00:00:09.000Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, I take your questions.
00:00:12.000It is Monday, so I take your questions.
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00:02:12.000Well, first of all, Megan, thank you so much for the question.
00:02:14.000You went a signed copy of the MAGA doctrine, and please email us to redeem it.
00:02:18.000So look, the Overton window, we talked about, I think, my goodness, probably a month and a half ago.
00:02:23.000So thank you, Megan, for the good memory recall.
00:02:26.000And we talked about the Overton window as a way to judge political ideas.
00:02:31.000It's a way to basically be able to measure certain ideas that go from once unacceptable in the general population to public policy.
00:02:40.000What is the spectrum that it actually goes on?
00:02:42.000And the Overton window argues that things can go either direction.
00:02:48.000So to answer your question, absolutely.
00:02:50.000And so here is the actual spectrum of the Overton window.
00:02:53.000It goes from unthinkable to radical, to acceptable, to sensible, to popular, to policy, to popular, to sensible, acceptable, radical, unthinkable.
00:03:02.000And so basically, the Overton window can move both ways.
00:03:05.000The left likes to use the Overton window as a measuring stick to try to get things that were once completely unthinkable, that were so radical, that were sort of the mainstream into public policy and popular.
00:03:17.000What's really interesting, though, is if you look at the Overton window, since we have last talked about it, especially when it goes from something that's unthinkable to policy, let's take defunding the police.
00:03:28.000The left has actually leapfrogged a couple of these steps.
00:03:33.000So it's supposed to go from unthinkable to radical to acceptable to sensible to popular to policy.
00:03:41.000Well, they took something that was unthinkable to radical to policy.
00:03:46.000Defunding the police and abolishing the police was never actually sensible.
00:03:50.000It's actually still not very popular, but now it's policy.
00:03:55.000You see, the left has taken an unprecedented and very risky move here to use the power that they have in urban cities such as Minneapolis, in New York City, in Los Angeles, to defund or eliminate the police altogether, which they're trying to do in Minneapolis or Seattle, where they don't actually go through the hard, arduous work to persuade their population around what might be best for their people.
00:04:19.000Instead, they go from something that's unthinkable.
00:04:21.000I mean, the fact that two years ago we would be even discussing abolishing the police, it's out of the zeitgeist, which means spirit of our times.
00:04:30.000And then they use the power that they have and the little momentum that they might find within some radical base to actually implement it into policy.
00:04:38.000Now, we talk about this a lot on our program, which is how the left is willing to use their power to actually try to convert people.
00:04:46.000Whereas we as conservatives try to convert people to try to give us more power to give us a mandate to do what is right to give people more freedom.
00:04:55.000The left thinks that if they're able to do something, eventually that will be able to persuade people.
00:05:00.000I see it both ways, but it's very, very dangerous.
00:05:03.000So, for example, according to Gallup, it says black Americans want police to retain local presence.
00:05:09.000This is gallup.com, August 5th, 2020, by Lydia Saad.
00:05:13.000Their public polling shows that black Americans are a bit more likely than most other groups to see police locally, but still, 81% want police to spend the same amount or more time in their area.
00:05:26.000And so, again, we as conservatives try to persuade people in the public arena so that we are able to protect constitutional freedoms.
00:05:32.000The left, much more Machiavellian, they will use any sort of majority or any sort of power that they have to try to get people over to their side, whether by force or whether by policy, and eventually, if by total fiat, persuasion.
00:05:46.000Now, this Gallup survey is very interesting because you go back to the question about the Overton window, which again goes from the spectrum is unthinkable to policy, is black Americans don't even support what the media is telling them that they support.
00:06:01.000So, what's basically happening is you have a group of ruling class, predominantly white liberals, that are putting forth public policy measures that almost no one in the country supports.
00:06:12.000This, first of all, according to this poll, is a huge opening for President Trump.
00:06:18.00081% of black Americans want police to spend the same amount or more time in their area.
00:06:26.000And so, if you actually look deeper into the polling, it is white Americans that think that the police should spend less time in black America.
00:06:36.000Even though white Americans don't live in these communities, this is a white liberal imposition onto black culture and the black community, where 81% of black Americans want the police to spend the same amount of time or more time.
00:06:51.000More time, 20%, same amount of time, 61%.
00:06:54.000So you add those together, they're perfectly fine with the number.
00:06:58.000Interestingly enough, 20% of Asian Americans want the police to spend less time in their communities, whereas only 19% of black Americans want them to spend less time in their communities.
00:07:10.000So BLM Incorporated is not even representing the black community at all whatsoever, even though the black community has more frequency of which they see the police because black Americans commit more crimes.
00:07:23.000And we have gone through the reasons for that.
00:07:25.000It's not because of the color of their skin.
00:07:26.000It's because of socioeconomic challenges, mostly of which black America's family has been completely devastated.
00:07:32.000And because of that, black Americans commit more crimes generation after generation.
00:07:37.000We should be unafraid to talk about why black America is committing more crimes and also that black America is unfortunately one of the most dangerous parts of American society.
00:07:46.000And there's nothing insensitive by saying that.
00:07:48.000In fact, I think the more honest, the more forthright we are about crime in America, the more likely we'll be to actually solve these issues.
00:07:57.000So Megan from Virginia, the answer is absolutely yes.
00:07:59.000We have to take certain things that are in public policy and actually move them to the unthinkable.
00:08:26.000When conservatives run on life issues, conservatives win on it unless they're in California or New York, the abortion capitals of America.
00:08:33.000So conservatives should absolutely try to bring things that are in policy and eventually reverse it and bring it to something that's unthinkable.
00:08:40.000Conservatives get a lot wrong and Republicans rarely fight.
00:08:43.000But one of the issues that we actually have won on, and one of the issues that we have actually been successful on moving the Overton window, is the issue of firearms and weapons.
00:08:54.000This is an issue that throughout the years, the American people have actually grown in the direction of conservatives, not in the direction of the gun grabbers or in the far-left-wing statists or collectivists.
00:09:07.000However, it has now grown to be popular.
00:09:10.000We have seen such a massive surge in gun purchases.
00:09:13.000According to the New York Times, Keith Collins and David Yaffe Balany, April 2nd, 2020, quote, about 2 million guns were sold in the U.S. as virus fears spread.
00:09:25.000NPR.org, July 16th, 2020, by Chris Arnold.
00:09:29.000Sales of guns to be first-time owners rise amid COVID-19 pandemic.
00:09:35.000So the window can absolutely move in both direction.
00:09:39.000And just to reinforce that point, in just seven months of 2020, we have sold more guns than all of 2019.
00:09:48.000And we as conservatives should not be completely dismal or pessimistic that the left always is able to move the window in their direction.
00:09:55.000They're better at it than we are, but they also have more of a backfiring component to it because they are willing to go from the leapfrog of unthinkable to policy just when they have one more vote than we do.
00:10:07.000I'm saying sometimes it does work because then people see the public policy and they don't have the motivation to try to reverse it or to try to upend it.
00:10:34.000She says, hey, Charlie, so as a Christian, I have kind of an interesting question.
00:10:37.000I'm a huge Trump supporter, and it makes me cringe to think of Biden or any of his cronies in office.
00:10:42.000However, I know that God is ultimately in control and his purposes will prevail.
00:10:46.000In the Bible, there are numerous instances where God uses an evil leader to work out his purposes.
00:10:52.000Is it possible that if Biden is elected, God forbid, that it may be for God's doing to use him as a tool for his ultimate purpose in the end?
00:10:59.000I hope I am wrong in that Trump gets another four years in office, but at the end of the day, even if he doesn't, I trust the Lord, and as scary as it may seem, I hope that this is all part of God's sovereign plan.
00:11:09.000For Trump supporters who are not Christians, I don't know how they could find any solace on this.
00:12:35.000And so we're going to post that on CharlieKirk.com.
00:12:37.000I also have a recent clip that has gone viral on our YouTube channel.
00:12:41.000And also, I want to encourage all of you, if you have not yet subscribed to our YouTube channel, do you know that we have a YouTube channel?
00:12:46.000We have 108,000 subscribers, praise God, and we are growing very quickly.
00:12:50.000So I want to use this as kind of a commercial soundbite for you guys just to type in Charlie Kirk to your YouTube browser right now and hit that subscribe button and that little bell that goes with it.
00:13:00.000If everyone listening to this right now did that, we will surge in YouTube.
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00:13:06.000There's a lot of shenanigans, but it's still a platform that we are able to get our voice out, praise God.
00:13:10.000And I have a video there that is going very viral that you guys can pick up, which is why every Christian should vote for President Trump.
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00:13:20.000So please subscribe and hit that bell.
00:13:21.000And when I am in the Battle Station Chair in Phoenix, Arizona, all these podcasts are also delivered in video form on the Charlie Kirk Show YouTube channel.
00:13:34.000I've been in Michigan, Florida, Las Vegas, D.C., Aspen, Wyoming, Montana.
00:13:39.000I know that the Chinese coronavirus has slowed a lot of people down, but we are speeding up quicker than ever on the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:13:44.000And I just want to say thank you again for those of you that make everything we do possible at charliekirk.com/slash support.
00:13:50.000When you contribute to us, you pay for our sound editing team, our production team, our promotion, our website build out, all the podcast costs so we are able to deliver the amount of podcasts that we are.
00:14:12.000Since your podcasts are very focused on serious talks and a constant battle of politics, I figured I'd ask you some non-political questions that you can answer like a fast money round on Family Feud so your viewers can get to know you more.
00:14:31.000However, I don't trust them as much as I used to when I was younger.
00:14:35.000I've learned way too much about the skittishness of the architecture and the skeleton of a roller coaster.
00:14:41.000Not as big of a fan of roller coasters as I was growing up, but I do like roller coasters generally.
00:14:46.000As long as they're properly designed and they don't have too many of the turns that make you go completely upside down, I am a fan, but I'm very careful what roller coasters I go on.
00:14:56.000At the right height, I am very scared of heights.
00:14:59.000I'm not scared of heights if it's 10 or 20 or 30 feet, but if it's right around 100 feet and you have to kind of look over the edge, terrified.
00:15:32.000I'm not sure their whole stance on BLM Incorporated.
00:15:35.000Here I am probably plugging a shoe line that probably promotes BLM insurrection in our country, or maybe not.
00:15:41.000So maybe you guys can go find out for yourself.
00:15:43.000I'll do an update in a minute on New Balance, and so I'll have my team look it up and see if New Balance has pandered to the racial crowd or not.
00:15:51.000And I just went to their website, and it looks like they haven't.
00:17:43.000I'd say probably my guilty pleasure is I enjoy a 20-minute nap here and there.
00:17:47.000I don't know if that's a guilty pleasure or not.
00:17:50.000And I think I am actually a pro, I'm pro-napping if it's done correctly in a scheme of a productive day.
00:17:58.000I love that like 26-minute nap, like right on the nose.
00:18:02.000I mean, if I'm up at 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. doing podcasting and traveling, and I'm on an airplane and I just have 20 minutes to be able to turn off the phone, I can fall asleep in 90 seconds or less, maybe sometimes 30 seconds.
00:18:13.000I could just turn it off and turn it on.
00:18:15.000So I guess that would be a guilty pleasure.
00:18:55.000It was the people I was spending time with.
00:18:57.000And being able to get out on the water and just disconnect from the world, camping is not exactly something that I would be overly excited to do.
00:19:30.000I try to do this during the summer where I'll just kind of put my phone away.
00:19:33.000I've told people this before, but I have deleted Instagram and Twitter from my phone, and I have an amazing team that I just kind of text my tweets to.
00:19:39.000I say, here, go tweet this or tweet that.
00:19:50.000They think that they're tweeting at me, that I'm going to see it, and they don't.
00:19:53.000And so they tweet all these things, and it actually doesn't hit my screen at all.
00:19:58.000So I'm a happier person because of it.
00:20:00.000And I'll periodically check my Twitter feed to see how things are going externally, but internally, I never look at the comments or look at what people are.
00:20:10.000And I don't even look at the comments of YouTube.
00:20:11.000And I actually have been able to produce more.
00:20:13.000It's why we've been able to do as many podcasts as we do here is I just don't even look at these applications.
00:20:18.000I could not care less what the chattering class of prognosticating anti-American Marxists that are very bitter, resentful, deceiving people have to say about me.
00:20:27.000Doesn't concern me, and I don't think it should concern you either.
00:20:31.000But of course, keep listening to the Charlie Crook show, because that's important.
00:20:57.000I have a very good memory, and I am able to dialogue with people quite well.
00:21:02.000My sense of direction, even my production team says it's freakishly good.
00:21:08.000Mr. Producer, who's terrific and works very hard, we've been lost in Los Angeles, and we kind of be turned around and be like, you have to go here, here, here, here.
00:21:16.000And it's just, I have a built-in compass to myself.
00:21:18.000I am able to find my chart, my course.
00:21:22.000And if I do not have a specific map, if I do not have a specific area that I know I'm charting, I all of a sudden get a headache and I have to almost get my smartphone out and get my map and I look at it very specifically.
00:21:34.000My grandfather was a pilot in World War II.
00:21:37.000He was also really ran the old company called Pan Am.
00:21:42.000If you don't know what Pan Am is, it was like the airline.
00:21:45.000And so I think it's genetic, honestly, within my family.
00:21:48.000And everyone that I get a chance to be with when I'm outdoors, they're like, your sense of direction is extraordinary.
00:21:54.000And I've been with people, my goodness, where their sense of direction is just, it's just, I'm like, how do you not know exactly where you are?
00:22:57.000So how do you think this justification of slavery sounds to African Americans?
00:23:01.000And do you think that what he said about slavery is being a necessary evil just because it led to the creation of America is a good argument.
00:23:08.000Full cotton quote in context, which he's talking about, let's read the quote or he.
00:23:16.000It is actually written in the masculine.
00:23:19.000So I will say that it is a he, but I don't want to assume anyone's gender.
00:23:23.000How's that for the inspiration of your person you like, AOC?
00:23:27.000Okay, here's what Cotton said, Tom Cotton.
00:23:29.000We have to study the history of slavery and its role and its impact on the development of our country, because otherwise we can't understand our country.
00:23:36.000As the founding fathers said, it was a necessary evil upon which the union was built.
00:23:40.000But the Union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to ultimate extinction, Cotton told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette in an interview that was published two Sundays ago.
00:23:51.000So in full context, what Senator Tom Cotton is talking about is in order to keep the entire Union together, in order to not have the southern states immediately and instantaneously form their own country, there were negotiations that were committed to that eventually the plan was always to eradicate slavery.
00:24:11.000Despite what many people will tell you, and Senator Cotton was articulating this very correctly, was that in order to keep the Union together, to eventually abolish slavery, there had to be compromises that were given.
00:24:24.000So for example, some people like to point out the three-fifths compromise, and they say, oh, look, we thought of black people as sub-human beings.
00:24:32.000That is a lazy, sloppy way to interpret it.
00:24:37.000Instead, the slave-owning South, they wanted to count every slave as a full human being.
00:24:43.000You might say, well, what's wrong with that?
00:24:45.000Well, they don't want to give them voting rights.
00:24:48.000They did not want to give them citizenship, true citizenship.
00:24:52.000They simply wanted it for electoral representation.
00:24:55.000They wanted it for electoral representation so that they could make slavery the law of the land.
00:25:01.000You see, the way the union was formed, they eventually came to a compromise of three-fifths so that the southern states will have some sort of political check against them and they couldn't make all of America a pro-slavery nation.
00:25:13.000Thomas Jefferson, despite owning slaves himself, actually was the first president in 1807 when it was legally permissible under the United States Constitution to ban the new importation of slaves into America.
00:25:26.000Vermont in year 1777 abolished slavery completely after being inspired by the Declaration of Independence.
00:25:32.000George Washington signed a slavery prohibition, the Northwest Ordinance into the Northwest Territories, that the new Northwest Territories were slavery free.
00:25:42.000The Founding Fathers, especially the Founding Fathers that were the true architects of the republic that we love today, it was never a question of if we were going to abolish slavery.
00:25:52.000It was how are we going to abolish this couple thousand year old sin.
00:25:57.000What Senator Tom Cotton said is absolutely correct.
00:26:00.000That he said necessary evil upon which the Union was built.
00:26:06.000I would basically say it a little bit different, and I'm not disagreeing with the essence of what he's saying.
00:26:11.000Instead, what I would say is kind of a point deeper, or a better way to put it in my own mind, is the compromises that were made to keep the union together actually ended up abolishing slavery over the next couple hundred years post-that than it otherwise would have if the south would have formed their own nation.
00:26:32.000So this article was published about his efforts to target an initiative by the New York Times.
00:26:38.000The initiative, of course, was the 1619 Project Curriculum, which proposes that schools reframe U.S. history by marking the nation's founding in 1619, the year the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia.
00:26:48.000Cotton, however, told the Democrat Gazette that he's proposing legislation that would withhold federal funding to schools that embrace the curriculum.
00:26:55.000So to your question, the specific question from Aaron, and thank you for listening as a liberal and a Bernie Sanders supporter and a AOC supporter and an Elon Omar supporter.
00:27:06.000We love different ideas and we love dialogue.
00:27:10.000We love the collision of different worldviews.
00:27:14.000You say here, how does that sound to African Americans?
00:27:20.000Well, more generally, I think that anyone, despite their skin color, would be offended if Tom Cotton was defending slavery, which he was not defending slavery.
00:27:29.000What Tom Cotton was defending was the very specific political compromise that was necessary to abolish slavery.
00:27:37.000Tom Cotton thinks that slavery was reprehensible.
00:27:40.000But if the Union would have self-segregated themselves at the Constitutional Convention and would have said to the South, secede, you have your own Southern nation and to the North, we have our own Southern nation, then the states of South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, which were slave-owning states, what would it have taken for them to abolish slavery?
00:28:02.000With the advancement of the cotton gin, which actually made the abolition of slavery much harder, believe it or not.
00:28:08.000The cotton gin actually made the demand for slaves much more, not less.
00:28:13.000The cotton gin was actually the greatest exponent on the demand of slaves, but there was no more importing of slaves allowed, which is what put a lot of the southern states in a very tricky and difficult position because Thomas Jefferson signed the abolition of new slaves into America in March of 1807.
00:28:30.000So therefore, once the cotton gin came around, the entire issue of slavery was kind of resurfaced.
00:28:35.000And I'm not saying the Civil War was solely because of slavery, but it was partly because of slavery.
00:28:40.000There's a lot of literature that is written that says that slavery played no role.
00:28:43.000I don't find that to be the case, actually.
00:28:45.000There's a very provocative book that makes that claim.
00:28:51.000I think it was one piece of a broader question around northern versus southern sovereignty.
00:28:55.000And it was a piece around exactly what the North identified as core fundamental values and the South.
00:29:02.000And so I think it did play a role, but also I would recognize there were multiple decades of tension that were building up between the North and the South.
00:29:10.000And so look, I think it's very important that we look at the founding of our country with the correct amount of nuance and criticism.
00:29:17.000We should be critical that some of our founders own slaves.
00:29:21.000We should also be proud that those very same founders that had that kind of inherent contradiction, which we as human beings know exists, were also able to abolish the new import of slaves while also owning slaves themselves.
00:29:35.000Even Thomas Jefferson in the Virginia House of Commons, before he became president of the United States, tried to abolish slavery in the state of Virginia.
00:29:42.000So this was a moral dilemma that our founders absolutely wrestled with.
00:29:46.000See, the picture that we paint our founding fathers with is as if they were completely supportive of slavery, no matter what.
00:29:52.000It was something they wanted to continue, they wanted to advance, and they wanted to spread throughout the lands.
00:30:01.000A lot of them owned slaves, and they even knew it was wrong, and they released the slaves on their deathbed, like Thomas Jefferson.
00:30:07.000They went out of their way to make sure no new territories or states had the evil, sinister practice of slavery.
00:30:13.000They were a transition period, a monumental great leap forward from the tyranny and the bondage of slavery, which, by the way, predated America, that unlike Senator Tim Kaine, who said America invented and perfected slavery.
00:31:20.000The American founding was the great leap forward.
00:31:22.000It was the breaking point of the sin, the unspeakable sin of human beings owning human beings.
00:31:30.000And yes, albeit it was not completely a perfect separation.
00:31:34.000And some of us look back and we say, how could they have not done it so seamlessly?
00:31:38.000Well, don't look back with any sort of cockiness or ubris that you think we have today that they weren't thinking back then.
00:31:45.000There were plenty of abolitionists, even at the American founding, but they wanted to keep the entirety and the totality of the union together.
00:31:53.000And good that they did, because it actually ended up leading to the liberation of more black Americans that were in slavery if we wouldn't have otherwise negotiated that.
00:32:04.000So thank you for your question, Aaron, and thank you so much for listening.
00:32:07.000I encourage you guys to listen to our sister episode today.
00:32:10.000Please email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:32:14.000Subscribe to that YouTube channel and consider supporting us at charliekirk.com slash support.
00:32:18.000And I just want to continue to build what I said earlier.
00:32:20.000New Balance did come out with a statement.
00:32:23.000In fairness, it was probably one of the more vanilla statements out of all of corporate America's apology for how awful we are as a country, which of course is not true.
00:32:31.000So I just want to make sure that I just contribute that New Balance wasn't without any sort of demerit in this, but I'm reading the statement.
00:32:38.000It is a lot better than what Nike or Adidas or their other partners did.
00:32:42.000Please consider, again, subscribing to our YouTube channel.
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