Ask Charlie Anything 24: How and Why You Can Fight Back, Presidential Hunger Games? Should Trump Get a Dog? Presidential Trivia, the Declaration of Independence Analysis and Mores
00:00:55.000It'll become around July 15th for those of you that have chipped in to become a monthly donor.
00:00:59.000If you guys want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com, tpusa.com.
00:01:04.000Email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:01:09.000And if you guys want to win a signed copy of the MAGA doctrine, subscribe, five-star review, screenshot it, email us at freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:02:03.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:03:48.000Some people should be very calculating as to how they get involved in this struggle, really, of good versus evil in our country, and this struggle of reason versus indecency and reason versus the left.
00:04:05.000The more I read about how the most destructive and disastrous societies came to power in the 20th century, which I'll talk about in my next question.
00:04:18.000The more I'm convinced that good people don't have a choice whether or not to fight.
00:04:24.000Now, everyone can fight in different ways.
00:04:26.000Some people can do it extremely publicly.
00:04:32.000However, I am more convinced than ever before that if you're listening to this podcast and you are battling leftist totalitarianism in corporate life, in family life, in church life, you have a moral obligation to do something.
00:04:52.000Here's my rule: every person should confront creeping tyranny no matter where it occurs.
00:05:01.000So, a lot of people have also emailed me.
00:05:04.000They say, Charlie, how do I know whether or not I'm in an unhealthy business relationship or religious environment?
00:05:12.000How do I know if I'm around this kind of creeping tyranny?
00:05:17.000Here's a very good question: Is your job or profession causing you to be weaker?
00:05:24.000Does it force you to go on your knees for something that you don't believe in?
00:05:29.000Does it force you to apologize for something you didn't do?
00:05:34.000Are you in a pathological work environment where something is so broken and so backwards that you are always walking around in fear to be who you really are?
00:05:46.000People say, well, Charlie, what can I do to fight to save the country?
00:05:50.000Spot and identify every example of tyranny and totalitarian behavior in your life and confront every single aspect of it.
00:06:03.000Now, you might say, well, Charlie, what do you mean tyranny?
00:06:30.000Using your position as head of cultural diversity at a university and forcing people that are of white skin color to atone for something they did not do wrong.
00:06:42.000Being a pastor and shepherding your flock or directing your congregation to support causes and movements that are against the Christian faith.
00:06:54.000A general rule is that problems that are not confronted multiply.
00:07:00.000If you think you can allow your boss or your best friend or the head of your fraternity or the head of your sorority or your professor or God forbid, even your parents to indulge and advance creeping leftist totalitarianism and somehow you don't have anything to say about it and you're just okay with it,
00:07:26.000then in most circumstances, you are equally complicit to what they're trying to do.
00:07:34.000Now, mind you, most of the people that are engaging in this form of totalitarianism, and you all know exactly what I'm talking about here.
00:07:42.000And for some of the older listeners, you might say, oh, I'm not really into this.
00:07:49.000Do you have someone in your social circle that is preying on the innocent because they don't agree with them?
00:07:56.000Do you have someone in your neighborhood, maybe it might be in a Bible study, that is forcing other people to think the way they do and wear the BLM ink shirts, BLM Inc.
00:08:10.000If you don't know what that means, then I encourage you to go back in the Charlie Kirk Show archives.
00:08:16.000Hit subscribe and check out that episode.
00:08:20.000If you do not fix your sphere around you, you are tolerating tyranny.
00:08:28.000Now, mind you, a lot of people say, well, Charlie, I don't really know what to do.
00:09:03.000And maybe the leftist totalitarians, maybe they chose this moment of corporate tyranny over employees intentionally because of how much economic despair and uncertainty there is.
00:09:16.000Maybe they knew people would not be pushing back in their work environments because they knew people needed their job now than almost ever before.
00:09:23.000Because of the mounting personal debt, wages that are not going up, because of the economic uncertainty that we're living through.
00:09:33.000Maybe the leftist totalitarians and the tyrants within the cultural Marxists, maybe they recognize that this moment was the moment to punish people because they won't fight back because they have too much to lose.
00:09:49.000Standing for truth and fighting for that truth is not a futile cause.
00:09:55.000If you're able to get your words right and you're just able to engage in the fight a little bit, it's not futile.
00:10:04.000Is there not a price to the tyranny that you must continue to endure?
00:10:09.000Is it worth you having to go to a Wendy's or a Burger King where you might work and have all of your coworkers make you take a knee for BLM Inc.?
00:10:19.000You wouldn't believe the emails we get at freedom at charliekirk.com of young people that are being attacked and ridiculed.
00:10:26.000And the messages that I get of people that say they're sick to their stomach, they're borderline depressed.
00:10:31.000And if it wasn't for this podcast, they wouldn't really have the words or the tools or the perspective to be able to fight back.
00:10:42.000And here's the other interesting part: that if you are able to stand up against that sort of tyrannical behavior, you'll actually become tougher because of it.
00:10:57.000Instead of trying to avoid the problem, confronting the problem head on, you'll actually get metaphorically stronger shoulders.
00:11:06.000You'll be able to hold a bigger burden.
00:11:10.000You'll be able to endure more in the future.
00:11:16.000And if you're afraid of the cost of what would happen if you stand for what is right and good in the world, you've already lost.
00:11:24.000If you fear the downside, then the advancement of truth, then it's at that point the bad guys have already won.
00:11:31.000And I recognize it's very hard for the single mothers that are listening to this podcast right and they say, Charlie, what do you want me to do?
00:11:38.000Take my kids out of daycare and because they're being taught this nonsense, I need this, I need that, I get it.
00:11:45.000But how will you ever get good at defending your values if you don't start right now?
00:11:53.000What is the level or the line of tyranny that you're willing to endure?
00:11:59.000And I encourage a lot of you here, I get some messages.
00:12:42.000First of all, that might have a bigger impact than you would realize with the people around you.
00:12:48.000You vote with your feet, you vote with your money, you vote with your values.
00:12:53.000And exiting from tyranny is actually biblical.
00:12:57.000It's a story that is built within the archetypes of Western society.
00:13:02.000We all know the story of Exodus in Egypt, of Moses, where God delivered God's chosen people from the tyranny of the Pharaoh.
00:13:12.000We also know the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which I think is widely misinterpreted as something that it's not, where it focuses on, let's just say, some forms of moral indecency, which is, of course, part of the story.
00:13:28.000But I think the bigger part of the story is if you're going to leave, don't look back.
00:13:34.000If you know the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
00:13:37.000Lot's wife, of course, turned back and turned into a pillar of salt.
00:13:44.000Be bold enough to be able to leave the church or leave your profession or even leave your university.
00:13:51.000Now, I'm not saying leave without standing for truth first.
00:13:57.000But if you think there's no way I can leave this, there's no way, then you are going to have to be subjected to that tyranny, to that totalitarianism on a daily basis.
00:14:11.000Always confront tyranny wherever it rears its sinister and malevolent head.
00:14:20.000When sensible people say nothing, when horrendous things are happening, totalitarianism is the result.
00:14:33.000Now remember, these are weak and corrupt people that are doing this.
00:14:40.000Immanuel Kant came up with the idea of the categorical imperative.
00:14:48.000He was trying to come up with a moral and ethical system to replace religion.
00:14:56.000He was actually fascinated by religion and Kant's ethics.
00:15:00.000So Immanuel Kant wrote many books, but the one that's probably the most famous is The Critique of Pure Reason.
00:15:07.000And through his writings, he also wrote Universal Natural History, The Metaphysics of Morals, The Critique of Judgment, Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason, all these written between 1755 and 1793.
00:15:23.000I mean, the guy was totally brilliant and one of the hardest reads you could possibly go through.
00:15:28.000He had a huge influence on ethics and political theory and postmodern aesthetics, you name it.
00:15:35.000And so Immanuel Kant, I mean, boy, I could spend five hours on this, and I'm still even wrestling with some of the stuff that he talked about, which was around Enlightenment philosophy and foundationalism.
00:15:48.000And anyway, the thing that he's most known for that I can apply to this is as he was trying to replace religion, and I don't think he succeeded, but I think he did contribute to the liberation of the Western mind, which I, of course, do support, was this idea of the categorical imperative.
00:16:13.000Now, this is a multi-hour explanation done in probably 30 seconds, but the categorical imperative is easiest boiled down to Spock and Star Trek, where Kant's categorical imperative was played out in Spock where I can't dare do a bad thing because if I do that bad thing, what if the rest of the world also did that bad thing and therefore I can't tolerate or see myself also doing that bad thing?
00:16:55.000But let's play out Kant's categorical imperative where you wouldn't want to see anyone not do where you wouldn't want to see anyone do what you yourself would not do yourself in the sphere of influence.
00:17:09.000For example, it's very easy to play Monday morning quarterback with some of the great tragedies of the last couple hundred years.
00:17:15.000Oh, I wouldn't have been involved in Stalin's Soviet Russia.
00:17:20.000I wouldn't have been involved in Mao's China.
00:17:24.000First of all, if you say that so confidently, you don't know the darkness that every single human being possesses.
00:17:32.000And we'll get into that later in this program.
00:17:35.000Secondly, you understand how that kind of totalitarianism and tyranny begins.
00:17:40.000It's by people not standing for truth in the micro sense.
00:17:45.000Is people not calling out the corporate tyranny that we're seeing at Starbucks, calling out the corporate tyranny that we're seeing from Airbnb in the personal sense, not the macro sense.
00:18:00.000You see, you understand when Stalin overtook Russia and when Mao overtook China through the Cultural Revolution, it was not an insignificant takeover.
00:18:13.000It wasn't just a political system takeover.
00:18:16.000Every single level of every single form of society had the ethos that they were trying to put forward governmentally.
00:18:26.000Every single facet, corner, and square inch of those societies were tyrannical.
00:18:34.000Two out of five Soviet families were informants for the Soviet government.
00:18:46.000It was in every single organism throughout the Soviet Union, which is why it was so incredible that it was able to crumble and fall without a shot being fired.
00:18:59.000And this kind of goes to the second question.
00:19:01.000I was going to kind of ask a question, but I might as well tie this all together.
00:19:07.000The second question was: Charlie, what can we learn from the 20th century?
00:20:17.000I'm not going to be forced to say something that I don't believe in.
00:20:23.000I'm not going to be forced to protest or help destroy a religious institution.
00:20:28.000That, of course, we saw throughout the 1930s and 1940s in Germany and in the Soviet Union and all throughout Mao's China, especially in the Cultural Revolution in the 60s and 70s.
00:20:41.000So if you kind of connect the two in the tragedy of the 20th century, over 120 million people slaughtered and murdered that we know of.
00:20:48.000And you can look at different numbers.
00:20:54.000But if you count the famine, the starvation, the breadlines, the intentional murdering, the gulags, I think it's easily 120, 130, 150 million.
00:21:04.000As Joseph Stalin used to say, though, that one death is a tragedy, a million is just a statistic.
00:21:09.000Boy, you got to be a sick and twisted human being to believe something like that.
00:21:14.000But was it tyrannical, top-down government edicts that hypnotized the people?
00:21:20.000Or was it small forms of micro-tyranny that bubbled up from the bottom that allowed these tyrants to take hold?
00:21:29.000I think it's a little bit mixture of both.
00:21:31.000I think you obviously have very persuasive leaders.
00:21:35.000But I think to just say that it was only because of how stupid the people were that they followed, I think that's completely incorrect.
00:21:44.000I think we are seeing now, and I'm not trying to equate the horrors of the 20th century than what we're seeing now, but I am saying that if we do nothing, who's to say we won't repeat it?
00:21:55.000And this sort of instantaneous dismissiveness that is around especially suburban America, I find to be unbelievably repulsive.
00:22:04.000Oh, that's never going to be us, Charlie.
00:22:25.000But this revisionist history, that somehow we as human beings are so much better than they were in the 1940s, that we are not taking the same sort of sequential steps that were taking just 80 or 90 years ago that resulted in the most horrific mass casualty toll in human history is stunningly idiotic to me.
00:23:05.000The use of power to harm and exploit the innocent.
00:23:09.000Where do you see in your life someone that is probably actually very weak and corrupt inside using a piece of power that they may have earned or given to them or they forced their way into to exploit people that did nothing wrong or just based on their immutable characteristics?
00:23:27.000If you somehow think that the fight against authoritarianism and tyranny is a light switch that you can turn on and turn off and that, oh yeah, I'll let the local pastor kind of do his thing.
00:23:40.000But don't worry, when the mayor starts to tell me to do something, I'll fight back.
00:23:48.000How many Christians and conservatives sat idly by when we couldn't go to Easter Sunday because unconstitutional edicts given to us by mayors, local city council, state reps, and governors?
00:24:01.000We were happy to abdicate our religious liberty and freedom.
00:24:06.000The trend that I'm seeing right now is that we have grown so cushioned by our Western lifestyle that we value the comfort that we currently have right now over the potential fear of widespread leftist tyranny.
00:24:26.000But if you're afraid to leave the college that you're in or get a bad grade from your professor or get kicked out of your job or have your kids no longer go to the socially acceptable middle school in the North Shore of Chicago or in the Beverly Hills or in Highland Park, Texas, you guys know the type of neighborhoods I'm talking about, then the tyrants have won.
00:24:48.000And understand that if you study 20th century history, as I kind of connected these two questions together, you know that the most disastrous, dangerous movements don't actually start because of a charismatic, anti-social maniac like Fidel Castro or Benito Mussolini.
00:25:11.000They take advantage of a society that was afraid of the micro-tyrants on every single corner.
00:25:17.000They take advantage of a society that had millions and millions of instances of people being oppressed, and they became the ultimate oppressor over that entire society.
00:25:29.000See, a society that has courageous people standing up against that sort of exploitation at every corner makes it nearly impossible for politicians to do the same.
00:25:39.000The reason why BLM Inc. has been able to be so successful in the last couple weeks is we've allowed this kind of creeping autocracy or reign of terror.
00:25:50.000Quite honestly, it's a form of fascism or despotism or absolutism at the grocery store, at the soccer match, at the National Basketball Association, at the National Football League, in the Boy Scouts of America, in our local churches, in our food banks.
00:26:11.000And the more you tolerate it or the more you reward it with your dollars, or the more you just say, I can keep my head down, it doesn't impact me.
00:26:21.000I'm not saying pick every single fight because that would be foolish and you wouldn't win it.
00:26:26.000But pick the one of something you know, a person that you know, a sphere of influence that you have.
00:26:33.000You might sit on the board of a school.
00:27:13.000We've been through this on our program many times.
00:27:16.000Happy to do it more, but I think we've done it better than almost any other podcast out there, to be perfectly honest, and we've been rewarded by the amount of downloads and subscribers.
00:27:27.000And if the restaurateur says, you don't know what you're talking about, if he dares says you're a racist, then you look that person in the eyes and you say, I will never eat here again.
00:27:40.000I will not reward my dollars when you advance something that is sinister behind a movement that is around destroying the nuclear family, abolishing police, and abolishing prisons, we're done.
00:27:53.000And you walk out and you never look back.
00:28:05.000If just one person listening to this podcast did this today or tomorrow, the world would be a better place.
00:28:14.000If every person listening to this podcast, which is a significant amount of people, thank you guys for awarding our podcast and for subscribing.
00:28:41.000If half a million people did this, the country would be saved.
00:28:45.000Because the shock waves in a community, because what happens is as soon as you stand up to that bully, as soon as you stand up to that virtue-signaling social media sanctimonious activist, as soon as you do, it shocks them to the core.
00:29:04.000They'll tell, oh, you won't believe what happened.
00:29:06.000Sally Sue told me that she won't shop here if I won't take it down because she said this.
00:29:10.000And other people will start to think, well, I know Sally Sue.0.96
00:29:15.000And of course, a couple of people will say, yeah, screw that person.1.00
00:29:19.000But this is how movements are started through singular people that act courageously in a singular moment, not thinking that it's going to necessarily change the entire planet, but you know that is the correct thing to do.
00:29:32.000And you know that it is the moral and righteous thing to do.
00:30:02.000Because I get the messages from all of you and I appreciate you.
00:30:05.000Our civilization will fall if we think that the fight for individual freedom and liberty in our country is a spectator sport.
00:30:12.000You send in your money and you don't do what is right or what is needed.
00:30:17.000The good news is that this whole thing could get turned around in an afternoon.
00:30:22.000I encourage you guys to share this question and the way I've answered it with some of your friends because I think that it's lost on a lot of people that this is involved in every single decision that you make.
00:30:33.000The restaurants that you go to, the dry cleaners you tend to, the neighbors you interact with, the way you educate your kids, where you go to church.
00:30:43.000There is no place where the left has not touched in society.
00:30:47.000And there's no place that you should not courageously stand for truth and be prepared to leave that environment if it so warrants that decision.
00:31:22.000Clarence wins a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine.
00:31:24.000A little bit more lighthearted question.
00:31:26.000If all 45 U.S. presidents were made to compete in the Hunger Games-style competition, who do you think would emerge victorious?
00:31:33.000Well, okay, this is a more light-hearted question.
00:31:35.000Obviously, it's not even close, by the way.
00:31:37.000It'd be Teddy Roosevelt versus Andrew Jackson, and I don't know who would win that.
00:31:40.000Andrew Jackson, of course, was a war hero from the Battle of New Orleans.
00:31:43.000Teddy Roosevelt, a lifelong outdoorsman, who, interestingly enough, Teddy Roosevelt won a Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Russia-Japanese war.
00:31:52.000I was just in Mount Rushmore and learned quite a lot about Teddy Roosevelt.
00:31:56.000And he was a different type of president, technically a Republican president.
00:31:59.000In some ways, he was very progressive.
00:32:00.000In some ways, he was very nationalistic.
00:32:02.000In other ways, he was very conservative.
00:32:14.000John Fitzgerald Kennedy was 41 years old when he was elected.
00:32:19.000I think the guy that has the least chance of doing well is probably John Quincy Adams, not exactly the biggest person ever to serve in the White House.
00:32:29.000Or I think George Washington would do pretty well.
00:32:32.000Gerald Ford was a football player for the University of Michigan, if you want a nice fun fact.
00:32:40.000Who is the only president ever to be elected to either vice president or president of the United States?
00:32:45.000Gerald Ford played football at the University of Michigan.
00:32:48.000And who is Gerald Ford's chief of staff?
00:32:51.000Dick Cheney, youngest chief of staff in U.S. history, before he went out to Wyoming to go run for Congress and eventually, of course, got selected as Vice President of the United States for George W. Bush.
00:33:07.000Franklin Delano Roosevelt probably wouldn't do too well.
00:33:11.000He had a health condition if it was hunger games.
00:33:13.000Again, this is obviously a light-hearted hypothetical for the Huffington Post that is listening to this, trying to see if I'm trying to talk about something that is less than politically correct.
00:33:22.000But I think it's kind of fun to go through political history.
00:33:27.000I think people say, Charlie, who was the best president?
00:33:33.000It's difficult because you have to look at every single president during the time that they served.
00:33:38.000You have to look at every single president in context.
00:33:40.000You have to look at every single president of where they came from and what they were dealing with.
00:33:46.000Some of the best presidents, of course, I think Abraham Lincoln was a terrific president.
00:33:50.000There is an anti-Lincoln movement in some of the more libertarian circles in the country who think that we should have let the South secede, who thought that it was horrible that he suspended habeas corpus.
00:34:02.000Obviously, not a fan of the suspension of habeas corpus, but all things being equal, I think that Abraham Lincoln, the protector and the preserver of the Union, was something that was extraordinary and something that we should understand.
00:34:16.000And the fact that they're taking down statues of Abraham Lincoln in Boston, Massachusetts, you like that Boston accent, I think was absolutely outrageous, uncalled for.
00:34:27.000And so I encourage all of you guys to really study presidential history.
00:34:31.000We've gotten some great feedback when we kind of go through the great presidents and going all the way from Washington Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Quincy Adams, Jackson Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, who I believe was the shortest serving president in American history.
00:35:04.000Grant was actually an awful president.
00:35:05.000He was a terrific general, horrendous president.
00:35:09.000Then Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, Cleveland, of course, Cleveland being the only president in U.S. history who served two non-consecutive terms.
00:36:48.000I think that some of it, of course, was big government Republicanism, but he was a great president for a perfect time, serving two terms post-World War II, really putting the nation through a healing moment.
00:37:00.000We had the federal interstate because of him.
00:37:02.000He desegregated a lot of the country, sometimes through force.
00:37:06.000Then, of course, we have JFK, Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of the worst presidents in American history, Richard Nixon.
00:37:12.000Look, I was treated very nicely at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library.
00:37:14.000In fact, you can go back in the archives and listen to my speech there.
00:37:17.000I do not think he was a good president.
00:37:18.000Followed by Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Reagan, H.W. Bush, Clinton, W. Bush, Obama, and then the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump.
00:37:45.000They both died on the same day, July 4th, 1826, exactly 50 years since they approved the Declaration of Independence.
00:37:53.000And then John Quincy Adams wrote an incredible note where he said, a coincidence so wonderful that it gives confidence that the patriotic efforts of these men were having directed and furnishes a new hope that the prosperity of these states is under the special protection of a kind providence.
00:38:10.000Basically saying there's no way that this was a coincidence that two of our founding fathers died 50 years from the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
00:38:17.00050 years, they both died on the same day.
00:38:25.000He also told Congress on December 5th, and they died on the same day on July 4th, which was the founding of our country, the birth certificate.
00:38:33.000Since your last meeting at this place, the 50th anniversary of the day when our independence was declared, were by one summons at the distance of 700 miles from each other, called before the judge of all to account for the deeds done on this earth.
00:38:45.000Jefferson described Adams as, quote, the pillar of the Declaration's support on the floor of Congress, its ablest advocate and defender.
00:38:54.000So there's some fun presidential analysis and history for you.
00:38:59.000I don't have enough faith to believe that's a coincidence, but if you think that's a coincidence, then you have more faith than I do that there is not a divine being in this world that might have just allowed the United States of America to exist.
00:39:30.000I'm not going to go through the entire document, but let me go through kind of what is the most famous parts, if you will, up into let's just say the first couple paragraphs.
00:39:39.000So we all know the beginning, but let's talk about what the significance of this is.
00:39:45.000So, Thomas Jefferson and company, it wasn't just Thomas Jefferson, he was the primary author of the Declaration.
00:39:50.000So, before we get into the actual Declaration, we have to understand the kind of landscape that they were entering into.
00:39:56.000Unlike the 1619 Project and other conservatives that say we are 400 years old, which is complete nonsense, July 4th, 1776, was the creation of something new.
00:40:06.000We have to understand our founders were building something from the bottom up.
00:40:09.000They were inspired by something that came before them, but British colonial slave trade rule is what they were rebelling against.
00:40:18.000British colonial slave trade authoritarian tyranny was part of the reason they had a declaration of independence.
00:40:27.000They were declaring that they were sovereign away from the colonies.
00:40:33.000And so, you have to imagine King George getting this note.
00:40:37.000He probably regretted having all those Scots and Irishmen leave, let's just say, then the kingdom of Britain to go to the United States of America because you have to understand a pretext to this, and this is why I'm so proud of my Scottish heritage.
00:40:51.000Kirk means church, and I'm almost 80% Scottish.
00:41:13.000But William Wallace, in the movie Braveheart, you have seen this many times.
00:41:17.000He helped lead the rebellion, which he actually never saw the successful fruits of that rebellion against which was then the absolute superpower of the time, and it was in the United States of America, the Kingdom of Britain.
00:41:31.000But understand, the founding of America were the very same people that rebelled against Britain in Scotland and some of the Irishmen and the idea of Scots-Irish.
00:41:40.000A lot of Scots-Irish started this country.
00:41:44.000They came to America in the early 1600s.
00:41:46.000I can trace my bloodline coming back to the United States of America to Alphonsus Kirk, coming back in year 1623.
00:41:52.000Our family's been incredible with documentation.
00:41:55.000We can even trace our bloodline back to the Maxwell clan, which fought in the Scottish War of Independence in the Battle of Falkirk and the Battle of Sterling Bridge, where the Scots did beat the British in that fight.
00:42:05.000They lost the Battle of Falkirk, and that's actually the inspiration of the Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty at Liberty University.
00:42:10.000However, you have to understand before that this declaration was written to the King George, there were other declarations: the Magna Carta, which recognized human rights, which came before the Declaration of Independence, the writings of John Locke that came before the Declaration.
00:42:25.000And John Locke really pushed the boundaries of this idea of natural rights.
00:42:29.000John Locke was inspired by the teachings of the Bible.
00:42:32.000We've gone through extensively in previous AMAs and previous podcasts who John Locke was and his contribution to the founding of our country.
00:42:40.000But it's very fair to say, without John Locke, the founding fathers would not have had the intellectual depth or the backdrop to be able to articulate what is in the Declaration.
00:42:51.000But understand, the very same people that founded the religious colonies, the Pilgrims, if you will, throughout the 1640s and the 1680s, they were, in a lot of ways, they were forced to participate in British colonial slave trade rule.
00:43:07.000And this idea that America was founded on slavery, I talked about this, and it's one of my favorite factoids to dive into.
00:43:13.000Slavery was beginning to be abolished, inspired by the Declaration of Independence.
00:43:18.000In 1777, Vermont, which was a religious colony in the northeast of our country, abolished slavery in 1777 as inspired by the Declaration of Independence.
00:43:28.000So understand that there's a very significant historical backdrop to the founding of America.
00:43:33.000It wasn't just they just woke up one day and they said, oh, this sounds like a great idea.
00:43:36.000It was hundreds of years of the struggle of tyranny versus free people.
00:43:40.000Like, can we start something new that is, in some ways, a meritocracy where we recognize natural rights?
00:44:05.000These ideas, this ideal that I am striving towards, is worth it.
00:44:09.000So you know this, but let's repeat it.
00:44:12.000And some people actually forget it so often.
00:44:14.000When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another to assume among the powers of the earth.
00:44:23.000Now, before I go any further, understand Jefferson, the main author of this, he read the Bible every single night.
00:44:29.000So, the beautiful poetry here, the language that we don't teach our children, it's so incredibly well written as far as the prose, the diction.
00:44:39.000And this was not just something that they wrote on the back of a napkin.
00:44:42.000They debated this for months and they said, Hey, young Thomas Jefferson, why don't you just take care of this?
00:44:48.000And he was, in a lot of ways, the most intelligent linguist that the founding fathers had at their disposal.
00:44:56.000And he got his inspiration by reading John Locke, by spending time around Patrick Henry, who I think gave one of the best speeches ever in 1775 at the Virginia House of Commons.
00:45:10.000You can start to see the rumblings of the beginning of America.
00:45:12.000I encourage all of you guys to check it out.
00:45:14.000The speech by Patrick Henry is called The War Inevitable, March 23rd, 1775, where he gave it to the Virginia Assembly in 1775, similar to the Virginia House of Commons, but they didn't really have the House of Commons then.
00:45:26.000But you can start to see where this started to pop its head up.
00:45:29.000So, anyway, it continues: the separate and equal station.
00:45:32.000Here's the most important line in the first part of it: to which the laws of nature and nature is God.
00:45:55.000Anyone who tells you that the ideas in the Bible were not just instrumental, but they were imperative to the founding of the country is just wrong.
00:46:05.000I mean, I could use a lot of different ways to fill that in.
00:46:08.000It's wishful thinking at best, and it's trying to create America in an atheistic, humanistic image, and that's just not true.
00:46:13.000Laws of nature and nature is God entitle them a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation.
00:46:23.000So, you see this first paragraph, it frames the argument.
00:46:27.000Basically, it's saying it sometimes is moral for people to dissolve from political tyranny.
00:46:35.000I mean, King George reads this and he's like, I know that we've been fighting the Scots for some time, but who thought it was a good idea to bring them to this new land where they could flourish infinitely?
00:46:45.000You can just imagine because this sort of language began bubbling up in the 1300s and the 1400s with William Wallace and the rebel of the Scots.
00:46:54.000And it was the same genealogy that came to America, which were religious-seeking, freedom-loving people.
00:46:59.000This idea of freedom is not something that every country embraces.
00:47:03.000This is why our military excursions and experiments in Libya and the Middle East have proven futile to try to create the next Thomas Jefferson in Libya or in Syria.
00:47:14.000They do not have the philosophical or historical backdrop to be able to have a document like this have resonance.
00:47:21.000Here is the most famous line, in a lot of ways, the most important line.
00:47:26.000We hold these truths to be self-evident.
00:47:30.000You've probably heard this by a teacher, and I hope a teacher did this justice.
00:47:35.000Because this idea of self-evident truths, this idea of natural rights, completely blows up the idea. of medieval autocracy and tyranny.
00:47:47.000It obliterates this idea of Rousseauan Hegelian.
00:47:52.000Hegel didn't quite write yet, but eventually you see the American left embrace him.
00:47:56.000But Rousseau was right near this time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
00:49:47.000I mean, the divine right of kings, which is a completely philosophically and morally flawed concept, which basically argues that kings have total authority to rule people because they were put there by God.
00:49:59.000It's not correct, but something that was very pervasive for hundreds of years throughout the Middle Ages.
00:50:05.000It's that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
00:50:11.000And it continues, and by the way, in a future episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, we'll dive deeper into this, but I want to stop on that.
00:50:16.000From the consent of the governed, meaning that you must communicate with the people that you are ruling and they put you there.
00:50:22.000Every single free society on the planet can point to this document that we celebrate on July 4th, 1776, that you hopefully had a great time celebrating this last weekend as the reason why the world is a freer place, is a better place, is a place that recognizes natural rights, individual initiative, freedom of speech, freedom of prop, freedom to exercise your religion as you see fit without the government spying on you, without the government coming in and taking your stuff.
00:50:48.000The Bill of Rights articulated these natural rights.
00:50:54.000We need to get our kids to love America again.
00:50:56.000And I encourage you to check out the sister episode that we have here on the Charlie Kirk Show where we dive into that and we dive into what the president said about Rushmore, which was absolutely terrific.
00:51:05.000And I want to make sure I was saying something very specifically.
00:51:32.000The failure to know your history, I believe, creates an immature infant society that puts us in a decline of civilization, not into the prosperity of our civilization.
00:52:06.000And before I answer this question, I want to encourage you guys to continue to send me in your ideas for President Trump, what you think I'm missing, what you think that the statistics, the studies, the things you want us to include in our podcast.
00:52:17.000We read every single email, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:52:19.000We get so many emails, but I go through them.
00:52:21.000I take at least an hour and a half a day to go through every single email that I get.
00:52:38.000Thank you for contributing in our monthly donors.
00:52:42.000Coming up right around July 15th, we'll be emailing you.
00:52:44.000We're going to be doing a private Zoom call or Skype or whatever we call it nowadays to be able to meet and discuss ideas privately only for our monthly donors at CharlieKirk.com slash support.
00:52:57.000She says, Charlie, I love the idea that President Trump put forward in his executive order about creating a statue garden of American heroes.
00:53:03.000What statue do you think should go in there that he may be missing?
00:53:25.000Thaddeus Stevens, I hope, is in there.
00:53:27.000If he didn't make it, I sure hope he would.
00:53:29.000One of the original abolitionists that was an incredible guy and really loved his country and fought for abolition even when it was so difficult and so hard.
00:53:38.000Let me think who else that would be missing in the United States.
00:53:42.000I hope Dwight D. Eisenhower would be there, one of the most complete people in our country's history.
00:53:56.000He's terrific, and he helped start the sports as we know it, the National Football League, and, of course, the merging of two leagues, the AFL and the NFL.
00:54:07.000Alexander Graham Bell, of course, the founder of the telephone.
00:54:12.000The great inventors, I think, throughout our country's history need to be recognized.
00:54:17.000Jonas Sulk, who came up with the polio vaccine in the 1930s, and not Henry Ford.
00:54:24.000I do have appreciation for the company he built, but Henry Ford had, let's just say, a questionable history in some ways that has been revealed.
00:54:31.000I don't know if I'd do a statue to Henry Ford.
00:54:32.000I don't think Ford should be renamed, though.
00:54:47.000No, I don't think Mr. Producer said, do you think there should be a statue to Yale?
00:54:51.000No, I don't think there should be a statue to Yale.
00:54:53.000Nor do I think there should be a statue to Leland Stanford.
00:54:57.000Leland Stanford helped build the American Railroads, which was an admirable undertaking, but he did use a lot of, let's say, questionable slave labor, quasi-slave labor, Chinese labor.
00:55:09.000Jonathan Edwards, who was a preacher of the American Revival, I think would be incredible.
00:55:14.000Jonathan Edwards, not that Jonathan Edwards, no.
00:55:16.000The Jonathan Edwards that was preaching the American Awakening helped really contribute to the founding of our country.
00:55:24.000Andrew Jackson, I would hope, be there just because I'm a big Andrew Jackson fan, despite his, let's say, moral missteps.
00:55:30.000I think he was a terrific president and generally a phenomenal president of the United States of America.
00:55:35.000Teddy Roosevelt, but he's already got his face on Mount Rushmore, so I think he's off to a pretty good start.
00:55:39.000I don't think he needs another statue, even though they're taking down the statue of Teddy Roosevelt at the Natural, I think it's the Natural History Museum in New York, something like that.
00:55:47.000Billy Graham, that is a very good one.
00:55:49.000Billy Graham should get a statue in the American Statue of Heroes.
00:55:52.000And you just look at the heroes that built our country.
00:55:55.000Babe Ruth should be included in there.
00:55:57.000Lou Gehrig, who gave one of the greatest speeches, I think, ever.
00:56:00.000And I encourage all of you to listen to it.
00:56:03.000Hank Aaron, definitely Hank Aaron should be in there.
00:56:06.000Jackie Robinson, who is, of course, broke the color barrier.
00:56:10.000And I think we've done a pretty good job, actually, of honoring Jackie Robinson in our country.
00:56:15.000I think that's something that we should applaud ourselves for.
00:56:20.000Rosa Parks, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, just to name a few.
00:56:25.000I think that there's so many American icons and heroes who know our history, understand it.
00:56:29.000And I actually will have a, let's say, a more complete list on the future episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:56:34.000So email me your questions, everybody, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:56:37.000And if you listen to this AMA and you want a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine, subscribe, leave a five-star review, screenshot it, email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:56:45.000And if you are selected as for the first 20 people, you get a signed copy of the MAGA Doctrine.
00:57:30.000I want to celebrate the Davids against the Goliaths.
00:57:34.000I want to celebrate the people that stand up against the authoritarians in our life that have the creeping levels of tyranny in every single sector: church, business, culture, school, family life.
00:57:48.000Be respectful, be compassionate, be decent, ask questions, but don't give an inch.