to re-listen to my podcast today.
[01:22:56]  It was one of the more moving hours we've done in quite some time.
[01:22:59]  Sometimes when we don't do any show prep, but this is the case, like 10 minutes before we just change the topic.
[01:23:04]  And we were getting emails.
[01:23:05]  This is a real thing.
[01:23:06]  And I want to challenge a big demographic here, which is we got about 100 emails on this genre and about 30 that were really explicit and 10 that would take your breath away of all of our listeners and our viewers of grandmothers that said, I hope my grandkids don't have kids, I wouldn't want a kid to be born into this world, and I think that is an unbelievably evil thing to believe it is.
[01:23:26]  It is.
[01:23:27]  It is having a a crisis of fear, of a posture of fear, an attitude of fear.
[01:23:33]  No, you do the right thing, regardless of the weather.
[01:23:36]  You do the right thing.
[01:23:37]  You have an obligation to be fruitful and multiply as an act of worship to the divine.
[01:23:41]  Yeah, I mean, people say Charlie, you gonna have kids in this mess, of course, because maybe they'll be smart enough to solve it, maybe we're gonna raise good people.
[01:23:50]  How do you have hope without having children?
[01:23:52]  I get these emails of these people and they say, it's all so dark and broken.
[01:23:58]  You got free choice, you got agency.
[01:24:00]  Do something about it.
[01:24:03]  Thanks so much for listening.
[01:24:04]  Everybody email us your thoughts, as always, freedom at Charliekirk.com.
[01:24:07]  Thanks so much for listening and god bless For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.