Charlie always insisted on reminding the public that America was a Christian nation, built from nothing on Biblical principles. Christian author Eric Metaxas joins for the first time since September's tragedy to discuss Charlie's crucial insight into America and why it is our collective duty to spread that in his absence. Plus, he reacts to Charlie's favorite Seinfeld clips. John Daniel Davidson gives his take on how the Trump Administration should avoid retreat in Minnesota. 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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All right, welcome.
Hour two of the Charlie Kirk Show is underway.
We are joined by one of my favorite thinkers, writers, journalists.
That is John Daniel Davidson, who's been on the show a number of times.
John Daniel Davidson, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
It's good to see you.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Biden's Border Strategy00:15:49
So you and I were chatting because, you know, we're reacting to what's going on in Minneapolis.
And I think you share my perspective here that this is not the time where the administration can blink.
This is not a time where we can bend the knee or back down.
Please explain why you feel that way and what you're seeing.
One of the main things I think that we're all seeing is this narrative shift.
And we're seeing the Trump administration and the president respond to a narrative frame that's really being set by the Democrats and by the left and by the leaders in Minneapolis.
In some cases, leaders of what looks to be sort of an organized insurrection, anarcho-tyranny.
And instead of imposing the narrative that is the administration's policy that Trump was elected on to enforce our immigration laws, to effectuate mass deportations of the millions of people that were let in during the Biden administration, you now have the president having to respond to these oftentimes disingenuous or distorted questions from the press.
He's accepting the frame that there's been, you know, errors made in the enforcement of immigration law, that somehow these agitators and rioters in Minneapolis are legitimate, that their tactics in disrupting law enforcement are legitimate.
And we're seeing him respond even in terms of personnel and some policy statements as well.
I think it may be too soon to say, you know, that there's actually been a change in what those ICE agents are doing on the ground, but certainly from the perceptive point of the media and of us who are watching it from afar and online, it appears to be that Trump has blinked and that he is retreating, at least rhetorically.
And I find that very disturbing.
He seemed like he might be, but also then he's very animated this morning.
He seems annoyed with Mayor Jacob Fry.
So I don't know.
We've been around the block a few times with Trump.
He's definitely, he's had a lot of showdowns about things.
We've had policies he's pursued, policies he's backed down on, policies he's then reignited after that.
There's always this give and take with President Trump.
We saw that with the Greenland thing where he seems all in on something and then it might have been a negotiation tactic.
So how do you unpack maybe what the president's strategic thinking might be, John?
I don't know.
Honestly, I think Trump is a creature of instinct and of intuition.
I don't think he is a deep policy thinker.
I don't think that he is super disciplined in how he approaches things.
I think part of his genius is that he does operate on instinct and he does operate on intuition.
And he has great intuition and great instincts, even at the level of like genius instincts when it comes to U.S. politics and leadership.
But on something like this, this immigration issue and the issue of deportations, this isn't one issue alongside a bunch of other issues like Greenland or Venezuela or tariffs or something.
This is the issue.
This is the thing that got him elected the first time.
This is the thing that got him re-elected the second time.
This is what the American people voted for.
And what, you know, polls show they still say they favor in overwhelming numbers mass deportations for all illegal immigrants.
That's what he was elected to do.
If he does nothing else, that's what he needs to do.
And I don't think you see that kind of urgency, the administration.
And some of this comes down, I think, to the way administrations work.
And it plays into some of Trump's weaknesses, which can be a lack of discipline, a lack of focus.
One of the reasons, for example, that we saw the raid on Venezuela and the capture of Maduro is not necessarily, I don't think, and this is just a side example of what I'm talking about in terms of the dynamic.
I don't think that the Maduro raid was number one priority on Trump's list, but it was on enough people's agendas inside the administration that the thing got done.
And so that's the kind of push and pull that you're going to see in any administration, but I think especially in this Trump administration when his focus isn't always laser-like and he can get distracted and follow his intuition and his instincts, which is a blessing and a curse.
But on immigration, this is the one thing that he does need laser-like focus on.
He needs everybody in his administration to be on board.
There can't be any room for compromising with a radical insurgent left that is essentially imposing a nullification of federal immigration law in Minnesota.
And I guarantee you, I think we're already starting to see this.
This is going to spread to other cities and other states.
And it may become quite bad as the weather warms up in some parts of the country.
Yeah.
And that's been my basic operating premise here: you've got to squash it now in the winter in Minneapolis because spring and summer, it's going to spread.
We're already seeing it spread, by the way, John.
The signal chats, right, that we've now discovered were an organizing point focus for a lot of these activists have now been, they're being used in Portland.
They're being used in Los Angeles.
So this is going to spread.
Somebody is training people how to do this, how to organize them.
And there's a lot of data behind it.
A lot of it's automated.
A lot of it's being linked directly to Airtable.
So that's a sort of a database app that you can use, pretty user-friendly.
But I do just want to make one point here.
And we had this graphic up just a second ago.
This is Kyle Kalinsky was absolutely freaking out yesterday.
He said, major breaking.
Trump regime is increasing illegal DHS raids.
That's what he calls them against protesters.
That's what he calls them in Minnesota.
Bovino firing was a PR stunt to head fake de-escalation.
So I just, I want us, while I agree with you, John, of all the issues, we need to be laser focused on immigration.
The president needs to be laser focused on it because I think viscerally this is the most winning issue in this administration because people don't like to go to Costco or the DMV or the hospital and feel like they're living in a third world country.
And that's what it's become.
80% of the population growth in the United States over the last decade has come from immigration, not births, 20%, right?
And by the way, historically, even when we had a lot of immigration in the 90s, early 2000s, it was 60% of growth was Native-born American growth.
Now that is 80% immigration.
This has become untenable.
And I want to just also encourage everybody.
There was a big story in the New York Times yesterday that showed we are on pace for this next upcoming year that ends.
I guess it's, you know, they do it on a halfway mark.
So it'll end in July of 2026 for only 321,000 new people in the country.
That's down from 2.5 million in 2024 under Biden.
So like the ship is moving in the right direction.
We got to correct course when we need to.
And the left is freaking out.
So I just want to just keep a center place here.
And sometimes Trump is prone to head fakes.
Sometimes Trump is prone to operating on instinct, but things are moving in the right direction.
But I completely agree with you.
And John, why I wanted to talk to you about this, because I think the message that is sent to these insurgents needs to be firm and there needs to be prosecutions.
There needs to be the DOJ on the ground arresting these people.
Explain that piece of it because you have made a good point on your Twitter feed, on your X feed, that the interior enforcement of immigration is actually what's saving the border.
It's actually what's having all these downstream effects that are positive.
Yeah, that's right.
So I've spent many years reporting from the border, both sides of the border.
I started following this back in 2014 when the unaccompanied minors started showing up during the second Obama term, and nobody understood kind of what, you know, why are these unaccompanied children showing up?
And that was the first indication to me that, like, well, there's something going on at the border we don't understand.
What I came to realize, which a lot of people understand now, is that it was the industrialization of illegal immigration by the cartels that created a huge black market.
And then under Biden, you know, we had 10 million people at least.
Those are just the ones we know about come into the country illegally during Biden's four years in office.
So when I say that where the real effects of deportation come is interior enforcement, what I mean is you can shut the border down at any time.
Like Biden could have shut the flow of illegal immigration off in five minutes, anytime he wanted to.
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So, John, I want to keep talking about why interior enforcement is so important, but you were reacting to a report from Bill Melusian who said the bipartisan co-chairs of the Problem Solvers Caucus, which sounds like goodness, what a cringe name.
The Problem Solver Caucus.
Brian Fitz from Pennsylvania and Rom Tom Souzi from New York, Democrat from New York, have penned a letter to President Trump in which they urge him to take up immigration reform.
And I replied, immigration reform is code for treason, telling him that his success at securing the borders is being overshadowed by the interior enforcement.
And so what do they want?
They want to codify Trump's executive order to have the border secured, fix the broken asylum system, provide legal protection to millions of immigrants, whatever that means, because that means probably amnesty, that means path to citizenship, whatever you want to insert there.
Mandate federal agents only take actions for which they are thoroughly trained and urge local law enforcement to cooperate on public safety threats.
Five, require all federal law enforcement involved in shootings must be subject to a thorough independent investigation.
You reacted to this very strongly and you were making that point.
So please continue.
Yeah, I believe the point that I made was that we're done debating these things.
This is not, you know, this is something out of the past.
This is sort of the gang of eight.
This is amnesty.
We've had these debates.
And what we got for having these debates was at least 10 million illegal immigrants flooding over the border during the Biden administration in the greatest movement of human beings probably in the 21st century anywhere in the world.
A global phenomenon that has completely changed the United States to your point earlier about population growth.
That's where that comes from, is from Biden's border surge.
When I was saying before about controlling the border, the way you control the border, it's easy to do.
The operational capacity is there through CBP and Border Patrol.
They're very sophisticated, very highly trained personnel there.
You control it by letting them do their job and enforce the border, which they can do, detaining everybody who the Border Patrol picks up who's crossed into the country illegally, which the Biden administration did not do.
And then imposing deterrent policies so that the people who are in northern Mexico or in Central America or who are back home in their country of origin, who are thinking about paying $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 to a smuggling organization connected to a cartel will not actually take out the loan and pay that money and head north because they know there's no chance that they'll be allowed to stay.
All it takes.
I don't know if you guys remember the 15,000 Haitians that were under the bridge during the Biden administration in Delhi.
Oh, I remember Texas.
I remember.
Okay, do you know what happened there?
They went in because the Biden administration realized all this press is showing up with drones and all these images of these horrible conditions under this bridge.
And they said, all right, we have to, we got to wrap that up.
We got to get those people out of there.
They went in and they took a couple hundred people out of 15,000 and deported them back to Haiti.
About 8,000 to 9,000 of those people immediately went back across the river to Mexico.
They self-deported because they did not want to be sent back to Haiti.
So in other words, it's deterrent policies that secure the border.
And that can be done at any time.
But what do you do about the 10 million people that already got into the country?
You have to send ICE out into the interior of the United States and find those people and arrest them.
And it's a lot easier to do that.
And you can do it without any protests or any accidental shootings or tragic events if the local police will honor ICE detainer requests as they do through most of the country, everywhere except these sanctuary districts.
And so I think we have to like, we've allowed ourselves, and I think to go back to where we started, the Trump administration has allowed itself to kind of tumble down this leftist rabbit hole of adjudicating these fake things, right?
When what we're actually talking about is enforcing the immigration laws that we have on the books.
The ICE agents are not breaking the law.
They are not warrantless, doing warrantless arrests or kidnapping.
And anyone in the mainstream corporate media who says that should be called out for it.
They're just lying.
They're acting under their lawful authority under Article 2, not Article 3, right?
So they don't have judicial warrants, which is a whole nother thing we can talk about.
But all immigration enforcement is under the executive branch.
Immigration judges are administrative judges.
And the warrants that ICE agents have for illegal aliens are administrative warrants.
That's why they can't go into private homes and they wait sometimes outside places of business or public places to make their arrests.
But we just got to get back to reality on this because we've gone, the administration has allowed the conversation and the narrative to go so far afield.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
No, I completely agree with that.
Go ahead.
Well, it just occurs to me.
So people are freaking a lot of people who should know better are letting themselves have panic attacks because they can't handle an ugly image.
They're easily tricked by, oh, they used a five-year-old this bait.
And I feel like the low-hanging fruit of it disincentivizes coming here.
It encourages people to self-deport and it doesn't create as many bad images is if the administration put more pressure on something we know is illegal, which is businesses knowingly employing illegal immigrants.
And I've often thought like the way you cut the Gordian knot is you make a really public example of one or two business owners who have very egregiously been hiring illegals and use that to put the fear of God in others.
And so they self-deport their illegal employees out of their companies and then those employees self-deport out of the country.
What do you think of that?
Public Examples for Immigration Enforcement00:02:02
Great idea.
I've been talking about that for years.
This is the one thing.
The reason that we got mass illegal immigration is because on the Democrat side, they wanted it to increase their voter rolls, which they have been saying for decades, right?
That's not a conspiracy theory.
And on the right, it was Republicans in sort of the commerce, Chamber of Commerce Republicans who wanted lower wages for their big business constituents.
And so they kind of turned a blind eye and allowed cheap labor to flood into the country at the behest of those special interests.
I think if you knowingly employ illegal immigrants, you shouldn't just get fined or get some slap on the wrist.
You should go to jail.
And I totally agree that you don't have to get every business.
You just have to send a message to encourage the others, so to speak, and actually put real meat on the bone there and say, if you break our immigration laws and knowingly hire illegals, you're going to jail.
You personally, owner of this business, are going to jail.
And we don't talk about that enough.
And that's a huge part of the incentive, the pull factors for illegal immigrants to come here.
They won't come if they know they're going to get deported as soon as they get caught crossing the border.
And they also won't come if they know there's no jobs for them here.
Well, and they also won't come if they know they're not going to immediately be put on the dole, right?
Because that's another pull factor.
They come here, they were getting free debit cards filled with free cash, free flights into the interior, family reunification.
And by the way, they expedited everything on the CBP1 app.
So to your point earlier, they didn't like the bad PR.
So they're like, listen, you don't have to come flood the border.
That's bad optics.
You know, you got Bill Delusion down there with drones.
No, just get on the app.
We'll get you a flight from Mexico City.
You come up, go wherever you want, and then just get immediately on the dole.
That's what they're doing.
It's treason.
It was absolutely treason.
And by the way, everybody who wants scalps from the previous administration, if you're not bringing up Alejandro Majorkis, you're missing the point.
Simpsons and Seasons00:02:43
Oh, yeah.
So, John, John.
Yeah, that guy's a trader.
Yeah, we completely.
We're out of time here.
Thank you so much.
Very, very, the moral clarity is important.
Thank you.
Thanks, guys.
Thanks for having me.
I am very excited about our next guest who's been a longtime friend of mine personally.
And of course, to Charlie, and that is Eric Metaxas, great American, great patriot, great Christian man.
Eric, welcome back to the show, my friend.
I never left, Andrew.
Where have you been?
It's so good to see you.
I just get blessed in my bones.
Thanks for having me.
God bless you.
You know, I'm just sad that you didn't wear a pink shirt or something that I could have.
Just to throw back to Charlie, some golden boy quote.
We got to get Seinfeld.
Load up a good Seinfeld clip.
We have to do it in Charlie's honor.
I kid you not, Eric.
I have been the, so I fall asleep to Seinfeld every night in honor of Charlie.
I'm working my way through the entire 10 seasons.
Okay, now I'm going to have to interrupt you.
I got to tell you what Charlie and I had like an ongoing disagreement, and he eventually agreed with me.
Oh.
And here's what it is.
Seinfeld, the last few seasons basically stink.
Now, when I say basically, there's still great moments and stuff, but it's like they handed over to a bunch of younger writers who turned it into the cartoon version of Seinfeld.
So when you watch like the first six, seven seasons, it's a certain show.
And then it gets, you know, like when they do stuff like Kramer has the Merv Griffin set.
Yeah, that's funny.
It's like it's funny, but it's like cartoon funny.
I know you weren't expecting to have this discussion with Christian.
No, Charlie, listen, I don't disagree.
I'm slightly younger than you guys, so we talk about this with The Simpsons.
But the problem is, at least with Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld had the wisdom to refuse 4 million an episode or whatever they offered him to keep going.
And yeah, and they just ended it.
Whereas The Simpsons has been going for three times.
It's been a bad show for three times longer than it was ever a good show.
And it's still going.
Well, it's still going.
You are host of Socrates in the City, author of Bonhoeffer, Is Atheism Dead and Letter to the American Church.
So I wanted to start this, Eric, because you are a man of God.
And one of the core ethos, central themes of this show, and it will forever be this way, because this is a show that is dedicated to the legacy of Charlie Kirk and continuing the mission of Charlie Kirk, is to honor faith, is to lift up Jesus Christ and to do it boldly, proudly, loudly, and without apology.
And so I want to play a clip.
It's longer.
This is the Charlie Kirk show.
He deserves the time.
Christian Form of Government00:10:24
Of Charlie explaining why America's Christian roots must be, are Christian and why we need to keep it that way.
And then I just, we'll let the conversation go wherever it is.
So please enjoy this longer clip, 345.
Remember that we were a collection of states and colonies, and you need to read the state constitutions before anything else.
13 out of 13 required a declaration of faith.
9 out of 13 required you to be a Protestant, except Maryland, which was Catholic, which still required a declaration of faith.
Every single one of the original state constitutions, Pennsylvania included, they had, I profess Lord and Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in the original state constitutions.
Secondly, 55 out of 56 of the original signers of the Declaration were Bible-believing church attending Christians.
You asked about common law.
So common law is inherited from Blackstone, who was Christian.
Common law is an outgrowth of the scriptures.
So let's go to three principles of common law, due process and jury of your peers, wrapped into the ultimate biblical principle that you shall not favor justice if you are rich or poor, which is in Leviticus 19, right before the most famous part of Leviticus 19, which is that you should love your neighbor as yourself.
But before that is that in the administration of justice, you shall not favor the rich or the poor, which is the idea of blind justice.
We get that in the West, which is incorporated also in the New Testament ideal, neither slave nor Greek nor Jew, you're all one in Jesus Christ, which is we have the idea of human equality.
These are all biblical ideas.
They're not enlightenment ideas, which is they kind of get conflated at the time.
But more importantly than that, they say that God was only mentioned four times in the Declaration of Independence.
Well, that's a big deal.
Okay.
Laws of nature and nature's God.
The last paragraph of the Declaration reads as a prayer.
It says we appeal to the supreme judge of the universe.
Who's the judge of the universe?
Jesus Christ, as it says in Revelation, that Jesus will judge the earth on his throne.
So, in the declaration, they were praying to Christ our Lord as a prayer very specifically.
Thirdly, as I said on stage yesterday, Deuteronomy was by far the most quoted book, religious or non-religious, in the time of the founding when they were putting together the Constitution, more than John Locke, more than Montesquieu, more than Blackstone.
So, the book of Deuteronomy, which talked about laws, customs, traditions, it was Moses' farewell address as he's about to say goodbye, say, hey, good luck in Canaan, guys.
Here's how you should set up your form of government.
But finally, and most importantly, let's look at actually what the founders said.
John Adams seamlessly said the Constitution was only written for a moral and religious people.
It was wholly inadequate to the people of any other.
The body politic of America was so Christian and was so Protestant that our form and structure of government was built for the people that believed in Christ our Lord.
One of the reasons we're living through a constitutional crisis is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government and they're incompatible.
So you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population.
Your reaction.
Listen, I could laugh.
I could fall down laughing with joy because the fact that Charlie, only Charlie, could rattle things off like boom boom like enough.
Like it's unbelievable.
It's so beautiful and it's so true.
I tell you, Andrew, you and I haven't talked much because I've been deep in the bowels of working on a book on the American Revolution.
I have never in my life understood what Charlie just was talking about in the way that I do now.
The book will come out in June.
It is outrageously inescapable, inescapable, utterly inescapable that this nation is a Christian nation.
Now, you have to define what that means.
It doesn't mean that the government tells people you have to go to church or the government, the government has to be agnostic.
The government has to sit back and we have freedom in America.
But the founders, as Charlie was just saying, there's no doubt.
And when you know the details, you'll be embarrassed that you didn't see this before.
You didn't learn this in school.
There is no doubt.
There is no America.
There is no America, period, without Christian faith.
All of the founders, and I'm really focused on the founders before the founders, right?
I'm talking about Samuel Adams, John Adams in the 1760s.
This is what I talk about in my book before I get to the actual war or the revolution, but they were radical Reformation Puritans.
These were people who were just, they saw the whole world through a biblical lens, and they knew that God's model is for us to do what the ancient Israelites did in Sinai, have a direct covenant with God.
No king but Jesus, no king but the Lord.
They all understood this.
They all understood this.
And when they created our government, that's what they were doing.
And it's just so amazing to me how we have lived at a time where this is news to most people.
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But as I've been writing this book, I have been so astonished.
I cannot tell you.
The name of the book is Revolution.
And as I say, you can't even pre-order it yet.
But the reason it's called Revolution is because every other revolution is not a revolution.
It's a fake revolution.
Fake and gay.
The French Revolution is a demonic parody of a revolution.
It's like it becomes a bloodbath because they take God out.
The Bolshevik Revolution, all these things we call revolution.
They're not actual revolutions.
The one true revolution in the history of the world in terms of government is America.
And it's so beautiful.
And so I think I have to say that what's become clear to me is like a lot of people say, well, I'm conservative or I love America or whatever.
It's like, if you really understand that, you understand apart from God, that makes no sense.
You should be a liberal.
You should be aware.
In other words, to love America, to understand what America is, it points you back.
Every single one of the folks who gave us this country understood it is about Jesus.
It's about bringing biblical, you know, they basically said, well, if we wanted to form a government on biblical principles, what would that look like?
It would look like America.
That's what it is.
And that's what, and many of them said it explicitly.
Samuel Adams, I think, said it explicitly.
They looked at, you know, the authoritarian monarchies in the same way that they looked at the Roman Catholic Church at the time.
It's like top down.
It's going to tell you what to do.
You don't, you know, and the Reformation changed everything.
So suddenly every single person has the ability to have a direct relationship with God.
And they said that, you know, that's the way it should be.
Could we form a government that looks like that?
Would it be possible?
And as you just said, quoting John Adams, it's like, it is not possible unless the people get that.
It is not.
If the people aren't tuned into this, it's not going to work, which is why I hope in this 250th year of celebration, which we have called the supercentennial, in case anybody didn't get the memo, this is the supercentennial.
President Trump agrees with that term that in this supercentennial year, we need to go back.
We need to understand that without that, America goes away.
So, you know, nobody got this better than our friend Charlie.
And just listening to that clip, I just get, I get joy from that, that he said all that.
Yeah, no, I look forward to us discussing that book when it comes out.
And one of Charlie's big causes was he just, he really flogged at that point.
America is obviously a Christian country.
And it obviously is, you almost have to feel like a moron.
Like you said, once you notice it, it's like, okay, so we were settled by a bunch of Protestant religious zealots of various stripes.
Zealots.
Yeah.
They weren't just technically.
Coming from a nation of huge religious ferment.
Like, I think, what is it?
Half the Protestant denominations in the world probably come out of England in this time period.
They're constantly coming to Luther Versions.
They're the ones who translate the Bible into every language, send missionaries everywhere.
They're constantly trying to convert the Indians in America.
They're coming out of a very religiously infused revolution in the English Civil Wars.
That's basically a religious infused revolt.
They have the Glorious Revolution, which I'm a Catholic.
I don't even like that, but that's totally a religious infused revolt.
And that's where we get our entire concept of the Bill of Rights, the original Bill of Rights, is basically born out of the Glorious Revolution and its aftermath.
That's what's going on.
But immediately after the revolution, America is this Christian country.
And that's what drives abolitionism.
That's what infuses both sides of the Civil War.
And then they want to tell you, oh, and then during the period where the country was founded, oh, that was just a bunch of deists.
No one really cared.
Give me a break.
Oh, that's a that is something.
It's funny you say that because I, you know, when the book comes out, there's like nine things that I'm just champing at the bit to talk about.
The whole deist thing, complete baloney.
I never dreamt that I would discover that it's total baloney.
I mean, almost nobody is a deist.
Even the deists are not deists.
I mean, you read what Franklin says, you read what Jefferson says.
And these are the only two people that everybody points to, you know, like their deists.
They say radically Christian things.
Ben Franklin and Jefferson, when they were going to design the Great Seal, you know, we were going to design a great seal for the new nation.
They both suggested Moses parting the Red Sea and the Israelites in the wilderness.
And what, like, there's like that, that's it.
They Say Radically Christian Things00:07:03
That's it.
Those are the two quote-unquote deists.
And they say so many things that deists don't talk like that.
Certainly Washington is not a deist.
It's like hilarious.
Well, and you're, you're, you're making a point that they were so steeped in the language of the Bible and the language of scripture.
It, it, it animated their turns of phrases, the way that they formed their thoughts.
It was so innate to them that they couldn't help themselves.
All right.
So, Eric, in honor of Charlie, I have to play, I have to play a Seinfeld club.
Here we go.
How about this?
This is the pitch for their show: 410.
You want to go with me to NBC?
Yeah, I think we really got something in.
What do we got?
An idea.
One idea.
An idea for the show.
I still don't know what the idea is.
It's about nothing.
Right.
Everybody's doing something.
We'll do nothing.
So we go into NBC.
We tell them we got an idea for a show about nothing.
Exactly.
They say, what's your show about?
I say nothing.
There you go.
I think you may have something here.
I got one more.
I just have to play it, Eric.
Tuesday has no.
Don't say it.
4-11.
What's today?
It's Thursday.
Really?
Feels like Tuesday.
Tuesday has no feel.
Monday has a feel.
Friday has a feel.
Sunday has a feel.
I feel Tuesday and Wednesday.
All right, shut up to both of you.
You're making me nervous.
He's right.
Tuesday doesn't have a feel.
Tuesday has no feel.
I was around for a Tuesday yesterday.
I didn't feel anything.
I don't know if I told you, Andrew.
I don't even know if I told Charlie.
I was friends with Larry David before Seinfeld.
He was nowhere in his career.
And everybody said, like, oh, this is a comedian's comedian.
And I went to watch him at a club here in the city in New York.
And we were friends.
And I went to a dinner party at his apartment and the real Kramer popped in.
Like, I was, it's so bizarre.
And I knew him through the woman that Elaine Bennis is based on.
So all those stories about Fat Camp and all that kind of stuff.
It's so crazy.
And then when I became born again and became politically conservative, he couldn't really handle it.
And so our friendship evaporated.
But it's such a bizarre thing to think that, you know, I knew him before Seinfeld was a thing.
It's just crazy to me.
I can't be that old, obviously.
Yeah.
I mean, you know what's interesting?
I think, you know, Larry David's off obviously a crazy person, very lib.
He's given the world a great show, but so did Jerry.
And Jerry Seinfeld is not crazy woke.
So we can take solace in that.
And actually, if you watch Seinfeld back, this is the 90s.
I mean, it started basically, I think season one was 1989 and it ended, you know, around 2000, 1999, something like that.
And it is not woke.
The show is very nut woke, and it sort of predicts so much of the weirdness that we're experiencing in our modern culture.
It predicts it, right?
Like, you got to wear a ribbon.
I think we play that's you know, it's a very good idea.
I don't know before the black square.
The takeaway is not that it predicts it, it's it's kind of a solace to it that it's actually always been there and it comes and goes.
Well, and I think it's accentuated by social media, yeah, certainly.
That's why I'm talking about it.
It's already making fun of it, it's already making fun of it.
I actually remember when I graduated from Yale in the 80s, you had to wear a ribbon at graduation that showed that you stood against apartheid in South Africa.
And there was another ribbon for, I forget what, and you had to wear the ribbons.
And, like the jerk that I was, I wore the ribbons.
It's like, oh, you got, you got to wear the ribbons.
This kind of virtue signaling has been going on for a long, long time.
And of course, Seinfeld was mocking it.
You know, there's so many episodes where they mock it, where they say the stuff that everybody's thinking.
So that's called comedy.
And what comedy is, is truth-telling.
I mean, the reason we find it funny is because like, yep, exactly.
So, yeah, I'd love to.
That's somebody I'd love to interview someday is Jerry Seinfeld.
I think I could have a fun conversation with him.
Well, we have his Duke commencement speech.
Our team, our crack team in the studio, is like pulling Seinfeld stuff a lot.
So here we go.
I'm just going to play one.
Let's go ahead and play 415.
Privilege is a word that has taken quite a beating lately.
Privilege today seems to be the worst thing you can have.
I would like to take a moment to defend it.
Again, a lot of you are thinking, I can't believe they invited this guy.
Too late.
I say, use your privilege.
I grew up a Jewish boy from New York.
That is a privilege if you want to be a comedian.
My point is, we're embarrassed about things we should be proud of and proud of things we should be embarrassed about.
Pretty smart.
Well, the joy is that he clearly, it's like Ricky Gervais, he doesn't care.
He's like, come at me.
Like, come at me.
I got tenure.
I got comedy entertainment tenure.
I'm Jerry Seinfeld.
I can say this stuff and I can shove it in your face.
And what are you going to do about it?
What are you going to do?
Well, yeah.
The team is telling me that these are all clips Charlie loved.
So we're going to just, this is all just an Ode to Charlie segment with you, Eric, because that's the right thing to do with you.
Let's go ahead and play the next one, 416.
You went to Duke.
That is an unbelievable privilege.
I now have an honorary doctorate of humane letters degree from Duke University.
And if I can figure out a way to use that, I will.
I haven't figured anything out yet.
I think it's pretty much as useful in real life as this outfit I'm wearing.
Unbelievable.
Eric, I got an honorary doctorate from Liberty and from Hillsdale.
Listen, Hillsdale's a partner on the show.
We've got some news that's coming up very soon.
We love Hillsdale.
We love Dr. Larian.
He was just in our studio.
And it was Charlie's favorite university, the Beacon of the North, America's greatest college.
So go to charlieforhillsdale.com.
I got an honorary degree from Hillsdale and an honorary degree from Liberty.
Are you ready for this, Andrew?
On the same weekend.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I left my house.
I got two honorary degrees from the greatest from Hillsdale and from Liberty, and I came home and I had them both.
It's like that was a pretty good weekend.
It's been tough every day.
Eric Metaxas, you are a national treasure.
I've missed you, my friend.
Let's have you on again soon.
There's so much to talk about, and the country needs Jesus, and we need comedy.