What's the true history of how tariffs drove the rise of America? How does China's favorite board game symbolize their approach to strategy? How is debt linked to the collapse of empires? Historian Bill Federer joins Charlie for a wide-ranging Memorial Day discussion of what makes countries strong, what makes them weak, and how so many countries go from the former to the latter through their own poor choices. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com!Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Okay, everybody.
Today on The Charlie Kirk Show, we have an amazing guest and friend of mine to talk about history, how it connects with current events, and that is Bill Federer from AmericanMinute.com.
Bill, great to see you.
You're impeccably dressed as always.
Thanks for taking the time.
Charlie, great to be with you.
So, Bill, I want to ask a couple questions, the first of which, what is the history of tariffs in America?
The media makes it seem as if we've never done this before.
Have we financed our government tariffs before?
How did some of our founding fathers think about tariffs?
And how does that connect to some of the news of President Trump using tariffs as a negotiating tool?
Right.
For the first century and a half of our country, that's how the federal government raised its money.
So a little background.
Industrial Revolution in England.
Coal was what they burned, and they had coal mines that would fill up with water.
So in 1769, Isaac Watt invented a steam pump to get water out of coal mines, and that quickly turned into a steam engine that ran factories.
And so women would have to sit at a spinning wheel and take this yarn and turn it into thread and then make cloths.
Well, factories could make bolts of cloth really quick, really inexpensive.
And so this is called the Industrial Revolution.
But the British did not allow manufacturing in the colonies because they wanted to market.
And so when America becomes independent of Britain, the second bill that George Washington signed as president was the Tariff Act of 1789 to put a 5% tariff on all imports into America to make those 5%.
Matter of fact, there was no income tax in America until the Civil War.
I'll get to that.
And the U.S. Constitution specifically mentions that tariff taxes was the way the federal government was going to get its income.
Article 1, Section 8, authorizes the federal government to collect duties and imposts, which are different terms for tariffs, to pay the debts, provide for the common defense, and the general welfare of the United States.
So basically, all federal money came from tariffs.
And so Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, created the Coast Guard to do what?
To catch ships that were trying to smuggle stuff into America without paying the tariffs.
And so he's in charge of federal revenue.
He's the Secretary of Treasury.
The fastest ships of the day were called cutters.
And so these were called revenue cutters.
It was the beginning of the Coast Guard.
the Coast Guard was started to collect tariffs.
And so when the...
Thomas Jefferson, the third president, stated April 6, 1816, it may be the duty of all to submit to this sacrifice to pay for a time and impost on importation of certain articles in order to encourage their manufacture at home.
So it's like, look, everybody, we're going to have to pay a little bit extra if we want these foreign goods.
Why?
Because we want to create a margin so that people can take the risk and start factories in America.
And this was amazing.
Instead of women sitting at spinning yards, they could buy bolts of cloth.
Instead of going to a well and dragging buckets of water into the house, they could have indoor plumbing.
And then we, so basically the Industrial Revolution freed women up from these menial tasks.
And then they produced farm equipment.
And so instead of a farmer having to hire manual labor, one machine could harvest a field.
Instead of ladies using wash tubs, they could use a washer machine.
And so this saw the fastest rise in the standard of living in human history.
And between 1792 and 1812, tariffs went up to 12.5%.
After the War of 1812, tariffs went up to 25%.
In 1820, they were at 40%.
and near the Civil War, they were at 60%.
Franklin Pierce, the 14th president, said December 5th, 1853, Happily, I have no occasion to suggest any radical changes in the financial policy of the government.
Ours is almost, if not absolutely, the solitary power of Christendom, having a surplus of revenue drawn immediately from imposts on commerce.
Ben Siegelman wrote in 1962 in the commentary magazine article, Tariffs Kennedy Administration in American Politics.
He said, in the early years of the republic, all but about $20,000 of the $4.5 million of treasury income stemmed from tariff levies.
Up to the Civil War, in fact, over 90% of the federal government's It's unbelievable.
The majority of the tariffs were collected at southern ports.
So the South, like Charleston, South Carolina, threatened many times to stop collecting the tariffs because they were in a position as an agricultural area of having to buy more expensive stuff from Europe or more expensive stuff relatively from the northern factories.
So the tariffs helped the northern factories, but really didn't help the South.
So when the Civil War started, The South held back their tariff income.
And the federal government was like, uh-oh.
So Lincoln pushed through an emergency income tax, and it raised $750 million to finance the Union during the Civil War.
And after the war, it was repealed.
No income tax.
Why?
Because the South is now part of the Union, and we can go back to normal, collecting tariffs at the Southern ports.
And so this was the way it was.
Up until the late 1800s, it was 95% tariffs.
This is what's called the Gilded Age.
And you had all kinds of factories and bridges made out of steel and high rise.
And if you've ever been to the state capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, it was built around this time.
It's a gilded masterpiece.
I mean, it is the most, you feel like you're in some foreign palace.
There was so much opulence and wealth in America at this time.
And then even into the early 1900s, I wrote a book on George Washington Carver, the Tuskegee scientist from down south, and the United Peanut Growers Association in 1921.
Asked Carver to go to the House Ways and Means Committee and to lobby for a tariff on peanuts imported from China because they could bring them in from China cheaper than the southern farmers could grow them.
And he was successful.
They passed the 1922 Fordney-McCumber tariff bill.
And then there's the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill of 1930.
But they say that the tariffs, though, by the way, let me just interrupt.
It's an antiquated model of economics, that even though we had it previously, that tariffs should never be used.
So kind of blend this bill using some of your economic expertise with the historical.
Is there a place for tariffs, looking at it through a historical and economic lens, in the current American geopolitical portfolio?
Yeah, definitely.
You know, the move away from tariffs sort of snuck in the back door.
You had Marxists from Germany immigrating to America, and they wanted redistribution of wealth.
And so they pushed through the first income tax in a peacetime in 1892, but the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in Pollock v.
Farmers Loan and Trust in the 1894 Supreme Court case.
The Supreme Court said any legislation that discriminates based on race, religion, or economic status is class legislation.
It's sort of economic DEI.
We're going to tax people more because of their status.
And the Supreme Court said, no, it's unconstitutional.
So what did Woodrow Wilson do?
Amend the Constitution.
With the 16th Amendment in 1913, he actually tacked a 1% Income tax on the top 1% richest people in the country onto the 1913 tariff bill.
It's just going to tax the Rockefellers, Carnegies, J. Paul Geddes, Astors, Flaglers, Harrimans.
It's not going to tax you and me.
And then you had World War I, and everybody said, okay, we had it.
Income tax during the emergency of the Civil War.
Now it's emergency of World War I. After the war, they reduced it, but did not eliminate it.
But it was still a tax on the wealthy.
You even had John F. Kennedy in his 1960 speech.
He said, introduced during the war.
When the income tax was extended to millions of new taxpayers, previously it had been a selective tax imposed on the wealthy.
And then, of course, FDR had his greatest tax increase in world history.
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So Franklin Roosevelt expanded the income tax to tax everybody.
And most people made $5,000 a year.
They didn't save up money to pay it.
And so FDR instituted paycheck withholding.
An emergency effort.
It was Uncle Sam needs you, buy war bonds and fight the axes, pay your taxes.
The person that came up with it was Beardsley Rummel, chairman of Macy's Department Store.
You know the Thanksgiving Day parade?
Oh yeah, very well.
And so it was called the pay-as-you-go tax.
You squeeze the sponge, the water goes out.
You raise the taxes on businesses in America.
Guess what?
They're going to go to other countries where the taxes are lower.
So after World War II, we were helping to rebuild Germany and Japan with brand new equipment, and they have cheap labor, no lawsuits.
No environmental red tape.
None of that.
And they could produce stuff really cheap and then ship it into America.
And with the profits, they would lobby politicians to lower the tariffs so they could bring their stuff in cheaper.
This is called free trade.
Now, the problem was that other countries would subsidize their businesses to help them produce their goods cheaper so they could sell them cheaper and put out of business the American competition.
And then once they had a monopoly, then they could flex their muscles when it came to negotiating foreign policy.
We'll hold back what you need because we're the only ones giving it to you.
And so we see that what Trump, in a sense, is wanting to do is to go back to the original model that did make America the wealthiest and most prosperous nation on the planet.
And you're making other countries pay a premium to have access to our customers.
And so, yeah, let's just kind of go a level deeper here.
So, You're a free market guy.
Can you reconcile how to best explain those two things that we want open to markets?
But also talk about China as well.
You're a historian that understands the Chinese Communist Party.
How do they view trade themselves as the middle empire?
Give us a little bit of their psychology and how they're currently viewing, let's say, markets with America.
It's not about enriching us.
It's about something different.
What is that?
Yeah, well, China is the oldest civilization in world history.
It goes back 5,000 years.
They had dynasties.
They've always had a top-down, controlled economy.
And then you had the British, and they colonized.
And what happened was the British were growing opium in India and shipping it into China.
And the emperor didn't want it.
And fought back, and then the British brought their navy in.
Well, the Chinese didn't have a navy, and so they lost.
And so it's called the Opium Wars.
And this is when the British set up HSBC Bank, Hong Kong Singapore Bank, which was used, basically, to take the profits from selling the opium into China.
Talk about a government involved in the drug trafficking.
But this is called the Century of Humiliation for China.
And they never forgot it.
And they're sort of paying us back with saying, OK, we'll weaken the West with fentanyl and all kinds of other things.
But when you had Admiral Dewey opened up trade with China, but we had the most powerful navy in the world.
You had during World War II.
America was defending China against Japan.
We had the Fighting Tigers.
But then you had Chiang Kai-shek.
He converted and became a Christian, maybe because he thought that would get Americans to want to support him.
And he's fighting the Japanese and fighting Mao Zedong and the communists.
And Harry S. Truman said, we're going to pull out.
MacArthur wanted to go in and defeat the Communists, and he may have been able to do that because they were not all that organized.
But Truman fired MacArthur, and Truman helped form the United Nations.
And Truman said, well, let's let the United Nations take care of this.
And it's like, it didn't work out that way.
So Chiang Kai-shek is chased out to Taiwan for Mosa, Free China, whatever the name was.
And the Communists took over China.
And they began to do a cultural revolution, not just a revolution, but a cultural one, which means they were destroying thousands of years of Chinese culture.
They destroyed the oldest gates, you know, in Beijing and the oldest Buddhist temple and tens of thousands of ancient Chinese works because they wanted to do the New People's Republic of China.
And they play the long game.
I heard somebody explain the difference between chess and poker.
But Americans are known for poker taking risks and gambling, and the Chinese are very strategic.
Yeah, so talk more about that.
The long-term planning of the Chinese Communist Party, how far out do they look?
And are they viewing this kind of trade war as an economic one or even something greater than that?
Well, the most popular game in China is called Go, G-O.
But your goal is to get control of different parts of the playing board with the fewest amount of pieces necessary.
And so it's very long-term strategy.
And so they apply this generationally.
They do have what I could best describe as a manifest destiny.
When America was first starting, we sort of knew we were going to go from sea to shining sea.
But China has this sort of corporate concept that they are the best and that they are going to grow and eventually take over.
And to a large part, they've been successful primarily through bribing politicians in other countries.
The China Silk Road Initiative, Turkistan.
They've always viewed themselves as the center of the world, as their natural place, which they feel they must regain.
Yeah, it's a psyche.
That's there.
So I think they've been rattling the sword that they wanted to take back Taiwan.
And of course, they did get Hong Kong back, which was a tremendous abandonment of the freedom-loving people there.
But Trump, I feel, is brilliant because when he threw them on their heels with this tariff war, so to speak.
40 Chinese banks have gone belly up just within the last two months.
They've had to pull back.
Their global aspirations have taken a hit, partly because they've bought a whole lot of Treasury bills.
And if they attack America, they're going to lose their customer.
Right?
Because because we're the ones that.
America is the market for the world.
And so if if they do anything to to So they're in sort of a box, and Trump is probably the only person on the planet that has the guts to push back against their agenda.
If you look at the Hutchison-Wempol company, which is a Chinese-owned company, they've been strategically taking control of major maritime ports, Panama Canal, the Dardanelles, different areas around the world that are choke points.
For naval travel around the world.
It's like, why are they doing that?
The Bahamas, they built a deep water port down there.
And then in Africa, they go to countries and say, well, Now, sorry to interrupt.
What would you say is their weakness?
If you were to advise President Trump, because you know this very well, what is the weak point of China that is a card that we could play?
Well, their population.
It's unsustainable.
The fewer women go back to the one-child policy they used to have, and they would all want men.
And they overstretched themselves so that they are vulnerable, I think, financially.
They have a good front.
Militarily, they do have some advanced things and supposedly hypersonic missiles and so forth, but very few.
The American military outnumbers the Chinese almost 10 to 1. So they're not ready to engage.
In anything.
They are trying to do what's called BRICS.
Brazil, Russia, China, India, you know, Singapore, whatever.
I always get the S mixed up.
But they've added, these are countries that want to trade with something other than the U.S. dollar.
And they've gotten a little headway, but I don't think it's anywhere near competitive.
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That brings up another interesting scenario.
FDR, on his way back from the Alta Conference, stops off.
His USS Quincy boat in the Suez Canal, and he meets with the King of Saudi Arabia, Aziz Ibn Saud, and they do an oil for security agreement that America will provide security for Saudi Arabia in exchange for Saudi Arabia selling its oil in U.S. dollars.
The number one commodity sold worldwide is oil.
And when everybody in the world is having to buy oil in U.S. dollars, and since Saudi Arabia is the biggest seller of it, one of the biggest, then everybody wants U.S. dollars.
And so we're able to be the reserve currency for the world.
Biden let that slip, and that's dangerous, because if it ever happens that we're not the reserve currency, there'll be lots of dollars that have been created that nobody needs.
I think Trump is very effectively trying to push back against that.
And then you had the Bretton Woods Agreement around 1948, Harry S. Truman, that made the international agreement that the U.S. dollar would be the reserve currency for the world, backed with gold.
It was secure.
Everybody said, hey, you can put your money in dollars and you know it's the most safest until Richard Nixon got us off the gold standard.
But even then, it was still responsibly managed.
But then under Biden and Obama and the spending, spending the trillions and trillions of dollars, we're the most in-debt nation in the history of the world.
Can a nation survive the amount of debt that we've accumulated?
Not without a miracle.
So I've written several books.
One of them is called Chains to Chains.
I go through all the world's history and I track empires.
Debt is always the precursor to an empire collapsing.
The Roman Empire, it expanded, expanded.
But then when Hadrian built its wall, it was this far and no further.
And they had to live within their means and they couldn't.
And they got in debt and then they ended up collapsing.
The Spanish Empire.
It was getting gold from America, but they were spending it as fast as they got it.
And when they lost their Spanish armada in 1588, trying to attack England, then they lost another armada a few years later, and then another one, Spain, went bankrupt, and they couldn't maintain their global empire.
And that's when, you know, England and France and others began to settle colonies in America.
France, under Louis XIV, became the biggest empire in the world.
But then France helped us with our Revolutionary War.
Thank you.
But what did they get in return?
Nothing but debt.
You fight a war, you should get something in return.
They didn't get any trade agreement.
They just got nothing but debt and then a couple years of crops failed and France went bankrupt and they had a French Revolution and it collapsed.
You look at the Ottoman Empire.
And it expanded and it would tax the non-Muslims.
And after centuries, the non-Muslims turned into very small minorities and the tax base was gone and then the Ottoman Empire fell.
And then how did we get rid of the Soviet Union?
The arms race.
Reagan was spending on military.
Russia tried to keep up and they couldn't and they took all their money out of their GDP and put it in the military and they collapsed.
And so we have been doing to ourselves voluntarily Well, we did to the Soviets to collapse them.
We got them to spend, spend, spend, and they went in debt and collapsed, and here we are.
So debt is fat to the body politic.
What's fat?
Well, you eat something you shouldn't, and then it turns into a fat cell, and you've got to carry it around.
It's not a brain cell.
It's not a muscle cell.
It doesn't add anything to you, but you've got to keep it alive.
What's debt?
Well, you spend what you shouldn't have.
And you have interest.
And you've got to keep paying that interest.
It doesn't add anything to it.
So America is like a 400-pound patient on the emergency room table.
And the Democrat comes in and says, I think you can handle another 100 pounds of debt.
We can keep this spending going.
And Trump's like, we need to put in some stints.
We need to do some radical surgery here.
We need to cut back on this.
And so America is at a very vulnerable spot.
Trump is trying to fix it.
You know, I did a book on the history of socialism, and a socialist tactic is you get a country to go into debt.
And then when they're destabilized, they also add in pitting groups against each other, victims and oppressors.
But then they destabilize the country, and then everybody cries out for the government to help.
And the government says, we'll help.
We're just going to take control of your lives.
But you look at the countries that fell behind the Iron Curtain.
They were all destabilized, and debt was a chief factor in that.
So Trump's trying to turn things around.
I think if he, you know, Kennedy talks about that.
He says if we could cut taxes, it will spur economic growth.
And then we'll be able to get our economy growing again.
And so Trump's taking this attitude of let's free up individuals so they can keep their money and then the economy can grow.
I did a book called The Interesting History of Income Tax, and John F. Kennedy talks about FDR's high taxes and how they've been chasing money out of the country and doing this outsourcing.
So February 6, 1961, Kennedy said, I've asked the Secretary of Treasury to report on whether present tax laws may be stimulating in undue amounts the flow of American capital to industrial countries abroad.
Right?
You squeeze a sponge, the water goes out.
Kennedy said April 20th, 1961.
In those countries where income taxes are lower than in the United States, the ability to defer the payment of U.S. tax by retaining income in subsidiary companies provides a tax advantage for companies operating through overseas subsidiaries that is not available to companies operating solely in the United States.
And so he says we need to give tax cuts to businesses.
The caveat is that And he says a tax cut.
This is September 3rd, 1963, JFK.
A tax cut means higher family income, higher business profits, a balanced federal budget.
Every taxpayer in his family will have more money left over after taxes for a new car, a new home, new convenience, education, investment.
Every businessman can keep a higher percentage of his profits in his cash register or put it to work expanding his business.
And as the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenue.
So if you cut taxes, people will have more money and they'll spend it.
And then the factories will have to hire more workers to meet the increased demand, right?
And so the idea is that you can stimulate the economy through cutting taxes.
And again, at the same time, replacing that with tariff income.
Taking a step back with all of this, the direction that President Trump is heading with tariffs and national security, how do you place him in the list of American presidents on the macro of what he's trying to achieve and the realignment, trying to really consolidate our hemisphere?
How would you judge it?
How would you grade it?
How would you compare it?
I would say he's one of the best presidents ever.
I agree.
I really believe that, you know, you see a concentration of power that takes place, and he is trying to cut the size of government.
It's like, who does that?
I've never seen, in studying all the presidents, you know, FDR concentrated power with his New Deal programs during the Depression, and then World War II, and he hired, and then he gets out, Eisenhower, Republican, gets in, Eisenhower hires Clarence Mannion.
The dean of the Notre Dame Law School.
His job is to go through all of the concentrating of power that FDR put in place and basically do doge.
What can we do to trim back all this stuff?
And he comes up with a great list, but all the rhinos had gotten to Eisenhower and said, look, look, wait a second, we're in charge.
It's okay to have big government, because the Republicans are in charge of it.
And so they basically let Clarence Mannion go, and he pioneered the conservative movement that Eddie Rickenbacker became a part of, and then Phyllis Schlafly, and then all the rest of us sort of followed along.
But that was Eisenhower.
he gave a cryptic address at the end of his term and he warns of the military industrial establishment but that was his words for the deep state it's like there's some people here and they got their own agenda and they're wanting to So really quick, I'm sorry to interrupt, Bill.
We're short on time.
Has any president in the last 100 years actually made that a stated goal and been successful to curtail the Leviathan?
A few.
Believe it or not, Andrew Jackson was the only president who paid off the national debt.
And that brings up a whole other thing.
You had the John Maynard Keynes.
He's a friend of FDRs, and it was a debt-stimulated economy.
So here we are, depression, and he comes up with this idea, hey, it's okay for the government to go in debt, to spend money in the private sector to create jobs.
Those jobs will pay taxes, and the taxes will pay off the debt.
Sounds good on a chalkboard, but it never gets implemented because every generation of Congress, right, says, hey, let's go in more debt so I can funnel money to my district to get votes, and then we'll let the next Congress decide how to pay it off.
And so that's how there's even a guy named Buchanan, James Buchanan, and he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1980.
Because he discovered what I just told you.
He's an economist.
It's like, why are these guys getting us in debt, these congressmen?
And he noticed that whenever they're up for re-election, they vote to increase the debt.
And so he says politicians will do anything to get re-elected.
And so and they hate trimming back the spending because they got to go back to their district and say, hey, no more pork projects.
But so what Trump is doing, actually cutting back the fat, trimming it, getting rid of deep state.
He's coming up against not just Democrats, but rhino Republicans and people that have been entrenched in this government spending.
But I think he's.
Going to be successful.
And I'm praying that he's successful.
And I think that's why we have to support him.
It may take, like Thomas Jefferson said, it may be the duty of all of us to have a little sacrifice to pay a little more for these goods so that we can encourage the manufacturing at home, get some of these factories back on American soil.
And it's a doable thing.
And I think the good Lord has given us this opportunity, and we need to support the president in it.
It may take a few months, maybe a year, for it to work through the entire system.
When Milley took over in Argentina, and he was in debt to the globalists, right, Argentina was, and he cancels all that debt, and for a while it was a little bit of an upheaval, but now Argentina's on solid footing.
And countries are like investing in Argentina because they say, hey, wait a second, he's got his act together.
They're on financial solid ground.
Final thought here, Bill, and then we've got to run, is how would you, in a quick 5-10 minute way, let's just keep it to 5 if you can, say that how Christians should think about government.
Where in the Bible does it say that we should have separation of powers, consent to the governed?
Why is it that Western government is grown out of biblical principles?
Make the case.
Yeah, so the default setting for human government is gangs.
And a gang leader with enough weapons we call a king.
And the first recorded instance of this was Nimrod, Tower of Babel.
And Josephus, the Jewish commentator, said, Nimrod wanted to build a tower so high that if God destroyed the world again with a flood, he could survive on top.
And he made everybody in town bake bricks and bring them or he would kill them.
And since the population of the world was centered there in Mesopotamia, and he wanted to control it, in a sense, Nimrod was the first globalist.
And God comes down, confuses the languages, the people scatter into language groups that turn into nations.
Lo and behold, nations was God's invention to postpone a one-world government.
But every generation has some king, pharaohs, caesar, kaiser, sultans are that wants to conquer other nations.
And if left unchecked, they'd have been happy to conquer them all.
And they keep getting bigger and bigger with the latest military advancements.
The kings can kill more people.
So instead of cane-killing Abel with a rock, they can kill with a bronze weapon, an iron weapon, a phalanx spear the Greeks had, a scimitar sword that the Muslims had.
And with the latest technological advancements, the kings can track more people.
Augustus Caesar wanted a worldwide tracking system, 2BC, called the census.
If he could add access to 5G and cell phones and facial recognition software, I bet he'd been tempted to use that.
So these kingdoms keep getting bigger until the king of England had the biggest the sun never set on the British Empire.
He was a globalist.
He was a one-world government guy.
India, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, British, Guyana, Canada, Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, and America.
So America's founders broke away and flipped it and made the people the king.
And so the word citizen, It means co-king.
So kings have subjects who are subjected to their will.
Republics have citizens.
And the citizen is a co-king.
And where did the founders get this idea?
It's a polarity change.
America is an experiment of a polarity change in the flow of powers.
It's had a top-down rule by gang leader kings.
It's bottom-up rule by we, the people.
We got the idea from the New England pastors.
That in Connecticut, in New Hampshire, in Massachusetts, in Rhode Island, where did they get their ideas?
From the Bible.
What part of the Bible?
That first 400 years out of Egypt before they got a king.
So king is the norm.
The Pharaoh was one of the most powerful.
And around 1400 B.C., millions of Israelites come out of Egypt, and for four centuries, no king.
And it worked because every citizen was taught the law and personally accountable to God to follow it.
And it worked for four centuries?
Until the priests went woke and stopped teaching that there was sin.
And Eli, the high priest, his own sons, are sleeping with women in the tent of meeting, and another Levite with a silver-graven image, and another Levite with a concubine, where the law says the Levite's to marry a virgin of his own tribe, and the poor concubine's raped to death by a bunch of sodomites.
Something about that behavior that appears at the last stages of a people around themselves.
And it turns into chaos.
They all go to Samuel, the prophet, and they say, this self-government system's not working anymore.
We want to be like the other countries.
We want a king.
And Samuel cries, and the Lord tells Samuel, they did not reject you, they rejected me.
Now, why is this story important?
Kings of Europe looked to the Bible for their authority, but they looked to the King Saul and on part of the Bible, divine rod of kings, I'm the royal gang leader, and the pilgrims and Puritans that founded New England looked to the pre-King Saul part of the Bible.
Millions of people, everybody taught the law, personally accountable to God to follow it.
So King Saul's the divider between England and America.
And so the idea of people being involved in government goes back to the pre-King Saul part of the Bible.
And so in New England, you literally had churches founding cities.
So the first Baptist church in America founded Providence, Rhode Island.
The first Congregationalist church in America founded Hartford, Connecticut.
Everybody's involved in church.
Everybody's involved in city government because it's the church founding the city.
There's like no non-church members there to be lazy and let them run stuff, right?
And they had one building in town called the Meeting House.
That's where the pastor would teach the Bible, and that's where they'd do their city business.
The word synagogue means meeting house.
That's where the rabbi would teach the law, and that's where they'd do their city business.
And so this was a covenant form of government where you get rights from God, you're fair to your neighbor because you're accountable to God.
You get blessings from God and you voluntarily share them with your neighbor as charity because you're doing it as unto God.
It's not socialism where the government takes away your stuff without your permission and gives it to somebody you'll never meet and they don't care where the money came from.
No, this is your money and you're moved upon by the Holy Spirit to be generous.
And this system worked for a century until it got a little dry.
And the pilgrims and Puritans taught it academically at Yale and Harvard.
And so they got nicknamed Old Lights.
And so David Brainerd was expelled from Yale because he said his professor was as spiritual as a chair.
And so in the 1700s, you have the New Lights.
And these are people that said, look, it's more than a plan.
Even if it's a good plan, you have to have an experience with Jesus.
When you do, your life will change.
You won't do worldly things anymore, like bars and brothels and government.
It's like, wait, what was that last thing?
Yeah, government, it's worldly.
If you're really a Christian, you're not going to be involved in worldly things like government.
It's like, huh, that's sort of different than an entire century where Christians are involved in government because it's Christians founding the city.
They're like, yeah, we're not going to do that anymore.
Or if you're really spiritual, you're going to withdraw.
Well, that brings up an interesting scenario, because if all the spiritual people withdraw from government, who's left to be involved but the less spiritual?
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Don't get involved in government because it's worldly.
Well, why is it worldly?
We're not involved.
All the Christians have left and there's a vacuum, right?
And so, you know, I thought people say, well, I'm spiritual.
I'm not going to get involved in politics.
By the way, politics comes from the word polis, which means city.
And politics is simply the business of the city.
And the policy is what the citizens all agree upon.
And polite is how they're supposed to treat each other.
And police is what happens when they don't treat each other polite, right?
But everybody's involved in the city.
And so in New England, you had churches founding cities, but when this revival happened, they're like, no, if you're really spiritual, don't be involved.
So if people, Christians are not involved, they're letting non-godly people teach kids there's no God and there's no sin, right?
Try this kind of sex.
Try that kind of sex.
If sex outside of marriage is not a sin, arguably there are no sins.
And if there's no sins, you don't need a Savior.
They're undermining the entire gospel.
You have to admit it's a pretty clever trick the devil's pulled.
To get Christians who believe the gospel of Christ, let their children be taught the gospel of Antichrist.
Oh, we're really spiritual.
We don't want to get involved in politics.
We're going to let our kids be taught there's no God, there's no sin, there's no need for a Savior.
